Audio: Etgar Keret reads.

P.T. sees him first. We’re on our way to the park to play ball when he suddenly says, “Daddy, look!” His head is tilted back and he’s squinting hard to see something far above me, and before I can even begin to imagine an alien spaceship or a piano about to fall on our heads my gut tells me that something really bad is happening. But, when I turn to see what P.T. is looking at, all I notice is an ugly, four-story building covered in plaster and dotted with air-conditioners, as if it had some kind of skin disease. The sun is hanging directly above it, blinding me, and as I’m trying to get a better angle I hear P.T. say, “He wants to fly.” Now I can see a guy in a white button-down shirt standing on the roof railing looking down at me, and, behind me, P.T. whispers, “Is he a superhero?”

Instead of answering him, I shout at the guy, “Don’t do it!”

The guy just stares at me.

I shout again, “Don’t do it, please! Whatever took you up there must seem like something you’ll never get over, but, believe me, you will! If you jump now, you’ll leave this world with that dead-end feeling. That’ll be your last memory of life. Not family, not love, only defeat. If you stay, I swear to you by everything I hold dear that your pain will start to fade and, in a few years, the only thing left of it will be a weird story you tell people over a beer. A story about how you once wanted to jump off a roof and some guy standing below shouted at you . . .”

“What?” the guy on the roof yells back at me, pointing at his ear. He probably can’t hear me because of the noise coming from the road. Or maybe it isn’t the noise, because I heard his “What?” perfectly well. Maybe he’s just hard of hearing.

P.T., who’s hugging my thighs without being able to completely encircle them, as if I were some kind of giant baobab tree, yells at the guy, “Do you have super powers?”

But the guy points at his ear again, as if he were deaf, and shouts, “I’m sick of it! Enough! How much can I take?”

P.T. shouts back at him, as if they were having the most ordinary conversation in the world, “Come on, fly already!”

And I’m starting to feel that stress, the stress that comes with knowing that it’s all on you.

I have it a lot at work. With the family, too. Like what happened back then, on the way to Lake Kinneret, when I tried to brake and the tires locked. The car started to skid along the road and I said to myself, “Either you fix this or it’s all over.” Driving to the Kinneret, I didn’t fix it, and Liat, who was the only one not buckled in, died, and I was left alone with the kids. P.T. was two and barely knew how to speak, but Amit never stopped asking me, “When is Mommy coming back? When is Mommy coming back?”—and I’m talking about after the funeral. He was eight then, an age when you’re supposed to understand what it means to die, but he kept asking. Even without the constant, annoying questions, I knew that everything was my fault and I wanted to end it all, just like the guy on the roof. But here I am today, walking without crutches, living with Simona, being a good dad.

I want to tell the guy on the roof all this. I want to tell him that I know exactly how he feels and that, if he doesn’t flatten himself like a pizza on the sidewalk, it’ll pass. I know what I’m talking about, because no one on this blue planet is as miserable as I was. He just has to get down from there and give himself a week. A month. Even a year, if necessary. But how can you say all that to a half-deaf guy who’s four stories above you?

Meanwhile, P.T. pulls on my hand and says, “He’s not going to fly today, Daddy. Let’s go to the park before it gets dark.”

But I stay where I am and shout as loudly as I can, “People die like flies all the time, even without killing themselves. Don’t do it! Please don’t do it!”

The guy on the roof nods—it looks like he heard something this time—and shouts at me, “How did you know? How did you know she died?”

Someone always dies, I want to yell back. Always. If not her, then someone else. But that won’t get him down from there, so instead I say, “There’s a kid here,” and point at P.T. “He doesn’t need to see this!”

P.T. yells, “Yes, I do! Yes, I do! Come on and fly already, before it gets dark!” It’s December, and it really does get dark early.

If the guy jumps, that’ll be on my conscience, too. Irena, the psychologist at the clinic, will give me that after-you-I’m-going-home look of hers and say, “You’re not responsible for everyone. You have to get that into your head.” And I’ll nod, because I know that the session will end in two minutes and she has to pick her daughter up from day care, but it won’t change anything, because I’ll have to carry that half-deaf guy on my back, along with Liat and Amit’s glass eye.

“Wait there for me!” I scream. “I’m coming up to talk to you!”

“I can’t go on without her. I can’t!” he shouts back.

“Wait a minute,” I yell, and I say to P.T., “Come on, sweetie, let’s go up to the roof.”

P.T. gives an adorable shake of his head, the way he always does right before he sticks the knife in, and says, “If he flies, we can see better from here.”