SOREN IS in the river up to his waist, water so cold that a painful cramp crushes his shins, penetrates his bones, he’s sure it reaches all the way to the marrow, corroding his strength, he’s suffocating, can’t move anymore – stands for a long minute without being able to let go, without being able to launch himself. It’s the sputtering of voices behind him that pushes him forward into the fuliginous waves, he falls in, stifling a yell with a tremendous effort, keeps his head above water without really having any coordination, like a panicked dog fallen overboard, then manages to calm down, getting used to the temperature, regaining control, and, synchronizing his breathing with the movements of his body, he begins to swim silently towards the bank, immersing himself completely at regular intervals in the current that carries him downstream. This is when excitement and fear, the fact of being swallowed but conscious, make him believe that a bulky animal is swimming along beside him – he can make out its mass and its phenomenal strength, there are new underwater currents that accompany him, he lifts his head out of the water without seeing anything but the licorice river that grips him and far off the lights of the river shuttle coming back with the night teams – inside they’re probably joking around, having a last smoke, daydreaming – he dives under once more but again the animal is there, escorting him, brushing against him with its thick, dense fur, a colossal beast that could well be a bear, the bear from Anchorage, it’s wild, it’s hungry, hunting whatever it can to feed itself, he’s delirious, he speeds up without being able to turn around or cast a glance to his side – terror has so paralyzed him – he hears a growl at his neck and nearly sinks like a stone – there’s no fear more terrible than an open jaw behind your back – the bank comes nearer now and the lights of Edgefront press large gold squares of light onto the water while the reflection of the vegetal gangue on the bank lengthens: tall tough plants, bristling black and sharpened lances, they form a barricade, holding Soren back inexorably from all human life. He speeds up till he touches ground, grabs a root, pulls himself out of the river and collapses in a crevice of mud. The bear has disappeared. He breathes, spits, half-dead, and now he still has to take the remote out of its watertight case and press the button that will make everything blow up, he’s out of breath, rummages in his bag, drooling bile, can’t see anything, droplets form stalactites from the arch of his brow, obstruct his nostrils, block his ears, he hurries, body shaken by opposing pieces of information – he’s alive, he’s dead – numb fingers suddenly touching the little hard-plastic case, shivering violently – shakes that tear him apart – he adjusts his gaze to the pier where there is no movement yet. The boatload of workers has passed the river bend, it’s heading for shore now, begins to slow. On the Edgefront tower site, still very brightly lit, almost festive, three men stroll out nonchalantly, walk to the edge of the quay, cross their arms over their chests, and stand there, posed, waiting, like actors caught up in the pursuit of theatre. Soren has never heard the sound of their voices but he can see the pink of their cheeks, the steam that clouds as it leaves their mouths, three little fellas just doing their job who stand at the edge of the river, the boat is still two hundred feet away, he has to press the button, he has to press it now.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WATER
IT’S A CHILD, BARELY THREE YEARS OLD – LITTLE Billie – who finds Soren’s body five days later in a vacant lot behind the soccer field in Edgefront, where she’s wandering, teddy bear in hand, left to her own devices.
