Fall From Fort Point

Josh gave me a setting, character, and line of dialog for this story as I was asking for in my last post. This was a lot of fun. Feel free to go back to the last post and read what I was saying and throw out your own ideas. The minimum I'll write is 500 words. This one came out to 1,666 (oooohhh) words. Thanks, Josh!

Also, this is a first draft and I skimmed over it briefly but there are bond bound to be typos (see?), sorry.

Fall From Fort Point
By Matt Moore

This is it. This is the spot she fell into the water. Fort Point. Below the Golden Gate bridge. This is where she fell. Where she always falls. She continues to fall each time I replay the scene. Each time Kim Novak falls in and each time James Stewart saves her. Then he falls. Falls for her, and she falls again for him and again to her death, though the first time she doesn't die, the second time she does though, after making him fall in love all over again.
I feel like falling. Not into the water. But falling, forever. With only space above me and below me. I feel like falling. I've been falling all of my life. Just not free falling. The wind is picking up and I can smell the daily catch coming from, well from just about everywhere. I wonder how long I have been standing here. I wonder how it would feel to fall from further up.
I woke up here this morning. No real memory of coming here, though I find I wake up here many mornings. Clutching onto my empty bottles like a cliche. I never used to drink. That isn't true. Do you want to hear that I was once a successful man? Do you want to hear that I was just screwed over? By a woman, by a boss, by a bank? That I found myself on the street all of a sudden one day having ostracized everyone in my life? That I turned to drink only after I was left alone in this world? Do you picture me falling from the top, hitting every ledge but never getting a handhold before falling further down?
Yes, I was once the head of industry. I ran a newspaper, we have several here. A homeless newspaper. I was in charge of everything. We take turns running it. This was last week. When I was a newspaper man. Now I'm a poet. Sold my first poems on the street just days ago. So far I've gotten positive reviews. But who am I kidding? I wasn't being read by the Paris Review. I suppose there aren't many people out there who read a poem and tell the smelly old fart that wrote it and sold it to you for fifty cents worth of beer money that it was a piece of shit.Unless you plan to tell him he is a piece of shit. I've heard that more than once.
You'd think I'd be tired of falling. Each muttered remark and each condescending ass who gives you a quarter and expects you to kiss their ass for it. Even the ones that just drop a dollar or two my way and barely make eye contact bother me. What sort of asshole would give me money? What is so wrong with them they feel they need to buy redemption from me? I fall further down each time anyone does anything for me, even if all they are doing is nothing.
Perhaps I don't hate them that truly want to help me. They are just too naive to understand that they can't do anything to help me. No one can help anyone. Everyone is falling, and everyone is powerless against the forces around them. We grab onto each other in mid-air, we shout into the wind at each other. We hold on for a while then let go. Some of us just fall faster than others.
I'd love to stop falling. To find my feet on solid ground. Yet when it gets cold and wet at night and I haven't got a place to sleep I lay on the ground and picture myself falling. Sometimes I jump from a plane first. Sometimes I'm just falling. I never hit the ground. I can't see where I started from. I'm just falling. A bottomless pit and I am completely powerless against anything in my environment. All I can do is allow gravity to do what it is already doing. And I know that thinking I am the one to allow it to do that is just as ridiculous as the thought that I could stop falling if I really wanted to.
I'm sitting in a corner, hidden almost in the long shadows from the rising sun. I'm cold, but I hear someone coming and I don't want to go into the open just yet. A woman, I can tell from the clicking of the high heels. I suppose I don't know its a woman for sure in this city. Either way she would like to be called a she so long as she is wearing high heels. Perhaps she will become he when he goes into work. You can't take any of this stuff for granted anymore.
She passes by me and I know she doesn't see me, but she wouldn't slow down even if she knew I were here. Determination. I don't expect a woman like that to have any interest in me. Not even enough to acknowledge my presence on the same planet as her. But that won't stop my interest in her.
She stops in just the same spot as Ms. Novak. And from behind I could almost, almost... she turns and looks right at me. She is. She looks as good as she did in 1958. She's even wearing the same clothes from the movie. She can't be her. She'd be in her seventies by now. She looks barely twenty. But I am standing up now and I don't know and she has turned back towards the sea. And I'm standing in the warm morning sun, the same sun as her. And we stand, the wind blowing my tater clothes the same way it blows on her tailored dress. She doesn't let out much of a sound, just a gasp, and she is gone. Over the edge. And I am Jimmy Stewart and I am going in after her. I take only a moment to throw my coat and my shoes to the side as I run towards the edge. She is laying face down in the water, the current pulling her away from me, towards the open water just beyond the bridge and I am a terrible swimmer.
Now I am falling. Finally a true free fall. The water isn't too far away but I am in the air for what seems like a lifetime. Minutes, hours, before I hit the surface of the water I see her young body age, die, decompose, turn to dust atop the water and blow away. I'm stuck in the air, not moving. Not falling, and yet I'm still falling, somehow.
Time remembers it has forgotten me as I smash into the freezing water.
"Ahhh... Fuck!" I hear before my ears go under. There is a current down here, its pulling me, not an entirely different sensation than that of falling. Yet in this place time moves much faster. I want to embrace my new life underwater, the few moments of it I feel I will have before I suck in enough water to become John Doe. But there is a hand on me chest, and another hand on my leg, and I'm being pulled towards the surface. Falling upwards.
"Come on Al, at least try to swim." He was talking to me. All I could see was his face. A pleasant face, but to square to be doing anything other than working for the government. I kicked absently in the water, but knew to try to push against the water was as useless as kicking against gravity. I was falling sideways now.
Soon we had gotten to a ladder and he helped me climb up. He wore only soaking black slacks, but laid out on the ground next to my discarded clothes was the upper half of his uniform and utility belt. I laid myself out next to them, he sat on the cold stone ground and shook his hair of the salt water.
"I thought you might be a government man," I said to him. I want to hate him for helping me. For grabbing onto me in midair for a few seconds. But I can't seem to hate him as much as I'd like. Something about him tells me that he knows how to fall better than most.
"Goddamnit Al, one of these days I'm not going to be here to save you."
"You already saved me." I sat up and extended my hand to shake his.
"Just like last month, and last year before that. Do you wait for me before jumping in or is it just that I am that goddamn lucky?"
"I'm sorry, have we met?" I retracted my hand, not wanting to shake his hand until he started to make some sense.
"Trying to save Kim Novak again?"
"Yes, she fell. She keeps falling. Just like me."
"That was a movie Al. It was a movie from a very long time ago."
"But she hasn't stopped falling."
"Yes she has. You haven't." He stood up and pulled his shirt and belt back on, ran a hand through his hair to try to even it out, then reached out his hand to mine which I had extended towards his again. "Come on, get your coat and shoes. I'll take you to the hospital."
We walked dripping the cold water from our clothes back to his car.
"She died out there."
"Al, your going to die out there. I can't always save you."
"But you saw her. She died out there. She fell and she died. But she loved the fall. You saw her." He opened the door and let me in the back. "Tell me you saw her." He closed the door and walked around to the front and got in.
"I saw her." He said as he turned on the siren and headed towards the VA hospital. "I saw her."