Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  Perhaps that level of impairment is all that it takes to make any of us sneak up on ourselves and end our own lives in a twinkling.

  The police had worked on the case for months. But I heard nothing. There were few leads in the newspaper. There were no suspects, at least none that were formally named.

  There was so little news coverage devoted to it.

  That upset me. I was fascinated by this whole new form of suicide. And it had happened on a bridge. In fact, it had happened on a bridge that was in my bailiwick as a bridge inspector. It happened on a bridge that I could see out my window!

  I had to know what happened. I just had to.

  So, some ten months later, I hatched a cockamamie plot. I, of all people, was going to turn reporter and write a book about Faith’s uniquely mysterious death. That pretext was, at first, really a cover so I could snoop around and ask the authorities nosy questions.

  I never thought that I would actually complete a book, much less publish it. But I had never had anything graduate from a fascination to an obsession before. And the only way that I could free myself was to write it all down and send it out into the world like a message in a bottle. An astounding message in a bottle!

  2

  I knew what my first move should be. I realized that the Minneapolis Police Department probably knew more about this weird semi-suicide than anyone else, but I was scared to reach out to them.

  I’m half African American. My dad is black.

  He warned me about exactly how to deal with being approached by the police when I was a very young girl. Then he gave me a difficult written test to make damn sure that I understood.

  The cops were something that I feared. The idea of going to them of my own free will seemed absurd. Surely, if anything could jar my dad from his walking death, the idea of his only daughter going to the police for information would do it.

  Still, I thought, I don’t look black. My mom was Indian, as in from India, from Asia, home of the model minorities. And I look like a dusky Indian woman.

  I am constantly being told that I look like Norah Jones. And I do see a vague resemblance. But I don’t look “just” like her. And the number of comparisons that I tend to get seems to be more than our looks warrant. Don’t get me wrong. People could be comparing me to a lot worse than Norah Jones. But I’ve begun to wonder if I should be seeing these constant comparisons to Norah as a kind of microaggression. Were people comparing us, not because Norah and I are twinsies, but rather because we were the only two women with our skin tone that they’d ever seen in their life? In other words, was there a you all look alike element in those comments?

  It might be like this situation? Every year, someone from Human Resources invariably finds me somehow, even though I’m rarely in my office. They find me for diversity week. They ask me to be a part of the diversity committee.

  I really put the poor woman through it who asked me to be on the diversity committee this year.

  “Why do you think that I would be good on the diversity committee?” I asked.

  She sputtered and said, “Um, you’re just such a good advocate for diversity.”

  “What specifically makes me a good advocate for diversity?” I asked.

  “Ha,” she exhaled. “Your teams are just so diverse.”

  My teams are not diverse. There have only been three times in the last three years where I haven’t been the only woman. There have only been six or seven times where I wasn’t the only person of color. My teams aren’t diverse. I am.

  But to her credit she wouldn’t admit it

  Even after I asked, “Which team was diverse? I’m not remembering a team with more than two women and/or people of color. Which team are you thinking of?”

  “I’ll let you think about it,” the HR lady decided. “You can just email the general mailbox for HR if you decide that you’re interested. We’d love to have you.”

  I’m sure they’d love to have me. It’s bad optics to have five white men on your diversity committee. And maybe I should even feel like I ought to be on that committee.

  Why? I’m good at my job, and I deserved my promotion. But I have to admit that it’s possible that I was promoted to chief inspector much quicker than usual. The average age of a chief bridge inspector is in the mid-fifties. I’m in my early thirties. I supervise people on occasion who have fifteen or more years of experience than I do. It’s possible that my rapid promotion was at least partly due to my diversity.

  Do I feel guilty that I may have got the promotion over a more experienced white guy? Ha! What white guy has ever felt anything less than that they earned their privileged place? Certainly no white man has ever refused a promotion because there was probably some woman, or minority, or minority woman who deserved it more! I work hard. Isn’t that what they always say? Like no one else in the world works hard.

  So I took it. F ‘em. Besides, I’m well qualified and have mad skills. It doesn’t take fifteen extra years of experience to recognize corrosion on a steal beam.

  But I’ve gotten off the topic of police. Because I was afraid to face them.

  I tried to remind myself that I was a journalist and an author…kind of. That I was going to approach the police of my own free will. They were not stopping me. They were not questioning me.

  I went back and forth like that. Until one rainy day I made a decision. I walked into the downtown Minneapolis police station.

  I stepped into an elegant stone building surrounded by police cars. I was in a hall with speckled robin’s egg blue tile that smelled faintly like moldy leaves. Above me were those ceiling tiles that look like they are about to shed little beads of foam. The fluorescent light at the end of the hall flickered in a very weird and spastic pattern. In between it was dark in spots but still somewhat luminous in others. It was like a dark star next to a pulsar.

  I looked at the doors in this hallway. They were wood and frosted glass. The names of what they led to was conveniently stenciled onto the frosted glass. And for some reason, an abbreviated name was on a little placard that stuck straight out into the hall over the door like a street sign.

  I went into the door labeled receptionist.

  I was hoping to see a friendly secretary.