Billie likes this grassy wasteland a lot, lumpy, with dirty edges, begs to go there more and more often, and this morning while Katherine was getting her dressed, standing her up on the kitchen table before leaving for the site, while she was adjusting the elastic of her little canary-yellow skirt, the child took her face between her two soft hands and said, I want to go to the garden, so determined that Katherine suspended her gestures, admiring, looked at her and then hugged her close, whispering into her neck, I promise, my little chicken, you can go there today. Lifting the little one to the ground then, she rushed to the boys’ room, Liam had already left for junior high but Matt was still asleep – he had come home late again last night. The room stinks, an odour of livestock. Katherine sits on the edge of the bed and shakes Matt by the shoulder, wake up! He lets out a long groan and, since she’s still shaking him, pushes her away, eyes closed – she can feel that he’s almost as strong as she is now – then turns onto his side facing the wall, but Katherine persists, walks to the window and pulls open the curtain; streams of sun sweep through the room revealing heaps of crumpled, indistinct clothes, worn-out sneakers, dirty underwear, mistreated school books and binders, cookie wrappers, empty soda bottles, and crumbs over everything, and Katherine, discovering this mess, this filth, gags and asks herself how long it’s been since she came into this room; it comes back to her like a boomerang that Liam has been doing his homework at the kitchen table for a while now and only comes in here to sleep. Her own feeling of guilt, even more than the state of the room, is what throws her into a rage. She comes back to the bed, shakes Matt again, hard this time, channelling all her anger into this action, wake up, you little shit! Gets nothing but a loud snore. Unhinged, she charges to the kitchen and fills a pitcher with cold water and back in the room throws it in Matt’s face – he bolts upright yelling, Augh! Are you fucking out of your mind? Leaning back on his elbows, he drips, waxy circles under his eyes, mouth grey, skin bleary, stunned to see his mother standing straight and immense at the foot of his bed, pitcher in hand, and to hear her gunning him with these words: you have ten minutes to get up. Then you’re gonna clean up this room – your brother can’t even set foot in here anymore! When I get home tonight I want it to be spic and span, and this afternoon, instead of just skipping class, you’re gonna make yourself useful, take Billie to the garden after her nap, I want you to take care of her and talk to her, I want you to play with her, is that clear? The boy sits on the edge of the bed, head in his hands, and grumbles half-heartedly yeah, and if I don’t? Katherine hesitates, then, casting maternal reason and good role modelling to the wind, responds from between clenched teeth: Matt, if you don’t do it, I’ll break your face. She slams the door, looks at her watch, and goes to find Billie, who’s already watching TV on the pullout couch beside her sleeping father, passes a hand through her curly hair, I’m off, my little warbler, Matt will take you out later to play in the garden. The little girl, absorbed by the screen, doesn’t answer and mechanically holds out a cheek for her mother to kiss. As she passes through the front door, Katherine feels herself wobble, her eyes burning, her legs weak. She does a U-turn and swallows a big glass of water in the kitchen, breathes a long sigh with her arms stretched out on either side of the sink, then comes back to Matt’s room, pushes the door open gently, the boy is standing bare chested, getting dressed. His body’s changing, his shoulders are broadening and he has the torso of a young man now, he’s not a kid anymore. Matt, she begins, Matt, I’m sorry. The boy pulls a T-shirt on without looking at her. I got worked up. He turns his back to her, goes to open the window. I’m leaving you ten dollars for lunch, okay? She takes a step towards him, places a hand on his shoulder. His smell has changed too. He pulls away, Katherine’s hand falls. She begins again in a stronger voice, okay, take care of your sister. And in the doorway she hears the boy murmur I will, don’t worry. Later, in the bus full of tremors, Katherine bursts into tears without thinking of anything in particular, and to the woman beside her who looks at her questioningly – a very young woman full of solicitude – answers simply, I’m so tired.
WHEN MATT reaches the vacant lot there’s a girl there, sprawled in the grass, waiting for him with beers. What’s this? she asks, pointing to Billie in the stroller, little canary with pink heart-shaped sunglasses. This – this is my little sister! Matt releases Billie and she jumps from the stroller. The girl pouts, disappointed, I thought we were gonna be chill, I’m not crazy about kids, and Matt hastens to answer, don’t worry, she’s not a drag, you
’ll see; already he’s kissing her with eyes closed squeezing her breasts, and Billie walks off quietly.
