[RADIOLAB INTRO]

HOST: Thank you for being here and enjoy.

[applause]

LULU MILLER: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF NASSER: And I'm Latif Nasser. And back in March ...

LATIF: Hello, hello, and welcome to Symphony Space!

[applause]

LATIF: ... we got invited to guest host a show called Selected Shorts.

LULU: And we are the co-hosts of Selected Shorts!

LATIF: It's a kind of iconic show that happens in New York City on this big stage called Symphony Space, where they get a bunch of terrific actors, usually from TV or Broadway, to come on stage and read shorts—short fiction or sometimes nonfiction, usually fiction.

LATIF: And here they are.

LULU: And for this show they asked us to pick the stories, so we spent weeks re-reading old things and new things and getting suggestions. And finally, we settled on four stories that we really love. Most of them are fiction.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: And the thing is, obviously, you know, what we usually do here at Radiolab, we deal in nonfiction, fact-checked true stories.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: But what became really neat about fiction, I think, for this show in particular, was that it allowed us to do something we can't always do, which is that, you know, the place we're trying to reach in Radiolab is kind of that edge of what we think we know, to push it out a little further. But with fiction we could just, like, punch right through the edge and go to places that you just—you can't go in nonfiction.

LATIF: That's exactly what we were searching for.

LULU: Latif, what did we ...

LATIF: Yeah?

LULU: What did we wear?

LATIF: We wore shorts. Apparently we were the first people ever to wear shorts while hosting Selected Shorts.

LULU: I feel very proud of that. Okay, continue.

LATIF: So we kind of treated it a bit like a Radiolab episode, in the sense that we—we found a theme, and the theme of the stories we picked was flight.

LULU: So yes, sit back, enjoy. We're gonna take you on this journey through the sky, up and down. And we're gonna kick it off with a short essay. So we're easing you into the fiction. Our very first one will be nonfiction. And this was written by a writer we love, who I think both you and I only discovered, sadly, after he had passed away.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: If he was still here, he'd absolutely be the kind of person you would hear on this show. His name is Brian Doyle. So we're gonna kick it off with one of his essays. It comes from a collection called One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder. And it was performed onstage for us by the actor Becca Blackwell.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Good evening. "Joyus Voladoras."

BECCA BLACKWELL: Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats 10 times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. "Joyus voladoras," 'flying jewels,' the first white explorers in the Americas called them. And the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe. More than 300 species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Each one visits a thousand flowers a day, and they can dive at 60 miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than 500 miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest, they come close to death. On frigid nights or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rates slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating. And if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold and they cease to be.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped wood nymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills, and Andean hillstars, spatula tails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but moreso, have incredible, enormous, immense, ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms, they have race car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles, anything to gulp more oxygen. And their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death. They suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on Earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly like a tortoise and live to be 200 years old, or you can spend them fast like a hummingbird and live to be two years old.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born, it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It's way bigger than your car.

[laughter]

BECCA BLACKWELL: It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day. And when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty. And then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on Earth. And of the largest animal who ever lived, we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing, yearning tongue can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and molluscs have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all, but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

BECCA BLACKWELL: So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open, with no one in the end, not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open doors to each, but we live alone in the house of the heart.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young, we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always. When we are older, we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and and impregnable as you possibly can, and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words, "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself in the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning, echoing from the kitchen, where he's making pancakes for his children.

[applause]

LATIF: So now we're airborne, but we're not gonna let it end there.

LULU: We want to go further up into the sky. This story is by Miranda July. She is, of course, an artist, filmmaker and writer. You may know her from her film, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," or her books, "No One Belongs Here More Than You," "The First Bad Man," and coming out in two months, "All Fours."

LATIF: Here is Molly Bernard reading ...

LULU: "Roy Spivey" by Miranda July.

[applause]

MOLLY BERNARD: "Roy Spivey."

MOLLY BERNARD: Twice I have sat next to a famous man on an airplane. The first man was Jason Kidd of the New Jersey Nets. I asked him why he didn't fly first class, and he said that it was because his cousin worked for United.

MOLLY BERNARD: "Wouldn't that be all the more reason to get first class?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "It's cool," he said, unfurling his legs into the aisle.

