I.

It was a day in January 2021. A young man threw himself to death from the top of the Vessel at the heart of Hudson Yards in Manhattan. It was already the third suicide that had occurred in the year since it had opened to the public. Its unique spiral staircases, designed by the famous British architect, Thomas Heatherwick, had successfully drawn crowds of tourists, and even a handful of frustrated minds.

This story is not about the idiosyncrasies of any specific architecture or place in the delirious city. If one had to dwell on any one of these meaningless quirks, no one would be able to take a breath. To live side by side, it is important not to question any causality that you happened to witness here. Or better to engrave the quote by George Bernard Shaw on your heart: “If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.” But it seemed not everyone shared the same way of dancing with it.

Here was a young woman who doubted that only three people had succeeded in committing suicide from that banal skeleton. Assuming that there might have been more attempts, she wanted to calculate the probability of success. That was her own way to appreciate such architecture. Her curiosity continued; if I dropped a ball from the highest point of the structure and watched it roll to the lowest point in the building, what kind of trajectory would it take, and how many possible trajectories would it have? ‘Start with Pascal’s triangle ,’ she mumbled. Sticking to this childish play was her desperate effort to distract herself from visualizing the execution of the worst scenario that the three people had carried out.