In the beginning, the little girl meanders along, picks up cigarette butts, drinks the last drops from discarded cans of beer, squats to pick dandelions. Hard to say what stories she’s telling herself, it looks like she’s talking, wandering in the sun, stepping over the carcasses of rusted bikes, gas cans busted by rifle shots. Soon she’s fondling a sole, unlacing a shoe, pulling at a sock, scratching the skin that’s revealed with a little wooden stick – she concentrates, her little pink tongue poking out between pursed lips – all the while shooing the flies hovering around, lots of them here, and noisy, then behind the leg she sees another leg, the same shoe and the same sock, and lifting her eyes discovers the rest of the body. She stands still for a long moment, above the head where half the face has disappeared beneath a black crust. Billie, surprised, leans over to ask, hey, are you sleeping? You asleep? When there’s no response, she begins to play with the hair, wiggling the head back and forth to unstick it from the ground and holding handfuls of hair at the back of the skull, but as soon as it comes unstuck, a swarm of flies, very dense, swells and surrounds her like the mesh of a net; the little girl hides her face, looks at her fingers covered in brown paste, doesn’t understand any of it, and at that exact moment a dishevelled Matt grabs her by the wrist exclaiming, oh shit! They back up. The horrified boy looks at the body, then looks at his sister, she’s disgusting, hands bloody, he calls out get over here to the girl who has stayed at the other end of the lot, and when she too is standing in front of the corpse, Matt yells at her, take the little one, take her, but the girl, seeing Billie’s hands, lets out a shriek and steps back, are you crazy, she’s covered in blood! So Matt sits Billie down roughly: hold up your hands, don’t move, stay like that, you understand? And Billie bursts into tears, then her face slowly deforms and she begins to scream as Matt leans over the body again, he too shooing the flies, it’s carnage, only the legs are intact – the head, the abdomen, and the entire back are lacerated, torn, ravaged.
THE BOMB hadn’t gone off. Unless, in the end, no one had pushed the button to detonate it. Short-circuit in the remote, bad electrical assembly, or a last-minute defection. The packs of dynamite remained stuck to the pier until they were discovered shortly after the men had arrived for the third shift. From the top of their building, standing neatly in a row before the picture window and looking at their watches, seeing nothing happen, the silent partners grew impatient, and finally the Frenchman yelled dammit, he fucked me over, and while Alex was admitting his failure, his fault for having chosen such a sucker, the Frenchman set the hunt in motion.
AFTER A brief moment of panic at the foot of the Edgefront tower, and once the explosives were neutralized, the guys called Diderot, who immediately whipped over to the site and then spent the rest of the night examining the apparatus, what is this mess? The quantity of dynamite was shocking but the ignition system was rudimentary. The work of an amateur, he concluded.
Soren, for his part, had bolted long ago, shivering in his heavy clothes, soaked with miry water and mud, terrified, not knowing if he had pressed the button on the remote or not, only that he’d thrown the case into the river and had run, looking for some shelter for the night, sure that if he went back to his place the Frenchman’s gang would find him there – he had run breathlessly towards the forest, the ultimate refuge for him, he would know how to survive there, a revelation, hit by the smell of the woods, racing along a dark road, faster and faster as the forest approached, with more and more joy to be coming back to the place where he belongs, but suddenly at the edge of the mountain range, headlights that flash on, beams that capture him, men who block his way. A wild growl. There’s a bear missing from the city zoo.
TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF JUNE THEY HAD TO speed things up even more. Diderot stroked his chin in front of calendars and work plans and the insides of his cheeks grew raw with wounds. The men from Pontoverde were harassing him now, daily phone calls, messages saying they’d already exceeded the projected budget and that the only way to not lose money now was to reduce the duration of the last work phase.
The towers were ready, solidly set in the riverbed, powerfully held in their protective concrete sheathing, but no matter how tall and red they were – acrylic paint developed to respect air-quality standards – they were stupid, didn’t signify anything besides the absence of the bridge to come – the main component was missing: the deck that would allow vehicles to cross from Coca to Edgefront.
GOTTA GET a move on now, gotta get to the other side of the water! This is what you’d hear if you left your ears lying around in the site offices, in the locker rooms, on the jogging paths stretched out along the banks – the runners took advantage to stop for a breather, hands on their hips, red-faced, some of them still bouncing as though possessed by St. Vitus’s dance, and talked about the progress of the work between two panted breaths. But in the end, more than urgency, more than deadlines to meet, it was the imminence of the last phase of the site, that of the forming and the placing of the deck, that excited the bridge men and women, the city’s population and the few columnists from the coast who cast a glance now and then at what was happening in Coca: everything would soon make sense, everything would finally become reality. For Diderot, on the other hand, this last phase was not a completion: it fit into the whole as a brand new experience, and once more it was a matter of plunging ahead, of running the risk, in a single sweep, and the cables incarnated this new situation perfectly.
