The Bridge

by D Keith Mano

  The doctor glanced up. Priest’s interruption irked him. Priest repeated. “I can’t speak that way.” The doctor released Priest’s arm. Priest formed the words exactly. “I can’t speak that way. I have never learned.” The doctor’s lips moved. “I can’t see your mouth. Please move to the light.”

  “Stupid fool.” The plywood vibrated under his fist. “Damn it, man—there is no excuse for this. Are you stupid?” Priest backed, edging toward the window’s illumination. “Do you understand me?” The doctor’s lips were heavily fleshed: to Priest’s eyes they pronounced a silent hsp.

  “I understand.”

  “Move your lips slowly. I have not spoken this way in twenty years.” Priest mouthed: the doctor shook his head impatiently. “Can you write?”

  Priest nodded. The doctor pushed sheets of paper and a broken pencil stub across the plywood. “You have a bad record, Priest.” Priest agreed, but he had seen only the last word. “You raised your voice to Thomas Ogilvy. A guardsman. You spoke in anger. You threatened him.”

  “Yes,” he wrote. “He touched me. He raped my wife.”

  “That is no excuse.” Priest hesitated, then decided to write nothing. The doctor opened a wooden case on his desk. He removed a black-and-white capsule. He gave the capsule to Priest.

  “What is this?” Priest prodded the capsule in his palm. The doctor slapped his arm. “Watch my lips, you great moron. I haven’t all day to waste.” The doctor licked his lips, as though to improve clarity in his speech. Then he reconsidered. He handed Priest a notice printed on cardboard.

  “Yes?”

  “Read it. You can read, can’t you?” Priest read:

  DECREE OF THE COUNCIL IN FULL,

  PASSED UNANIMOUSLY July 7, 2035

  whereas it has been ascertained irrefutably by the Council’s Emergency Committee on Respiration that the process of breathing has and will continue to destroy and maim innumerable forms of microscopic biological life, we of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours. It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species.

  This decree will be carried out finally not later than July 20, 2035 by all private citizens; not later than Aug. i, 2035 by all officers of the Council.

  It is hoped, brethren, that you will donate your physical bodies to the earth in such a manner that the heinous crimes of murder and pollution committed by our race throughout history may in some small way find redress. Go now in peace and love.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What?” The doctor had not seen Priest’s mouth. He was fitting small articles into a torn canvas bag.

  “I don’t understand this.”

  “No? But it’s very simple, my stupid friend.” The doctor smiled. “You have seven days. This is July 13. Can you understand what I’m saying?” Priest nodded. “The pill I gave you. It brings death in thirty seconds. Painless. No pain. Do you understand?” But Priest had written on the paper, “What have I done?”

  “Oh, God. Stupid. Stupid.” Exasperated, the doctor began combing fingers through his dense, grizzled beard. “Didn’t you read it? Didn’t you read the paper?” Priest nodded. “It’s all we’ve done. All men. For thousands of years. Who do we think we are—God Almighty? How can we dare to take life? All life is sacred. We can’t keep committing murder. Do you understand, all life is sacred?” Priest blinked. He wrote quickly, “I am alive.”

  The doctor read. He frowned. “So. That’s the way it is. Yes. Just as I thought—a radical.” Priest checked the moving lips warily. “I give you fair warning. Priest. If I make a sign, six men will come in here. I can have your pill administered now. I’m tempted to do it.” The doctor made an exaggerative swallow. “Do you want that?”

  “No.” Priest raised his palm. “No.”

  “Priest, listen to me. I know what you’re thinking. I can see it in those vicious pig’s eyes of yours. Forget it. You can’t escape. The full Guard will be left alive as long as it takes. They’ll hunt down anyone whose card hasn’t been collected. The thing, you see, has been planned very carefully.” Priest had not paid attention to the doctor's lips. He stared at the pill. “You understand now?”

  Priest nodded.

  “Then keep your eyes on my mouth, damn it.” The doctor extracted a duplicate form. He copied data onto it from Priest’s identity card. “Where will you end?” Priest frowned. The doctor isolated each word. “Where will you die?” Priest wrote, “With my family.”

