I recently spent an afternoon watching a guy entertaining three of New York’s finest on the eastern parapet of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was wearing what looked like a green track suit.

“Jumper!” the call went up in the office.

The view here is extraordinary: the Brooklyn Bridge, the World Trade Towers, the financial district, the Statue of Liberty, and the harbor beyond. We had seats in the sky box for this one and watched as the P.D. cleared the roadway of traffic (both to and from Manhattan), set up command posts, moved two pods of Emergency Service Unit officers (the name they give a S.W.A.T. team these days) into position, one on the cables below him and one on the parapet with him.

We shared a pair of binoculars, looking through them at the Jumper, who didn’t look like the kind of guy who anybody had paid much attention to before. I don’t know why we all agreed about this, because even with the binoculars it was impossible to tell much of anything. Maybe black, maybe Hispanic. Somebody said he was an Arab. Maybe Thirty, maybe twenty, he was wearing a baseball cap backward on his head.

Regardless, he had his audience now. There were the three cops in the first ESU unit, two helicopters, two harbor patrol boats, half the tourists in downtown Manhattan, and us. Why hadn’t he jumped already? we asked, handing the binoculars around. Why don’t the cops just grab him? They were three big guys after all. The one closest was sitting Indian-style right next to jumper whose feet dangled over the tower. That cop was tethered to the other two guys and the bridge’s super structure. He could just reach out and boom. Like that.

But Jumper just kept on talking, gesticulating—angry sometimes, sometimes morose.

“He looks a little dingey,” observed someone in the office, handing off the binoculars to pick up a call ringing through on her desk. “We’ll have the meeting in five minutes,’ suggested someone else, wandering towards the water cooler. Soon the curious crowd at the window thinned to just two of us.

The P.D. had inflated a giant yellow and white mattress thingy on the ground below the parapet. Jumper just talked and talked. “He’s not going anywhere,” said the other guy at the window, walking back to his desk.

“Five bucks says he goes,” I said.

“Dude,” scolded my officemate.

“You can’t bet on that,” said someone else looking up from her computer. I watched for a while longer trying to keep the binoculars in focus. Then I picked up the phone and called a friend in midtown. I explained the situation.

“How long’s he been with the police?” asked the friend.

“Going on twenty minutes.”

“He’s not jumping. No way. These guys jump in the first couple a minutes if they’re gonna go. No way he jumps.”

“So?”

“Five says he doesn’t jump.”

“I’ll call you.” I said and hung up the phone. The afternoon sun was making it hard to see what was going on but the two cops supporting the negotiator were leaning on the railing on top of the parapet like they were on break now. Bored stiff I figured. Each had one leg up on the railing, the one with the hard hat on had his right arm slung like a wing over the top bar. The cop on point, squatting, stood up now and shook out his legs and Jumper just talked and talked. I took a call and made two.

“Is he still up there?” a voice called from the conference room.

“Yep. The cops look pretty bored. I bet this was going to be the highlight of the shift for most of those guys. Now, I don’t know.”

“Yell if something happens.”

“I imagine I will.”

Jumper must have looked down and seen the mattress inflated bellow him. The Eastern parapet, the one in Brooklyn, isn’t in the East River. There’s a cobblestone park below it that’s quite nice to visit just after sunset when the skyline lights start to shine. Anyway, Jumper got pretty agitated and tried to scoot around the other side of the tower, away from the mattress-thingy. He did this on his belly and hung his legs out over the tower to show he meant business.

“He’s moving!” I yelled.

The meeting in the conference room broke up and our windows were full as the three cops dropped to their knees and crawled towards him. He waved his arms wildly.

We all made the same sound when he started to drop. A loud strangled gasp with a curse mixed in there. Jumper spun spread eagle, maybe three revolutions, before he hit an outcropping in the tower half-way down. He only made it half way, though. As he fell he hung pretty close to the granite (quarried in Vineyard Haven, Maine) that the tower’s made of. The ambulance guys are trying to figure a way to get him back onto the roadway right now. They don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, though. The three ESU cops are still on the top of the tower. One guy, I’m guessing the lead negotiator, seems pretty broken up.

Traffic out of Manhattan is starting to pick up again, now. It’s just about rush hour. I must say, it tightened me up a bit watching him spin like he did. I sure wish I hadn’t made that bet.

Ahmadullah Raghbat, his uniform and sneakers in a polystyrene shopping bag, stands waiting for the bus. Raghbat is a young Afghani, and though he has lived in New York for most of his life, the city once again feels new to him. Today is his first day at a new job since before September 11, and he’s going to be late.

Twenty-one years old, handsome and outgoing, Raghbat, immigrated to the United States from Karachi, Pakistan, in 1992. Before that, he lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was born. He attended PS 32, Junior High School 189, and Flushing High School, in Queens, and has completed one semester at Queensboro Community College. Raghbat has big plans, even if they are not completely in focus.

In addition to a career in acting, he has considered joining the U.S. Air Force, where he would hope to train as an engineer, like his father, Khwaja M. Raghbat. Before all of this, he submitted an application for a job at a home heating oil company, and had an interview there on Sept. 7. The woman he met with almost hired him on the spot, he says, when she discovered that he spoke six languages, including English and Pakistani.

“The company has a lot of Pakistani customers,” he says, “and this lady said I would be very good for the job. She said she would call me the following Tuesday.”

When Raghbat called a few days after the attack to ask about the status of his application, he says the same woman told him that the position was already filled.

