Birth of a Bridge (3 page)

ORCHESTRATING THE TRIAL AND ERROR

JOHN JOHNSON, A.K.A. THE BOA, IS A MAN OF medium height, hairless body, weightlifter’s torso and Asian complexion, strong neck, thick eyebrows above little slitted eyes, no lips, pointy teeth, grey tongue. He takes over Coca’s city hall in January 2005. He’s been elected; now he invests in his image. Puts away the black satiny shirts and fedoras, acquires a tailor on Savile Row, orders a dozen custom suits in anthracite grey. Goes on a diet, gets hair transplants, pays for a beautiful smile, takes up golfing. Far from seeing his new position as retirement with an unobstructed view of the leisurely pension of corruption, he is suddenly seized by grandeur. He remembers his campaign slogans – phrases concocted by professionals, powerful formulas that smack like flags in the stadiums and the town squares, twelve-foot-high watchwords that lend power to his voice, give him the chin of an orator – and speaks them softly into the golden night, standing on the balcony of city hall, which in his mind is a gangway revealing him to the world; he imagines an appropriate gesture and, galvanized by his own words, captivated by the marvellous promises he made to the crowds, the blood rises to his head, his heart beats wildly: he will become the man he said he was, he will – he’s deciding it right now. From now on, he treats fortune like the useful gadget of respectability and doesn’t think about anything except making his mark. He will impact his time – people will remember him.

A FEW WEEKS
after his election he takes a trip to Dubai. It’s his first journey off the continent and he’s in a state. On the plane, he takes sleeping pills, drinks champagne, tries to smooth-talk the flight attendant, and falls asleep just before they land. He’s ushered into a special lounge at the airport and then into a white limousine with tinted windows; another limo will follow with the bags and the people who make up his select cabinet. What he sees on the drive from the airport to the city fills him with a simultaneous sensation of euphoria and crushing defeat.

The cranes are the first things to gobsmack him: clustered together in the hundreds, they overpopulate the sky; their arms are fluorescent laser-sabres brighter than any Jedi warrior’s, and their pale halo crowns the construction-site city with a cupola of white night. The Boa cranes his neck to count them all, and the man in the white dishdasha sitting next to him tells him that one-third of all the cranes in the world are requisitioned here: one in three, he repeats, one in three is here, in our city. His tiny mouth, accentuated by a thin line of moustache, says very quietly, we are building the city of the future, a Pharaonic undertaking. The Boa says nothing more. He salivates, bewitched. The proliferation of towers stuns him – so numerous you’d think they were multiplied by a fevered eye, so tall you have to rub your own eyes, afraid you might be hallucinating – their white windows like thousands of blinding little parallelograms, thousands of effervescent Vichy pastilles in the faded night: here people work 24-7, the workers are housed outside the city, the changes of shift happen via shuttles – the man whispers each piece of information, escorting the Boa’s surprise with great delicacy. Farther on, he points with a waxy index finger to a building under construction, already a hundred storeys high, and says: This one will be 2,300 feet tall. The Boa nods his head, suddenly inquires about the height of the Empire State Building, the Hancock Center, and the towers in Shanghai, Cape Town, and Moscow, he’s euphoric and stupefied. Thus, in Dubai, the sky is solid, massive: ground to develop. The drive is long in the long car, the sea takes its time to arrive, the Boa waits for it: flat, unaffected, heavy black oilcloth whose edges are erased by the night, and he is startled to discover that it too is constructed, rendered solid, crusted over, and apt to become the base for an artificial archipelago, a reproduction of the world map (Great Britain selling for three million dollars) or a luxury housing complex in the shape of a palm tree: thus the sea too is ground to develop.

The Boa arrives at his hotel bowled over, cheeks red and eyes bugged out, he has a hard time falling asleep, the night is too bright, as though filtered through hot gauze, and he is far too excited – the Burj Al Arab is one of the tallest hotels in the world, an immense sail made of glass and Teflon, swelled before the Persian Gulf which is completely black at this hour, and closed as a chest that raggedy pirates armed with AK-47s might try to steal. When he wakes, the Boa is convinced he’s found the inspiration that was missing for his mandate. A mastered space is what offers itself up to his gaze – a space, he thinks, where mastery combines with audacity – and that is the mark of power.