  The doctor consulted Priest’s identity card. “New Loch, New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that across the river?” Priest hesitated. “Across the river? The Hudson?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t go there.” Priest lunged forward. The sheet of plywood butted the doctor’s stomach. His move was startling, fierce. The doctor grasped a chemical warmer, then backed sideways.

  “I’m going home to see my wife. I have a child—”

  “Shut up, you big dumb ox. I can’t understand that gibberish anyway,” the doctor snarled. “Another move like that and you leave here a dead man.” Priest apologized with his hands. “I said. You can’t go there. The bridge is down. The George Washington Bridge.”

  Priest mouthed, “The bridge.”

  “You can’t swim the Hudson, Priest. No one knows what’s going on over there in Jersey—we’ve been cut off for two weeks. You’d better make plans to die here.” The doctor returned Priest’s identity card. “You have only seven days anyway—not time enough to walk, even if you could cross the Hudson. We were perhaps a little slow getting this decree around to the prisons. Many private citizens have died by now. Members of your family have no doubt already taken final steps.” He bent over the form. His face became shadowed; it was silent to Priest’s eyes. Priest repeated, “The bridge. The bridge. The bridge is down.” The doctor watched him. “Some of our prisoners have shown interest in fertilizing the New York City parks. Several areas of Central Park, for instance, are still badly undergrown. I can issue permission for you to cross the Harlem River at 149th Street. You’ll have plenty of time to reach Manhattan Central by the twentieth of July.” Priest tongued his lips. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you want to fertilize the park?”

  Priest nodded. The doctor wrote; then he tore off the original. Priest folded it four times, crammed it into his identity pocket. “You can cross the Harlem River at 149th Street. I’ve written permission on the form. You will be expected at Central Park before the twentieth. Contact Guards Major Adam Tarboosh at Tavern Headquarters. He will provide grave space and interment.” The doctor closed his bag. “Make sure you show up there. If you don’t, Guards Major Tarboosh will have an alarm out for you in twenty minutes and—wake up man. I’m talking to you.”

  “Yes. I thank you.”

  “Take my advice. Drink some E-diet before you go. Your skin is too white. We’ll be shutting down the public fountains in a few days. You can go.” He gestured toward the hut door.

  “My ankle,” Priest said. The doctor did not understand. Priest wrote, “I sprained my ankle. I need support to walk.” The doctor considered; then he opened a footlocker under the table. He gave Priest a frayed, dirty elastic bandage. Priest made the sign of thanks. He jammed the bandage into his thigh pouch. The doctor escorted him out. “Make your peace, Priest.” In sunlight the doctor’s words seemed amplified. “You don’t understand. You can’t expect to: you have no education. You don’t know our history. But this will be for the best. The Council is right, Man has brought nothing but destruction and misery to the earth. Destruction and misery and filth and war. Make your peace.”

  “I will,” Priest said.

  ***

  Walters had waited for him under the el. The creeper amazed Priest: a low ve
getative swell came south, urged by the wind, along a quarter-mile section of River Avenue. It rose over hidden sandbars of curbstone, of abandoned cars; it broke silently around Priest’s shins, then traveled beyond. The creeper’s choppy surface climbed building façades, sank trees whose naked mast tips only poked through. The perspective was vertiginous, sickening. Where sunlight had not opened them, yellow creeper buds were crinkly tight sphincters. A dry candle smell exuded: pollen thick as dust beaten from pillows. The dense bed of creeper growth and creeper humus gave under him; it surprised his bad ankle. Priest approached the el. In an orbiting ball, bumblebees disengaged themselves near his feet. Priest lifted one arm, apprehensive. He was afraid of bees. Walters grinned: big teeth. Priest walked toward him. He moved in a strut, as though crossing deep snow. There were many bees near Walters’ face, seeming attracted there. Walters did not show concern; his mask was open.

  “It’s been coming to this,” Walters mouthed. “I’m glad. I’m glad.” He yanked a creeper vine with his left hand. Bees were shaken out. Priest stepped away. One hovered near Walters’ eye: blur of wing fanned blur of lash. Walters did not blink.

  Priest unsnapped the mask so that Walters could read his lips. “The bridge is down.”