  What I saw instead was one tough looking black woman who I was sure could rough me up. And she would not be anywhere near as restrained as some white man might, fearing a civil rights lawsuit from me.

  “Can I help you?” she said in a way that really meant, “What do you want?”

  I stood there mute. I was ten feet away from this woman who was encased in a little office of bullet proof Lucite. There was only one door next to her. I suddenly felt claustrophobic as I realized just how small that room was. The far, white block wall was only a few feet away from me.

  I suddenly felt like I was in jail.

  The woman just studied me with a look that said, “Speak now. What are you stuck on stupid?”

  “I left something in the hall,” I said.

  I turned and darted out. I kept looking behind me as I walked down the hall toward the exit, but no one was coming after me.

  I stepped out of the building into a cop.

  “Sorry sir,” I said.

  It was a woman.

  She didn’t follow me down the street. I walked back home in the driving rain over my favorite bridge in Minnesota, the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.

  I was on that bridge when it occurred to me just how stupid I had been. That tough inquisitor at the downtown Minneapolis police receptionist desk probably didn’t know a thing about Faith Nguyen’s death.

  What I should have been looking for was a public relations or public info officer. The Minneapolis P.D. had to have such a person or persons. The agency that I work for, MNDOT, has public relations people. No one cares what goes on at MNDOT unless there’s major road construction or a crippling snowstorm. But people must want information from the Minneapolis P.D. all the time.

  There were no two ways ab
out it. I was a lousy journalist.

  So I looked up the public information number online when I got home. I called and left a detailed message on a general voicemail.

  I doubted that I would hear anything, but an officer sent me an email the next day. (It was a good thing that I thought to leave my email. Maybe I was getting better at this whole journalism thing.) In the email, the officer wrote that he was not able to discuss active, ongoing investigations, and he referred me (with links!) to the public statements that the Minneapolis P.D. had made.

  So it wasn’t entirely a lost cause. The police had provided me with two links that I had failed to find in my research.

  I had missed them because they had only been posted on the web on the Minneapolis P.D. public information page.

  The first link was useless. It was just a summary of what the police were willing to reveal about Faith Nguyen’s suspicious death a few weeks after the victim had been identified. It would have been useful earlier, but by now I had found all of the information in that press conference in several scattered sources. I knew that her coat was found on the river’s edge, away from Faith. I knew that they had never recovered Faith’s purse, etc.

  But the second link was a winner! Most of it was just a summary of what was known about Faith’s death about a month after Faith had been identified. The statement rehashed a lot of what had already been covered in the first link and in other sources. But there was one gem in there!

  “And I just want to thank Marlon again. For those of you who don’t know, Marlon is the security chief for MNDOT who is responsible for the video that we have, to the extent that we have it of the suspicious death of this young woman,” the public relations officer declared during a press conference.

  Marlon? MNDOT? It was a very uncommon name. MNDOT is huge, but there couldn’t be many Marlons.

  I remotely logged onto MNDOT on my company laptop. I did an employee search. There was only one Marlon! I found his name, email, and office location. He worked downtown.

  Now all that I had to do was pray for another rainy day.

  The best part about being a bridge inspector is that you get the day off when it rains. Of course that puts you behind and that means twelve to eighteen hour days in the summer when it’s light a long time. But it’s still worth it to get an occasional day off in the week during business hours.

  So on the next rainy day I opened my umbrella, walked to the bus stop, and caught a 10 bus into downtown. I got off at Fifth Street and Nicollet Mall. I walked up to Hennepin Avenue and stepped into an old stone building eerily similar to the police station just a few blocks away. Except that this time I wasn’t stepping into an institutional hall of speckled tile, a flickering fluorescent light, and the smell of decaying organic material somewhere. No, I was stepping into a glossy concrete floor with the smells of turmeric, cardamom, cumin, and hot peppers from the Indian restaurant right by the entrance.

  I decided to take the stairs up to the third floor. I walked into an office with a glass door labeled “MNDOT Minneapolis Bridge Security”.

  A receptionist tried to stop me, but I showed her my senior MNDOT badge. She just nodded tersely.

  “Where can I find Marlon?” I asked.

  “Control room,” she pointed straight back.

  I walked right back over thin gray carpet. I walked past gray filing cabinets. I walked past gray cubicles. Nothing hung on the walls. Everything was gray or blue and looked like something from a dystopian movie where the inmates eventually figure out that their office IS a prison.

  Let no one say that MNDOT is wasting taxpayer money on décor.

  I walked straight into that control room ready to prove my rank if I had to. I didn’t No one was in there but Marlon.

  Marlon was a black man, probably in his early forties but he looked at least ten years younger. He shaved his head completely bald. He wore glasses with thick, black frames. He had a round, amiable face. His body was almost as round as his face. He was certainly overweight, but it was obvious that he had a lot of muscle too.

  Behind him were maybe one hundred screens that showed bridges. Cars were driving over. An occasional bike rode over.

  “Can I help you?” Marlon asked.

  I showed my badge. “I have a few questions to ask about the…uh…the incident on the Third Avenue Bridge back in January. I think that you know what I mean.”

  Marlon saw the bold red line that indicated that I held a senior position. Fortunately, he didn’t ask to see what that senior position was.

