Birth of a Bridge (10 page)

LATER, SUMMER
tosses her hard hat into a corner of her office and goes to the sink to drink from the tap, water splashes everywhere – for goodness’ sake, there are cups, everything you need, plus the water in Coca is polluted, no doubt about that; dries herself off with the back of her hand and goes to sit in front of her laptop: no news from the Tiger, whose face has begun to dissolve, his face and body blinking precise at intermittent illuminations, then suddenly grainy, becoming transparent, and so Summer closes her eyes more and more often, even presses hard fists against her lids, worried to think that one day there’ll be nothing left to make him reappear in full force, nothing to counter the progressive erasure of this guy, exactly the way you lift the heavy chain of the bucket in a well of shadows, exactly the way you lift it into the light, the bucket and its fragile, perishable cargo – heave-ho, heave-ho – what does he look like, the Tiger, what is the timbre of his voice, the grain of his skin, the scent of his body, what is the taste of his mouth, heave-ho, heave-ho.

AROUND HER,
the plant purrs, the workers – loader operators and mixing truck drivers – labour away, the aggregate flows at a constant speed, well spread out on the transport belts, and this continuous flux of energy gives her security, envelops her like a coverlet, a kind of mental cabin where she now passes the clearest part of her time: the batch plant has become her home, a shelter. With a view of the entire site, she oversees these industrial tools, lowers her eyes to the latest touch screen, follows the production of the concrete in real time, step by step, ready to make the slightest adjustment: at every moment, the variable nature of the aggregate can require modification of one parameter in one of the three hundred and fifty formulations saved on the computer. To those who tease that she’s a brown-noser, mocking her record work hours, seeing an excess of zeal or ambition – with Sanche Cameron at the forefront – or to those, far more pernicious and cruel to hear, who imply that the poor thing, she only has this in her life, nothing more than staring at her desk and reacting to the detection of an anomaly in the test results for the mixer, a trending graph indicating the consistency of the concrete, Summer calmly responds that she likes to be here, in her workplace, at her command post, that the metamorphosis of the material is a spectacle that fascinates her, that things do have to move forward – which is not very convincing at the moment, and they stubbornly see her articulate speech as the mask of her solitude.

Summer examines her work plan, evaluates what these three weeks of interruption will mean for her, the one who remains in charge of perpetual movement – what a joke.

Don’t stop. We don’t stop, this is her first instinct, we don’t stop, we’ll get ahead, we won’t stop until it’s impossible to stock the concrete on the site, we just keep on going, that’s all she can find to say, her mouth twisting over her charts, when two guys knock at the door and ask if they should stop the centrifuges. They frown at her words, and the smaller of them, a thickset Mexican, points out that the whole site is stopping. Summer turns around, looks daggers at him, not us, we’re going to get ahead. The guys back up on the landing and close the door again, she hears them swearing in Spanish the bitch, the
hija de puta
. Then someone knocks again. It’s Sanche. He pokes his head in the door. You all right? He’s taken off his work overalls and is dressed to go out on the town, a black leather Gestapo-style jacket with visible yellow stitching, pointy shoes, a silk scarf printed with cannabis leaves. Whatcha doing, Miss Concrete?

Summer smiles,
nothing
, I’m not stopping is all, I’ve got the whole team on my back but I don’t care. I haven’t gotten any other instructions. Sanche smooths the ends of his scarf with an automatic hand, looks at her, shrugs his shoulders, answers that the whole site is stopping for three weeks. Summer remains silent. The darkness grows in the room. The lamp on her desk carves her a ghostly orange face with grey shadows, a jack-o’-lantern on Hallowe’en night, she’s scary, you should stop working, Diamantis, come with me, everyone else is already gone. She shakes her head, concrete is a very complicated recipe, you know, very complicated, we always think of it as a basic material but it’s a surprising substance, tricky, and stopping production requires a protocol – Sanche sighs, pretends to beat a retreat, walking into the door, for god’s sake, bangs his fist against it, deliver me from this crazy woman; she raises her voice now and accelerates the flow; for example, a concrete formulation must be validated by laboratory tests and then by on-site tests, they check its strength after twenty-eight days, and it takes a long, long time to find the right enunciation, the one that will suit every need, the one that will respond to the desires of the architect, the right tint, the right resistance to freezing, to thaw, the one that will endure shifts in temperature, the one that will ensure the concrete doesn’t set too quickly, doesn’t set too weak, her voice fades away softly, she turns her back to Sanche, who’s placed his hand on the door handle and is getting ready to leave as he says, stop, Diamantis, you’re such a pain. Summer whips around. A mixing plant is not a car, it’s a process, it doesn’t stop when you press a button, we have to be sure of ourselves, is that clear?

IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. A BALCONY, Diderot, and before him, the landscape in motion. He holds himself up, leaning against the icy rail, naked, the blanket ponchoed over his head, his chest inclined towards the street where the snow has hardened into slabs now, filling in the length of the sidewalks in dirty strips. Calm arms and sleepy legs, soles of his feet soon sealed by the cold to the concrete floor, he leans, breathes, seeks, down there, leaning his head towards the river which he knows is within his reach, so close that he touches a section between two buildings, the velvety purpled surface of the water appearing beneath the wintery fog: the birds are still there.

Last day without the bridge, thinks Diderot, shivering goosebumps as the landscape unfurls before him at the rate of the rising day, higher, brighter, wider, deeper, with more contrast; as it’s laid out in tiers and terraces – miscellaneous facades and roofs fringed with satellite dishes, underwear, and capitalist logos hung out to dry, raised parking lots, interchanges, triumphal arches, cranes, arrows, domes; as it fragments and assembles itself with the same momentum, which is still the impetus of beginnings, a powerful combination in which, far off in the background, high and grey, stands the great forest of the other bank. His heart, wrung out at the close of a long night, also begins to dilate, in unison with the upward impulse tied to daybreak, which is enough to make the blanket fall to his shoulders, his head out from under the cover, his funny head, the cold sets it aflame like a handful of dry leaves, he feels his heart beating now in his chest,
bang bang
, beating so hard it tears open the day without a bridge on the horizon, goddamn shitty day he knows it already because after twenty days of forced time off without pay, anguish is what seizes him, creasing his forehead and knotting his stomach; calculations are what colonize his cranium and costs are what stack up.
Bang bang.
Quick look at the dry sky and he pivots inside, gets dressed quickly, a gulp of cold coffee and no shower, nothing, not even toothpaste, just a new bandage over his scarred middle, the Velpeau bandage that holds him together, a pair of bike shorts moulding his big thighs, and he dons his cycling shoes, three turns of the scarf, thick yellow wool hat, steps over the mess and goes straight out, down the stairs, grabs his bike in the garage, and there he is – outside, alive and well, the scent of the night on his skin, outside outside outside, because that’s the best place to be.

THE TASTE
of rebirth. This is the first time he’s been outside in a whole week – the last time he felt this weak he was seventeen and had banged up his kidney in a motorcycle accident, pissing blood and unable to get up; the arrival of the birds, condemning him to inaction, had only worsened his state. A low moment. He’d amassed a long string of days spent stewing, when nothing in him knew how to fend off the sadness that infiltrated his frame – came in through the cleft of his wound, he thought, even though it was completely healed over now, didn’t hurt anymore, just a purpled line of skin with no swelling – and poisoned his blood. He had spent most of his time suffering, obsessing over the man he’d fought, and was already making a thousand plans for the next time he sees him, while down there, on the site, in the slowed-down offices, the guys were glutting themselves on comments: Diderot, idol with feet of clay, paper tiger, felled oak. Some talked about finding the guilty man – Soren Cry took care to throw his knife into the river as a precaution – and got geared up to organize a punitive expedition into Edgefront, into the shady neighbourhoods, because he could only have come from there, could only be one of those guys. Strangely, no one thought back to the testimonies of Summer Diamantis and Katherine Thoreau, who had both spoken of a white man in a tie. The site’s turning to bedlam, dereliction threatens. Work has to start up again tomorrow. It’s time.

BIKE ALONG
slowly, first rolling alongside the river, then for two miles follow the black paved path that weaves back and forth beside the frozen river, solid and intense as Chinese ink against the uncertain murk of the static waters, pass the juvenile financial district, effulgent, bristling with cranes that are too red, too high, too new, makes him think of a teenager at the peak of his growth spurt, leave the park on the left-hand side, promise yourself to go hang out there when it warms up, to go see if they barter here as much as people say – an HP printer for a Moroccan ottoman nailed together in Meknes, an issue of the
Village Voice
for a set of muffin tins, a water pipe for an IKEA duvet – if they deal here, if they turn tricks as much as people say, if they tire themselves out – martial arts under the trees, kites on the meadow, dodge-ball soccer and running everywhere – if they make love amid the vapours of New California Gold, compressed inside acid trips against a background of mind-blowing music, or breaking away to languish beneath the wide green leaves of the banana trees (so soft and welcoming), if you can hear poets in baggy jeans and fluorescent flip-flops droning the language of owls plaited together with that of capitalists, if people organize politically, if they dance on Native burial grounds, if they pray – if in fact the place creates a utopia at the heart of Coca, a clearing where unbridled words fluctuate, a gap where the world could reformulate itself, and Diderot pedals faster and faster, caressing the foliage with his eyes, leaves powdered with snow, the California black oaks against the chalky bronze and golden highlights of the ginkgos, speeds along beside the stone wall that breathes, snowflaky, and rings this park without gate or fence. Gain momentum and roll onto the boulevard that snakes along the side of the valley, inhale and exhale regularly, above all don’t force it, don’t waste your strength, don’t rush, instead climb in cadence, wait to change speed, and when the slope is at a good angle swing onto the plateau without pedalling harder, take advantage of the bends, pass the McDonald’s, the Trader Joe’s, the Walgreens, and the Safeways, and once you’ve reached the top of the boulevard, only then turn right and climb to the circular promontory that advances into space, balcony that overhangs the valley, the city, the river, and the bridge that rises up over the water, dome of the forest behind, get off the bike, unhook the flask, and drink the water that will have taken on the metallic taste that is, for Diderot, the very flavour of Coca, embrace the white landscape, sparkling under the hard sun, and measure how far you’ve come. This is the first stop.

Diderot huffs and puffs, water dribbles down his frozen chin, his face is the colour of a beet, and sweat trickles into his eyes: he would never have believed he could have such a hard time making it up a hill. He’s leaning against the guardrail that drips melted ice, his feet buried up to the ankles in a grimy snowdrift, chin resting in his big paw bundled in a glove, he gazes at Coca at the bottom of the valley: I’m too old for all this, don’t have the body for it, don’t have the shoulders for the job anymore, nor the legs solid or feet nervous enough, and he soon thinks of the little house in the Finistère and quickly shakes his head, no way, the Finistère, dammit, the name alone makes him want to run because here we are at the edge of the continent – there, there would be only his mother like the crust of the earth, his mother in a blue blouse trimming the hedges, her hands between the leaves moving a pair of pruning shears much too heavy for her, his hunched-over mother in the mauve mountains, blue sky, roses, his tiny mother, all dried out except for her cheeks so red and waxed like apples, so brittle, osteoporosis and memory lapses, they’d go walking along the Bay of the Dead (
Baie des Trépassés
), on the sandy beach where stiffs drowned in the Raz de Sein wash up after eight days, they’d laugh at the macabre toponym and would promptly fall into the trap of the place, its implacable nature, its din; they’d watch the waves forming far off that would swell, powerful, great rolls of rough and nebulous force that pulverized light in their passage and imposed themselves with a kind of absolute fate, like the very first world, the very first proof of days, and maybe he’d even swim naked in the sea, lifting himself up onto his toes and raising his arms with each wave that smacks against his chest, yelling with cold, joy, fear, yelling with his mouth wide open soon smothered with so much oxygen and nitrogen, soon dry and silent, while the little old woman would recite the names of the capes and rocks to herself, her maroon cardigan buttoned to the neck, house shoes buried in the wet sand soaking up sea and crabs, yes, maybe it was time now to go home and set himself up in a part of the earth where there’s no more ground to dig, precisely, not many more gestures to make, a place where he could enjoy the world as it is, the simple perception, head on, without there being a need to add any action, without a need to make anything other than what already exists there, tangible as a pleasing flower that we pick with one simple movement, a pure sensation that would still – just like the motion of the waves, like their knowing and mysterious rolling – return him from the inside and shake out his bones, just a sandbank then, a bit of earth and water, animal exuberance all around and the bitter smell of seaweed, just a cape, a simple, rudimentary place, and leave airports behind for good.