  “Which? The big one—over the Hudson?” Priest nodded, frowned. “You can’t swim that, Priest. You haven’t got time anyway. They were real slow telling us.”

  “I will get across.”

  “How? The tunnels are blocked. A raft? Currents would drag you down to the ocean.”

  “I will get across.” Walters shrugged.

  “I’m going to enjoy killing this.” He pulled up his insect suit shirt. Abdominal muscles had learned to flex the tumor. It moved. “Thought you could live without me, didn’t you?”

  “I have to go.” The bees worried him. Priest closed his mask.

  “Go.” Walters waved a hand cheerfully. “Good luck. You re crazy, God knows. But good luck.”

  Priest stepped forward. He grasped Walters’ arm and pressed fore, middle, ring fingers together: a tight triangle. It meant good-by, one of the few signs he knew. Walters nodded. “It’s been coming to this. Dead by our own free will. Thank God—we didn’t deserve to live.”

  Perhaps Priest answered him; Walters could not see. The bulging wire-mesh eyes and nose in the plastic mask seemed stupid. It was the smooth, simple face of an insect.

  Chapter 3

  Several hundred cows milled near the riverbank. They were uneasy; their lowing was querulous. Priest crossed the still floe of concrete rubble, girders. A gargantuan road crusher lay upended, its cab flat; one half-track was broken, treads scattered, bits of an unstrung necklace. Thirty years before, the crusher’s weight and the battery of its twenty-four jackhammers had collapsed the Major Deegan Expressway. Priest scooped into the rear hopper. Aged green creeper seeds were stored there yet, large as walnuts, lima-bean shaped, several half sprouted from the nourishment in their fat cotyledons. Priest tossed a handful toward the railroad tracks, toward the Harlem River. Priest wondered if he could swim across.

  The Macombs Dam Drawbridge had been open for three decades. Its middle span was swiveled out at a 60-degree angle. A goatee of creeper vines reached from roadway to river, carded below by the sluggish current. Upper levels of the old girderwork supported a rookery metropolis. Ravens strode fussily backward/forward through the steel fenestration, balancing with dark wing bursts. Priest saw thick, shredded bundles: nests. He judged it was possible. Here, though he was a poor swimmer, Priest could halve the distance. An artificial island housed the bridge’s central pivot; the island seemed a barge, prowed, with wooden bulkheads. Eight-foot cattails grew on it. Priest planned to rest there.

  His ankle ached. Priest stepped across four double lines of track. In one place the rails had been tormented: made molten, crowbarred up/back on themselves, knotted. Ties were charred. Priest knew of railroads. The Erie-Lackawanna had run just west of New Loch. He had seen a diesel locomotive once: he had been small then; the recollection was exaggerated, massive. Priest appreciated power. He stooped to touch the third rail. He paused. South, across the Harlem River, Priest observed a square cloud, mesalike, sheared flat by high air currents. The fire, he estimated, was in Manhattan Central. After three weeks of drought, the creeper undergrowth was britde, eager kindling. But he anticipated no danger: the cloud was three miles south; winds were against it.

  But the cows did worry Priest. They had crowded into a short peninsula: this extended to a pier where once freight cars had been loaded onto river barges. There was sparse grazing on the peninsula. Cows could not eat creeper leaves. The herd’s bulk, perhaps four hundred individuals, was south, near the railroad pier, but a half dozen rows separated Priest from the river. Irritated by hunger, the cows wandered in an aimless pattern. Five or six bulls rammed through the pack, initiating busy, short-lived ripples of sexual panic. Priest trampled gritty burdock and Canada thistle, some hybrid plants ten feet high. Beyond this, where weeds had been cropped low, he approached the shifting, anxious periphery of the herd.

