Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  So I moved on to thinking that I should just disclose what I was researching and reporting on. But I really didn’t want to tell him that it was in conjunction with a mysterious death, a death that happened shortly after the victim left his now defunct bar

  Then I just knew what I should do. I should be a woman of mystery. I should leave something to the imagination.

  So I changed into my shortest skirt, my highest heels, and my tightest blouse. Then I married two technologies together. I took a selfie of myself in the mirror. That was the new tech. The old tech was that I took my selfie with an instant camera. You know, the kind that instantly spits out a low quality picture.

  Remember instant cameras? Congratulations, you’re old.

  I actually have an instant camera because of work. We’re not allowed to be on our phones…at all at work. (There’s nothing MNDOT fears more than the self-righteous taxpayer catching one of us looking at memes when we’re supposed to be at work.) So they don’t let us do something simple like take out our phones and take a high resolution photograph that we can instantly email to everyone concerned. No, why do that when we can snap a poor resolution instant camera photo? Welcome to government work.

  Actually, I’m being a little unfair. Our instant cameras are supposed to function as “visual notepads” to remind us of aspects of the bridge that may need further inspection, etc. We have access to extremely high resolution digital cameras if we need them. The problem with them is that they only interface with the company laptops. So I have to stop inspecting the bridge and go down below to upload and look at my photos. The truth is that my instant camera is handy, and I rather like it.

  The instant camera shot of me was low quality, but I felt that I looked good enough to give fresh hope to a man in jail.

  So I composed the letter. This was what I wrote:

  “Dear Mark,

  I would like to visit you and ask you something about a person that you might know.”

  That was all. I just loved the mystery of it. What jailbird wouldn’t love getting a letter out of the blue from a scantily clad, mystery woman who wanted to meet them?

  I smiled.

  Then I moved on to the next order of business. Because who knew how long it would take for Mark to receive and respond to my letter.

  I had more threads to pull on.

  The last known people to see Faith alive were David Sanborn and her friend Christine. (Why didn’t I get her last name? I’m a terrible journalist.)

  I decided to look for them on social media. I looked. Just as I suspected, Faith’s social media had outlived her. It was a like a digital ghost talking to me from beyond the grave.

  It was easy to find David Sanborn. Incidentally, David Sanborn was the last person that Faith had ever followed.

  I sent a direct message to David. I was more direct with him than I was with my jailbird. I told him that I was a writer who wanted to speak with him about Faith.

  It took more work to find Christine Plotz, but I found her. (And even learned her last name.) I sent her a very similar message.

  David responded almost instantly. We made arrangements to meet at a campus tea place called Sencha that next afternoon.

  I immediately began to prepare for that interview. I would not be a piss poor journalist again.

  Who am I kidding? Of course I would.

  6

  I felt so old.

  I felt ancient when I saw David Sanborn in person. Is that really what someone who’s twenty-one looks like these days? He looked like a baby! He had baby fat! He had a dad bod that was the opposite of a dad bod. I would guess that he got in with a fake ID if I saw him in a club and assume that he was jailbait even if I went full on cougar.

  He was handsome in his own way. His hair was a little mussed up. It was hard to tell if that was from the wind on that blustery November day, his way of styling it, or some of both. He looked like the guy in the boy band who was slightly overweight and definitely not the teeny boppers’ favorite but had a cult following among a certain group of teenagers who was now trying to rebrand himself and go solo as a genuine artist.

  The mussed up hair was a dark, mahogany brown. His brown eyes seemed only partly present, like the perpetually daydreaming tortured artist that he was trying to change into. His face was oddly, compellingly misshapen, almost like a porterhouse steak. Rather than turning him into Quasimodo or something though, it just made his appearance catch and almost fascinate the eye even more. He had on a red one of the fashionably puffy jackets on that I’ve always thought make someone look like a colorful tire spokescartoon. Dark blue jeans and brown shoes rounded out his ensemble.

  He was waiting at a table when I arrived. I had never been in Sencha before. It looked like most coffee and tea shops in that there were scattered tables of wood almost the same color as David’s mussed up hair. At the head of the room was a counter with delicious looking baked goods that I was tempted to order. I could see metal canisters of tea on some wire racking behind the counter. They had those kind of gummies or bubbles that were all the rage to add to teas. Myself, I have never been much of a tea person. Cold press coffee is what I need to start my day.

  So I ordered a chai. Chai is the tea for people who wish they were drinking coffee.

  I waited at the counter for my chai. Then I took my foamy faux coffee over to the table that David was sitting at with his intriguingly misshapen head in a textbook.

  We exchanged greetings. We exchanged the usual pleasantries. Did you find this place alright? Yada, yada, yada.

  I took a sip off of my chai as if that would somehow steel me or prepare me for what was only my second interview in my budding hobby of journalism. I was confident that I would not do as poorly as I did with Faith’s parents and her sister. I would make sure that I got everyone’s last name this time.

  I decided to start with easy, unobtrusive questions. So I asked him if he was a student at the U.