  “You know,” he said. “I’ve wanted to talk to someone about it.”

  “What about?” I could hardly believe my luck.

  “I’ve seen the whole thing. I saw the entire short, mysterious death of Faith Nguyen. And I can’t believe what I saw!” Marlon exhaled.

  “What did you see?” I could feel the hairs on my forearms stand on end.

  “Well the footage wasn’t perfect. First of all, there’s a camera above the bridge that captures the bridge deck,” Marlon paused.

  “Yes,” I said like I knew that.

  “And then, because of the topography around the Third Avenue Bridge, the motion sensing camera that we use for possible suicides starts about ten feet below the undercarriage or whatever of the bridge,” Marlon nodded once.

  I nodded.

  “But here’s what I can’t figure out. On the bridge deck, the girl is clearly impaired and staggering, but she’s at least somewhat conscious. But by the time the second camera picks her up, she’s unconscious. And if you would’ve seen her hit the water! It was like a rag doll sliding into second base. It was just so incredibly awkward. I’ve seen a lot of jumpers, and a few people fall, but I’ve never seen one lose consciousness once they jump or fall!

  Imagine it! Imagine if you made the decision to jump or accidentally fell off of a bridge. Imagine trying to pass out as you’re approaching terminal velocity and death! How could you not stay awake for that?” Marlon demanded.

  “You’re right,” I beamed. “There are people who jump off of bridges in an effort to kill themselves and survive. To a person they say something like this afterward: ‘Once I jumped, I realized that I could change anything in my life except for the fact that I just jumped off of a bridge.’”

  “Right,” Marlon agreed.

  “What did the police say about her being unconscious?” I asked.

  “That it was the act of falling unconscious that probably propelled her over the bridge,” Marlon declared.

  “That seems plausible,” I decided.

  “It does, but do you know how many people I’ve seen jump or fall off bridges? I’ve been doing this ten years. I’ve never seen anyone else who was obviously unconscious when they hit the water. That fall would wake the dead!” Marlon insisted.

  Marlon proceeded to tell me the rest of what he knew, the exact date of the jump, Sunday, January 7th. Of course I knew that. The time, precisely two minutes after three in the morning. The exact weather conditions. Unusually warm for January, still a degree above freezing at two minutes after three in the morning, with a strong wind blowing out of the south.

  “I’m going to give you my email,” I took a pen out of my purse. “Let me know if you think of anything else or if something else happens.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “I’m not in any kind of trouble, am I?” Marlon asked.

  “No, no,” I decided. “I’m thinking about joining the MNDOT diversity committee, and I’m curious what our diverse employees are up to. You may get an award.”

  “We got to stick together, sister,” he said.

  At that moment it occurred to me that Marlon was also quite young to have had his job for the past ten years. It looked like I wasn’t the only person leapfrogging these poor, hapless, experienced white men.

  I walked out of the office. I walked past the fragrant Indian restaurant. I walked out into the crowded streets. A light rail train honked repeatedly at pedestrians wh
o didn’t seem to care that they were walking in front of a moving train.

  The rain continued to fall. It had been a deluge earlier. Now it was just the plop-plop of thick raindrops against my umbrella. The day had started out slate gray, but now the sun was starting to peak in through a less gray corner.

  Marlon’s report stuck with me. How could Faith Nguyen lose consciousness when she was hurtling toward death?

  Marlon had never seen it. But how many people had jumped or fallen off of a bridge in Minneapolis in the last decade with deadly levels of alcohol and the date rape drug in their system?

  I’m guessing that there was only one.

  3

  I went for a run when I got home. I love running in the rain.

  There’s nothing better for running than a fall day with temps in the fifties or low sixties and light rain. That October day was perfect.

  Imagine, my weather app rated it a one on their one to ten scale of running conditions. This is Minnesota! A one is a January day right after we just had some freezing rain and the world is a skating rink. That day was a ten if ever there was a ten.

  I ran out from my place. I live in the downtown zone, but it’s actually in the small part of what’s considered downtown that is north or east or northeast or whatever of the Mississippi River.

  I live in a one bedroom condo. It’s small and it costs me a small fortune. Plus the association dues are just out of control because I get a parking spot in the underground, climate controlled garage whether I want it or not, there’s always at least one security guard on duty and security has their own vehicle, and there’s someone at the front desk day and night. It has to be that way. A lot of (at least locally) high profile people live in the building. You might be surprised who I make small talk with from time to time.

  That’s not the reason that I’m spending nearly the limit that I can afford to spend on a glorified, small one bedroom apartment. (And I make good money at MNDOT.) The reason that I live where I live is because I’m on the seventeenth floor of a towering building with a view of not just one, not just two, not just three, but four different bridges. I’m right by the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. I’m so close that I could’ve been a witness to Faith’s death on the Third Avenue Bridge if I just would have got one of my bouts of insomnia at the right time. Also, I can kind of make out the Stone Arch Bridge, a pedestrian only bridge that connects the part of downtown by the Guthrie Theater with a neighborhood by the University of Minnesota. I can also see the new 35W Bridge and the colorful lights on it every night.