MOLLY BERNARD: I let it go because what do I know about the ins and outs of being a sports celebrity? We didn't talk for the rest of the flight. I can't say the name of the second famous person, but I will tell you that he is a Hollywood heartthrob who is married to a starlet. Also, he has the letter 'V' in his first name. That's all. I can't say anything more than that. Think espionage. Okay, the end. That really is all. I'll call him "Roy Spivey," which is almost an anagram of his name.

MOLLY BERNARD: If I were a more self-assured person, I would not have volunteered to give up my seat on an overcrowded flight. I would not have been upgraded to first class, would not have been seated beside him. This was my reward for being a pushover. He slept for the first hour, and it was startling to see such a famous face look so vulnerable and empty. He had the window seat and I had the aisle and I felt as though I were watching over him, protecting him from the bright lights and the paparazzi. Sleep little spy, sleep. He's actually not little, but we're all children when we sleep. For this reason I always let men see me asleep early on in a relationship. It makes them realize that even though I am five feet eleven, that I am fragile and I need to be taken care of. A man who can see the weakness of a giant knows that he is a man indeed. Soon small women make him feel almost fey and low. He now has a thing for tall women.

MOLLY BERNARD: Roy Spivey shifted in his seat, waking. I quickly shut my own eyes and then slowly opened them, as if I too had been sleeping. Oh, but he hadn't quite opened his yet, so I shut mine again and right away opened them slowly, and he opened his slowly, and our eyes met. And it seemed as if we had woken from a single sleep, from the dream of our entire lives. Me, a tall but otherwise undistinguished woman, he, a distinguished spy—but not really, just an actor, but not really, just a man—maybe even just a boy. That's the other way my height can work on men, the more common way. I become their mother.

MOLLY BERNARD: We talked ceaselessly for the next two hours, having the conversation that is specifically about everything. He told me intimate details about his wife, the beautiful Miss M. Who would have guessed that she was so troubled?

MOLLY BERNARD: "Oh yeah, everything in the tabloids is true."

MOLLY BERNARD: "It is?"

MOLLY BERNARD: Yeah. Especially about her eating disorder."

MOLLY BERNARD: "But the affairs?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "No, not the affairs. Of course not. You can't believe the 'bloids."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Bloids?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "Yeah, we call 'em 'bloids, or tabs."

MOLLY BERNARD: When the meals were served, it felt as if we were eating breakfast in bed together. And when I got up to use the bathroom, he joked, "You're leaving me!"

MOLLY BERNARD: And I said, "I'll be back."

MOLLY BERNARD: As I walked up the aisle, many of the passengers stared at me, especially the women. Word had traveled fast in this tiny flying village. Perhaps there were even some 'bloid writers on the flight. There were definitely some 'bloid readers. Had we been talking loudly? It seemed to me that we were whispering.

MOLLY BERNARD: I looked in the mirror while I was peeing and I wondered if I was the plainest person he had ever talked to. I took off my blouse and I tried to wash under my arms, which isn't really possible in such a small bathroom. I tossed handfuls of water toward my armpits and they landed on my skirt. It was made from the kind of fabric that turns much darker when it is wet. This was a real situation I had got myself into. I acted quickly: I took off my skirt and soaked the whole thing in the sink, then wrung it out. I put it back on. I smoothed it out with my hands. There. Okay, it was all a shade darker now.

MOLLY BERNARD: I walked back down the aisle, being careful not to touch anyone with my dark skirt. When Roy Spivey saw me, he shouted, "You came back!" And I laughed, and he said, "What happened to your skirt?"

MOLLY BERNARD: I sat down and explained the whole thing, starting with the armpits. He listened quietly until I was done.

MOLLY BERNARD: "So were you able to wash your armpits in the end?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "No."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Are they smelly?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "I think so."

MOLLY BERNARD: "I can smell them and tell you."

MOLLY BERNARD: No."

MOLLY BERNARD: "It's okay. It's part of showbiz."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Really?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "Yeah. Here."

MOLLY BERNARD: He leaned over and he pressed his nose against my shirt.

MOLLY BERNARD: "It's smelly."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Oh. Well, I tried to wash it."

MOLLY BERNARD: But he was standing up now, climbing past me to the aisle and rummaging around in the overhead bin. He fell back into his seat dramatically, holding a pump bottle. "It's Febreeze."

[laughter]

MOLLY BERNARD: "Oh, I've heard about that."

MOLLY BERNARD: "It dries in seconds, taking odor with it. Lift up your arms."

MOLLY BERNARD: I lifted my arms and with great focus he pumped three hard sprays under each sleeve.

