Vessel – Amalia Mairet

January 8, 2025

As we drive down through Vermont, I want to bury my body in the mountains. At the rest stop, I sit in the parking lot eating cold mac and cheese from a Tupperware with a plastic fork, lifting the soft tines mechanically to and from my mouth. October sun warming my back. The mountains come up in slow orange and red swells, their texture nubby and faraway like a shag carpet. How do all trees remind me of you? Some should be spared, don’t you think? 

I look at the mountains and feel three extra breaths of air in my chest. It’s a strange pressure, like when you ask your little brother to stand on your back for a second, his feet and all the weight behind them pushing and pushing until you are relieved of some tension you could feel but not name. Strain and then collapse inward, in a good and painful way. When I look at the mountains I feel like a fallen tree. Rot from the inside, body turning to ground, to woodchips. This sick tender feeling in my torso. Too soft for anything useful. 

When we get back on the bus, I sit on the right side against the window. The seat is too small for my laptop, my elbows pigeoned in against my ribs. I give up writing. Outside, the rocks wear long vertical grooves like backpack strap marks in shoulders, like a child after a day of school. As if someone trussed the stone and left the rocks to grow around the wire like a grafted tree. Let them grow and then removed the straps carefully, like my father would unlace twine from the legs of a roast chicken. Did all this work, then came back and undid it. Left the marks here, stark and open, laid bare to the highway traffic. I wonder if they thought people would see, if they counted on the fact that nobody would look. It takes thirteen milliseconds to process a visual image, even less if the image is familiar. I know all the strange ways love gets etched into things, so I can see their handiwork out the window, even as a glimpse. 
        I watch as the road comes up and down and falls away, as highway gives out to the deep green scoop of a valley or a sand pit, a rusted barn, a cloister of tin roofs. A wooden bridge with dark struts framing the river, the perspective changing as we move, the railings and cover shifting like the see-through dimensional cubes you doodled in fourth grade. A dam with the water pouring over, the smooth pond broken at one side into a rush of white streamers. At the points of some trees there are spiderwebs like gossamer baseball mitts. 
        The window reflects halfway, makes a double exposure that floats over the expanse of trees, each one reaching desperately upwards toward the light. The girl in the glass has a face smooth and colourless, suspended like a mask over the dark expanse of her hair. All the invisible things behind her. I mean the bus seats. 
        There are these fields in Vermont where every tree is stripped to a stick. Beetles, I think. Settlers came and cut down the oak and hickory, and in their place grew pines. The former are resistant to the beetles, built up a tolerance in sap and resin, but the pines are not. So here you have it, whole swathes of forest laid bare. It’s hard to recognize the symptoms of a pine beetle—it starts with just a softness, the tree’s innards gone porous and spongy and black. 
        Once the beetles get in, scientists can prescribe a burn, set a forest fire and watch it wipe the insect infection from the land. Fire cauterizes the forest’s skin, razes the empty trees stuck up like hair from goosebumps. If they don’t burn the field they fell the trees, chopping the rotted ones and taking them away, like a corpse dragged through the night to a wood chipper, or leaving them where they fall. Either way, the point is distance, to make space, to slow the rot. It’s hard to catch early because the only clue is absence, a field which should be green made spare in secrecy. Made empty. When does empty become suspicious? How many branches fall before you know to start the burn?

On the bus to New York, I’ve been wiping my nose with the sleeve of my sweater because I have no tissues. This is one of those childish, desperate actions I never wanted you to see. You caught me in a few: leaving items in the wrong place at the grocery store, refusing to get up and brush my teeth before bed. There are a million things wrong with me but I managed to get away with most of them in secret for as long as you were around. 
        Except: remember that time we sat the wrong way in a canoe, you at the front and me at the back. You asked to switch places in the boat so you could steer. I didn’t want to. I was afraid to fall in. But the boat needed steering and I couldn’t do it, so we switched. Remember me crouched in the belly, knees braced against the thin sides, feeling water lick the hull. Wobbling as I placed each foot, the ribs trembling up and down, my body low as I could get it. Each step a tremor, threatening error, threatening consequence. I came to the middle and you stepped past my shaking knees, deft and decisive, only half crawling. When it was over we sat opposite, the wind turning the boat almost in a circle. You said You worry too much. I thought Finally. The other shoe always drops. I was glad to have it over with. 

When we land in New York, I step off at Hudson Yards and see the Vessel has opened again. After a three-month hiatus, the same structure, newly covered in safety nets. In the middle of the old docks, a honeycomb of bronze sixteen stories tall. It rises from the ground like a beehive, like a copper-woven apple basket sitting upright and empty among the skyscrapers. All these staircases ascending and descending, these beautiful inroads to nowhere.
        The Vessel was open for eleven months before someone jumped off. He was nineteen, a former rugby star from Connecticut. Sixteen stories is one hundred and seventy-three feet. There were tourists everywhere. 
        Next there was a twenty-four year old from Brooklyn. The day after she jumped, her suicide note posted itself on Instagram. She wrote:
        This is pretty surreal isn’t it? One might say uncomfortable. Jarring. I guess if you don’t know by now you should probably sit down.
        If you’re reading this, I’m gone. Either that or somehow incapacitated in the hospital so I can’t delete this scheduled post. I really hope I’m not though.
        I don’t care to go into the reasons why I’m gone. I just want to leave my last mark on this world.

