Birth of a Bridge (21 page)

DISSOCIATE THE
light from the noise of the water. The clearing is vast, bathed in an electric whiteness, so brilliant that it takes Summer a few seconds to filter through the jumble of her perceptions, to distinguish the waterfall that bubbles, the high grass of an intense green colour – a soccer field lit up at night; to discern the bare-chested children armed with little yellow plastic water guns, the women, fewer men, all Native. She walks towards the falls, the little ones come running, their eyes shine, they laugh, call to one another in a language Summer doesn’t understand, they make a cortege around her all the way to the stone pool; she casts a glance at the adults who stare at her, greets them with a nod of her head. Then she crouches to drink, plunging her hands several times into the water, splashing her neck, her forehead, her forearms. Suddenly not a peep is heard in the clearing, the hubbub has gone silent. Noticing a large wooden signboard headlined Sugar Falls, she gets up to go read it, but a voice behind her stops her – don’t waste your time, it’s just propaganda, she turns around, the guy is white, the only white guy here. They look at each other. Sugar Falls! What a joke! the man says with irony, then says to her, you shouldn’t have drunk the water from these springs, it’s special here. Summer responds simply, I was thirsty. Looks around at the space that grows sharper now, perfectly spherical, but can’t pick out the beginning of the path she took to come here. Where are we?

THE WATER
in the falls isn’t sweet, not even a little. The young Franciscan monk who founded the first Spanish mission had not changed it into syrup by some miracle, contrary to what was written in a few tourist guides or other books given to children. But for the Natives, these headwaters are a blessing, a place populated by spirits, they like to meet here on the solstice, the most well-off among them leave their four-by-fours gleaming at the entrance to the uplands, at the level of the viewpoint, and come the rest of the way on foot. All of them know about it, the path. The guy has thus logically chosen this clearing to teach them archaeology, botany, their pharmacopeia, and their language. He counts on the women, the most regular ones, some of them coming all the way from the other side of Coca to listen to him. He has his theory: teach the Natives to be their own archaeologists so that they can claim ownership of their burial grounds – thousands of them scattered along the shores of the bay at the far reaches of the high plains, beneath supermarket parking lots, along freeways, in the foundations of buildings – and rename their territory, learn how to use the technologies that kept them isolated in order to reverse the situation. He was both full of passion and worn out, operated in a sawtooth rhythm alternating between surging forward and sinking back in depression; his violent fervour cut into the quiet of the clearing, the peaceful atmosphere of this Native picnic. During the lessons, they listen attentively to the man, some women get up to give evidence, unfold signs, pass documents around. Several times someone comes up to Summer, brings a black coffee, a cheddar-cheese sandwich, offers her cookies and cigarettes. Children come to flop down beside her at naptime, and one of them even puts his head on her knees, she looks closely at the inside corners of his eyes, flat and smooth like the interior of a shell, asked herself again how her eyelids work, drunk with sensations, and calm, inside an absolutely porous solitude at present, she simply sits there, listening to this man whose voice carries louder than the falls, dozing when he refers to the idiots at the university who had decreed the forest tribes extinct – Ohlone, Muwekma – their language, their ceremonies, and reviving when he concludes his talk: we want to take back the burial grounds to compare the DNA of the dead and the living – he points to the children who chase and squirt one another – and it will quickly become clear that these tribes are still alive and well! Suddenly his face grows tense and Summer recognizes the guy she passed on the site, the one who attacked Diderot.

She decides to head back before dark and there are children to accompany her, they are heading back to Edgefront themselves, the parents will follow later. All the way down, they whirl around her, fiercely playful, constantly changing speed, stopping for long moments only to catch up to her again, passing between the rays of golden light that sabre the woods, whistling in the zebra stripes that hide them and reveal them all at once. She can spot a head, an arm, sometimes a whole body, she points them out calling found you! When they get farther away, she can still hear their exclamations, without really knowing if they are joking or fighting, but soon she can understand their language again: their Native language gradually disappears the closer they came to the city and Summer admires this way they have of matching the world.

IT’S NOW WEEK FORTY-TWO, LAPPING WAVES ON the river, the sky slumps, it’s evening. Coca lights up slowly, Sanche watches from the top of his crane, never gets tired of watching it, a hundred and fifty feet – a height that truly suits him. Dashboard at rest, indicator lights on green, and joysticks raised, a mickey of Jack Daniel’s, cookies, a CD player, Sanche is at the footbridge and he’s waiting for Shakira.