MOLLY BERNARD: "It's best if you keep your arms out until it dries."

MOLLY BERNARD: I held them out, one arm extended into the aisle and the other arm crossed his chest, my hand pressing against the window. It was suddenly obvious how tall I was. Only a very tall woman could shoulder such a wingspan. He stared at my arm in front of his chest for a moment. Then he growled and bit it. Then he laughed. I laughed too, but I did not know what this was, this biting of my arm.

MOLLY BERNARD: [laughs] "What was that?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "That means I like you."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Okay."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Do you want to bite me?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "No."

MOLLY BERNARD: "You don't like me?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "No, I do."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Is it because I'm famous?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "No."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Just because I'm famous doesn't mean I don't need what everyone else needs. Here, bite me anywhere. Bite my shoulder."

MOLLY BERNARD: He slid back his jacket, unbuttoned the first four buttons on his shirt and pulled it back, exposing a large, tanned shoulder. I leaned over and very quickly bit it lightly, and then I picked up my SkyMall catalog and began reading. After a minute, he rebuttoned himself and slowly picked up his copy of SkyMall. We read like this for a good half hour. During this time I was careful not to think about my life. My life was far below us in an orangey-pink stucco apartment building. It seemed as though I might never have to return to it now. The salt of his shoulder buzzed on the tip of my tongue. I might never again stand in the middle of the living room and wonder what to do next. I sometimes stood there for up to two hours, unable to generate enough momentum to eat, to go out, to clean, to sleep. It seemed unlikely that someone who had just bitten and been bitten by a celebrity would have this kind of problem.

MOLLY BERNARD: I read about vacuum cleaners designed to suck insects out of the air. I studied self-heating towel racks and fake rocks that could hide a key. We were beginning our descent. We adjusted our seatbacks and tray tables. Roy Spivey suddenly turned to me and said, "Hey."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Hey," I said.

MOLLY BERNARD: "Hey, I had an amazing time with you."

MOLLY BERNARD: "I did too."

MOLLY BERNARD: "I'm gonna write down a number and I want you to guard it with your life."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Okay."

MOLLY BERNARD: "This phone number falls into the wrong hands, and I'll have to get someone to change it and that is a big headache."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Okay."

MOLLY BERNARD: He wrote the number on a page from the SkyMall catalog and ripped it out and pressed it into my palm.

MOLLY BERNARD: "This is my kid's nanny's personal line. The only people who call her on this line are her boyfriend and her son, so she'll always answer it, you'll always get through, and she'll know where I am."

MOLLY BERNARD: I looked at the number.

MOLLY BERNARD: "It's missing a digit."

MOLLY BERNARD: "I know. I want you to just memorize the last number, okay?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "Okay."

MOLLY BERNARD: "It's four."

MOLLY BERNARD: We turned our faces to the front of the plane, and Roy Spivey gently took my hand. I was still holding the paper with the number, so he held it with me. I felt warm and simple. Nothing bad could ever happen to me while I was holding hands with him, and when he let go I would have the number that ended in four. I had wanted a number like this my whole life.

MOLLY BERNARD: The plane landed gracefully like an easily-drawn line. He helped me pull my carry-on bag down from the bin. It looked obscenely familiar.

MOLLY BERNARD: "Many people are gonna be waiting for me out there, so I won't be able to say goodbye properly."

MOLLY BERNARD: "I know, I know. That's all right."

MOLLY BERNARD: "No, it really isn't. It's a travesty."

MOLLY BERNARD: "But I understand."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Okay, here's what I'm gonna do. Just before I leave the airport, I'm gonna come up to you and say, 'Do you work here?'"

MOLLY BERNARD: "It's okay. I really—I really understand."

MOLLY BERNARD: "No, this is important to me. I'll say, 'Do you work here?' And then you say your part."

MOLLY BERNARD: "What's my part?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "You say, 'No.'"

MOLLY BERNARD: "Okay?"

MOLLY BERNARD: "And then I'll know what you mean. We'll know the secret meaning."

MOLLY BERNARD: "Okay."

MOLLY BERNARD: We looked into each other's eyes in a way that said nothing else mattered as much as us. I asked myself if I would kill my parents to save his life, the question I had been posing since I was 15. The answer always used to be yes, but in time all those boys had faded away and my parents were still there. I was now less and less willing to kill them for anyone. In fact, I worried for their health now. In this case however, I had to say yes. Yes I would!