Just weeks after her, there was a twenty-one-year-old man who jumped at 11:45 in the morning. The sun would have been at 163 degrees, westward over the Hudson, bright and shining off the bronze. After him, the Vessel closed and reopened with security guards and the rule that nobody could visit alone. Railings were only chest-high, even though all the experts said they should be eye-level at least. Everyone who had jumped was young, aged nineteen to twenty-four. They said that young people commit a different type of suicide from adults. They’re more spontaneous, more impulsive. They kill themselves because they don’t know how else to make things stop. Or else because they don’t know how to keep going. 
        A tall barrier can’t be leapt over with a sneaker-toe braced against the metal grate, a single flexion of the chest and upper arms. A tall barrier forces a pause, a sound delay between action and effect. It prolongs the action itself, creates many vaulting motions of the arms and legs to think about the wind through the metal structure, forces consideration of the physical body you are offering to the concrete. Time to catch your own reflection in the smooth bronze curves of the structure, to think that perhaps things would be better if you stayed, your body closed up and intact. 
        But no. A tall barrier would ruin the view. 

The last suicide was a fourteen-year-old boy from New Jersey. Security checked him in, nodded him towards the new height of every landing. Made sure he was with company, since nobody was allowed up alone. He leapt from the eighth floor during a visit with his family.
        After that, the Vessel closed for three years. They put up steel mesh barriers on every balcony from the second floor upwards. The top level closed forever. 

People think there are two ways to die. Either you need a method, some sort of plan or good reason. Or, the best and easiest way, you let your guard down until death happens upon you. I never stop thinking about the latter. This is how I’ve always felt, ears up and sniffing for tragedy. I have taught myself to pay the type of attention that I hoped could keep you alive. I know now that isn’t possible, but I can’t stop. 

At the base of the structure are a series of plaques. The Vessel’s architect was Thomas Heatherwick. He says the design came from his childhood, when he fell in love with an old flight of wooden stairs outside a building site. Think of it, a seventeen-year-old alone in the dustbowl construction site, clambering over the gravel pits and the piles of warped tin and broken glass. 
        He said he loved the staircase because it was all possibility, infinitely malleable. You could climb up stairs, jump on them, dance on them, get tired and plonk yourself down on them. He imagined a whole maze of these near-useless staircases, each one barely elevating the climber, each leading to another equally minuscule riser. The building commemorates nothing besides the staircase itself and the act of climbing it. How it forces you to engage with yourself, with the object, creates the chemistry of attention. Making decisions even if they mean very little, change very little. Watching others choose, seeing and being seen, how the building’s ducking and weaving into itself choreographs the same movement in its visitors. Heatherwick knew there was no competing with the skyscrapers for size and scale, but he wanted to lift people so they could see each other. Hence the gaps, the spaces. The lack of safety nets. All so we could see each other, watch with no obstructions. 

When I climb the Vessel, it takes me forever to get to the top. I walk all the stairs, more than two thousand, around and around the dizzying spiral. I note each step like a zen garden, like a meditation. I think of Calcutta and Rome’s holy stairs, 28 of them, climbed on your knees. I walk all 154 interlocking staircases, the inner and the outer ones. I ask and the security guard tells me there is no right way. Just up, feeling each step through my whole body, sole to calf to thigh and ass and sore back, arms heavy and chest tight, heaving. 
        When I get to the top, as far as security will let me go, I stand and watch over the Hudson, the sharp mineral smell of the air near the water. Looking over the city, sternum pressed to the railing. Wind blowing through the honeycomb of staircases, wind singing right through me, through every porous hole in my torso. Arms to my side and feet rooted firm on the landing. I can see below, all the visitors milling beetlelike. The safety nets obstructing nothing, all their tiny decisions perfectly visible, passing clean through the mesh. Perfectly clear if you’re paying attention. So there was never a good reason, anyway.
        I stand up there and imagine him, Heatherwick, hand on the wooden side of these steps that go nowhere. Standing there, stock-still and obsessed, feeling that ache in his chest that I do when I look at the wide mountains behind a field of stripped trees, like I do when I think of us sitting in the empty belly of the canoe, or you being gentle somewhere so far away from me. When I imagine you, you’re standing solitary in a clearing somewhere, wearing your jean jacket. You look like the first man in the world. You look the way light does when it falls through a pane of glass. You look like a staircase in a building site, untouched, wooden meaning still indeterminate.