He called her before starting his shift at four o’clock this afternoon – more precisely, he sent her a text, prefers to communicate by SMS, lapidary signals or a quick joke without preamble, distance conserved, risk management – are you afraid of heights? No, she answered after twenty seconds. Meet at midnight? Okay. Sanche immediately put the phone down and rubbed his hands together because he had to do something, he was trembling with excitement, then three running steps knees to chest, one full spin, oh baby it’s yes, tonight’s the night and a little later, knees to chest still, he went to buy the whisky in a little joint beside the supermarket in front of the entrance to the site, and, on his way back, met Diderot who was at the wheel of the Chevrolet, about to leave, told him through the lowered window that he would be staying late tonight, two or three things to go over.

AND NOW
he’s perched in the night, and the stars and the electric lights get all mixed up. But Sanche holds himself back from any nervousness that would cloud his attention and keeps his eyes fixed on the river that snakes towards him, a path punctuated with light, powdery halos, upon which long shining leaves move, a magical view from so high up, this river that, in less than four hours, will carry Shakira to the foot of the crane – she’ll arrive on time, 10:55 in front of the main entrance to the Pontoverde platform, welcomed at the door by a contact who’s been paid to bring her across the diagonal of the esplanade to the quay, where another accomplice will take care of her; they’ll board the management shuttle and head for the Edgefront tower at full speed, where Sanche (who will be keeping watch) will phone her cellphone to guide her along the pier to the elevator door, and while the shuttle does a U-turn to go back on the double without passing the large shuttle of the night team, Shakira will rise to him along the length of the lit-up crane, a golden-yellow projection, and as soon as she steps into the cabin, Sanche will be amazed: this tall body enlarges the cubicle, it makes room.

The machinery of the elevator has been set in motion, mechanical buzzing of cables and promises, and when the doors finally slide open, Shakira is there – stepping over the doorstep, superhuman-beauty spike heels dangling by their straps from her hand, and once she’s there she turns in a circle, amazed by the immensity that’s so close, I’m taking the grand tour, curious, takes the time to look at everything, the indicators, the buttons, the joysticks, the stickers, the knick-knacks, the CDs, and each movement of her body increases the space in the cabin, it’s beautiful here, she concludes, is it dangerous? Sanche devours her with his eyes, he yammers away, the problem with cranes is the wind. The wind in sudden gusts, the wind in blasts. I hate the change of seasons, there are violent breezes that come off the ocean, squalls that form on the plains, swell, and then come hurtling over the river, explode against the woods, then the birds flee and the water starts to turn like in the circus, he mimes the actions: stretches out his arms to say the birds, draws circles with his index finger to say the circus. Since she’s listening to him, he goes on, exaggerating: the crane towers sway on their barges, the cabs get the shakes, the loads swing like a pendulum at the end of a long chain, and each lifting operation becomes a risk that shouldn’t be taken, when the load is a hundred and fifty tons and the counterweight is twelve, that’s why I’m here, to avoid that risk; he points to the anemometer: every morning I monitor the wind speed, if it goes above forty-five miles per hour all operations are forbidden; and above all I watch, I see everything! He’s finished talking. The silence thickens.

