by Mark Helprin
“. . . and since it was that way, I had to leave. Then he disappeared. It was a surprise to us all, since Jackson Mead thought that this one was going to be the eternal rainbow, the real one that had no end. And then he and the horse just vanished. I told them that Peter Lake knew the city better than anyone. If he wanted to lay low, he could do it for as long as he liked.
“And it’s useless now, without him. . . . It just isn’t time yet, I guess.
“I loved him,” said Cecil, not with tears, but with certainty. “He was like a brother to me. He protected me. And he never knew who he was.”
HARDESTY WATCHED the fog blow in on a whistling wind that tugged it into white streamers and pushed apart the silent masses from which they were drawn. Because San Francisco is surrounded by a cold sea, when the ocean winds decide to put the city to bed and reclaim it for the North Pacific, they do so without challenge, and hurl it into an oblivion of blue sky, white fog, and wind lines etched in silence across the bay.
From a fiftieth-floor hotel room, he looked over the city of his birth almost in its entirety. He could see his house on Presidio Heights, the highest thing around, as white as a glacier, the study tower easily visible against the green Presidio forests behind it. As the fog captured it whole, left it high and dry, or floated it upon the white tide so that it looked like a house in the air, Hardesty wondered if the gentle clouds that partitioned space and time were compassionate as well, and would let him look in to see his father and himself seated at the long wood table, turning the pages of an old book while his father explained its intricacies. Those events which have passed, and which are the foundations of our lives, must be somewhere, he thought. They must be recapturable, even if only in a perfect world. How just it would be if for our final reward we were to be made the masters of time, and if those we love could come alive again not just in memory, but in truth. A light went on in the tower and shone momentarily through the dark before the fog swallowed up the Marratta house for the night. Hardesty felt longing and pain, because he suspected that in the light that had winked across the fog there had been a living presence free of the constraints of time.
When Jackson Mead had spoken of the “eternal rainbow,” Hardesty had been transported into the past, and could think only of the Pacific and the forests above it drenched in fog. He felt that the answer to Jackson Mead’s riddle was somewhere in the pines of the Presidio, where he had spent half of his boyhood as if he had lived not in a city but in a range of isolated mountains. He had booked a flight and a room so that he might call upon his past. Except for a brief visit to his father’s grave (where Evan certainly would not be), he was in San Francisco solely to go back to the Presidio, to see if by doing so he could decipher two of Jackson Mead’s words.
The next day, he crossed the city, walking north in the clear sunshine until, in the forests he knew so well, the sun disappeared and fog rushed through the trees like an army of white-haired sorcerers. The fog hissed and sang like jangled and discordant harps. Shadows and mists closed off the world behind, and Hardesty found himself in a seemingly endless grove of delicate trees. He followed the fog contrary to its course until he lost sight of the trees and the ground. After crossing a patch of soft heather, he realized that he was standing at the edge of a cliff high over the sea. The wind was white, and, though he knew where he was from the sound and spray, he could see nothing. The sea grew so loud that he had to drop to his knees so as not to lose his balance. The shrieking of the wind pushed him to the ground as if he were being beaten by the waves. Because the flat ground seemed to be turning circles in the air, he held fast to the greenery and pressed himself against the sand and heather. It seemed like a safe place, and, covered over by the fog, he fought his dizziness and exhaustion with sleep.
Hardesty Marratta had been to heaven in his dreams often enough, for they were like all the paintings that Brueghel had ever painted, combined, in searing unearthly colors that moved 360 degrees ’round. But these dreams, no amateurish work to be sure, were now eclipsed as he rose quietly upward. For a while he could not see, but then the fog vanished and the air became as clear as ether. He found himself in a house of wood and glass, high over a blue lake. At first he didn’t know where to go or what to do, but he was soon approached by a woman who glided to him—flew to him, really—a woman whose hair was graceful and elastic in the wind, as if it were made for air and motion. She stretched out her hands and led him through the golden light, sidestepping (though she did not touch the floor), to a high terrace overlooking the blue lake—which was not so much a lake as a condition of the light. It seemed to enclose them in a dome of weightless azure that extended to the horizon and was filled with light of a different sort than its own, light that was full of gold and silver, airy, hot, and blinding. He held her hands as she floated before him, smiling, and he tried to recognize her, and to memorize her features, but she would not let him. She undid his vision with her eyes. Unlike anything that he had ever seen, they were a liquid, electric, bright, uncompromising blue, and she held him transfixed while they burned into him like rays, searing and cooling at the same time.
He awoke at dusk in the darkening Presidio, lying in a cold drizzle. The fog had been shredded by the rain, and the sea was now visible below, its breakers gray, dark, and dirty. Exhausted and sore, he felt like a pair of eyes carried by bones.
Dripping wet, he passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on his way back to the city. The toll plaza was choked with northbound traffic, the bridge itself a gently rising curve of glowing red eyes. It was as dark, wet, and bleary as Manhattan on an early winter evening after a day of sleet and rain.
