Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  Unfortunately, we did a little worse in a couple of other categories. I misspelled anemometer which cost us a sure point, and they were absolute Nazis about the spelling. I had an o where the first e should be. It sounded the same, and they would’ve accepted it in Jeopardy! I’m sure of it.

  I’m still a little bitter about it.

  That stupid spelling mistake cost us a tie for first place. But we won second place!

  “We qualified to take the test for the regional!” Thad beamed.

  “We’ll have to get together sometime and take that test,” Jace observed.

  “Yes, but after Thad’s had a chance to get through that whole sports trivia book,” Dave pointed out.

  “Definitely,” Thad nodded.

  “Where is the regional?” I asked.

  “Mystic Lake,” Thad said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll give everyone a ride,” Thad added.

  “They have real money in the regional,” Dave rubbed his hands together. “Like thousands of dollars. If we could make state, it’s like tens of thousands of dollars.”

  We basked in the glory over a drink. I had made sure to wear some frumpy sweater and jeans. And other than the shot, I had nursed only one craft beer for the rest of the trivia contest. I had one more craft beer with my friends to dream great dreams of winning first thousands, and then tens of thousands. There was no doubt that we were going to pass the trivia test and get into the regionals.

  Four days later I had my first date in like forever.

  Here’s how that happened. I was upstairs drinking my cold press coffee in that Dunn Brothers off of Third Avenue downtown again. There was a guy there. He was the perfect color of all of the races of men and women living in harmony with each other. He was tall, which I liked. He was skinny which I probably would’ve changed if I could’ve waved a magic wand. He had this sheepish grin, like he was ashamed of being so happy, on a face with such boyish good looks that he was a pleasure to gaze upon.

  It seemed like he was embarrassed because he just found out that he was the only person who was given the secret to happiness.

  He looked at me a good half dozen times or so. I carefully noted that.

  When I was done with my cold press coffee I made sure to walk past him as I prepared to bus my glass and leave. That was when I saw what he was working on in what I thought was a big notebook.

  It was actually a sketch pad. He had drawn an adorable cartoon version of me.

  “Why the lacrosse stick or whatever?” I asked him.

  “I imagined that lacrosse was your favorite sport,” he admitted.

  “It’s not,” I said.

  “Forgive me,” he pleaded. “What is your favorite sport? I’ll redo it.”

  “Running,” I said.

  “That’s a hard one,” he decided.

  “You could do European football, soccer, if that’s easier,” I replied.

  He smiled.

  “I’m Angie,” I offered my hand.

  “Lorenzo,” he shook my hand.

  We ended up agreeing to go on a date two days later on a Friday evening. We met at Brit’s Pub downtown. I rode the 10 bus right there in semi-sexy attire. It was a bad idea, but I didn’t want to walk in my heels that far. Fortunately, the guys on the bus who did pay attention only leered and didn’t take any action.

  I immediately realized that something was wrong when I arrived at Brit’s and met Lorenzo. His curly hair and his brown eyes were wild.

  He had promised me that he was going to show me the drawing of cartoon me with a soccer ball that Friday. He had apparently forgotten all about that. Instead he had a poem to give to me.

  It was what I suspected. Here are two lines from the poem.

  “Jimble shire greatly.

  Humbug armadillo scotch.”

  Lorenzo rambled on about how the poem was done in the magic number of three and was not just the greatest love poem ever written but also a piece of divine alchemy that unlocked all the secrets of the cosmos to someone who was wise enough to understand it. And he was certain that I was wise enough to understand it.

  What I was wise enough to understand was mania. My brother has the family legacy of depression and alcoholism, and his depression is the bipolar type. My brother would get manic in his teens.

  I learned that asking him if he took his lithium, or if he wanted me to call the police, or if he wanted to go to the hospital were the wrong things to say. My brother believed that he had never been better than he was at the moment he was manic.

  I sometimes grew to envy that certainty, that confidence. He would talk about the most bizarre and impossible things, just like Lorenzo was. He’d talk about things like finding the abstruse meaning of life in something that doesn’t exist, like poetic geometry. And he would believe in it absolutely.

  He believed in it with more faith than the Pope believes in Catholicism.

  So I knew what I had to do. I drank one strong, slightly bitter British beer before I excused myself to go the little girl’s room. I did go to the little girl’s room. Then I snuck out.

  I didn’t know why I felt so much like Faith Nguyen at that moment.

  I hope Lorenzo is still alive and safe somewhere.

  That next day I decided to try to do some Christmas shopping.

  My Christmas shopping list is pretty short. The only people that I buy gifts for are my father and brother. (Of course that Christmas I thought it would be funny if I got Thad and Dave and Jace a bottle of the alcohol that they chose for our shots prior to the start of bar trivia. I had to wait on that though. I wouldn’t know what Jace’s shot was until next week. It was kind of a gag gift because I have a gift for recognizing the obvious. I didn’t know if Dave even liked Jim Beam, or if Thad actually liked one hundred proof peppermint schnapps. Clearly the degree to which the chosen shot pissed off everyone else was a factor in those selections, maybe even the only factor.)

  There’s this old line about Christmas presents. What do you get the woman or man who has it all?

