He was standing on a steel beam nine hundred feet above Fifth Avenue, balancing between two structures with a one hundred and fifty foot gap that he had to cross in seven steps, when the wind hit him like the open mouth of God. His left foot was planted on the I-beam of the north crane. His right foot hovered over nothing — pure nothing, the blue-gray sky dropping away beneath him like a curtain torn from its rod — and with each step he took he was making a choice to trust his feet, his muscles, the calloused arches of his bare soles, to believe that gravity would hold just long enough for him to reach the next beam.

Eddie Malone closed his eyes. Not out of fear. Out of focus. When his eyes were closed, the city below ceased to exist. There was only the beam, the next beam, the space between — and the feeling of his own body as an instrument of precision, of balance, of something his mother in that ruined coal town in West Virginia would never have understood. "God didn't give you those hands for standing on nothing, Eddie," she would say. And he would nod and smile and not explain that sometimes standing on nothing was the only thing that made him feel alive.

It was September 12, 1927. The building — a forty-story Art Deco monster of steel and glass rising out of Midtown Manhattan like a pencil drawn by an architect with megalomania — was six months from completion. The construction crew had taken their lunch break. Below him, on a platform fifty feet beneath his feet, his co-workers were eating sandwiches and drinking beer and watching him with a mixture of awe, boredom, and the occasional muttered bet. Jack "Roulette" Donovan — the crew's resident daredevil, who performed the same stunts Eddie did but with a flask of bootleg whiskey in his back pocket — had wagered five dollars that Eddie would not attempt the gap today.

"Seven steps, Malone," Jack shouted up. "You sure you're not afraid to die?"

Eddie didn't answer. He never answered. He opened his eyes and stepped.

His first step carried him across the gap. The beam on the other side caught his right foot with a metallic click. He shifted his weight, found his balance, stepped again. The wind pushed. The city swam beneath him like an aquarium. His third step was the longest — a full eight-foot stride over empty air — and for a moment his center of gravity wavered, just a fraction, just enough for his stomach to drop and his heart to hammer once, hard, against his ribs. He recovered. He always recovered.

By his fifth step he was moving with a rhythm that surprised even him — left, right, pause, left, right — as though his body had learned something his mind had not. The gap was closing. Two more steps. Then he would be standing on the south crane's I-beam, looking across at the north crane where he had started, looking down at the tiny cars moving along Fifth Avenue like children's toys, looking ahead at the forty stories of steel skeleton that stretched upward into the fog, and thinking: this is why I do it. Not for the money. Not for the fame. Kitty's drawings had made him famous last week — published in The New Yorker, reproduced in newspapers from Boston to Chicago — and he had read one of them on the construction site at dawn, standing on the same beam he was standing on now, reading it with grease on his fingers and fog in his eyes. The drawing showed him as a silhouette against the city skyline, arms outstretched, head tilted back, and beneath it the caption read: The Man Who Walks on Nothing.

But fame was something that happened to other people. Eddie Malone was not a famous person. He was a riveter. He was a boy from a coal mining town where the mountains had been strip-mined into ruins and the families had either starved or left or both. He was twenty-three years old and he had come to New York with nothing but his hands, his balance, and a mother who sold her wedding ring to buy him a bus ticket. He owed the city everything. And sometimes, standing on a beam nine hundred feet above the ground with his eyes closed and his body perfectly still, he felt like he was paying it back.

The seventh step brought him to the south crane. He stood there for a moment — maybe five seconds, maybe a minute, time moving differently up here — and then turned and walked back across the gap in the opposite direction. Seven steps each way. Fourteen steps total. Ninety seconds of pure exposure over nothing. When he reached the north crane, Jack was clapping slowly, like a man at a theater who had just seen a performance he would talk about at the saloon for months.

"Damn, Malone," Jack said. "You ever think about doing this for real? Not just for the crew. For the world."

Eddie shrugged. "World's got enough people standing on beams."

But that night, in his tenement room in East Harlem — a single window looking out at a brick wall three feet away, a thin mattress on the floor, a single photograph of his mother pinned to the wall with a nail — Eddie Malone lay awake and thought about Jack's question. Not for the first time. For the hundredth time, maybe. Why did he do it? Why did he keep climbing higher, taking bigger risks, standing on narrower beams, walking gaps that made even Jack Roulette keep his whiskey flask corked?

He had no answer. He only knew that when he was up there — when the wind was pushing and the city was swimming and his body was doing something his mind could not explain — he felt, for the first time in his life, like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

On September 22, during his most spectacular walk yet — between two cranes one thousand and fifty feet above Manhattan, in fog so thick he could not see the ground beneath his feet — Eddie lost his balance.

It happened on his third step back. A gust of wind caught him from the side like a man's hand shoving him. His right foot slipped off the beam. He grabbed at nothing — air, nothing, air — and his body swung outward, over the gap, held only by his left hand gripping a steel cable that ran along the side of the crane. He dangled there, two hundred feet above his co-workers, his body swaying like a pendulum, the cable biting into his palm, the wind in his ear sounding like the mountains back home — the Pine Creek Mountains, where he had grown up and his father had died in a mine collapse and his mother had sold her ring and sent him away.

For thirty seconds he stared at the face of death.

He did not see it as a tunnel of light. He did not see his life flash before his eyes. He saw nothing. Only an infinite, patient, completely indifferent void staring back at him from below. The city was not judging him. The wind was not attacking him. Gravity was not pulling him down. Nothing was happening to him. He was simply falling, slowly, toward the ground that would break him, and the universe was watching with the same blank expression it gave to a falling leaf or a drifting cloud.

Then his hand found purchase. He pulled himself up. He climbed back onto the beam. He turned and finished the walk. Seven steps back. Fourteen steps total. Ninety seconds of pure exposure. When he reached the other side, he did not look down. He looked at the sky and said, very quietly: "Not today."

Weeks later, before the building was completed, before the ribbon-cutting ceremony and the champagne and the newspaper photographs, Eddie made his final walk. He went alone at dawn, when the city was silver with mist and the construction crew had not yet arrived. He carried nothing — no safety rope, no walking stick, not even his work boots. He wore only his bare feet and a faded blue shirt and denim overalls that had been washed so many times they were nearly white.

He reached the highest point of the building — the pinnacle beam, where the spire would eventually be installed, the absolute top of the forty-story structure, one thousand and twenty feet above the ground. He stood there and looked at the city waking below him. The skyscrapers of Midtown were rising like a forest of glass and steel, but this building — his building — was the tallest, the highest, the point from which all of New York could be seen as a single vast and shimmering organism. He watched the sun come up over the Hudson and paint the skyscrapers in gold and pink and orange and for a moment the whole city was on fire and he was standing at the center of it and he thought: this is what it feels like to be exactly where you are supposed to be.

Then he turned and walked back down. Seven steps. Fourteen steps. Ninety seconds.

He put both feet on the same beam and did not look back.

Author Note & Copyright: