Birth of a Bridge (13 page)

BY THE END
of the millennium, Coca’s getting bored, super-provincial, and so confined. Definitively insular. The youth who mope around here spit in its face. The asshole of the world. The city has nevertheless verticalized with a few buildings. People also say it’s a modern city. White city hall with columns, white courthouse with cupola, white chamber of commerce. Standard American decor with large dark-windowed sedans gliding past. You wonder where the people are. Air conditioning everywhere and long bars of automatic watering on the beds of close-shorn grass, of a gaudy green. Indifference towards the world, exacerbation of family powers, suspicion towards foreigners, contained prosperity, sorrow of women whose elegance is lifted directly from the pages of fashion magazines from Paris, New York, and Milan – copied so closely it breaks your heart, truly, it hurts to see – no distance, no delay, the latest lipstick on their dry lips, the right bra, the right panties – people are suffocating here.

Luckily there’s the water. The movement of the water. The light of the water. The deep, wide, fertile river. The frozen river – skating rink that cracks on all sides when the thaw comes, wakes like an animal and shakes its scales of ice, suddenly so alive beside the weary city. Luckily there’s this freedom. But on the other bank, the neighbourhood of Edgefront is still nothing but an edge – edge of the city, edge of the forest, edge of the river, thrice marginal, triply fascinating – densely populated strip served by the old Golden Bridge and the cohort of ferries crammed tight with people who are pushed back from the pleasures of the city, them and their motorcycles, strollers, cars, those who live in the shanty towns leaning up against the forest. There’s nothing of interest here. Sure, there are factories, harbour docks, a football field without bleachers, a supermarket, a school. But no one puts a kopeck into it. Volunteer associations set up free clinics in prefab buildings that start leaking at the first sign of the rainy season, maintain the church, care for the cemetery. That’s it, and the general opinion is that that’s enough. It’s the land of cobbling things together and small-scale deals, schemes, ploys, all the little survival strategies that keep the mind alert; the land of small gardens, all the yards in fertile disarray; the land of hammocks cobbled together in damp shacks, the latest plasma-screen TVs and fridges full of beer; of trailers where Natives with piercing eyes sleep, depressed; and slapdash houses that won’t make it through the winter – the floors warp, the electric wires melt once the space heater is plugged in, the exposed pipes freeze to the front walls. It’s the land of the other side of the water, it’s the outskirts of the city and the suburb of the forest, it’s the land of the edge.

WHEN JOHN
Johnson, called the Boa, bursts onto the municipal political scene in the early 2000s, he causes a stir – he is the reform and the new – and by bypassing the elite, supplanting the local heirs and using surprise, he creates a tactical advantage that lasts until his election. During his final campaign speech, he presents himself as Prince Charming, called to wake Sleeping Beauty. The one you’ve all been waiting for to begin living again.

A THIRD LANDSCAPE

WINTER GOES ON FOREVER, A SHEATH OF GLASS. Cold corsets the city. Oxidizes perspectives, clarifies sounds, detaches each gesture, and in all of this the sky plays an exaggerated part. On the river – bleached ashen like the rest – people are at work and the bridge expands. Near the enormous columns that are now like the two indestructible ankles of this whole story, there are now long concrete seawalls reinforcing the banks. Steel is unloaded onto them, carried by rail to the Pontoverde platform, and then transported here aboard barges equipped with icebreakers.

It’s phase two of the site, we’re switching over to height, colonizing the sky. Diderot, in fine form, lifts his glass to no one in particular during a gathering on the work site, New Year’s resolutions formulated by the skin of their teeth on December 31st, mulled wine served in translucent plastic glasses that immediately melt a little – but we know that his glass holds only Coca-Cola. In other words, Diderot’s voice smacks, we’re finished with the holes, the excavators, and the explosions, terminado the digging and the blasting of the ground, heads underwater and feet in the abyss, eardrums shaken by dynamite and the pressure of underwater chambers, the mud and the mire, done with the dredger – Verlaine packed his bag three days before Christmas – the time has come for cranes and arrows, the time of welders, rock bolters, the time of skilled labourers. We begin the raising of the towers: the Coca tower and the Edgefront tower, seven hundred and fifty feet high. Cheers! Shouts fuse together over the esplanade, and one voice distinguishes itself from the hubbub – a vaguely nasal timbre, probably that of Buddy Loo: seven hundred and fifty feet, yeah, kinda like the Empire State Building, eh – an assertion that’s corrected right away by Summer Diamantis – the Empire is taller, ours will be more like the Tour Montparnasse, and she’s barely finished her sentence when Sanche’s voice sounds in her ear, Diamantis, there’s not a single person here who knows the Tour Montparnasse, and without answering him, she migrates towards the wine.