AT MID-MORNING,
the man who had welcomed him the day before comes to pick him up and guides him around the city. His keffiyeh floats out calmly at his back like a mage’s cape any time he quickens the pace – no one knows, except me, that he has sunk into a dire melancholy, that he shepherds officials around in order to flee the palace; no one knows that he plans to return to the desert to live with the oryx, the fennecs, and the scorpions; that, stretched out inside a tent lightly ventilated by the desert breeze, he will write poems and smoke a narghile; no one knows that he spits with rage into the mirror that reflects him – him and the wide hall of his villa that is just as empty and marbled, just as huge, inert and senseless as the rest. The Boa rushes along, his cardiac rhythm speeds up with pleasure and exhilaration. The city appears as a consumerist phantasmagoria, a gigantic ghetto for nomadic billionaires, the model of a virtual universe where you can lose your mind: strange combination of hotels with ostentatious pomp, shopping malls with unmatched opulence – the largest duty-free mall in the world, with miles of shop windows, brand names that assault, conjuring desire and striking an exclusive clientele of Arab princes, Anglo-Saxon rock stars, Russian oligarchs, and Chinese industry leaders – and extravagant theme parks – an indoor ski hill with a snowy summit, mechanized lifts and a polar bear, an Andalusian-style spa, a Nubian village, an underwater hotel, and a giga-zoo. The Boa loses himself in space-time. In the very near future, we will have attained the grand number of fifteen million visitors; the accompanier states these facts in such elegant English that the Boa has difficulty understanding, he’s losing his grip, he succumbs, stammers in a continuous loop when I think that twenty years ago there was nothing here, nothing, just a little patch of desert, a sandy bit of Earth’s crust, and not even any oil – and now what? Paradise.

He’s driven to the palace a little before noon for a short audience with the emir Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – the man the Boa unwisely calls “my counterpart
.”
He waits for three hours in the antechamber, using the time to imagine partnerships between Coca and Dubai; he mulls over ideas while behind the thick, padded door, sheik Mo nibbles pistachios with his minister of war, murmuring a few questions about the technical and military capacities of the Rafale jets showcased the day before on the tarmac at Bourget, in Paris. Finally the Boa is received, and here he is, perfumed little guy in a room paved with marble that reminds him all at once of Grand Central Station in New York. He is bursting with an idea, the horses, and his step is full of drive. From a ways off the sheik looks massive and immaculate as authority itself, but his form becomes more and more human the closer he comes – the akal of his keffiyeh falls a little over one ear, making the monarch’s head a bit lopsided. The Boa greets the prince according to protocol – above all, don’t get too close to the sacred body of the sheik. Then the latter snaps his fingers, has a new bowl of pistachios brought to his guest, and here they are seated fifteen feet from each other. So, the horses. The Boa, instead of fawningly paying his respects, tells the prince about his wish to develop stud farms in his city, Coca. The sheik frowns, doesn’t know where this energetic little being comes from, has never heard the name Coca, and nods his head, very calm. The Boa winds up, gaining momentum, the high plains to the east of the city are among the best pasturages in the world, the grass is marvellous and the water is pure. This is a subject that the sheik enjoys: he is a horseman, had his chance to shine in the competitions, and the royal family owns the largest stable of thoroughbreds in the world, magnificent animals bought for their weight in gold, most of them at the yearlings auction in Deauville. The conversation flows in this way for more than four minutes, a record, and finally the sheik agrees: a collaboration begins to take shape. The Boa cuts the inside of his mouth while violently crunching a pistachio.

IN COCA,
what is now called the Dubai Trip creates a buzz. Its influence can be measured in the feverish urbanism that seizes the city. From then on the Boa is crystal clear about the single goal for his city council: put an end to three centuries of conservative prudence, once and for all get rid of the stranglehold of old money that reigns in the affluent downtown neighbourhoods, cut down the dynasties of the Cripplecrows and the Sandlesses that have been rubbing shoulders incestuously for the past two centuries, between satin sheets and plumes of cigar smoke – rather than being leaders of the city, they are masters over it. He wants to be done with their erudite conceit, their culture, their archives, too much Europe here, too much Europe, he repeats this time and again, heavy identity, sticky traditions: it stinks of death! He gets to work busting open the city centre, breaking its hard pit, its historical pit, pulverizing its meaning and scattering it to the periphery. The old buildings and bourgeois neighbourhoods, traces of the origins and symbol of the pioneers’ values – physical courage, a spirit of conquest, work, piety, monogamy, and all other qualities that glorify rootedness – are removed to museums: dust is what suits them best, sneers the Boa, his action is oriented elsewhere, out of range of patrimony, far from all the old fictions that begat the city plan. I’m going to air out all that. I’m going to free the city and put it on the world map. An era of grand manoeuvres follows, in which manila envelopes circulate containing wads of new bills that crinkle like biscuits.

