God jumped off the Bay Bridge during the middle of a rush-hour traffic jam last Thursday afternoon. If you had been standing above the pavement, maybe on top of one of the streetlamps, you would have seen how he jumped out of the driver's side door of a red Volvo, yelling something about "stupid Americans," that was quickly drowned out by a small sea of impatient and dissatisfied car horns.
Finally, in frustration, his cursing stopped, and he tore off his gray, grease-stained tee-shirt, threw it at the pavement, and spat on it. Then you could have seen how he made his bare-chested and furious way across three lanes, flipping off two semis and a Miata, until he got to the rail, crawled over it, and hurled into the sparkling brown water of the San Fransisco Bay.
Thirteen minutes later a Highway Patrol officer peered inside the Volvo's open left front door in search of somebody with a name she could put on a traffic ticket. Finding only an empty coffee cup and a September 20th issue of the Oakland Tribune, whose pages rustled slightly in the breeze, she turned away and asked dispatch to call a tow truck.
A brief argument ensued forty minutes later, between the two men who had been sent to collect the red Volvo, about "what the hell kind of dumbass would just leave their car in the middle of a goddamned bridge during rush hour." One said he must have been an old drugged-out hippie, or some addict teenager, and the other was convinced it had been "one of those damned Asian drivers." One thing they both agreed on was the tangible notion that they would be getting paychecks for all of this tomorrow.
If you had been looking up at the western sky this last moment, your gaze drifting from the continuous passage of exhaust-emitting, metal, plastic, and fiberglass automobiles, you would have seen a funny-looking airplane above the city. If you had been looking up at this, away from the tow truck that was just starting to roll away dragging a deserted red Volvo, then you would have seen in the sky a tiny black dot plummeting slowly from the airplane, through the crisp, gray-brown air, towards the glittering squares of the city buildings.