At the bottom of the valley Coca dazzles, and it’s as though the impatience, the avidity, the rapacious desire have been rendered visible. And this peps Diderot up, reinvigorates him. He jumps back on the seat,
hup
, and in one moment has turned his back on the city and on the future Finistère, spins towards the white plain, his tires whistling on the asphalt again, again the pleasure of being swift, of splitting the air as though it were matter, again the joy of penetrating space headfirst, laid flat over the handlebars in the position of speed, making his body one with the machine, hair and clothes flapping noisily in the atmosphere like so many minuscule flags, and Diderot laughs in spurts, the icy air he swallows dries his throat but he opens his mouth, and his teeth, spoiled by deposits of tobacco, gleam in the sun as his big all-terrain tongue flaps against his lower lip, the air he exhales is exchanged for that of the limestone plateau, it’s a strange vertigo, as though his presence were the only thing that made the space around him exist, as though he were at once the centre and the engine. At this point, it’s ecstasy: the conjugated forces of his body and his wheels propelling him forward with the firmness of a piece of artillery, every swerve seizing his senses. Diderot takes off, glides, lifted, and his thoughts also materialize, roll in his brain, tangible as stones and precise, he’s having clear ideas – it’s always on his bike that everything settles, everything crystallizes.

RETURNING VIA
Colfax, nearly noon, a barbecue joint, pickups with snow tires outside, and at the edge of the parking lot, an empty swing that grates dismally on a crossbar: Diderot’s hungry, he goes inside. Dim room panelled in yellow pine, no windows but Christmas decorations in abundance, club music turned up loud – Jefferson Airplane, “Somebody to Lov
e”
– and a phenomenal hubbub that finally covers his internal weather, the incessant come and go of servers with hard smiles, weak phrasing. A girl in a cowboy hat welcomes him with a menu in hand, reels off a commercial greeting in the form of a question – How are we doing today? – turns on her heel, leads him between tables populated with beers and men wearing large lumberjack shirts, two or three tables with girl duos, one with a family. For Diderot, a table in the corner and
andiamo
: triple burger, fries, Coke.

When the door opens, the ray of light whitens the atmosphere and reveals the dust suspended in the room, thousands of particles without mass, without volume, mysteries of matter, and then dark silhouettes enter stamping their feet on the doormat with disproportionate ardour, on the pretext of knocking off the snow that’ll soon turn to puddles. Diderot’s irritated hearing them
stamp stamp
for ages, bloody racket, raises his eyebrows: a new family has been seated at the other end of the room. There’s a little girl in a high chair, two teens, a woman with auburn hair, a man in a wheelchair. The woman captures his attention. She shrugs off a fuchsia parka, lifts her hair from the hood of her tracksuit, and is now studying the menu while the man in the wheelchair drains his first beer.