THE WORKERS
drink, pace, and comment, glasses in hand, we’re gonna have to climb up there, gonna have to do it, with a mix of impatience and anxiety unbridled by the alcohol. Sanche Alphonse Cameron swallows a smile, arms crossed over his chest, puts on an innocent face: his time has come, and he knows it. Four months overseeing vehicle maintenance was enough for him – now he’s going to gain some altitude. The Coca and Edgefront towers will be identical, each one composed of two immense steel piers placed thirty yards apart; these will be solidly anchored to a concrete foundation and then innervated to each other via crosspiece supports, sorts of gangways that will also serve as platforms to hoist people and materials. The piers themselves will be composed of prefabricated steel girders, bolted one to the other all the way up – requiring a rhythm of twenty-five girders per worker per day, the guys have been informed. With each tower thus reinforced, they’ll rise yard by yard, and the higher they get, the more a mass of cables, pulleys, winches, and hoists will trickle down, and the crane will also progress, unfolding its boom in tempo with the work. Sanche’s crane will work on the construction of the Edgefront tower.

He dribbles his way along the crowd to the buffet, lingers over the pot where the liquid churns like a priest’s robe scented with alcohol, pepper, and cinnamon, orange zest floating, refills his cup: he likes this wine that rasps his tongue, exactly as this city has rasped his skin from day one. Because in terms of promising the good life, Coca has done more than meet his expectations: it has reinvented him. He arrived in September as a model crane operator, a loving only son, an attentive fiancé, but since then he’s had the feeling that each day he’s slipping a little further out of his lovely smooth skin, his even skin: it has dried, flaked off, fallen in scraps, and he rids himself of it with a stiff joy, kicking in the shavings, in the slough. Everything happened as though the city, which acted on his skin like silver nitrate on photographic paper, was revealing the stigmata of desire and ambition, the taste for the game, the will to power, and now he enjoys the feeling that another skin is forming beneath the old one, another skin that he doesn’t yet know but that is the skin of real life, there is no doubt, and when he looks at his leopard body in the mirror, he feels handsome, yes, and tells himself that the moment has come to let what is inside him come to life.

DEEP INSIDE
the multitude, Katherine Thoreau for the moment keeps her distance from Diderot, who verifies her presence with quick sidelong glances – they’re waiting for each other. Night falls, the crowd disperses, people throw their glasses into large trash cans and drift towards the locker rooms; the alcohol has warmed them, but it’s bonuses they’re talking about as they open their lockers, this Christmas bonus that no one has got yet, can’t let ourselves be lulled by cheap wine, we gotta sort this out. Trestles, portable stove, and cases of wine packed up, emptied, thrown out, and Mo Yun, astounded by these actions, begins to turn near the pot, there’s still enough to fill his flask and this is what he rushes to do, then sets about fishing out the orange peels one by one and stuffs them in a piece of newspaper, a cone he pockets, excited by this sweet deal, and then wanders away – and it’s at this precise moment that Diderot makes out Katherine’s hair as she moves towards the workers’ facilities, tells himself she’s leaving and he’s going to miss her, tosses his cup in the can, and with hands in his pockets launches himself in her direction – after all, I never really got to thank her, this is what he tells himself to get himself in gear – and intercepts her, almost solemn, hey Thoreau, one thing, I wanted to say thank you – and Katherine, who had seen him, a moving mass slaloming between the last groups still on-site and had instinctively slowed her step so they would meet – choreography of collision, it’s as old as the hills and still totally magic – she stops, opens her alcohol-clouded eyes wide, thank you? Thank you for what? She’s had too much to drink, Diderot sees it right away, her face is capsized, he gets right to the point: thank you for the other day, the fight, you know what I mean. She rests her naked eyes on him, transparent irises stinging behind the slight swell of her lids, oh, that’s all in the past, she pouts, that’s behind us; she wobbles on her feet, puts a hand to her temple – I have to eat something, I’ve had a few drinks, I have to eat, and Diderot seizes the opportunity – a miracle of a chance – to simply say, wait for me, let’s go.

