But her trajectory was poor. Too close to the bridge, her foot smashed against a beam, spinning her around and pointing her feet and legs downward. She was looking at Baby as she went past him, apparently just as surprised to see him as he was to see her. She was looking into his face, into his eyes, her arms upstretched, drawing him to her as she dropped away.
And wondering how you decide to remember what you remember, wondering why you retain the memory of one detail and not another, Baby would remember, running those two seconds over and over in his head, her hands reaching toward him, fingers splayed, and her left hand balling into a fist just before the fog swallowed her. He would remember a thick, dark green pullover sweater, and the rush of her fall bunching the green under her breasts, revealing a thin, pale waist and a fluttering white shirttail. He would remember bleached blue jeans with rips flapping at both knees, and basketball shoes—those red high-tops that kids wear—and the redness of them arcing around, her legs and torso following as she twisted at the hips and straightened out, knifing into the bed of fog below. But what he could not remember was her face. Although he got a good look at her—at one point just about nose to nose, no more than six inches away—it was not a clear, sustained image of her face that stayed with him, but a flashing one, shutter-clicking on and off, on and off in his head. He could not remember a single detail. Her eyes locked on his as she went past and down, and Baby could not—for the life of him, and however hard he tried—remember what color they were.
But he would remember hearing, in spite of the wind whistling in his ears, in spite of the roar of traffic, the locomotive clatter of tires over the expansion gaps in the roadbed above, in spite of the hysterical thunking of the air compressor in the machine shed directly over him—Baby would remember hearing, as she went past, a tiny sound, an oof or an oops, probably her reaction to her ankle shattering against the beam above less than a second before. It was a small, muted grunt, a sound of minor exertion, of a small effort completed, the kind of sound that Baby had associated—before today—with plopping a heavy bag of groceries on the kitchen table or getting up, woozy, after having squatted on his knees to zip up his boy’s jacket.
* * *
Whale drops his gun and goes clomping down the platform after Baby, who stands frozen, leaning out and staring down, saying, Man oh man, man oh man oh man. He gets to him just as Baby’s knees buckle and hooks his safety line first thing. He pulls him to his feet, pries his gloved fingers from around the railing, and walks him to the other end of the platform. He hangs on to Baby as he reels the scaffold back under the tower, too fast. The wet cables slip and squeal through their pulleys, and the platform jolts and shudders until it slams finally into the deck with a reassuring clang. He unhooks their safety lines—Baby’s first, then his own—and reaches out to clip them onto the ladder. He grabs a fistful of Baby’s harness, and eases him—limp and obedient—over the eighteen-inch gap between the scaffold gate and the ladder platform. He puts Baby’s hands on the first rung. They brace themselves as they swing out, the gusts always meaner on the west side of the bridge. The shifting winds grab at their parkas and yank at their safety lines, the yellow cords billowing out in twin arcs, then whipping at their backs and legs. They go one rung at a time, turtling up the ladder in an intimate embrace—Whale on top of Baby, belly to back, his mouth warm in Baby’s ear, whispering, Nice and easy, Baby, over and over. That’s it, Baby, nice and easy, nice and easy. Halfway up, they can hear the Coast Guard cutter below them, its engines revving and churning as it goes past, following the current out to sea.
* * *
They knock off a little early. In the parking lot, Baby leans against his car, smoking another cigarette, telling Whale and Bulldog and Gomer that he’s okay, that he’ll be driving home in a minute, just let him finish his cigarette, all right? Whale looks over at Gomer, then takes Baby’s car keys and drives him home. Gomer follows in his car and gives Whale a ride back to the lot.
* * *
Suiting up in the crew shack the next morning, they ask him how he’s doing, did he get any sleep, and he says Yeah, he’s okay. So they take this time, before morning shift starts, to talk about it a little bit, all of them needing to talk it out for a few minutes, each of them having encountered jumpers, with C.B. seeing two in one day—just hours apart—from his bosun’s platform halfway up the north tower, first one speck, then another, going over the side and into the water, and C.B. not being able to do anything about it. And Whale taking hours to talk one out of it once, and her calling him a week later to thank him, then jumping a week after that. And Bulldog having rescued four different jumpers from up on the pedestrian walkway, but also losing three up there, one of them an old guy who stood shivering on the five-inch-wide ledge just outside the rail and seven feet below the walkway, shivering there all afternoon in his bathrobe and slippers, looking like he’d taken a wrong turn on a midnight run to the toilet; and after standing there thinking about it, changing his mind, and reaching through the guardrail for Bulldog’s outstretched arm, and brushing the tips of Bulldog’s fingers before losing his footing.