Hardesty found a neglected little park just east of the tolls. In the center of a flagstone floor was a bronze head mounted on a plinth. He was so worn out that he leaned against it. He thought this was a bad place for a statue, since the park and its memorial were practically inaccessible to the public, and he went around to the front of it to see who was memorialized. Though it was already dark, Hardesty was able to make out an inscription.
1870 JOSEPH B. STRAUSS 1938
He skipped a paragraph of smaller letters in favor of the single line beneath it:
CHIEF ENGINEER OF THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
1929–1937
He then returned to the paragraph of smaller letters, and read a bronze inscription that had been there, patient and immobile, for most of the century. His guess had been right. He had seen it before. And now, even in the half-darkness, the dull bronze seemed as bright as the sun.
HERE AT THE GOLDEN GATE IS THE
ETERNAL RAINBOW THAT HE CONCEIVED
AND SET TO FORM. A PROMISE INDEED
THAT THE RACE OF MAN SHALL
ENDURE INTO THE AGES.
Like a parachutist about to make a jump, Hardesty briefly closed his eyes. Then he opened them, and with a restrained and ironic smile he lifted his gaze to meet that of Jackson Mead, who had been there in the fog and the mist all the time, staring toward San Francisco for more than sixty years. Hardesty was sure that in other places there were other statues with other names, but the same far-reaching stare.
IN ONE of the halls of the museum, where Hardesty had gone early in the morning to see Jackson Mead, was a huge painting that depicted scientists at work in the court of Frederick the Great—who stood in the midst of several men and a complicated laboratory apparatus, posing heroically in a black-and-gray coat.
When told by an assistant that he could go in to see Mead, Hardesty walked down a long corridor with a floor and walls of the soft-polished beige stone that so often finds its way into museums. Cocksure for days, he suddenly felt as if he were on his way to an audience with Frederick the Great, and was somewhat taken aback to realize that, indeed, it might have been so. Neither Mootfowl nor Mr. Cecil Wooley was present, and the easels and paintings had been removed. Jackson Mead was sitting away from his desk, on a simple wood and reed chair. Under the artificial March light, smoking a pipe of cherry tobacco, h
e looked pensive and kind. He motioned for Hardesty to sit down. When Hardesty was comfortably settled on a couch of gray crushed velvet, he took out his own pipe, filled it, lit it, and began to puff in silence.
After a while, Jackson Mead looked down at the floor and said, “I get so discouraged sometimes.” Then he resumed puffing on his pipe as if he hadn’t said a thing.
“You do?” Hardesty asked.
“Oh yes. Deeply discouraged. It’s not easy to architect these big projects: its like holding together an empire. Without a perfect balance of art, passion, and luck, all the elements tend to fly their own ways. And then there’s the opposition. I always seem to be dogged by some mistakenly high-minded elitist who has taken it upon himself to protect from me and my work the people he is sure that he will permanently have underneath him, or by cliques of self-proclaimed intellectuals who have ruminated for decades upon a Marxist hairball that has turned their thinking to bile.
“For example, your friend Praeger de Pinto, a very long shot for mayor, seems to be focusing his campaign on me. Why doesn’t he just leave me alone? I’m not going to do anything to hurt his sheep.”
“Praeger’s not one of the elitists of whom you speak,” Hardesty asserted. “He’s the most egalitarian man I’ve ever known.”
“Then he’s a Marxist.”
“Of course he’s not. Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor. Praeger is the editor. Besides, he grew up in the city of the poor. You know as well as I do that in this country Marxism is a religious passion of the middle class.”
“Then why is he so intent on hounding me? Which of his principles demands that he poke around in my affairs? Neither a city nor a civilization can be run by its critics. Critics can neither build nor explore. All they do, really, is say yes or no—and complicate it. (Not book critics, of course. They are second only to the angels.)”
“He’s not hounding you because of any principles. He’s after you because he’s curious, that’s all.”
Jackson Mead sighed. “Eventually, I will satisfy his curiosity, but I need time to get things into place. It’s my only chance.”
“I know,” Hardesty said. “The railroad lines from the steel-making regions have to be completed. The reception docks and piers have to be put in place. The stockpiles of tools and alloys have to be assembled and moved.”
Jackson Mead took the pipe from his mouth. He wondered if that was all Hardesty knew, and imagined that it was. But Hardesty went on. He was slumped back on the velvet couch, and his hair shone in the simulated daylight.
“You’ve got to get condemnations, and move God knows how many people. You’ve got to clear away factories, houses, and commercial buildings. Then you can begin to lay the foundations. Everything will have to be right before you build this bridge, Mr. Mead, for this eternal rainbow is going to anger the city, since what you have in mind is so much greater than anything that has come before, and you know very well that people don’t like to feel small, to be left behind as the hinge to the future is put in place by someone like you. In the old days, they burned the mills and put their natural philosophers on the rack. These days they think it’s their duty to tie down the builders and humiliate them with the smell of the ground, and they love it, to boot.”
“I hate them!” Jackson Mead screamed, rising to his full height, and pacing.