  My dad is even tougher than that.

  The question with him is: what do you get the man who has given up on life?

  The answer is poetry.

  I don’t know why, but all my dad does is read and write poetry. He’s ostensibly a special assistant in the University of Minnesota Anthropology Department, but all he does all day is read and write poetry. If you go to the U to try to meet him, it’s even money whether you’ll find him in his office writing poetry or in the Wilson Library reading poetry.

  I think that my dad even considers himself a poet. And in a way he is. He’s getting paid to write poetry in a sense. In fact, he might be the best paid poet in the world.

  And his poetry is just garbage. (I can say that because he won’t read this. Unless I tell my story in a Homeric epic.)

  The only thing more pitiful than a man who just stopped living after his wife died, is a man who has dedicated the rest of his life to something that he’s an abject failure at.

  He was all aglow when some internet site published him. I think that they publish anyone and everyone. They’re on the internet. It’s not like they have a page limit like journals. Plus publishing everyone’s stuff probably gets everyone to look up the site to at least see their own published poem. And in the process, the site gets that many more people looking at their advertisers. But my dad thought that was his coming out party as a poet. He was legitimate.

  You don’t believe that my dad is a terrible poet? You think that this website represents the literary canon? Check out a brief excerpt from my dad’s actual published poem:

  “Sunshine you are so wild,

  Like a dreary, pinhole child.

  Would that I stole your fate,

  And with Prometheus doth ate.”

  First of all, no one writes rhyming poetry anymore. I know that, and I don’t even write or read poetry. Second, what the hell does it mean? Third, he writes like an Elizabethan or Victorian Sonneteer. It’s
just awful.

  And he’s been at this for years. And try and name a poet that he hasn’t read. The Wilson Library probably has the biggest collection of poetry in Minnesota, and he’ll spend all day there on occasion. Imagine how much poetry you could read in five hours! Except that my dad doesn’t have to imagine. He gets paid quite well to do exactly that, and the U of M counts it as work.

  He almost never buys books though. Even though he likes having books by poets that he knows and appreciates, perhaps even sees as peers.

  That’s my in. He won’t buy a book of poetry even though it’s his only love. And I think that I’ve been the only one buying him a Christmas present for years now. I’m pretty sure that my brother hasn’t bought him a present for more than a decade. So the only poetry books that my dad owns were all gifts from me.

  I know my dad’s library as well as anyone, maybe better than him even. It consists of an anthology of Langston Hughes’ poems, a collection of Rilke’s poems, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a tome by Donne, and a volume of William Carlos Williams.

  What was missing, I wondered as I headed toward my favorite bookstore, Magers & Quinn. Magers & Quinn is in uptown. So I had to take the 6 bus in that direction. It was a quiet Saturday morning on the bus. Sometimes weekend mornings on the bus are surprisingly the worst. Until you realize that even the latest busses stop running around one or two in the morning. Then they don’t start running again until like five. So some people close down a bar. Then they’ve got no way home until the busses start running again. Maybe they find somewhere or something to keep the party going. The next thing you know, you’re on an eight o’clock bus with two guys who are just knocked out loaded and obnoxious.

  It was smooth sailing that morning though. I got off at the uptown station and made the short walk to Magers & Quinn.

  I’ve always hated uptown. It’s so compact, and loud, and the traffic is just constant. The boys here are not my type. They are these pretty boys who spend longer on their hair than I do. And I pity the woman who’s ever been called dramatic or emotional by anyone, because these pretty boys don’t just take their hair seriously. They take themselves and their emotions, especially their pain, seriously. I hope you like to listen if you like these pretty boys.

  Uptown is also the realm of the hipster. You know the thing that no one is willing to call themselves even when they’re wearing a lumberjack flannel, a man bun, and once tried to dump a hen who wasn’t laying eggs on the Humane Society for someone to adopt…like it was a pet. You know the type.

  Such is life though. I had to journey into enemy territory to find a Christmas present for my dad, and hopefully a book for me.

  I found a book for my dad almost right away. It was a book of poems by Claribel Alegría.

  She is my dad’s favorite Latin American poet. He is especially enamored with a poem that I think gets translated as, “From the Bridge”. My dad showed it to me once, and I could see why he was taken by it. In the poem, a younger version of the narrator walks on a bridge toward the older version of the narrator, and has to walk past all the tragedies in the narrator’s life.

  My dad had really only had one tragedy.

  But I guess it’s not a contest.

  So I scooped up the Alegría book. Then I began to shop for myself.

  The great thing about Magers & Quinn is that I always find something unexpected, something that no other used book store seems to have. That time it was an illustrated copy of “Arabian Nights”. You know, the genii, the “open sesame”, and Scheherazade, the woman who spins the tales. It was a reprint of a reprint of a reprint. It had absolutely no collector’s value, but I’m not a collector. I buy books to read them. After that, I was probably going to sell it right back to Magers & Quinn.

  I bought both books. I thanked the clerk. I put both books in my Eastside Co-op tote bag and stepped out into a crisp November morning.

  I caught the 6 bus back to downtown. I had one more shopping stop.