Nobody says anything. Then Bulldog slaps his thighs and stands up. But that’s how it goes, he says, and he tells everybody to get a move on, it’s time to paint a bridge.
* * *
At lunch, Baby is looking through the paper. He tells Gomer and C.B. and the rest of them how he hates the way they keep numbering jumpers. She was the 995th, and he wished they’d stop doing that. And when they’re reeling in the scaffold for afternoon break, he turns to Whale and tells him—without Whale’s asking—that the worst thing about it was that he was the last person, the last living human being she saw before she died, and he couldn’t even remember what she looked like, and he didn’t need that, he really didn’t.
And that’s when Baby loses his noise helmet. It slips out from the crook of his arm, hits the scaffold railing, and lobs over the side. It being a clear day, they both follow the helmet all the way down, not saying anything, just leaning out and watching it, squinting their eyes from the sun reflecting off the surface of the bay, and hearing it fall, the cowl fluttering and snapping behind the headpiece, until the helmet hits with a loud, sharp crack, like a gunshot. Not the sound of something hitting water at all.
At break, Baby’s pretty upset. But Bulldog tells him not to sweat it, the first helmet’s free. Yeah, Red says, but after that it costs you, and Red should know, having lost three helmets in his nineteen years. But Baby can’t shut up about it. He goes on about the sound it made when it hit the water, about how amazing it is that from 220 feet up you can single out one fucking sound. He’s worked up now. His voice is cracking, his face is redder than usual. They all look at him, then at each other, and Bulldog sits him down while the rest of them go out to work. Baby tells him he’s sorry about the helmet, he really is, and that it won’t happen again. And that’s when Bulldog tells him to go on home. Go home, he says, and kiss your wife. Take the rest of the day, Bulldog says, I’ll clear it with the Bridge Captain, no sweat.
* * *
Everybody’s suiting up for morning shift. It’s a cold one today, with the only heat coming from the work lights strung across a low beam overhead. They climb quickly into long johns and wool shirts and sweaters and parkas. They drink their coffee, fingers of steam rising from open thermoses, curling up past the lights. They wolf down doughnuts that Red brought. Whale is picking through the box, looking for an old-fashioned glazed, and C.B. is complaining to Red why he never gets those frosted sprinkled ones anymore, when Baby, who hasn’t said a word since coming back, asks nobody in particular if he could maybe get a new nickname.
The painters all look at each other. Tradition says you don’t change the nickname of a painter on the bridge. You just never do that. But on the other hand, it seems important to the boy, and sometimes you have to accommodate the members of your crew because that’s what keeps a paint crew together. They watch him sitting there, concentrating on
re-lacing his boots, tying and untying them, saying, It’s no big deal, really, it’s just that I never liked the name you gave me, and I was just wondering.
So they take these few minutes before the morning shift to weigh this decision. Whale chews slowly on the last old-fashioned glazed. Bulldog pours himself another half cup, and C.B. and Red both sit hunched over, coiling and uncoiling safety line. Gomer tips his chair back, dances it on its rear legs, and stares up past the work lights. The boy clears his throat, then falls silent. He watches Gomer rocking back and forth. He follows his gaze upward. Squinting past the lights, peering into the dark, he listens to the gusts outside whistling through the tower above them.
So they did eat, and were well filled: for he gave them their own desire …
—Psalm 78:29
Hunger Tales
I.
She went grocery shopping three times a week, after aerobics class, stopping at a market that was on her route from the fitness center to her apartment. It was a tiny family-owned place, with a splintered wood floor and two checkout stands, dimly lit and narrow-aisled and very popular with urban professionals. They carried microbrews and power bars and arugula, plus all the staples. So when she needed bread, bananas, carrots, milk—the usual things—she stopped there.