LATER, THOREAU
and Diderot are sitting in an ordinary snack bar, dazzled and stunned to be there and for it all to have happened so easily – even though they had to perform several circumventions in order to slip away quietly, and even though as soon as they’d been seated Katherine had to get up to go vomit in the toilet bowl, vile, in the bathroom – and, plunging her head into the hole, holding her hair back in a ponytail, she’d wanted to laugh again, I’m drunk, this is ridiculous – then she’d copiously splashed her clothes while rinsing her mouth under the faucet. The room is sparsely populated, only a few individuals lingering, two cops taking a break on their patrol, a man with a very long beard who soliloquizes. Quick, Katherine, have something to eat – this sudden first-name basis accelerates the cadence – Diderot calls the server over and Katherine checks her breath in her palm. You okay? He looks at her, smiling, and Katherine lifts her head, I’m great, and then, as though she couldn’t wait any longer, she shrugs off her ugly parka, and, taking off her sweater, crosses and uncrosses her arms from bottom to top, a large movement, her face disappearing fleetingly into the wool collar, then she opens the top buttons of her shirt beneath Diderot’s eyes that comb over her, imperturbable, and finally shakes her head lightly so her hair settles – a light moisture dews her top lip and her cheeks are red, and with this gesture she’s just made you think she was too hot, but no – and in a rush of unexpected directness she says, I’ll warn you, this is all I have to offer; Diderot, vaguely outdistanced, chews the inside of his cheeks and then states in turn, just as calm as she, and direct, that’s already a lot, and Katherine, in a trembling voice, says I think so too.

AT MIDNIGHT, AT THE WHIRR OF THE SIREN THAT signals the end of the second eight-hour time slot, the men stagger from the Pontoverde platform, skin tight, eyes burning under flickering lids. While most of them go back to their digs, a few others head for downtown Coca, zone of games and pleasures. The single ones value this rhythm even though it exhausts the organism and disturbs the nervous system (they get up around two in the afternoon, work from four until midnight, party till dawn), it lets them have the nightclubs when they’re bumping. They like night on the work site, night that encapsulates them, encloses them in pools of light – multitudes of bulbs light up the darkness like a celebration, vehicle headlights signal to one another in code, the drivers’ cabins are lit like alcoves – and emphasizes their community, their solidarity, and their strength: they are comrades, brothers in arms. So they don’t stagger too long, no, they get excited, a little dazed and impatient to go hit on the easy women, to drink and gamble, impatient to find, after the difficulty and the tension of the work, a little simple flow, a little sweet fluidity. Once they’re out, they walk through the fallen dusk in groups and keep up a good pace all the way to the shuttles that will take them there; they climb inside, already jostling one another, a pack of kids joking and jeering, a gang of electric schoolboys. Soren Cry, with his skirting-the-walls attitude, usually goes to sit at the back of the bus, solitary, and leans his head against the window, his gaze wandering out into the darkness; he likes these trips that are like decompression chambers, floating tunnels where he’s taken in, transported, where he can finally let his guard down. He doesn’t even see the guy who sits down beside him, who gives him a few taps on the shoulder so he’ll turn around and holds out a solid hand, Alex. Soren extends his hand reluctantly and then turns back to the window, but the guy hits his shoulder again, three quick hits
whack
whack
whack
, I know, I know who you are, I knew you in Anchorage. Soren starts – no one can see it but I know that his heart jolts inside his chest as though he was suffocating and then starts up again in a torrent – he replies slowly, naw, man, you must be mistaken, I’ve never been to Anchorage, I’m from Ashland, Kentucky; but the guy suddenly leans in close till his shoulder is touching Soren’s and lowers his voice, let’s not waste time, Soren Cry, don’t bother talking shit, you got it? Then, as Soren nearly pukes from terror, the guy spits out rapid fire in a falsely relaxed voice you had a little trouble in Anchorage, Soren, a story of a girl and a bear, not pretty – Soren’s catapulted upright on his feet as though on a spring, leave me alone, man, I’ve never been to Anchorage, I’m from Ashland, you must be getting me mixed up with someone else – but the other gets up just as fast to push him back down with a palm pressed hard against his shoulder, listen up – this is your last warning before I go to the cops, they’d be glad to get the guy who killed someone with a bear, believe me, everyone there was real shaken up – are you listening – hey, are you listening to me? Soren lowers his head, the back of his black hat covers his brow and his eyeballs vibrate in the darkness, strangely liquefied, yeah, the guy comes to press his cheek violently against Soren’s as though for a tango and breathes nicotine-gum-scented breath in his face, when we get downtown we’re gonna get off together, but you’re not gonna take off and play right away, we’re gonna talk first, got it – I’ve got a job for you, a thing you can’t say no to, or else,
bang
– he’s placed his first and middle fingers together in a pistol against Soren’s temple, blows on them like the professional after the clean execution of the contract – and Soren stiffens in place, cornered – and in fact, cornered is exactly what he is. When the guy finally steps away from him to joke around with the others in the front seats like nothing’s going on, Soren turns his head to the window again: microscopic islands of light and noise – neon signs, yellow-gold windows inundated with the warmth of kitchens, glowing embers in car ashtrays, blue halo of television sets, dogs yowling, solitary joggers who breathe and hit the pavement in cadence, bikes that zip through the night – perforate the urban darkness, residential neighbourhoods that stretch out, that hold embraces, hold dreams, all this is not for him who will never, it seems, find any rest, never, ever. Soren knows the way, just a few more minutes before they reach the big time bad luck of the sidewalks, deep in the orange belly of the city; he is emptied out, and while the suburbs slide past the window, his past unrolls like a great scroll, just as black and shadowy, and, in a few linear bursts of light, there he is, back in Anchorage.