“They don’t understand that we have a mandate. I can’t just refuse to build these things: it’s my responsibility. All the engines, bridges, and cities that we put in place are nothing in themselves. They’re only markers in what we think of as time—like the separations of notes in music. Why do people resist them so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves. But look! We have already set the wheels spinning. Their progress impels us forward in like proportion and, when they rise, we too will rise. Such a rising, Mr. Marratta, will mark the end of history as we have known it, and the beginning of the age that imagination has known all along. Machines challenge certainty so well. They should not be able to move. But they do. They turn, and move, and never cease—there is always an engine going, somewhere—like generations of silver hearts that keep the faith of the world and stoke imagination in its continued and splendid rebellion.”
“But what about the real hearts,” Hardesty asked, “of those who get in your way? There is nothing greater than what can occur in those lowly hearts, the least noble of which is capable of putting a thousand bridges across a thousand harbors.”
“In their hearts rests the potential to throw a thousand bridges. In my heart rests the actuality of one. Who is more deserving?”
“The world needs both, equally.”
“I won’t deny it. Their course is perhaps more just than ours. Ultimately, I am their servant. But to be so, I must first be their master. Besides, I have no choice in the matter, do I? It has all happened before. They and I will fight like dogs, though, finally, I will prevail. The harder course prevails, because the bones of the world are made of rock and steel.” He stopped pacing, and stood in front of Hardesty. Their pipes produced even columns of white smoke. “How did you know?”
“A dozen of us spent four months on this, but, in the end, we were enlightened accidentally. I found the statue of Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, and when I looked into his eyes, you were looking back at me.”
“A coincidence. I knew Strauss. We did look alike, though not so much then, when I was younger, as perhaps we do now.”
“Be that as it may,” Hardesty replied, “I was able to find out what you meant by an eternal rainbow.”
“Do the others know?”
“No.”
“And where do you stand? Are you with Praeger de Pinto, or are you with me?”
“I don’t know. At the moment, things seem to be in balance, and my inclination is to let them stay that way. I’d like to know what’s in that ship you’ve got riding at anchor out there.”
“The tools and materials for building the bridge.”
“I don’t suppose they’re conventional.”
“You’re right.”
“What are you going to call it?”
“The name isn’t important, but we’re going to call it Battery Bridge.”
White Horse and Dark Horse
WHILE HARDESTY Marratta and Jackson Mead were debating the future, the city kept to its silent track. Nearly immune to the changing of the seasons, and forgotten by history, the people of the city of the poor struggled within a timeless empire that stretched from Manhattan to the sea, over fields of brick upon which factories stood like walled towns and flew snakelike pennants of blackened smoke from their chimneys. Talk as Hardesty Marratta and Jackson Mead might in the perpetual March light of the museum gallery, the city of the poor was always the same, and always would be. It was a weapon ready-cocked, a shotgun in the mouth of those who did not think they had to get down on their knees to get to heaven, but imagined that they would ride there upright in something with wheels.
The white horse had lasted under the beam for more than fourteen months, during which he outlived several masters and ignored many chances of escape. While marching ahead in trancelike circles, he had lost his sense of time and come to believe that he was winding up an eternal spring, to which others from the starry meadows had been apprenticed long and often. Like the mill that ground the salt of the sea, the beam had to be kept going. He thought that he was almost done, and he wanted to see his combat with infinity through. Working the beam to crush himself, so that he might return to the place from which he had come, he kept turning it, and he refused to die.
Sometimes, at the oddest hours, because the city of the poor had long been disjointed from the clock
of day and night, heads popped up over the board fence which hid Athansor from an alley that he could not see. Children stared at him. Drunks seemed to be amazed that he had the temerity to be a horse. Criminals on the run, or those who had just stripped a purse, smiled as if implying that he was one of them. The heads might suddenly arise at four in the morning or at noon, and they frequently talked to him. Perhaps because they assumed that he was lower than they were, they were at their worst—cruel, vulgar, and vulnerable, all at once. And the most bedeviling thing about these marionettes was that what they said and did was so inconsequential. He half wished that a head would pop up from behind the fence and give him something to worry about.
Though it had been only half a wish, it was granted. October was extraordinarily cold, and everyone knew that the coming winter would be apocalyptic. One night, as the north wind made the water in rain barrels ice, Athansor was, as always, moving forward at the beam. Passing the fence, he felt that someone was looking at him. Then he came around again. Though the white horse had not paused once in fourteen months, the man staring at him from behind the boards made him stop dead. His nostrils flared and his eyes moved back in their sockets.
Still tied to the beam, he broke both the lashings and the beam itself as he reared to his full height, and bellowed like a war-horse. But though his hooves flew, his eyes flashed, and the ground shook, he did not frighten the man resting his elbows on the fence.
The intruder smiled, and his eyes went electric, digging into Athansor’s flesh like augers. Sparks flew, and the wind brought thunder. “You don’t know how long I’ve been looking for you, horse,” he said. He held up his left hand, fingers spread, thumb on the palm. “And now that I’ve found you, I hope that you’re properly surprised.”