Day 182

[from A Thousand Miles to San Francisco]

"You know, I picked up a guy in Palm Springs once - must have been about twelve years ago now - he was heading to San Francisco too, but for a completely different reason. His name was Max, he was an IT wizard or something. He used to run some kinda online business - can't remember what it was called, or what it did - but when the dot-com bubble burst back in 2000, his company was one of those that went under. Guy lost everything: his job, his house, his money, his girlfriend… he told me he had nothing left, so he was gonna throw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge and end it all."

Samantha gasped, horrified. "What? Really?" she said.

John nodded. "Yep," he said. "'Course, he only told me that after I'd let him in and set off again. I said, I'm not driving you all the way to San Francisco just so you can kill yourself when you get there, that's almost five hundred miles. He was begging me, he said, 'I know I sound crazy, but that's where I want it all to end'.

"I looked over at the guy -- looked him dead in the eyes -- and I could see that he was desperate. But more than that, he was scared. Really scared. I fought in Vietnam for four years, I know what a man looks like when he's scared, and this guy was scared out of his mind. He'd had everything he'd ever worked for taken away from him in the blink of an eye, and he just didn't know what to do with himself. I realized he was so scared, he'd stopped thinking straight, and he'd somehow decided that suicide was the only option left to him. But I knew that deep down inside, he didn't really believe that. So I looked him dead in the eyes, and I told him, 'I don't think you want to kill yourself. Not really. I can see how frightened you are. If you really wanted to kill yourself, you wouldn't have hailed my truck, you would've jumped out in front of it.'

"Max then explained to me that the reason he wanted to go to the Golden Gate Bridge to kill himself was because he'd made a suicide pact with a woman he'd met online. Her husband had left her for another woman, and taken their kid with him, and she'd decided she couldn't live without her family. However, she didn't wanna die alone, so she'd been searching on the Internet for someone to join her in San Francisco and leap off the bridge with her. They'd met on some kinda Internet chat room, and they'd agreed to meet at the bridge that night and jump off together.

"He told me I was right: he was scared. He was having second thoughts about going through with it, but he didn't know what else to do. I told him to just take some time, think about what to do next with his life. 'You got all the time in the world,' I told him, 'you're still pretty young.' Honestly, he couldn't have been older than thirty. Seeing someone that young with so little hope was pretty darn sad. I told him he still had plenty of time left to get things sorted out, and to make something of himself. Hell, he owned his own company. It might not have worked out for him, but that's a lot more than I ever accomplished.

"So finally, Max admitted that I was right. He didn't really wanna die; he just wanted a solution, a way to fix his life. He hadn't been able to find one, so he felt like his only remaining option was suicide, but he told me he now realized that he just hadn't been looking hard enough, or thinking hard enough about it. I asked if he wanted me to turn around and take him back to Palm Springs, and he said no. He still wanted me to take him to the Golden Gate Bridge, but instead of throwing himself off of it, he was gonna try and talk the woman out of jumping, just like I'd talked him out of it. He told me, 'If I'm gonna try and build a new life, then I think she should try and build a new life as well'."

Samantha found herself rather touched by the whole story, but also a little anxious about its ending. "That's so sweet," she said. "So what happened in the end? Did he manage to save her?"

John merely shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "We got to San Francisco at about ten o'clock at night, I dropped him off as close to the bridge as I could get, he thanked me for all my help, and then he disappeared into the night. Never saw him again. For all I know, he might have jumped after all. I do wonder sometimes what happened to him, and to that other woman, but I guess I'll never know."

Samantha nodded. "I guess not," she said. For a fleeting moment, she had thought about trying to track him down upon reaching San Francisco, but in a city of four million people, and with nothing to go by except his first name, it would be utterly impossible. Besides, even if she did find out, she would most likely never see John again either. Somehow, however, not knowing how the story ended made it all the more intriguing and mysterious.

[AUTHOR NOTE: Sadly for you guys, you ARE going to learn how it ends! Not today, however, since it's almost 2am and I'm exhausted. I could just put it in a paragraph-long epilogue here, but why not write a full scene about it? This scene will most likely be exclusive to Project 20:15 and won't be in the final novel, so look forward to it at some point in the future.]