At the moment when the server brings their plates – three burgers for the five of them, two Cokes, two beers, they’ll share – Diderot catches the eye of the woman, who greets him with a nod of her head, murmurs something to the man in the wheelchair who also looks up at him, and finally she gets up, crosses the room, and comes to stand in front of his table, her jogging pants are loose, too big for her. Hello, she smiles, a heavy layer of turquoise eyeshadow on her swollen eyelids, clumsy mascara, lilac circles under her eyes, round smacks of apricot blush on her hollowed cheeks, mouth enlarged with a brown line, is it Carnival or something? Diderot puts down his cutlery and without getting up says hello. The woman holds out her hand: Katherine Thoreau, I work on the site, I’m the one who found you knocked flat the other day. Surprised, Diderot gets up – ah! – and shakes her hand, vaguely vexed by the use of the words
knocked flat
. Now they stand face to face. The woman is tall, her beautiful hair smells like family shampoo and cigarettes, she leans her eyes into his, sage-petal green eyes, softness itself, you’re feeling better, then? Her voice gets a little lost in the din of the restaurant, of the music and the cowboy servers shouting orders, but Diderot’s instinctively tuned in to the right frequency, and he hears her. Great, watch this – he lifts his arms in the air, would have even spun around – a server carrying a stack of dirty plates passes between them, he places his hands back on his thighs, great, no, really, excellent. I see that, she smiles, an exaggerated pout of admiration, her eyes shining now, you came by bike? Diderot clears his throat, yes – he wasn’t thinking of his bike shorts or of his flat little shoes, of his body, and feels suddenly naked and confused, forces himself to round up his memories – the man in the tie, the fight, the pain – but he doesn’t remember her, or that her hair caressed his face while he lay in the stinking muck, steeped in rain and blood, who is this woman? So everything’s great? she asks again, still cheerful, beginning to retreat towards her table – but I happen to know she’s lingering a little, wouldn’t even mind spending the whole day on this side of the room with this man, handsome as a continent. They’re standing straight as totems in the smell of the deep fryer, they’re hot, they shuffle, embarrassing the servers who graze past, held fast in this moment that’s quickly draining away. Great, Diderot watches her, twisting his mouth – how long has it been since he talked like this with a girl? Ignoring the three faces behind her and the little one who’s bawling, Katherine has put her hands in her pockets, there’s interest, she looks him up and down, pretend serious, we start up again tomorrow so better be in good shape, right? She’s pretty now, pretty because of her gaiety, a soft look, beautiful neck, body loose, so pretty that Diderot, looking for a way to keep talking, asks her abruptly: which team do you work on? End of the laughter – an end to the cat and mouse, the parenthesis of joking around and the molecular desire – what we have now, face to face, is the boss and the worker, and it’s as swift as a cudgel blow. Katherine Thoreau freezes and replies, I’m a driver, Anchorage Three. Ah, very good. Diderot bites his lips, thinks, you idiot, you complete idiot, while the woman takes a stronger step backwards, signifying that she’s returning to her table, in a hurry to be done now, but in that instant knocks against the wheelchair, stumbles, spins around. It’s a man Diderot hadn’t seen who’s come up behind her and announces, sugary sweet: your food’s getting cold, dear. Katherine lets out a cry of surprise, immediately covers her mouth; she hadn’t heard anything either, no one can hear anything in here, then she hurries through the introductions while looking away: Lewis, my husband, Mr. Diderot, the boss of the site – she feels miserable as she utters these words, the boss of the site! why not kneel before him and lick his boots while she’s at it! She grows hot with rage, wants to escape for good, but Lewis holds out a cheerful hand to Diderot, oh I see! You’re the one who was knifed by a wacko? Diderot nods, stepping back in turn towards his table, but Lewis insists and rolls closer to him, why don’t you come finish your meal with us, Mr. Diderot? It’s no fun to eat alone, isn’t that right, dear? Katherine, overwhelmed, breathes, let’s not bother him, Lewis. That is when Diderot, like an amateur actor, looked at his watch and then declined, thank you but you see, I’ve finished, I must go, after which he paid, picked up his things, and as he passed the family at their table, waved his hand, a wave that only Lewis returned, the boys just watched him hard, and she kept her turquoise eyelids ostensibly down at her glass of water, ignoring the little girl who wailed and held out her arms, demanding justice, they must have argued over the number of fries and sips of Coke, and now, on the plates, there’s nothing left for Katherine.