MOLLY BERNARD: We walked down the tunnel between the plane and real life, and then without so much as a look in my direction, he glided away from me. I tried not to look for him in the baggage claim area. He would find me before I left. I went to the bathroom, I claimed my bag, I drank from the water fountain, I watched children hit each other. Finally I let my eyes crawl over everyone. They were all not him. Every single one of them. But they all knew his name. Those who were talented at drawing could have drawn him from memory and everyone else could certainly have described him if they'd had to, say to a blind person—the blind being the only people who would not know what he looked like. And even the blind would know his wife's name, and a few of them would have known the name of the boutique where his wife had bought a lavender tank top and a matching boy short. Roy Spivey was both nowhere to be found and everywhere.

MOLLY BERNARD: Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

MOLLY BERNARD: "Excuse me, do you work here?"

MOLLY BERNARD: It was him. Except that it wasn't him, because there was no voice in his eyes. His eyes were mute. He was acting.

MOLLY BERNARD: I said my line. "No."

MOLLY BERNARD: A pretty young airport attendant appeared beside me.

MOLLY BERNARD: "I work here. I can help you," she said enthusiastically.

MOLLY BERNARD: He paused for a fraction of a second and then he said, "Great."

MOLLY BERNARD: I waited to see what he would come up with, but the attendant glared at me as if I were rubbernecking. And then she rolled her eyes at him as if she were protecting him from people like me.

MOLLY BERNARD: I wanted to yell, "It was a code! It was a secret meaning." But I knew how this would look so I just moved along.

MOLLY BERNARD: That evening, I found myself standing in the middle of my living room floor. I had made dinner and eaten it, and then I had an idea that I might clean the house. But halfway to the broom I stopped on a whim, flirting with the emptiness in the center of the room. I wanted to see if I could start again, but of course I knew what the answer would be: the longer I stood there the longer I had to stand there. It was intricate and exponential. I looked like I was doing nothing, but really I was as busy as a physicist or a politician. I was strategizing my next move. That my next move was always not to move did not make it any easier. I let go of the idea of cleaning and just hoped that I would get to bed at a reasonable hour. I thought of Roy Spivey in bed with Ms. M, and then I remembered the number. I took it out of my pocket. He had written it across a picture of pink curtains. They were made out of a fabric that was originally designed for the space shuttle. They changed density in reaction to fluctuations of light and heat. I mouthed all the numbers and then said the missing one out loud.

MOLLY BERNARD: "Four." It felt risky and illicit. I yelled, "Four!" And moved easily into the bedroom. I put on my nightgown, brushed my teeth and went to bed.

MOLLY BERNARD: Over the course of my life, I have used the number many times—not the telephone number, just the four. When I first met my husband I used to whisper, "Four!" while we had intercourse, because it was so painful. Then I learned about a tiny operation that I could have to enlarge myself. I whispered, "Four," when my dad died of lung cancer. When my daughter got into trouble doing god knows what in Mexico City, I said, "Four," to myself as I gave her my credit card number over the phone—which was confusing, thinking one number and saying another.

MOLLY BERNARD: My husband jokes about my lucky number, but I've never told him about Roy. You shouldn't underestimate a man's capacity for feeling threatened. You don't have to be a great beauty for men to come to blows over you. At my high school reunion I pointed out a teacher I'd once had a crush on and by the end of the night this teacher and my husband were wrestling in a hotel parking garage. My husband said that it was about issues of race but I knew. Some things are just best left unsaid.

MOLLY BERNARD: This morning, I was cleaning out my jewelry box when I came upon a little slip of paper with pink curtains on it. I thought I had lost it long ago, but no, there it was, folded, underneath a dried-up carnation and some impractically heavy bracelets. I hadn't whispered "Four" in years. The idea of luck made me feel a little weary now, like Christmas when you're not in the mood. I stood by the window and I studied Roy Spivey's handwriting in the light. He was older now—we all were. But he was still working. He had his own TV show. He wasn't a spy anymore. He played the father of 12 rascally kids. It occurred to me now that I had missed the point entirely. He had wanted me to call him.

MOLLY BERNARD: I looked out the window. My husband was in the driveway vacuuming out the car. I sat on the bed with the number in my lap and the phone in my hands. I dialed the digits, including the invisible one that had shepherded me through my adult life. It was no longer in service. Of course it wasn't. It was preposterous for me to have thought that it would still be his nanny's private line. Roy Spivey's children had long since grown up. The nanny was probably working for someone else or maybe she'd done well for herself, put herself through nursing school or business school. Good for her!