Now he works the graveyard shift at the Kennedy Fried Chicken on East Gun Hill Road, in the North Bronx. He works from six in the evening until four the next morning, closing time. This is familiar work since Raghbat’s last steady job was at a Crown Fried Chicken. Afghani immigrants own almost all of these KFC knock-off franchises, many of which have bulletproof partitions and serve neighborhoods where this is a necessary precaution.

To get to work, Raghbat walks forty-five minutes from his modest basement apartment to the bus stop. The ride itself then takes another forty-five minutes. And though Raghbat couldn’t be more proud of his black, 1993 Mustang GT, he would rather walk and wait for the bus than drive his car.

“I save my driving for the ladies,” he says.

On the bus, he points to a fair-haired girl in faded jeans going into a video store. “I went out with her for a few weeks,” he says. “She’s American. We talked a lot, but we never fooled around. That happens sometimes. I don’t know how to make the first move. I don’t want to be disrespectful to them, you know?”

According to Raghbat, most of his friends are women. So it comes as a surprise when he mentions casually how he believes in certain teachings in the Koran that he says blame women for the presence of evil in the world.

“You don’t think it’s true?” he says. “Come on. Say you’re in an office, right? And a woman walks by. You’re reading or studying something and she walks by and she has legs, and she smells so good and you become . . . distracted. That is where it starts.”

Traffic on the Whitestone Bridge moves slowly as passing trucks are searched for terrorist contraband by members of the National Guard. It’s getting dark by the time Raghbat switches buses at Connolly Avenue.

“Did you know that the Bronx is the only part of New York that is attached to America?” he asks. “I like New York City. It is its own country .”

He’s had some head shots printed up. Looking them over outside the Kennedy Fried Chicken, he says, “I have a very flexible look. I could play an Italian, a Greek, and, obviously, a terrorist.”

Then he goes to work.

They’re huddled in the far corner of the office, all of them peering out of the enormous window. They vibe is jittery. “Jumper?” I ask, throwing down my bag.

“Yup!” All five exclaim in unison.

Sure enough, here we are again. Our generous view has coughed up ringside seats for another round of human tragedy. Standing on the webbing under the exterior cable on the north side of the Brooklyn Bridge, stands another Jumper. Directly above him are three members of the New York Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit. Three boats from the Harbor Patrol chug against the tide in the East River below. One helicopter hangs against the Skyline above. The ESU team sport safety harnesses that anchor them to the bridge, but only one guy is wearing the bright blue hard hat tha just has to be required gear for a Jumper call. Any more detail will require binoculars.

“How long?” I ask.

“The cops have been up there about ten minutes. When the cops started climbing the cable towards him he threw his beer bottle away and started climbing off the pipe into the cables, there,” says someone pointing in the direction we’re all already looking.

“If you could see that it was a beer bottle he threw, it must have been pretty big. Big, like a 40 oz.?” somebody behind me says.

“It was big,” confirms another.

The numerous smaller suspension cables that once made this bridge a marvel run from positions on the bridge’s roadway to one of the four main cables. In doing so they create a rhombus weave, and Jumper has his feet jammed in the intersection of two of the suspension cables and he’s swinging one-handed from a third. The Jumper appears to be taunting the cops. They seem unimpressed.

I am impressed, though. “He’s crazier than he is drunk,” I say.

“There’s no way any of those cops are gonna reach out for him. He’s a loon,” someone says.

The Jumper swings for a while, monkeys around for a bit. But soon he grows bored. He starts making his way among the cables away from the cops and toward the Manhattan tower. The cops follow along the pipe, which descends toward and eventually intersects Jumper’s course. Jumper is showing every sign of giving up. Jumper reaches out his hand, the cop wearing the bright blue hard hat reciprocates. But now Jumper is grabbing an, until now, unseen cable that sews the exterior main cable to it’s interior twin. Hand-over-hand, legs bent but swinging freely, Jumper’s making the impossible 40-foot journey along the cable. He’s doing it bare-handed. “That’s it! He’s gone. There’s no way he makes this!” I squeal.

Eight times Jumper reaches out for that terrible, skinny cable. Eight times I’m convinced Jumper’s dropping to his death. The traffic is still stopped on the bridge in both directions. The walkway, usually quite congested at this hour on a balmy day such as this, is empty. The three boats that the Harbor Patrol dispatched still wait in the river below. The helicopter flits in the air above, more than two dozen police officers watch from command posts and action stations on the bridge. Jumper has just successfully evaded his rescuers.

Jumper isn’t a jumper after all.

Jumper’s a fearless fuckin’ cable monkey and a bad ass to boot. And, in the office, we’re all agog, looking at each other with our jaws swinging like jumper’s legs just were. Somebody says that the city should give Jumper a job rescuing jumpers from the bridge. “The Mayor could give him a fancy hat with a feather,” adds someone, walking away from the window. Jumper’s hidden from view now, behind the Brooklyn parapet. The office returns to the business at hand, still the roadway and the walkway are empty except for rescue vehicles. Somebody wonders out loud about how much money jumper is costing the city. Someone else suggests that the losses aren’t strictly the city’s, that commuters and tourists are being delayed and so, if you want to look at the Big Picture, all that should be calculated into the equation.

A few of us start working on the math.

After using the bridge as a jungle gym for an hour or so; after leaping the eight foot gap between the bridge’s interior main cables and another hand-over-hand journey of forty feet to the webbing on the bridge’s south side; after a few smokes in that webbing, Jumper scampers onto the walkway and is detained by members of the New York Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit.

For The Jumper part I, The original jumper, or at least the jumper who was something of a novelty for the people in Manny Howard’s office, click here