We’re going to put a phenomenal tension system in place, a magic system of force transmission, we’re going to attain finesse itself! Diderot filters these comments through his teeth while drawing diagrams on the white board, tracing dynamic arrows (→ and ) over capital Fs, and soon these become slogans called out in a clear voice: the suspension bridge is cutting edge, the cream of the crop of human ingenuity, of problem solving, a matter of distribution of power and mass, the ingenuity of balance, without which there’s only wear and tear, degradation, tugs-of-war, collapses and ugliness. He overflows with ardour, the engineers love it – they recall their years of advanced calculus, the problems and the exams, the experiments on freezing lab benches, the water cold and dirty at the bottom of the sinks, the grey smocks; they see again the halo of their desk lamps on graph paper, this yellow circle cut out in the darkness of their rooms, their mothers’ worried heads around the half-open door, did you figure it out? Almost finished? Go to bed! and the celebration it is to solve the problem in the hollow of the night, the sudden perception of their own naked intelligence when they nab the curve of the suspension bridge, define the famous catenary, the hyperbolic cosine, rub their eyelids once they’ve figured out the formula – and all of them suddenly had the feeling of being in exactly the right place, all of them, including Sanche and Summer who sit in on these meetings side by side and throw each other complicit, mocking glances when Diderot plays the ham.
AND DIDEROT may well have celebrated the suppleness of a hammock and the lightness of a nest, but this is still about labour. A hell of a job. High technology revisiting the archaic motion of spinners at the distaff, because overall it is a matter of spinning cables exactly as you spin yarn on a spinning wheel, the specialized work of the cable layers who have already been working for several weeks. The plans had two main cables passing through the summit of the two towers like successive mountain crests and linking the structure to each riverbank. So two titanic ropes had to be built, each composed of 27,572 strands of galvanized steel, divided into groups of sixty-one bunches of strands and assembled by twisting them into a helix around a central longitudinal axis. The cablers gather, twist together, and then compress everything to make it round. Once it was built, the enormous strand would be nearly three feet round and one and a half miles long, a lasso that could capture Ursa Major; a journalist from the San Francisco Chronicle determines that, laid out end to end, these steel strands could circle the
earth three times at the level of the equator, and it is this comparison, this scale of proportion, that will inspire the Boa’s municipal politics from now on. He is jubilant, the fishnet of the bridge is most definitely the net he has used to catch the city, an arachnidan webbing where each knot solidifies his influence and increases the intensity of his desires and ambition; he envisions great celebrations for the inauguration and begins to count down the days.
ONCE AGAIN the teams that swell with acrobats where the Natives take the lion’s share, once again the international agencies that windmill through their candidate files, driving a specific, calibrated workforce towards Coca, tightrope-walking workers, almighty men who are hard to pin down once they’re there – they run on challenges, confront death with the murky innocence of those for whom working at these heights is a feat as simple as drinking a glass of water or brushing their teeth – but once on-site, they work like gods, cable the bridge accurately – first the two long main cables, then the 250 pairs of vertical hangers, one every 70 feet, each one a hell of a clothespin, and over the weeks they devise an astonishing system of supported steel beams with a total mass of 25,000 tons, and capable of holding, while also stabilizing, a deck that will weigh 150,000 tons.
Reporters show up, cunning guys who want their chance at catching the spectacular image, the girl in a bra and hard hat suntanning on her break, beer in hand, sitting above the void, the guy who lifts his sandwich and looks at the camera, a laughing munchkin under the belled sky, an alignment of shoes in close-up with the river far away beneath, crackled like an oil painting or the glaze on pottery – but this wasn’t the time for monkey business, Diderot was shouting now, absolutely furious, the meters are running, still another few weeks to go, stay focused.
Birth of a Bridge Page 19