Shakira takes off her coat – it falls to the floor, reveals her in a black velvet bustier dress, a shape and a material that show her champagne-glass figure, the outline from her enormous breasts – did they grow again or something? – to her ultraslim waist, the chemical platinum of her hair, and the calm pressure of her very white skin, she is nearly naked and better than naked, a goddess and a little bit like a whore, goes to the window, watches the outdoors intensely, narrows her eyes as though she’s looking for geodesic landmarks, multiplied now in the panes, precise reflections of faces against the unstable night, spins suddenly towards Sanche, you see, I’m not scared of heights, I feel fine here, she sees the bottle of whisky, and I’d love a drink. They drink. Sanche comes to stand beside her, now he also appears on the glass walls, crowded in here, eh? He smiles, feels handsome beside her, he likes that this woman overcomes him like the outside overcomes the capsule, gobbles it up, reconfigures their presence, and unbridles both their movements and the free flow of their fantasies; he likes the relationship of their two bodies that grow and shrink like in a fairy tale as they touch, as they set in motion all the usual gestures of a first time and he likes that the glass cabin becomes the scene, ceaselessly renewed, of love affairs. He slips a hand sideways beneath her hair and pulls her to him while his other hand slides up under her dress, along the surface of her very real skin – it was phenomenal to touch her, like being the first witness to her existence, and perhaps even more to his own existence, as though it was the touch that created the body; she leans down to kiss him, taking him by the throat, then they undress each other without once bumping heads, no, on the contrary the cabin is exactly the right size for them, its walls provide support, offer them something to brace against or lever themselves with: she raises herself from the dashboard just enough that she can slip her panties over her ankles, lifts her arms just enough that he can slide her dress over her head – she touches the ceiling – he backs up just enough that she can unbutton his jeans and bend down to roll his boxers to the ground, then pulls his shoulders just far enough back that she can push the sleeves of his shirt off his arms, an obstacle course that accelerates the rhythm of their breath, increases their sweat, and soon the windows of the cabin are covered with steam, the carbon dioxide they exhale and the Joule effect of their naked bodies encloses them in the vapour of a sauna, a cloud of condensation that removes them from the gaze of the owls, bats, and moths, from that of the aviators and of teenagers who mess around at night on the rooftops of buildings, a halo that holds them together, sheltered in the heart of the shadows, when in fact the cabin is dilating, swaying, pliable, a limitless erogenous zone; they’re standing now, face to face – she had to lower herself a little – and when the moment arrives to enter her it again gets just complicated enough (she does, after all, have to be able to separate her very long legs, and in order to do so must press her back against the window without tumbling over backwards, and then lift her pelvis; he must after all place himself at the right height and be able to slip his hands behind her back, place them on her hips, and find enough amplitude to pull her towards him) that they are required to pirate some new solutions.

EVERY TIME DIDEROT SHOWERS, HE COMES UPON the scar from Jacob’s knife, a diagonal line along his side, two inches long. It’s been almost ten months that he’s been living with this crimson segment that screams
bastard
every time his eyes fall on it, and that marks the day when Katherine Thoreau crossed his path. Sometimes he tells himself that without this knife wound, he would never have met this woman, and with the tips of his fingers he traces the imprint. But he can’t let go of the insult of the thing. He promises himself he won’t leave Coca without having found that man again, the one he rolled with in the dust of the road.

For the moment, though, the site is pushing him hard. They still need to find some solutions for placing the flat deck of the bridge. They have to provide for thermal effects on the steel plates that make up the deck – in Coca, the variations in temperature are extreme, it’s a continental climate. Under the effect of a heat wave, swelling the steel, the length of the deck could increase by twenty-seven inches in a span six thousand feet long, and then retract again. So they need expansion joints every hundred and fifty feet – after some discussion they choose a system of modular expansion joints that will allow for movements of any amplitude, in three directions, and rotations on three axes. Deciding on the interval between them keeps the builders occupied for a few days. Diderot loves these crystal-clear technical demands; he orders tests, evaluates, compares, and decides. It’s the very movement of the bridge itself, its supple and living nature that’s at play in the pure reality of the steel, and he pores over this question with the zeal you put into finishing a project. The teams of ironworkers set out horizontally and assemble the span, plate by plate, six thousand feet long by a hundred across, it’s a mechanical job, weld, bolt, bolt, weld. Seamus and Mo are part of the team and work without talking to each other, they’ve synchronized all their movements with precision, it’s a choreography. They work fast in the lead and have quickly covered their strip – and then the river is crossed. They too feel like they’re almost at the finish line. A slackening that worries Diderot, it’s always in the last days that people mess up the most, careful, he warns them, all the more since in the last few days the heat has been torrid, the guys’ heads boil under their hard hats, and there’s hardly any shade to take a break in; the steel burns like the concrete that covers the whole span now, the site has become an inferno and it’s during the trips along the river that the men become reanimated, they’re already imagining themselves in the future, sharing a few leads. Seamus will skip the inauguration of the bridge and leave at the end of August for the northwest of Canada, Cigar Lake, the future’s in nuclear, he laughs, compares the wage he’s been offered with that of the workers on other sites, while the bridge guys grimace, I’d never do uranium, never, got no desire to become radioactive. Mo watches the banks parade past, he’s hesitant to leave with Seamus, who assures him that it’s a good contract, but he has a link in Zimbabwe, in a platinum mine where one of his cousins, who he found on the internet, is already working, there are hundreds of us here, he wrote. Mo doesn’t know yet what he’ll do, he’s always gotten by but one thing is certain, he wants to see the opening of the bridge, the lights, the jubilation. Three more weeks to go.