  There are only two things in life that my brother cares about: alcohol…and the Minnesota Timberwolves (for some reason).

  That’s right. My brother still loves the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, arguably the worst basketball franchise in the history of basketball. (That’s almost all I know about basketball, and I only know that because my brother almost always complains to me about how bad they are when I talk to him.)

  So every Christmas I go to the Timberwolves Pro Shop in Target Center and get him whatever the new T-shirt or jersey is.

  I went up to the store in the skyway level at Target Center. I decided to spring for an official game jersey with his (our) last name on the back. It would take time for them to stitch his name on the back, and they said they’d call me when the jersey was ready.

  So I ducked down from the skyway level. I stepped out onto First Avenue. It wasn’t too chilly. People were out and about. So I decided to take the long way home, wend around downtown, and do a little people watching.

  I walked by a restaurant specializing in grilled meats and the smell was amazing. I walked by an Indian restaurant and the smell was even better. I walked past people young and old, black and white, hustling and shopping.

  I eventually ended up by a hotel. I felt a twinge of nausea and anxiety bubble up in my stomach.

  All of a sudden, a familiar face walked out of that hotel. It was that guy that I had just hooked up with! It was that super soldier guy that I couldn’t relax with and fantasized about killing in his sleep! That guy!

  He wore a blue sport coat that seemed tailored to perfectly fit his tall and muscular frame. His white tie worked with the red custom made shirt and really brought out the blue in his eyes. His blue slacks looked like they were tailored to be tight. He wore interesting red socks. His black dress shoes were impeccably polished like he was still expecting inspection from a drill sergeant. He had balanced a black trench coat over his shoulder. He was trying to wrestle some red piece of fabric off from around the cuff of the arm of the tailored red shirt that he had pulled out of his sport coat with one hand. He finally freed that piece of fabric, juggled around his trench coat, put his arm back in his sport coat, and stuffed that piece of red cloth into the pocket of his slacks.

  I was stunned for a moment. I began to follow him from a distance without even thinking about it.

  Then I realized. I was jealous. This hook up, this guy, who I had literally thought of murdering had just had hooked up with someone else in that hotel, and I was intensely jealous.

  Then I thought some more. Why would he be in a suit and tie for a one night stand? Frankly, when it came to just hooking up, I’d prefer him the way that I saw him in that club. I’d rather see him in a tight shirt and tight jeans that left little to the imagination. And I think that he was an old hand at one night stands, and he knew that a tight T-shirt and jeans were the way to dress to make that happen. Suits are what you wear if you want to attract a mate or someone who is in it for the money, someone who doesn’t give it away until she gets a lot of that green. And why would you waste your money on gold diggers when you can get women every bit as desirable for what you really want in a T-shirt and jeans. It didn’t make any sense.

  The only explanation that made sense was that he was doing some kind of business in that hotel. And for some reason I was suddenly deeply curious what exactly his line of business was.

  So I immediately abandoned following him, and I walked three blocks back to that hotel.

  I walked in past the front desk with all the confidence of a platinum rewards member guest. I didn’t see people in the lounge or at the bar so I kept walking. Then I saw a sign with an arrow that read, “Conference Rooms”.

  I followed the arrow. I walked down the hall. The door of one of the conference rooms was open. I stepped inside.

  The first thing that I saw was a lectern with a contact list. The second thing that I saw was a giant swastika!

  Hanging on the wall directly across from me was the biggest Nazi flag tha
t I had ever seen!

  My eyes darted all over the room. The six or seven people left were all, fortunately, engrossed in talking with each other. The all wore the Nazi arm bands. And I knew then what that red fabric was that my hook up had wrestled off of his cuff.

  Without even knowing why at first, I stole the contact list off the lectern and darted out before anyone could see me. I walked as fast as I could out of the hotel with the list. I bobbed and weaved up two streets, over three, and down one. My heart was pounding. My palms were sweaty. My feet were so cold.

  It wasn’t until I got to the Hennepin Avenue Bridge that I felt safe enough to look around, exhale, and think, “Boy, you can really pick ‘em”.

  12

  My brain didn’t catch up to my hands until I had crossed the Hennepin Avenue Bridge and made it back home.

  It was at that point that I started writing what would become this book. Although my intention at that time was only to write down all the facts as I knew them. (I included things that I had only elided through intuition as fact.)

  I started with Faith Nguyen. I wrote down everything that I knew about her. I knew that she was mixed race like me. I knew that she was a college student at the University of Minnesota. I knew that she was raised by parents who loved her very much and insisted on showing me everything from pictures to old homework when I visited them. And of course, I knew that on one fateful January day at the beginning of 2018 she had staggered onto the Third Avenue Bridge. She had staggered, extremely drunk and under the influence of the date rape drug. She had staggered and stopped. She had the mien of a woman trying to compose herself in the middle of an extremely stupefying intoxicated state. She paused. Then she lurched toward the railing along the Third Avenue Bridge, the railing that guarded people from an almost certain death in the then icy Mississippi River. Faith had lurched too hard toward that railing. She fell over to her death in what I thought of as a semi-suicide.

  Oh, and there was that last message from beyond. There was that text that wasn’t read until Faith was already dead.