Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  So I went for a run over the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. Then I jogged down to the Third Avenue Bridge

  I ran back and forth over that bridge for like the hundredth time since the first report of Faith’s semi-suicide. I remembered how I had wondered about the exact same thing the first ten to fifteen times that I ran back and forth over the Third Avenue Bridge after her death. I had wondered. What did she think of as she fell off that bridge to her death?

  Now I knew the answer. She thought nothing. She hit the water with a force that was something like hitting concrete after a two story drop as a rag doll, completely unconscious.

  The Third Avenue Bridge is an older bridge. Many of the spans of a similar age have been upgraded.

  I’m not allowed to share how the bridge is holding up, structurally, after all those years. Even though I know.

  The Third Avenue Bridge doesn’t have the safety features that the new bridges do. Try leaping off of the Hennepin Bridge or the recently replaced Franklin Avenue Bridge. You have to climb and maybe even cross a bike path to do it. There’s no way that I know of to keep people from jumping off of a bridge. However, keeping people from falling off of a bridge is actually quite easy. All it requires are higher guardrails.

  The Third Avenue Bridge may be the last bridge over the Mississippi River that a person could just fall off of in all of Minneapolis. The railing is fairly high, but it wasn’t quite high enough for a woman who generated a lot of torque when she made that final stagger on the bridge.

  As I ran over the bridge for a second time, I reflected on the limited video that I had seen of Faith’s mysterious death. I took careful, mental notes of just how high the railings were. I intended to do a little experiment when I got back home.

  I thought about my upcoming experiment for most of the rest of my run. After I got off of the Third Avenue Bridge, I wound my way back to the running trail that winds along the Mississippi River and I followed it all the way down to Lake Street. Then I ran back. It was about ten miles maybe. A good distance.

  I looked frantically around my condo when I got home. I discovered that the back of my sofa was almost the same height as the railing on the Third Avenue Bridge. I walked it out so that I could stagger behind it.

  I stepped back and started to stumble toward my couch. I paused near the edge of it. I gathered myself. I took that decisive lurching step.

  I was completely unable to keep my balance when I shifted the weight from my left foot to my right foot. I did an uncoordinated Fosbury flop over the back of my sofa and landed awkwardly on the cushions.

  I wasn’t sure what I had learned. Other than that it might have been possible to accidentally fall off of the Third Avenue Bridge. But Faith’s final lurch, like mine, seemed to be an act that had to be at least partly intentional…and conscious.

  Obviously I didn’t have enough fidelity to the scientific method to repeat the experiment nearly literally dead drunk and roofied up.

  I didn’t know what to think. So my thoughts turned to the night ahead. My girlfriends and I were getting together for our monthly summit.

  Every month we get together and we all agree to take turns being the one who picks what we do.

  Tonight Hui was picking. That meant that we were all going to Cirque du ‘Sota.

  Who was we? We was all of us from the East Wing of Territorial Hall. Territorial Hall was a dorm at the University of Minnesota. All four of us met in the East Wing of said dorm.

  Alyssa was my roommate. I was scared to meet her. I was scared to be at the University of Minnesota.

  I was scared because I was afraid of having to live with someone that I’d never met before. I was also scared because I was at the University of Minnesota, and I didn’t know anyone…other than my dad who was employed there.

  It may shock people to learn that I went to high school not just in the state of Minnesota, but also in the very city, Minneapolis, with the main campus for the U. So why didn’t I know anybody going to the U?

  I went to a private preparatory school called Blake. Everyone at the Blake School was thinking Ivy League. Maybe the University of Chicago or Stanford if the Ivy League didn’t work out. No one, and I mean no one besides me even applied for the University of Minnesota back then.

  The U has risen in prestige lately, but back when I attended, it was still seen as less than even a safety school for the crowd that I attended prep school with.

  I didn’t want to move though. At least not far. I did want to move out of my father’s house because of the way he haunted it like a living specter, often well into the night.

  It’s creepy living with a ghost.

  So I went to the U. And I got a deal on tuition because my dad ostensibly works there.

  So I moved into the dorm at the U as a person of color from Minneapolis, and I was the least gritty one there. I learned how to sneak wine in past the R.A. with the help of my new best friend, my roommate and confirmed delinquent, a white girl from Eagan High named Alyssa.

  Alyssa taught me all that I know about sneakiness. She was the queen of getting guys to drink at parties as she pretended to drink. She would talk them into doing unbelievably stupid things like shirtless snow angels out in a front yard during February.

  All that sneakiness had a point though. She was looking for the guy who would catch on. All of those idiots thought that the way to her heart was to take five shots and roll around shirtless in the snow like an obedient golden retriever. Meanwhile the smarter and soberer gentleman who ignored her had already won her hand.

  Alyssa and I quickly became best friends. It was so exciting for me to be with someone who did the wrong things. All my life I had been surrounded by people who had been trying to do not just the right thing but the best thing. Alyssa made me realize just how dull those people are.