  Priest understood cows. His mother had managed a modest dairy farm. Priest remembered the night she had unpenned her cows, two days after the Decree, shooing the herd out through an open gate, her own voice bovine and sonorous. In those days Helga Priest had been a burly woman, chestnut braids spiraled on her head, the bit of a wide, dull drill. For Priest the child, that first Decree year had been fantastic: his mother’s ample body had wasted with the summer. Her hefty bosom appeared at first to tauten, as if erecting itself, rising; then the breasts vanished, D cups of the brassiere, which she wore from habit, became deflated, crushed beneath her sweater. When she hugged him, there were no consoling surfaces: she seemed suddenly virile. But that second day of the Decree, when she led her cows away, Helga Priest seemed to roll in walking, as men will move heavy, square objects, comer to comer to comer. Until the udders dried she went out secretly before dawn to milk them, spraying the earth. That second night, after she had returned. Priest watched his mother clean manure from the milking pens. He was afraid of her sadness. She shoveled and brushed wth stolid industry. Then she bent, plunged one hand to the wrist in manure. She squatted for several minutes. Priest knew her fingers were flexing.

  The cows overlapped, six tiers of tight brickwork, between Priest and the bollard-lined riverbank. He slid under the first cow’s chest, not behind her, wary of the hoofs. They were starved, udders small as gloves. Half wore tough, yellowish beards of slaver flecked with blood. There was an odor of disease. Priest penetrated slowly deeper into the herd. His progress was careful, painstaking, without abrupt starts. The animals were restless around him. Grass grew in niggardly, separate tufts. Priest heard water purling against the jetty side; then he stood on the five-foot-wide lip of concrete. Thirty yards to the right, masked by a thicket of weeds, he saw where the concrete lip ended above a shallow, rocky cove. He could swim from there.

  Priest heard a new tone in the lowing: it was more shrill, staccato. Priest turned; he tiptoed, stared back. After several moments he could distinguish barking: a pack of wild dogs. Then, near the railroad, portions of the herd began to run. They were crazed. They doubled back across the peninsula, toward him, toward the river, as if to make the intersection of a figure eight. Lead cows were loping; they stumbled, unable to reach a gallop. On the left flank Priest saw pairs of clever, murderous poodles. They savaged the kicking hamstrings. Priest edged hurriedly toward the cove. But cows on the jetty pavement had become apprehensive of the dogs, of the charging herd. They milled dangerously; their flanks jolted him. Priest watched the leaders close, perhaps a dozen head across. Quickly he embraced a bollard neck and swung around on it, outward, toes digging for purchase in the concrete bank. He hung over the water.

  As the vanguard struck it, a line of cows at the riverbank seemed to bulge outward through thirty yards. Some reared on hind quarters, wedged up by crowding. Then they began toppling into the river. A few did not resist
: they plunged forward in gangly leaps. Most huddled on their knees until by inches they were nudged over. Priest clutched the bollard. He heard the hissing friction of hide against its corroded metal. A cow went over near him, hoofs upward; Priest was drenched by the splash. His fingers were pinned against the bollard: one cow had anchored its side desperately against the metal. Its large head craned around to him, forehoofs precariously on the brim of concrete. Priest chewed his lower lip; even through gloves his knuckles were bruised. The cow lowed and Priest saw profoundly along its white, furred tongue. Then it was butted in the haunches. The cow inclined forward, and concrete edges chipped off neatly under its front hoofs. He recognized terror in its eyes. It fell, jostling him. To his left, cows from the panicked vanguard ran willingly into the river. Then the whole herd was urged outward/sideways. A dozen cows fell simultaneously. The compounded impact was thunderous. When they struck flank first, a thin spray was slapped from the river’s surface.

  The panic subsided. Abruptly the cows discovered grass and ate. Downstream, Priest saw a shoal of humped backs, cows treading water awkwardly toward exhaustion and death. He did not feel concern; Priest was tired of animals. He pulled himself onto the jetty. There were coarse brown hairs between the glove fingers of his left hand. He walked upriver along the pavement. The small cove was stagnant. Brush carried down by the current had woven a breakwater around the rocks that lined its mouth. Green algae wallowed in plump tufts. Priest watched, amazed. He saw a ten-yard-square mesh of water striders, thick as hair. Mosquitoes rose out of the burdock and Canada thistle surrounding the cove. Priest sat on the jetty’s end. His legs dangled over the seething hair mass, and the shadow cast by his feet appeared substantial. The striders shied away from it; they clambered on top of each other, heaping five or six layers deep. Priest was disgusted, fascinated. He played there for a moment. Then he heard the near barking of dogs. The pack, he guessed, was now just above him, screened by the weeds.