MOLLY BERNARD: I looked down at the number and I felt a tidal swell of loss. It was too late. I'd waited too long. I listened to the sound of my husband beating the car mats on the sidewalk, our ancient cat pressed against my legs wanting food. But I couldn't seem to stand up. Minutes passed, almost an hour. Now it was starting to get dark. My husband was downstairs making a drink, and I was about to stand up. Crickets were chirping in the yard, and I was about to stand up.

[applause]

LATIF: Coming up, we are so excited to share two more stories with you, one of which is by, I would argue, one of the most iconic writers alive today, but not writing about the things she's known for writing about—writing about something completely different, that you'd never expect she wrote about.

LULU: Yeah, she's jumping—she's jumping species.

LATIF: She's jumping species. Exactly. That's after the break.

LULU: Stick with us.

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Latif.

LULU: Shorts. We are now at the point in our journey of flight where it is time to fall.

LATIF: Quick warning, this story is about suicide.

LATIF: Lulu, you picked the next story. Why don't you take it from here?

LULU: Okay. So this is truly, no kidding, my favorite short story of all time. I do like to read them a lot. So yeah, I read it—I came across it very randomly about 20 years ago, and I think I am still seeing the Tweety Birds, like, going around my head from how hard it smacked me when I first read it. What's particularly amazing is how efficiently the author pulls off this effect. It is just a page and a half long. So it is by the author Don Shea, and he wrote tons of flash fiction, these super short stories, and published in places like the Gettysburg Review, the Utne Reader and beyond.

LATIF: So now performing "Jumper Down" by Don Shea, please welcome back Becca Blackwell.

[applause]

BECCA BLACKWELL: "Jumper Down."

BECCA BLACKWELL: Henry was our jumper-up expert. Had been for years. When the jumper was up, by which I mean, when he or she was still on the building ledge or the bridge, Henry was superb at talking them down. Of all the paramedics I worked with, he had the touch. When the call came in, "Jumper up," Henry always went if he was working that shift. When the call was, "Jumper down," it didn't matter much which of us went. We were all equally capable of attending to the mess on the ground or fishing some dude out of the water.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The university hospital we worked out of got more than its share of jumpers of both varieties because of its proximity to the major bridges—Manhattan, Brooklyn and Williamsburg. Over the years, dealing with his jumpers and the other deranged human flotsam that jogged through his way, Henry had become a tad crusty, you might even say burned out, although he was still pretty effective with the jumper-ups. He always considered them a personal challenge.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Henry was retiring. On his last shift we threw him a little party in the lounge two doors down from the ER. Even brought some liquor in for the off-duty guys, although that was against the rules. Everyone was telling their favorite jumper stories for Henry's benefit, and he'd heard them all before, but that didn't matter. Big John told the story of the window cleaner who took a dive four stories off his scaffolding. They got him in the bus, started a couple of IV lines and John radioed ahead to the ER, "Bringing in the jumper down." Now this guy was in sad shape: two broken legs, a femur poking through the skin. But he sits right up and says with great indignation, "I did not jump! Goddamn it, I fell!"

BECCA BLACKWELL: Just as Big John finished this story, a call came in. "Jumper up on the Brooklyn Bridge." Everyone agreed it was meant to be. It was Henry's last jumper, and I went along because it was my shift too. The pillar on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge is over water. Our jumper had climbed up the pillar on the Brooklyn side, which is over land. By the time we got there, the police had a couple of spotlights on him and we could see him clearly, sitting on a beam about a hundred feet up, looking pretty relaxed. Henry took a megaphone and was preparing to climb up after him when the guy jumped. It looked like a circus act. No exaggeration. Two half-gainers and a backflip, and every second of it caught in the spotlights.

BECCA BLACKWELL: The guy hit the ground about 30 yards from where we were standing, and Henry and I were over there on the run, although it was obvious he was beyond help. He was dead, but he hadn't died yet. His eyes were open, and he looked as if he was somewhat surprised by what he had done to himself. Henry leaned in close and bellowed into his ear, "I know you can hear me because hearing's the last thing to go. I just gotta tell you, I wanted you to know that jump was fucking magnificent!"