  He was. He studied English. So I made some comment about how I had just seen in the paper that the number of people majoring in English was in freefall over fears of not being able to find a job with a degree in English.

  David had big plans. He was planning on becoming an English professor. He intended to get a doctorate in English.

  So I asked him who his favorite writer was.

  He told me that it was Charles Bukowski. I thought that sounded like a very odd favorite writer for a future English professor. I was expecting someone more like Shakespeare, Chaucer, or at least Vonnegut.

  He was surprised that I knew who Charles Bukowski was. I felt like telling him that we were all twenty-one once.

  At some point, I decided to dig in. I asked him if he knew Faith because they had both been students at the U of M.

  He just looked at me like he thought that I was stupid.

  “Have you ever been to the University of Minnesota?” he asked.

  “Graduated from there, I am an alumnus,” I replied.

  “So you know how many people go there,” David laughed.

  “Of course,” I agreed. “But surely you know some of the people that go there. It’s not that ridiculous of a question.”

  “I didn’t know her,” David sighed. “I mean from the U. She was a math major. I was in English. Our paths were unlikely to cross.”

  “So the first time that you ever met her was in Club Canoodle,” I said.

  David looked around like he heard a branch snap and thought that someone might be sneaking up on him from behind.

  “Can we leave here?” he pleaded. “There are a lot of people here.”

  I thought about telling him that no one was listening to anything other than the conversations that they themselves were engaged in or whatever was coming through those earbuds. Then I remembered the almost universal unrecognized narcissism of youth where you always think that you’re the center of attention. Besides, what was it to me if we talked here or somewhere else? I just wanted to know his side of the story
. What was it to me if I had to waste half of a chai?

  I agreed and we walked out of Sencha and onto a bustling Washington Avenue. A green line light rail train honked and honked at the intersection as college kids who didn’t give a damn crossed against the light and risked being run over. I made sure to wait until we were clear of people to ask.

  I found my moment as we crossed University Avenue over by TCF Bank Stadium. I had been slightly following him. At that moment I pulled back up even to David.

  I said, “So you and Faith met for the first time at Club Canoodle.”

  “Yes,” David agreed.

  “Did you approach her? How did you two end up talking?” I asked.

  David looked behind him and seemed relieved that no one was around before he said, “I offered to buy her a drink.”

  “What did she say?” I asked after it was clear that he wasn’t going to continue.

  “She said that she didn’t want a drink. She said that she was already at her limit of two for the evening. She said that she could use some company though,” David bit his lower lip.

  “Wait, she told you that she had a limit of two drinks when she went out for the evening?” I almost gasped.

  “That’s what she said,” David sighed.

  “Was she really honoring that?” I asked. “Was she sneaking drinks? Did she seem intoxicated?”

  “She seemed bubbly and maybe a little buzzed when I first talked to her,” David decided. “But she turned down multiple requests that I made to buy her another drink. I didn’t see her take another drink. We talked for almost exactly two hours. And she never left my sight during that time.”

  “Were you trying to pick her up?” I asked.

  David sighed before saying, “Yes.”

  “Did you get her number?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “Did you two plan to date?” I asked.

  “I was certainly hoping that would happen. I mean outside of her wanting to go home with me that night or something. Dating would’ve been the second best thing that could’ve happened,” David admitted.

  “Had you been drinking a lot that night?” I asked.

  “No, I had just gotten to the club. I’d had a beer. She didn’t want a drink and I didn’t want to look like a lush. So I didn’t get another drink either the whole time that I talked to her,” David replied.

  “So what made you leave her side?” I asked. “Because at one point you two separated.”

  “I smoke,” David hissed.

  “Okay, so you had to go out for a cigarette?” I suggested.

  “Yes,” David looked around. “And because I’m a smoker some girl was murdered.”

  “Come again?” I said.

  “I may be young, but, when sober, I know when I’m doing well with a girl. I have no doubt in my mind that she went looking for me while I was out smoking. I obviously invited her with, but she said no. But I think that she changed her mind after I left. Because she was a non-smoker, she didn’t realize that the smoking patio for Club Canoodle was out back. So she went out front. Then I think that she walked around the block trying to find me. Instead she found some sick fuck who doped her up with booze and roofied her.

  A woman that I might’ve one day married is dead because I went out to smoke a cigarette. And I have to live with that for the rest of my life,” David teared up.

  I patted him on the shoulder. I said, “You know my mom committed suicide.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he asked as a lone tear trailed down his left cheek.

  “When she died,” I stated. “I thought that it was my fault because I had been bad. I was still a fairly small child then.”

  “So?” David asked.

  “So I had a lot of problems with therapy. Mainly it’s because the guy my dad took me to see was this Freudian with all these weird ideas…”

  “Funny, I took intro to psych a year and half ago or so, and I found a kind of logic in Freud’s approach. At the very least, it seemed true,” David contended.

  “Yes, and from the earth the sun seems to revolve around our planet, but if you like Freud great.

  The important thing is that I can definitively say that if therapy accomplished nothing else, it freed from feeling that I was responsible for my mom’s death,” I said.