FROM THE
airport onward he had trembled, rigid with exhaustion from the trip and the spectacle of corpses on display on the concourse. A magnificent collection of stuffed specimens from Alaska, land and aquatic wildlife, animals he’d taken the time to gaze at, impressed by the reflective gleam of their pupils – they too had a gaze – and by the shine of their teeth moistened with varnish – they were hungry; among them, a moose with flat antlers and gentle eyes, a strange amphibious and vaguely prehistoric creature, solitary and independent, who crosses large rivers and grazes with its head underwater; a white bighorn sheep with large amber-coloured horns curving in hoops like the rolled coiffure of Madame Bovary; and finally a brown bear standing on its hind legs, colossal: ten feet tall and at least a thousand pounds. Soren is fascinated by the power and the violence – two nouns that, to him, are strangely synonymous, and he has blithely confused them since childhood – that subsist in this furry carcass staged in the airport terminal. A handsome welcoming committee. One that nightmares are made of – and nightmares would come, the animal would come to life on the flagstones.

First there was the boat to build, a hull a hundred feet long with a steel frame that Soren and three other guys had put together over a few months; the owner, a rich restaurateur from Anchorage, is starting up a hunting business and wants to transport hunters and fishers in groups of thirty to the lodges he owns in Kodiak, Seldovia, and Eagle River. It’s on this building site that Soren meets his first bear, a hungry young male who pulverizes the empty beer cans left behind after the break and flees at his approach. A few days later, when he sees it again, Soren decides from then on to prepare a bundle of berries, roots, and dried fish for the bear – he leaves it behind the shed, in the animal’s path (he does this in secret: taming a bear on the work site is strictly forbidden). Ten days later, when he goes out behind the shed to see, there’s nothing left of the bundle, and paw prints are clearly visible in the snow; Soren smiles, quivers with joy. A few days later he hears it growling again behind the fence, rushes to see it finish devouring the enormous bundle he’d brought so carefully onto the site; when it catches sight of him, the bear freezes, and they watch each other – Soren notices the red crescent mark above its eye – this lasts two or three seconds, no longer, and then the animal disappears behind a wall of containers.

Once the hull is finished, Soren finds another job in a factory where he freezes his ass off all day long standing in front of trays of fish to be gutted before packaging. Yet he continues to bring provisions, once or twice a month, until the night when he finds the bundle intact – the bear’s not coming anymore. This desertion hits him hard: Soren lies around, gets drunk on weekends, feels himself foundering. When he hears word of a position as a bus driver that’s opening, he snaps it up, and, displaying some ultimate confidence, he begins to venture into nature, which is where he meets the woman who will drive him completely insane.