[laughter]

BECCA BLACKWELL: At first, I considered Henry's parting shot pretty insensitive. But then I thought about it some more. I mean, it was clearly not the occasion to admonish the jumper, who had obviously suffered enough defeats and rejections in his life. I mean, why should he spend his last few seconds on Earth hearing how he blew it once again? It seems to me if I was a jumper on the way out, right there on the ragged edge of the big mystery, I might indeed, upon my exit, find some last modicum of comfort in Henry's words, human words of recognition and congratulation.

[applause]

LULU: Becca Blackwell, absolutely killing that story!

LATIF: And now it is time for the final story of the night. Settle in, because now we're about to lose all sense of what's where, all sense of the rules of gravity, all sense even of what species we are.

LULU: Yes folks, it is time at long last to become the only mammal that truly flies—a bat. We shined the bat signal on our local public library, and you'll never guess who showed up.

LATIF: An obscure up and comer named Margaret Atwood. She, of course, wrote The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Blind Assassin, and many collections including the recent Old Babes in the Woods. She is Canadian. She is wise. She is fearless, and at times she can feel spookily like an oracle.

LULU: This story will be read by a much-loved Tony-nominated actor. Please welcome Zack Grenier!

ZACK GRENIER: "My Life As A Bat."

ZACK GRENIER: 1. Reincarnation. In my previous life, I was a bat. If you find previous lives amusing or unlikely, you are not a serious person. Consider: a great many people believe in them, and if sanity is a general consensus about the content of reality, who are you to disagree? Consider also: previous lives have entered the world of commerce. Money can be made from them. You were a Cleopatra, you were a Flemish Duke, you were a druid princess—and money changes hands. If the stock market exists, so must previous lives.

ZACK GRENIER: In the previous-life market, there is not such a great demand for Peruvian ditch diggers as there is for Cleopatra; or for Indian latrine cleaners, or for 1952 housewives living in California split levels. Similarly, not many of us choose to remember our lives as vultures, spiders or rodents, but some of us do. The fortunate few. Conventional wisdom has it that reincarnation as an animal is a punishment for past sins, but perhaps it is a reward instead. At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.

ZACK GRENIER: Bats have a few things to put up with, but they do not inflict. When they kill, they kill without mercy, but without hate. They are immune from the curse of pity. They never gloat.

ZACK GRENIER: 2. Nightmares. I have recurring nightmares. In one of them, I am clinging to the ceiling of a summer cottage while a red-faced man in white shorts and a white v-necked t-shirt jumps up and down, hitting at me with a tennis racquet. There are cedar rafters up here, and sticky flypapers attached with tacks, dangling like toxic seaweeds. I look down at the man's face, foreshortened and sweating, eyes bulging and blue, the mouth emitting furious noise, rising up like a marine float, sinking again, rising as if on a swell of air.

ZACK GRENIER: The air itself is muggy, the sun is sinking; there will be a thunderstorm. A woman is shrieking, "My hair! My hair!" and someone else is calling, "Anthea! Bring the stepladder!" All I want is to get out through the hole in the screen, but that will take some concentration, and it's hard in this din of voices, they interfere with my sonar. There is a smell of dirty bathmats—it's his breath, the breath that comes out from every pore, the breath of the monster. I will be lucky to get out of this alive!

BECCA BLACKWELL: In another nightmare, I am winging my way—flittering, I suppose you'd call it—through the clean-washed demi-light before dawn. This is a desert. The yuccas are in bloom, and I have been gorging myself on their juices and pollen. I'm heading to my home, to my home cave, where it will be cool during the burnout of the day, and there will be the sound of water trickling through limestone, coating the rock with a glistening hush, with the moistness of new mushrooms. And the other bats will chirp and rustle and doze until night unfurls again and makes the hot sky tender for us.

ZACK GRENIER: But when I reach the entrance to the cave, it is sealed over. It's blocked in. Who could have done this? I vibrate my wings, sniffing blind as a dazzled moth over the hard surface. In a short time, the sun will rise like a balloon on fire and I will be blasted with its glare, and shriveled to a few small bones. Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing? For some of us, the mythologies are different.

ZACK GRENIER: 3. Vampire films.

ZACK GRENIER: I became aware of the nature of my previous life gradually, not only through dreams but through scraps of memory, through hints, through odd moments of recognition.

