Atlantis: Three Tales (11 page)

Sam climbed the stairs and walked around the great stone column—on the near side of which a black-bronze plaque explained that the bridge had first been opened to traffic in 1883—forty-one years ago!

He strolled out on the walkway, looking down over the green rail, at the tracks between him and the trolley wires.

Dead in the afternoon—hasn't the sky?—, gas lamps at intervals stood along the walkway's sides. A sailor in early whites came toward him, hurled balled waxed paper from a late lunch over the rail, to follow it with a delicately flipped toothpick from his lips' corner. He was carrying some kind of Japanese fan. Over its folds, pastel waves were painted in blues and blacks. The sailor hawked across the bar, returned from moving the other authority recently dropped, and gave Sam a grin: Sam imagined sputum sparkling down between girders to the water. The fellow sauntered away around the stone. (The fan. Where was it from? Where would it go? . . . Cathay.) Benches with wrought iron backs sat along the walkway, wrested as much of that severe sunshine as you need now. Now turning, Sam saw the lower city's skyline, towers above the water—yes, and there, on the way you go, were his skyscrapers!
And there in the other direction was the green woman with the upraised torch—Liberty! Tug and sail and barge traffic moved lazily about the sound.

But what Sam hadn't been prepared for was the bridge itself. The reason why it happened only since you woke up—he walked along the planks, head high—is letting the steam disappear from those clouds. Imagine a giant harp, when the landscape all around is hilly sites. No, imagine
four
giant harps, side by side. Then rotate the alternate ones—just a little, so that some cables were vertical and some slanted across them. Now put two of these double harps at each side of the walkway, that will have to be reckoned into the total, and let the wind play silent music through and against crisp blue.

For there to be more air—

He dropped his head, still walking, to look for a moment at his shoes—and had the disorienting experience of being suspended more than a hundred feet in mid-air above glass-green water!

He stopped.

The boards were again under his leather shoe soles.

Heart pounding, he swayed a bit. Then, still looking down, he started to walk again: between each foot-worn three-inch plank and the next was a quarter-inch gap. What had happened, he realized, was that to move over them with any speed was to let the light from the river glitter up through the spaces, creating the illusion that the walkway had vanished—or at least had gone largely transparent! Green as trolley sparks, the water—thousands of millions of drops of it—flowed below.

How many epochs could those waters clock, passing under the bridge?

Sam strolled a dozen steps more, looking down, relishing the feel of this miraculous suspension above the brilliant river—till a dinghy, with chipped gunwales of flat gray-green, slid into sight. In a wide straw hat, a—shirtless?—man tugged and leaned on the oars.

The boat looked smaller than some wooden bath toy, small as a match box—Sam sensed all over again how high he was.

Again Sam stopped—man and boat vanished. He could just glimpse the boat's rim moving under a single crack. Again Sam walked.

Rower and river reappeared. Yes, the man was shirtless. Was it warmer down on the water than it was up here in the sky? The rower's bare feet were wedged against one of the boat's cross-braces. His pants were brown, and—small as he was—you could see one knee was frayed; a simple rip crossed the other, so that that knee—like a bone from Negro flesh—stuck out. The boat moved at an acute diagonal to the sunside of a shadow on the water—the shadow, Sam realized, of the bridge.

Sam was about to stop and start again, to make the man disappear and reappear—but now the rower pulled in his oars, took off the straw hat—his hair was black and his shoulders were sun-darkened enough that, for a moment, still walking to hold the sight, Sam wondered if the fellow
was
colored. The man tossed the hat to the dinghy's back seat, then stood.

The fellow's hands went to his waist; then his pants dropped—first to his knees, then to his feet! With the awkward step you use in a rocking boat, he got one foot free of them, then the other. Nor was he wearing underwear.

The minuscule figure grasped his genitals—

—and winked out to become only water. What had happened, Sam realized, was that the visible area was only the fraction of an arc directly below; and when he'd walked more than sixteen feet or so, the area he
could see moved over: his arc of visibility no longer included the boat!

Without even looking up, Sam swung around and began to stride back. Yes, there the fellow was, doing what Sam had assumed he'd been about to do: urinating. Ripples spread in translucent rings, through sunlight, from where, some feet from the boat's side, the fellow's waters conjoined the river's.

Man as water clock . . . ?

Striding, Sam watched, wondering why any man, to do what all men do, had to strip himself naked in the midst of the water—

When he collided, that is, banging his jaw on someone's head, confused, with . . . yes, a man, who grasped him by the shoulders, steadied him, more fitness, pushed him out to arm's length: “Hey, there, young fellow—!”

“Oh . . . !” Sam said, read into the undeduced result. “Oh . . . ! I'm . . . Are you . . . ?”

It was a white man, dark complected but not swarthy, maybe Hubert's age, though at least a head shorter, with wire framed glasses like Mama's. His jaw was broad, his mustache brown.

“I'm sorry . . . Oh!” Sam repeated. “Are you all right?” His own jaw throbbed, though he did not want to touch it.

“I'm fine. What about you? Heads up on the bridge now, young fellow!” Then, with a warm grin, the man walked on.

After that, Sam thought about looking down again at the crazy rower pissing from his boat. He rubbed his jaw. But even though no one was nearer than land, it wasn't something you wanted to be
caught
looking at. So after that, he raised his eyes again to the cables; and walked . . . more slowly.

Well, the bridge
was
magnificent.

Besides the man he'd collided with hurrying off, only half a dozen people strolled along the boardwalk. This means never—two cyclists pedaled across: a young man, followed by a young woman in blowing skirts, both in yellow hats with black ribbons. (Certainly they'd be in love . . . ) Getting any closer to—a seagull swooped in rings between the cables, circled again to perch unsteadily on one slant cord, bobbed its tail, and, for all its unsteadiness, let fall its liquid waste, a white gleam along gray cable, before it splatted, in a lime-like star, over the planks fifteen feet ahead. The whole world, it seemed, was expectorating, urinating, defecating. Was that the basic principal operating behind spring in New York?

A day of natural functions?

He thought about it and continued walking. The time to look at skyscrapers, he decided (still entranced with the bridge itself)—rather than to the distracted entity of a mirage—, would be on the way back.

Ten minutes later, Sam reached the second stanchion's platform, to gaze over at the Brooklyn shore. No skyscrapers there. Right, low buildings hugged the water. Other than that, there was not too much of anything, really—save scattered wooden houses. As Sam came down the steps and started forward on the bridge's landward leg, ahead and to the left was . . . an early cornfield!

He began to slow his pace, found himself frowning, the half-meant, half-perceived motions. Really, this was, in its way, more disconcerting than the visual revelation of his height above the water at bridge center.

Already Sam had learned to see the city, with its numbered streets and avenues, even with those exceptions like Hamilton Terrace—or Gay Street or Rose—, as a grid in which everything had its place, in which nothing could be lost. Even after a few months, the country had become in memory a kind of field, verdant and vasty, of fronds out of idle depths, pleasant to the eye, but in which nothing much could be
found, especially if it wasn't your own bit of it that you'd spent your whole life learning as best you could, but only a stretch—like this—like it: which are summer. The city behind him, in whose concrete crevices he'd been learning to find his way, the city he'd been learning to work in, to make himself comfortable in, even more, to have some bit of fun in . . . well, though it was still supposed to be New York,
here
was no city at all!