Though he doesn’t entirely believe in this thing between them – she’s in university, she’s travelled, and she speaks French – he lets himself be taken in because they share a similar metabolism, both are solitary, independent early risers, two mute and graceless individuals fascinated by wildness. In the beginning, Soren’s not very physically attracted to her – she’s stocky and short limbed, with a closed face and dull hair, but he likes her arrogance and her big breasts beneath the aqua down jacket, breasts she lets him enjoy at will, breasts he kneads, licks, sucks; besides, he’s aware that she’s not clingy, doesn’t ask questions, and that his appetite for sex suits her. When she arrives at his place because of some story about a broken heater in her studio, he opens the door politely, specifies with a smile that this is only temporary, right, but he’s so transfigured that a girl is knocking at his door, it’s as though he’s asking her to stay forever. So she makes her entrance, royal and desired, and soon there he is waiting for her to come home each evening, organizing night trips into nature, now he’s driving her around, guiding her, and making casseroles for her. The end of the study she’s been conducting on wolves (communication within the pack: decoding the cries and the howls) – signifies the end of their honeymoon. The girl returns to university and is suddenly smug about it, doesn’t bother answering the questions he asks, is openly bored; soon she brings guys over to his place in the afternoon, students who are a little boorish but flush, who down his beers and drain his hot-water tank. Strangely, Soren takes it, says nothing, holding out – but the girl humiliates him more and more often, refuses to sleep with him anymore, refuses to let him touch her breasts, snickering at his handwriting – are you dyslexic or something? You should get that checked out, buddy, I won’t be here forever – or at his job, going out each night under the black netting of new stockings, breasts out in the open, and comes home at dawn drunk to toss used condoms in the garbage. He finally asks her to leave – he’s scared now that he might hit her, he knows himself, she’s gotta get out of here. But the girl digs in her heels, says she’s waiting for a money order from her father; Soren, crazy with rage, answers coldly I don’t give a shit tonight you are outta here – but that night, ridiculous, they end up sleeping together again, and it’s so intense for Soren that he doesn’t know what he wants anymore. This time again the girl screamed her pleasure loudly; gleaming with sweat, strands of her hair stuck to her temples, she looks at him for a long moment with brilliantly shining eyes – her mouth is cruel and disdainful. Soren, it’s time I told you clearly: I am not a big dog, not a mare or a goat: I’m a woman, a human being, can you get that straight? Then she turned towards the wall with a sigh, stifled a dirty little laugh, and, with her back arched, presented her ass to him again, and he took it. It was that same night that the bear from the site reappeared, foraging in the shrubby bushes behind his building. Soren is completely disoriented, the girl is asleep on her stomach. Not knowing how to find an outlet for the sexual violence that torments him, and feeling himself losing ground, he gets dressed and takes the garbage out, keys in hand. The animal is there in the small courtyard, resplendent, walnut brown and lustrous beneath an enormous moon; he lifts his head and looks at Soren with his little eyes, they recognize each other, the bear has the same sliver of red above his eye, it’s him – Soren is dazzled, spellbound, calls the animal softly and he comes, moving slowly on four paws, swaying with his whole enormous body, and warm, it’s magic, Soren climbs the stairs backwards, step by step, holding out the garbage bag to the bear who comes slowly, with no other noise than that of his fur against the walls at the turns, then once Soren’s on the landing he opens the door quickly and puts the bag inside, a few feet from the doorway; he leaves the door open and slips out to climb a little higher on the staircase, and as soon as the bear goes inside the apartment, he turns the key in the lock with a fevered hand, closing the door on the bear and the girl.

THE MEN
have just got off the bus. Alex immediately places himself behind Soren – who moves ahead reluctantly, desperate – and pushes him forward with a series of jabs to his shoulder. They plunge into a gleaming, oily neighbourhood, following narrow alleyways and finally enter an ordinary bar where a Frenchman is waiting for them. Have a seat. Beneath the grenadine bulbs that light the place, Soren learns their faces – Alex’s intrigues him, he recognizes him vaguely. As though this conversation was just a pleasantry, an interlude of sociability in good company, the Frenchman points at both of them with a whirling index finger, what are you going to have? The minutes that follow are exactly like a hand squeezing the throat. The Frenchman, silver fox with prominent Adam’s apple, says you’ll receive a package at the midnight change of shift – Alex will bring it to you, but he won’t come onto the site – you’ll have to pick it up outside and then stash it in your locker. You’ll still have time to catch the bus and have a drink with the guys. Soren looks at his hands trembling on the table: and then? Then you wait for instructions. Soren doesn’t blink, he lowers his head again, his eye is reflected in the bronze of his beer, he exhales: what’s in the package? At this point Alex plants himself against his shoulder again and practically licks his ear whispering, shut up, while the Frenchman lifts Soren’s chin with the signet ring on his fist, listen up – you don’t ask any questions, you just wait for instructions and everything will work out fine. But Soren insists, tears in his eyes like glue, and if I say no? If you say no? If you say no we may just find ourselves a bear and lock you up with it.