There was my preference for the subtleties of dawn and dusk, as opposed to the vulgar blaring hour of high noon. There was my déjà vu experience in the Carlsbad Caverns—surely I had been there before, long before, before they put up the pastel spotlights and the cute names for stalactites and the underground restaurant where you can combine claustrophobia and indigestion and then take the elevator to get back out.

[laughter]

BECCA BLACKWELL: There was also my dislike for headfuls of human hair, so like nets or tendrils of poisonous jellyfish. I feared entanglements. No real bat would ever suck the blood of necks. The neck is too near the hair. Even the vampire bat will target a hairless extremity: by choice a toe, resembling as it does the teat of a cow.

BECCA BLACKWELL: Vampire films have always seemed ridiculous to me for this reason, but also for the idiocy of their bats—huge rubbery bats, with red Christmas-light eyes and fangs like a saber-toothed tiger's, flown in on strings. Their puppet wings flap flap sluggishly like those of an overweight and degenerate bird. I screamed at these filmic moments, but not with fear; rather with outraged laughter, at the insult to bats.

ZACK GRENIER: Oh Dracula, unlikely hero! Why was it given to you by whoever stole your soul to transform yourself into a bat and a wolf, and only those? Why not a vampire chipmunk, a duck, a gerbil? Why not a vampire turtle? Now that would be a plot!

ZACK GRENIER: 4. The bat as deadly weapon. During the Second World War, they did experiments with bats. Thousands of bats were to be released over German cities at the hour of noon. Each was to have a small incendiary device strapped into it, with a timer. The bats would have headed for darkness as is their habit. They would have crawled into holes in walls, or secreted themselves under the eaves of houses, relieved to have found safety. At a preordained moment, they would have exploded, and the cities would have gone up in flames.

ZACK GRENIER: That was the plan: death by flaming bat. The bats too would have died, of course. Acceptable megadeaths.

ZACK GRENIER: The cities went up in flames anyway, but not with the aid of bats. The atom bomb had been invented, and the fiery bat was no longer thought necessary.

ZACK GRENIER: If the bats had been used after all, would there have been a war memorial for them? It isn't likely.

ZACK GRENIER: If you ask a human being what makes his flesh creep more, a bat or a bomb, he will say the bat. It is difficult to experience loathing for something merely metal, however ominous. We save these sensations for those with skin and flesh: a skin, a flesh, unlike our own.

ZACK GRENIER: 5. Beauty.

ZACK GRENIER: Perhaps it isn't my life as a bat that was the interlude. Perhaps it is this life. Perhaps I have been sent into human form as if on a dangerous mission to save and redeem my own folk. When I have gained small success, or died in the attempt—for failure in such a task against such odds is more likely—I will be born again, back into that other form, the other world where I truly belong.

BECCA BLACKWELL: More and more, I think of this event with longing. The quickness of heartbeat, the vivid plunge into the nectars of crepuscule flowers, hovering in the infrared of night; the dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums clustering me around me, the mothers licking the tiny amazed faces of the newborn; the swift love of what will come next, the anticipations of the tongue and the infurled, corrugated and scrolled nose, nose like a dead leaf, nose like a radiator grill, nose of a denizen of Pluto.

ZACK GRENIER: And in the evening, the supersonic hymn of praise to our Creator, the Creator of bats, who appeared to us in the form of a bat and who gave us all things: water and the liquid stone of caves, the woody refuge of attics, petals and fruit and juicy insects, and the beauty of slippery wings and sharp white canines and shining eyes.

ZACK GRENIER: What do we pray for? We pray for food as all do, and for health and for the increase of our kind; and for deliverance from evil, which cannot be explained by us, which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs.

ZACK GRENIER: Goddess of caves and grottoes: bless your children.

[applause]

LATIF: I guess that's it. We can go put pants on now, I guess. [laughs]

LULU: From our shorts. We weren't pantsless. Reminding you of the shorts joke.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Okay. Okay. This episode was produced by Maria Paz Gutiérrez.

LATIF: Special thanks to Drew Richardson, Jennifer Brennan and everybody else at Symphony Space.

LULU: And to all of the actors who brought their all onstage, reading the stories: Abubakr Ali, Becca Blackwell, Molly Bernard and Zack Grenier.

LATIF: And a little extra thanks to Sammy Westfall.

LULU: Thanks, Sammy! All right, that'll do it for today. More stories of the nonfiction variety headed your way next week.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Basif Ghali, and I'm from Somerset, New Jersey. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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