In less than three months, the Boa manages to have Coca declared a free-trade zone by the Senate and twinned with Dubai; obtains, from the state bank – now under control of his own investment company – a loan at a low fixed rate for a large-scale city planning venture, and grants the municipality a lease of fifty years for each main facility. His private collusions in municipal projects alarm his shrewdest and most servile collaborators alike, but not one of them says a word and everyone knows why: the Boa presides over a fortress built on insider influence and he controls all the entrances and all the elevators, he is strong, rich, and not too concerned about the price one has to pay in order to remain in the good graces of the city’s respected institutions and organizations. Anywhere he can, he uses the tactics of the carnivorous reptiles he’s hunted since he was a child, and deploys such discreet strategies that only those who have a darkness to match his own can detect the long-term predatory power – these rare few, rendered speechless and weak, run for their lives – and then, buoyed up as he is by microscopic advantages that accumulate and activate one another, with the icy brutality that is his trademark, the Boa shifts without warning into attack mode and strikes. Those who might have tried to stand in his way are publicly mocked, dried up, simple-minded, sad. They don’t understand anything about the ways of the world. He’s sorry, but he eliminates them – what else do you expect, really, what do you want me to do? The implacable machine that’s running now at full throttle slowly suffocates them. After all, isn’t the Boa acting for the good of the city? Doesn’t he put himself entirely – himself, his companies, his screens, his men, his dogs – at the service of his fellow citizens? He has ideas for Coca – he was elected and he’s a man who keeps his promises: he is John the benefactor.

FROM THEN
on, he commands the territory by ukase, walking slowly around the huge maquette of the city he’s had installed in the middle of his office – a general on a campaign planning strategies, that’s what he makes you think of – chest leaning over his scaled-down model, hands crossed behind his back, examining a portion of cardboard and then suddenly grabbing a wand and ordering an internet city here, a media city there, a shopping centre here – a maze of malls paved with porphyry and adorned with fountains and cappuccino kiosks – a multi-purpose stadium here, a skating rink in the shape of a flying saucer there, an underground multiplex with fifty rooms, a cinder track on the roof of a row of low-rise buildings, a casino under a glass bell. He wants transparency, plastic and polypropylene, rubber and melamine, all things provisional, consumable, disposable: everything must be mobile, light, convertible, and flexible. Supercharged, he devotes himself to the manipulation of giant Meccano that he reconfigures daily, intoxicated by the infinite scope of new formal possibilities, by the hubs he draws, by the work sites he carves out, by the activity centres he defines and positions on the map. He has only one idea left in mind: to pull Coca out of the provincial anonymity where it has been sleeping peacefully and convert it to the global economy. He wants to build the city of the third millennium, polyphonic and omnivorous, doped up on novelty, shaped for satisfaction, for pleasure, for the experience of consumption.

AND YET
there’s something that wounds his pride: isolated as it is, Coca’s energy is rationed and dependent upon the coastal cities. The investors have fled for this very reason – it’s impossible to squeeze development out of a stingy little dump with a tight-assed population where spending is watched so closely. Moreover, the oil tankers that supply the city and its few industrial sites only come grudgingly up the river to the storage tanks downstream – the Boa sees condescension in this – isn’t he paying them cash, for Christ’s sake? He fulminates, mulls things over – alone at first, because he’s convinced that his people are incapable of coming up with a single idea. One evening a documentary on biofuel is on TV. It’s a revelation – he’s hooked by the subject and proceeds to study it in depth. Corn grows abundantly in the valley, and Coca has thousands of acres of preserves – the high red plains and the forest, whose edges could be cleared out, plus the interior of the massif if the Natives “play the gam
e”
– just don’t screw us over, that’s all I ask of them – this is how the Boa talks to himself. At the end of a brisk council meeting held at the beginning of March, he decides to convert the city to ethanol. An independent port will be constructed upstream at the oxbow in the river, a terminal with the capacity to hold ships of all tonnages and the corollary refineries. Fuelled thus, the city will export the surplus of energy to the coast, reverse the trend and shine at the forefront of global eco strategies. Coca, the green city! The Boa rubs his hands together, delighted with his coup, he’s done well. Now he just needs a bridge. A bridge by which they can enter the forest and reach the fertile valleys southeast of the mountain range, a bridge to connect the city to Ocean Bay.