  Alyssa is the main reason that I never regretted going to the University of Minnesota even if I could’ve been accepted into Harvard or Yale.

  Alyssa and I also quickly became friends with our only neighbors. Our dorms were the only two behind a slight turn at the very end of the hall.

  Our neighbors couldn’t have been more different. Maya was the daughter of second generation hippies. She was taught that everything was far out and interconnected. Strangely, she went to business school and didn’t even drink much less do any recreational drugs. She just had the dreadlocks, the sundresses, and the flowing, ethereal personality of someone who was raised by hippies. Also, like Faith Nguyen, she was from Columbia Heights. I don’t know what kind of self-respecting hippies can live in the suburbs.

  It was all weird. But she was fun and mellow and always sober and could stand guard if Alyssa, Hui, or I took a little too much wine or beer.

  Hui is actually from China originally. We used to talk in Chinese regularly. I had taken seven years of Chinese at the Blake School.

  In fact, all four of us learned basic Chinese. That way we could talk about the dumb white boys that Alyssa was testing without any of them having the slightest clue what we were talking about.

  Hui was very conservative. Not politically, I mean that she was reserved, very quiet, even when drunk. She has a sweet smile and speaks English without much of an accent.

  I was disappointed that Hui had selected Cirque du ‘Sota, for our summit tonight, but I couldn’t really complain. A little over a year ago I picked golf for our monthly summit.

  I thought why should the men get to have all the fun? Well, it turns out that golfing is not fun. Going vroom-vroom on a golf cart while you smoke a cigar and drink with your idiot friends is what makes golf fun. None of us inherited the chromosome that makes driving a golf cart fun, a cigar anything other than a plus sized cancer stick, and even drinking is much more fun on a patio, in a club, or even sneaking it out of your purse in a dorm bathroom.

  It was a terrible outing, really the worst ever, and I get ridiculed for it almost every time that we get together. Honestly, everyone else was going to love Cirque du ‘Sota, b
ut I just didn’t see the point in it. I don’t think that a thing is entertaining just because only a handful of people in the world can do that thing.

  There’s probably someone out there who can lick their elbow. I wouldn’t pay money to watch them do it.

  Everyone else was looking forward to it though. Me, I was barely even looking forward to dinner, drinks, and catching up. I almost wanted to stay home.

  That changed once I got to dinner. Every time that I see my old friends I realize that I have no one to talk to besides them.

  My dad is a ghost. My brother is immersed in his drunken, depressive stupor. All of my other relatives have fully or mostly retreated from life. I don’t blame them. It’s understandable, but it’s a fact. I don’t want to say how long it had been since I had a boyfriend. I especially don’t want to say how long it had been since I even had a date.

  Sure most of my co-workers have asked me out, but my co-workers never interested me. But they keep asking. Even the married ones. Hell, especially the married ones. And that has always made things awkward from the start when they ask me to join them at the bar after work.

  That’s before I even get into the fact that the overwhelming number of guys that I work with are typically very concrete and absolutely tedious. As a general rule, they’ve always loved bridges because they love to build stuff. It’s like building blocks for grownups.

  I like the poetry of a bridge. The building of it is just the drudgery one has to endure to produce the poetry.

  Bridges are the ultimate metaphor in human endeavor. Sure a massive phallic tower might say, “Look at me! Look how powerful I am!”

  (Or I guess it might say don’t look at my tiny penis.)

  The only thing that’s changed about towers in the hundreds of years that they’ve been built is which area of society uses them. They’ve gone from crenellated castle battlements to sleek glass phalluses of finance. But make no mistake. Towers are every bit as martial now as they were back then. Only now instead of pouring boiling oil down on climbing enemy knights, an executive perched on high ruthlessly plots marketing and branding strategies that, best case scenario, drive their competitors into bankruptcy and out of business.

  Towers are now used for war by another means.

  Bridges are the opposite of towers. Bridges say, “Come over here. We aren’t afraid of you!”

  Bridges connect the world.

  Bridges are also an engineering triumph. They are a true human accomplishment.

  Nature has conspired to limit the movement of human beings in a number of ways. There are rivers with roaring rapids like the ones that I looked down into as a six year old on a rope bridge somewhere in Costa Rica. There are seas. There are mountains. And so forth.

  Bridges also say perhaps to some type of Godhead or dharma or something, or at least to ourselves, “No you can’t constrain me. I’m far too clever to be forced to live my entire life on this side of the river.”

  That’s what’s interesting about bridges. Frankly, only an idiot would want to talk about this new support beam that they heard about in some engineering journal. And by that standard, most of my co-workers are idiots.

  That’s why dinner with the girls was so great. I finally got to have an intelligent conversation.

  It more than made up for the fact that Cirque du ‘Sota was so lame.

  The other girls were spellbound. I couldn’t help but try to figure out why.

  This guy ran three quarters of the way up a maybe ten foot wall, dismounted with a flip, turned arse over teakettle twice, and stuck the landing. A woman ran on top of a giant ball.

  They were like athletic hamsters who made wishes on a cursed monkey paw to turn into people. Why would anyone like this?