But when she felt she deserved a treat, then a special trip—a cookie run—was in order. For such trips she preferred to go to the biggest supermarkets she could find, places that employed so many checkers and rotated them so frequently that she could never become a regular to any of them. She always went late at night, when there were fewer people. And she liked to make the rounds, to zero in on the cookie aisle by switchbacking up and down all the other aisles, from one end of the store to the other. She did not linger on the perimeters of a supermarket. Seafood and Meat, Bakery, Produce, Deli, Dairy—these areas did not sustain her interest at all. The aisles drew her, and specifically, a particular effect of her passage through them: with each turn she took, a gallery of foods unfolded before her, glutting her field of view in a visual engorgement that made her skin tingle and her innards twitch and pucker, a kind of pre-cookie jitters that never failed to arouse her in an unsettlingly erotic way. The cookies would be gone fifteen minutes after she got them home—sooner if she opened the package in the car and started in on them while driving. Afterward, she would lie groggy on the sofa in front of the TV, sugar levels plunging, euphoria slipping away, feeling bloated and guilty and alone until she nodded off to sleep.
One night she drove to her favorite spot, a twenty-four-hour mega-market located at a mall just past the airport. It was the newly opened flagship store of a regional chain. It had twenty-six aisles, an all-night pharmacy and café, a video store, and a lounge with sofas and reading lamps and a fireplace with imitation logs burning in it. She scooped up a handbasket just inside the automatic doors, skirted the lounge, and headed directly for aisle 1A. These could be long nights for her. She could browse for hours, reveling not just in the sheer quantity of products but in their ever-expanding variety: there were ice creams with chocolate-covered pretzels or fudge brownie chunks or real vanilla bean specks in them, and made with organic strawberries or kosher cream or nuts not grown in a rain forest; there were white, yellow, blue, and red corn tortilla chips, and brown-, black-, green-, and orange-colored pastas; there were breakfast cereals shaped like peanuts, like raspberries, like doughnuts and cinnamon rolls, like waffles, like tiny slices of French toast; there were fifteen kinds of pasta sauce, ten flavors of rice cakes, and a dozen different flavors of carbonated water; there were eight varieties of something as simple as mustard. She felt immersed in abundance, gliding along like a love-drunk paramour, idly tossing items into her handbasket: brown sugar from aisle 2A, a can of sliced peaches from 7B, a box of raisins from 9B. At the end of the evening she would return most of these selections to their shelves, retaining only one or two benign items as counterbalance to the cookies. She never bought just the cookies. Nobody, she felt, needed to know that much about her.
But tonight, something was wrong. Although it was well past midnight, the supermarket was crowded. She had to squeeze past double-parked carts and around clusters of chatty shoppers blocking her path. Other late-night browsers began to loiter annoyingly on the periphery of her own late-night browsing. They sidled up next to her, perusing the same shelves she was perusing, their hands reaching for the jam jar next to the jam jar she had her hand on. One fellow trailed her all the way down the cereal aisle—inadvertently, she was sure—but persistently enough to compel her to move on. And worse, there were employees everywhere. They were crawling all over the place in their clip-on bow ties and starched blue aprons with name tags on them, briskly restocking shelves, trucking out head-high pallets of more boxed goods and taking box cutters to them with the panache of sushi chefs. They kept asking her if she needed help finding anything, and she kept saying “No, thank you.” She felt so rushed and prodded, so frustrated at losing the rhythm of the evening, that she curtailed her usual route. She skipped aisles 12 through 21 and headed directly for 22B, the bull’s-eye of her desire’s meandering arrow—Cookies and Crackers. Once there, she never varied in her selection—it was always either the Nabisco Chunky Chips Ahoy or the Keebler Chocolate Lovers’ Chips Deluxe. Yet she liked to mull over this choice, to savor the pretense of having to decide between one cookie or the other from the panoply before her: Which of you comes home with me tonight?
But even here she was hampered. There were people in the aisle—a couple, a man and a woman standing not just at the cookie shelves, but planted right in front of the Nabisco-Keebler array. She stopped a few yards up from them and pretended to scan the cracker shelves, waiting for them to leave. They both had shoulder-length hair and wore stylish black trench coats that made them look long and lean. They were young—in their mid-twenties, she guessed—and very attractive. They were standing there, hands deep in their coat pockets, talking intently, not leaving. She went back to Dairy and exchanged her two percent cottage cheese for one percent, then to aisle 6A to put back the sliced peaches. She returned to 22B. They were still there, in the exact same spot, slouching comfortably and murmuring to each other in that enticing and arrogant way couples in public do, inviting our exclusion from their intimacy. See how we can hear each other, they seemed to be letting the rest of us know. See how what we share is just out of your range.