  “But you weren’t responsible for her death,” David countered. “I was responsible for Faith’s death.”

  “Did you give her a ton of alcohol?” I asked.

  “No but,” David protested.

  “Did you roofie her?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he replied.

  “The person who did that is the person who’s responsible for her death,” I declared.

  (It certainly didn’t seem appropriate to offer up my speculation that Faith’s death might have been semi-suicide.)

  “Are you recording this?” David demanded, suddenly looking around wildly.

  “Noooo,” I wondered. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re a reporter or something,” David insisted.

  Suddenly a tape recorder sounded like a good idea. I hadn’t even brought a notebook to take notes. So much for doing better as a journalist.

  “Well, I don’t care!” he snapped. “Do what you damn well feel!”

  It seemed awkward to keep walking with him at that point. So I excused myself by the nearest bus stop and waited for the 6.

  I caught the bus, got off downtown, and made the short walk home. Once I got home I went for a run.

  I only went for a short run. It was about five miles. I find that taking a short run at a very fast pace does as much for my endurance as a run twice that long at a moderate pace.

  The other thing that it does is clear my head.

  I took a shower when I returned from my run. Then I packed my laptop bag with a notebook and pens. I swapped out my work laptop for my personal laptop just in case I thought of something and had to take my chances on coffee shop wi-fi.

  I took a brief stroll on my side of the river down to that now infamous (at least in my mind) Third Avenue Bridge. I crossed over to the side that the semi-suicide happened on. I walked the length of the curving bridge.

  I never get used to the view of downtown Minneapolis from the Third Avenue Bridge. It is without question the best cityscape in Minneapolis.

  The Hennepin Avenue Bridge is a much more beautiful bridge, but it’s just too in the thick of things to have a great view. It’s literally in the belly of the beast. The phallic towers stand like glass and steel redwoods on all sides. Yet you don’t feel like you are walking into them. You feel more like Moses has parted the seas for you and twenty thousand of your closest friends to walk down the street.

  The Stone Arch Bridge has excellent views of the river, the locks, and the Guthrie Theater, but downtown seems distant.

  The new 35 W Bridge is just too far away to offer a good view of downtown.

  The Third Avenue Bridge, however, is just perfect. That’s because it is situated in exactly the right place to yield a spectacular view. The skyscrapers end at Third Avenue (for the most part). Plus the bridge initially curves away from the heart of downtown only to curve back toward it as you approach. And it seems like the entire downtown of space age dominoes stand out like a glass and steel wheat field planted by a race of giant robots. At least to me.

  Every downtown looks sci-fi and surreal to me. And I know of no view, no other bridge in America, that captures the we are living in the society that the pioneers of that sci-fi warned us about in all of its terrible glory more then the Third Avenue Bridge. I blame it on the curve. Something about that curve in the bridge makes it feel like you have just passed from something like “Little House on the Prairie” to a new world full of cyborgs who can lift cars with their minds.

  It’s everything that a view of a downtown should be.

  Now I know that people from New York are going to say something like the view from the Broo
klyn Bridge is so much better. (Who am I kidding? No one from New York is going to be caught reading a gauche book like this from some woman in flyover country.) But maybe one of them is an Airbnb host or something and someone from Minnesota will mention this. And the New Yorker will give them fifty lashes and demand that they go up on the Brooklyn Bridge to look around, admit that it’s better, and atone for their sin.

  Here’s the thing about the view from the Brooklyn Bridge. Manhattan is a behemoth.

  What I love about coming up to the Minneapolis downtown on the Third Avenue Bridge is that it seems like you’ve found this weird little cyberpunk enclave in the midst of the work a day world that the rest of us live in.

  Manhattan is all sci-fi, all cyberpunk. There’s no visible contrast. There’s no curve and there’s no edge.

  And those are the things that make the Third Avenue Bridge incredible, the curve and the edge. The steel dominoes have practically all fallen on the other side of Third Avenue. It is the brown of a harvested field.

  I’ve traveled extensively, and I haven’t found a single bridge that offers such a perfect cityscape. And you can bet that when I travel I want to see the city’s bridges.

  So I walked toward that picturesque, futuristic glass forest. But I stopped a block or two from entering it.

  I stopped at my favorite coffee shop. It’s called Dunn Brothers. It’s in an old, two story brick building on the edge of downtown.

  The coffee is strong. I require that when I work on my personal projects. Actually, I require strong coffee for everything. Getting out of bed in the morning. Everything.

  I bought a large cold press. I don’t know exactly how they make cold press, but I suspect that it’s something like moonshining for coffee. What you’re left with after John Boy Cooter works his magic in the Kentucky backwoods is a coffee almost as thick as motor oil and so loaded with caffeine that it should be at least as hard to buy as pseudoephedrine. But it’s not. Thank God.

  I took my cold press upstairs. I used to always sit on the soft cushy chairs until I read a news story about bedbugs in most of the hotels in this area. I realized after that article that those cushy chairs could be a vector.