AND THEN
one morning Summer knocks on Diderot’s office door, and in a stroke of luck he’s there, lifts his head from his computer screen: everything okay, Diamantis? Summer will be the last to work hard, he knows it – the levelling of the freeway approaches, including six lanes that must be connected at various points from the bridge to the road system, requires an increased production of concrete. On the Coca side, the bridge freeway flows perfectly into the system, converging towards an interchange which, past the toll booth, will redistribute the lanes in all directions, two of them bypassing the city to head straight for the plateau; but on the Edgefront side, past the toll booth, the six lanes remain connected, and then the hundred-foot-wide channel narrows to look like a simple road that stretches along the river downstream. Summer has to prepare the ground for future construction: the mountain range road, once it’s open, will wreak havoc on the neighbourhood of Edgefront, dividing it into two equal parts before reaching the forest. This forest highway is bullshit, Summer blurts as soon as she sits down in the chair facing his desk, hard hat in her lap. She’d hesitated for a long time before knocking on Diderot’s door: she’d been working alongside him for nearly a year, and while she respects and admires the way he has of fulfilling himself in human action, connected to a materiality that exists outside of him, she’s also cautious of this man for whom living amounts to flowing with the flux of the world, with all its movement. Diderot leans back in his chair: what’s going on, Diamantis? This freeway, she repeats, this freeway they want to build, it’s gonna wreck everything. Diderot, curt: that’s not our job, Diamantis. But Summer shakes her head, but my job is also the freeway approaches and the grid connection. Silence, then Diderot nods softly, that’s true, but there isn’t a grid yet in Edgefront, we’re connecting to the road along the shore, we’re easing up the traffic in the centre, that’s all. Then, since they’re suffocating in the little room, Summer opens the window, turns around, I found the man who attacked you in November. Diderot shudders, his scar burns under his shirt, oh yeah? Yeah. Two minutes later, they’re on the way.

THEY STREAKED
along in the Impala, silent, zigzagging between vehicles, taking as many risks as fugitives with the cops on their tail, and once they reached the Edgefront side they climbed the road up to the viewpoint, a path that Diderot is seeing for the first time, Summer’s driving. Once they’re out of the car, he doesn’t take the time to contemplate Coca, marvellous, buildings piercing the heat haze, no, they go straightaway into the forest and the undergrowth does impress Diderot, disorients him, fragmentary, the day occupying the same proportion of space as the darkness, he walks for a long time without knowing whether he’s inside or outside, incorporated as he is into the frenzy of vegetation, with Summer silent at his side; and later, with the shade increasing its share, the light dissipates into slivers and a silhouette can be seen at the end of the path, ghostly but becoming steadily more incarnate as it draws nearer, Jacob is walking to meet them.

He stops a few yards from them – they too stop, and then the silence swells, swarms, a breeding ground. All three of them are covered with the same patches of light, clothes and skin transfigured. This is the meeting, Summer says simply, staying back while Diderot moves forward. The two men are now face to face, inches apart. They know each other by heart. There is so much noise that Jacob has to raise his voice, I knew you’d come, and Diderot answers slowly, dragging his syllables, I wanted to break your face – and also, I wanted to say thank you. Their timbres are expressionless, they size each other up, without affect, Jacob says, skip right to the thank-you, arms crossed over his chest. Critters of all kinds populate the luminous pastilles, pink flies, poppy-red butterflies, bronze beetles; then everything grows quiet and Diderot’s voice vibrates, all right, thank you for the knife wound. Jacob uncrosses his arms, dumbstruck, puts his hands on his hips, and kicks at a leaf; Diderot hesitates, thinks about dealing him a quick fist to the face, Jacob wouldn’t have the time to protect himself, he’d hit him in the nose, make him snort blood, the forest swirls around him, it accelerates, he smiles.

Summer paces behind them. A butterfly flutters about her, electric and delicate, she follows it with her eyes for a long moment, then crouches to look closer as it creeps into the corolla of an unknown flower, she concentrates. It’s a mission blue butterfly. A super-protected species. On the banks of the river they had to plant entire areas with flowerbeds so these butterflies would have something to live on and decreed that the boat speed and that of the cars on the freeway approaches would be limited to five miles an hour from March until June. The forest is saved. She exults, eyes closed. Then, lifting her head, pulls the elastic out of her ponytail, it’s the very first time – suddenly her whole look and face change, she calls to the two men, so is the war over now? I have to get back to work.