She walked stiffly past them and went down the adjacent aisle, Pastas and Grains. She stood at the shelves, blindly running her hand over the packages. She heard the man’s voice rise in pitch, heard the woman laugh. What could she be laughing about, for Christ’s sake? She listened to their low, muffled tones, the thrum of their voices languid and melodic. There was more laughter, until finally—finally!—she heard them moving away. She trailed along, paralleling their slow progress out of the aisle, when suddenly a blue-aproned employee appeared before her, a tall, boyish, rawboned man with a big smile and a receding hairline and a name tag that read BRAD IS HAPPY TO SERVE YOU! He asked if he could help her find anything tonight. “No!” she thundered, rushing past him only to barrel into the cookie aisle couple. She muttered an apology as she plowed between them, then took the turn into aisle 22B.
It was empty, at last. “Yes,” she said, reaching the cookie shelves. And she was standing before them for just a few seconds—she had hardly taken them all in, still adjusting her position so that they would fill as much of her peripheral vision as possible—she had just gotten to the cookie shelves when a woman moving past the end of the aisle turned to look at her. She, too, wore running shoes and tights and a big, fleecy sweater. Her dark hair was pulled taut into a ponytail that highlighted an unblemished face. The woman’s gaze moved idly over her, then to the cookies she’d been looking at, then back to her. And just before gliding out of view beyond the end-aisle display, the woman’s impassive face registered a barely discernible smile. It was a small and intimate grin, the tiniest check mark of a smile, but in its t
ininess was laden a knowledge of her so large—so complete an understanding of her evenings alone in these supermarkets, her enthrallment before these cookies, and the aftermath of it all—that she fled. She ran. She raced out the other end of the aisle and along the back of the market, loping past Seafood and Meat to the far end of the store, to take refuge in Produce. She paced among the bins, between homely mounds of polished fruit, breathing heavily, her eyes stinging, acutely aware of her own ridiculousness. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Stupid!” she hissed. “Stupid, stupid!” Yet back and forth she went, hemmed in by her desolate longing, blinking and pacing amid the shine and sparkle of mirrors and the reflected abundance of freshly misted vegetables.
II.
It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was sitting on a love seat that had one arm sawed off to accommodate his girth. The rear legs were raised on four-by-sixes, so that he was positioned on a forward incline. A rope was within reach, one end looped loosely around a nearby floor lamp, the other bound to an anchor bolt drilled into a ceiling joist. He used this rope to pull himself out of the seat when he had to go to the bathroom, an operation that could take forty-five minutes—hauling himself up, teetering toward the wall and groping along it for balance, squeezing through the doorframe (the door had been removed long ago), shitting or pissing into the tarp-lined tub, then moving carefully back toward his seat, sliding along the tracks sanded into the wood floor by his thickly callused feet. He did not want to fall. The last time, the fire department had been called to get him back up, and a TV news crew had tagged along to cover the story.
Because he could no longer dress himself, he wore caftans, which were easy to slip on and off. They were immense garments, handmade, beautifully embroidered, donated by a television sitcom star with a weight problem who had heard about him on the news. (I want, the sitcom star had said, to express my solidarity with him—with big people everywhere—by contributing to his comfort in this small way.) In addition, a big-and-tall men’s store had paid several tailors to make him a full suit coat, trousers, vest, a pima cotton button-down shirt, and a red and blue silk tie that was a yard and a half long. (We feel, the big-and-tall people had said, that no one—whatever their circumstances—should be deprived of a fine ensemble of clothing.) He wore this suit only once a year, when the local newspapers and TV news shows sent reporters to do their holiday stories about him, stories in which they would pity his confined existence and marvel at the tenacity of the human spirit. He didn’t like doing these interviews at first. They asked the same questions every year: What is your typical breakfast? What diets have you tried? What do you do for fun? Are you happy? Are you lonely? He learned to give the answers they wanted to hear, and he played along because the publicity was good for freebies. One donor paid for his subscription to the daily paper; another took up a collection at her office to pay his utility bills; a chef at a local bistro brought him fabulous meals every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which prompted a chef at another restaurant to prepare an annual birthday buffet. So the interviews he got used to. But he hated wearing the suit, which the TV people insisted on. It took four volunteers two sweaty hours to get it on him, then another hour afterward to strip it off without damaging it. Mostly he wore his caftans. Once a month, a Filipina on the second floor took them to the laundromat. She and her two daughters would need most of a day to transport and launder these vast garments.
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