  The first reason that I came up with, the initial reason why I believed Cirque du Soleil, and its local rip off, Cirque du ‘Sota were so popular, was because they were freaks. It was their freakish ability, their novelty that pulled people in.

  Then I decided that the unusual nature of this show couldn’t be the only reason for its success. The bearded lady was unusual, but she wasn’t venerated. All this Cirque du stuff was widely respected.

  Why was it respected? I didn’t really know. Maybe people wished they could do what the performers do. Maybe they longed to be those magic hamsters who wished on a cursed monkey paw that they could be humans and run on top of a giant ball. But it seemed unlikely.

  It also seemed unlikely that this was something like soccer, where most of the fans of the game have played soccer before so they can tell how good the soccer players are. Certainly few people in the audience had tried to run most of the way up a wall, jump off, flip twice, and stick the landing.

  Somehow my thinking turned into something more like daydreaming and I drifted into wondering about why I am so fascinated by suicide. Certainly it was something that I had thought about many times before, but in my liminal mental state, I wondered if I wasn’t fascinated by suicide for the same basic reason that people were fascinated by Cirque du ‘Sota, novelty.

  I’d always thought that two things made me fascinated with suicide. They were my mom’s suicide and the stakes.

  My mom’s suicide is the foundational memory of my childhood. Her death is the first thing that I think of when I think of being a girl.

  The stakes of suicide are obviously high. It’s literally a matter of life and death.

  But I started to wonder if the example of my mom was something akin to knowing someone in Cirque du ‘Sota. If any of my girlfriends were in Cirque du ‘Sota, or even my ne’er do well brother, I’d probably be fascinated by the show too.

  And as far as the stakes, Cirque du ‘Sota was not a safe performance. They were doing things that could get them grievously injured. They could maybe even fall wrong and break their neck and die.

  So the stakes weren’t a lot different.

  There had to be something more.

  And I found it. At least I believed that I did at the time. What’s fascinating about suicide is not the oddity of it. It’s the near universality of it.

  Suicide is like a soccer ball. Almost everyone has played with it at least a little bit.

  I challenge you to find me a single person who hasn’t at least thought about suicide at some point in their life. Maybe it was after a disastrous teenage break up. Maybe the immediate next thought was, but I would never do it. All of that was possible.

  But there’s a reason that probably the best known soliloquy in all of Shakespeare is the soliloquy where Hamlet entertains suicide. The best known line from the best known person in all of literature is, “To be, or not to be, that is the question:”

  And so many of us have asked that question of ourselves at some point. And fortunately most of us have come down firmly on the side of to be.

  Sadly some do not though.

  And I think that those people deserve more than a closed casket funeral by a humiliated and stigmatized family.

  I grew up with my mother. I remember her before. My first memories are of her being so happy. But then it all changed. Should she be seen as less than because she only fought for one whole year? Because she fought in vain for one long year and endured unimaginable suffering? She fought to the bitter end.

  It’s been hard at times for me to lead a relatively comfortable, relatively happy life? My mom battled abject misery for a whole year before surrendering.

  That was what I learned when I found forgiveness.

  Cirque du ‘Sota, I’m glad you found people who can run on top of a giant hamster ball.

  4

  My team finished its last bridge inspections over the Thursday and Friday that followed. We were done for the year.

  All that I would be doing going forward was reviewing an occasional bridge plan, attending meetings either via phone or webcam, doing a rare emergency bridge inspection, and talking strategy over the phone and email with my superiors. All of that would average out to about three hours a day over the w
inter. Depending on how long winter hung on.

  We were really delayed by last year’s winter that never ended.

  Some of you are probably budget hawks, self-appointed watchdogs concerned about government waste who feel that you have a right to boss me around because one infinitesimal fraction of one percent of your state income tax goes to pay my salary. Just remember, my salary is for forty hours a week. If you want to complain in December, come work sixteen hour days with me in July for eight hours pay.

  The great news about the offseason was that I finally had some time to do some real journalism, or at least something like some real journalism. I was taking my first meeting as a reporter over lunch on Monday.

  On Monday I had one budgetary meeting that I had to attend from my living room on speaker phone. It was scheduled from eight to ten in the morning, but it would almost certainly go long. It would probably be done by eleven. But even if it wasn’t, my supervisors would understand if I had only scheduled three hours for a meeting that was only supposed to last two hours.

  It’s a weird bureaucracy. If you have to go even three minutes before the scheduled end of the meeting they make you use paid time off. They literally will make you use paid time off for three minutes. If you are an hourly employee, you need to find a computer when you come in and punch in exactly within a window starting two minutes before your scheduled start time to two minutes after your scheduled start time. If you miss that window, even by a fraction of a second, you are late. (If you’re more than two minutes early the system just won’t let you punch in.) There’s a very rigid attendance policy when it comes to tardiness. Five times of being late in a year is usually enough to get fired. However, if our meetings go even just one minute late, you can be excused with no penalty and without losing any time off.