The Bridge

by D Keith Mano

  Priest stripped off his insect suit quickly. At once mosquitoes swarmed on his back: it became hirsute with them, across shoulder blades, over kidneys. A poodle appeared between weed stalks above the inlet. It was disconcerted to see him there: it backed. Calmly, shoulders hunched, Priest tied off his pants legs, then crammed a boot into each elastic knee. He stuffed his shirt into the waist, careful to pad the plastic insect mask so that it would not crack. The poodle reappeared; Priest counted perhaps eight other dogs with it now, chiefly the smaller breeds: spaniels and terriers. They growled as if at a signal, heads low between shoulders, jaws protrusive. Priest smiled. He spat at them, but his mouth had no moisture. The dogs began to flank him: pack strategy evolved during the thirty years of their dominance in the city. Some disappeared left into weeds; some worked right to interdict the jetty edge. They growled encouragement to each other. Priest strapped the belt around his waist. Mosquitoes feeding on his prepuce had caused an erection. The stuffed pants dangled at his hip from a single belt loop. Several dogs were near the concrete edge. Priest bent, scooped putrid water, and dashed it at them. One yelped; Priest grinned. He stepped into the teeming growth of striders. Algae broke apart and gas bubbles carried up a stinking winy odor. The water was only a foot deep. The growling ended. The dogs began to back, surprised—they had not seen a man swim before. Barefoot, Priest cautiously negotiated the rockbound breakwater. Then he knelt and pushed off into the river, mosquitoes lifting from his back as the water rose.

  Riotous fish glanced against his thighs and chest. The river was alive. Priest became fatigued after the first twenty strokes. His insect suit was too buoyant; it lurched into the even rhythm of his legs. He kept his face up. Swallowing water had been prohibited: Priest thought he was being watched by guardsmen on the Manhattan shore. A cage of branches floated past him: there were squirrels in it. Priest did not look ahead, afraid the prospect would dishearten him. The ankle was sore: it hurt when kept rigid; slack, the kicking buffeted sinews painfully. He counted one-two, one-two, as arms hugged water in against his chest. Priest’s open, smooth strokes became circumscribed and clumsy. He began to stroke only at the elbows. He was panting. He spewed water out, guzzled some involuntarily. Priest swam for ten minutes, his own coxswain, calling one-two, onetwo—then, as he tired, Ma-ry, Ma-ry, Ma-ry. He looked up.

  He had made an error. Unaware, he had permitted currents to draw him down, almost beyond the island’s prow. Priest thrashed around, upstream. The joint of his ankle seemed to desocket. For a moment he merely treaded water, head up, maintaining his way against the current. Carried past the island, he would certainly drown; he could not swim the river’s full width. The bundle of his insect suit rose, a treacherous, unbalancing rudder: in despair he nearly cast it free. His arm muscles had cramped; they were hard, osseous: he could not raise arms above the level of his shoulders. The slimed, wooden bulkheads were just thirty feet ahead of him. Furiously Priest began to dog-paddle, stroking even at the finger joints. He frog-kicked, and very slowly his lower body came to the surface. Bobbing, the soft, half-inflated insect suit probed between his legs, and it seemed then the sensuous and gentle touch of death. Priest became deliberate: he watched the tip of his nose: eyes crossed on it. His gasping became hoarse. He achieved a choppy, wasteful rhythm. Priest moved through pain to insensibility. His nose tip was a long snowbank: he allowed it to blind and numb him. When Priest reached the island he was startled. His forehead crashed against the wood.

  He flailed out for a hold, not able to stretch higher than four inches above his head. His vision was blurred; blinking would not clear river water from it. E-diet had stunted the natural lubrication of his eyes. Priest could find no useful lapse in the island’s slick bulkhead. He began to drift again. Reluctantly he stroked upstream, swimming with the joints of his wrists, legs in paralysis. Twenty feet beyond, he touched an inch-wide knothole. There he hung the full weight of his body on fore and middle fingers. He tried to straighten: his knees and arms were locked in the exigencies of his long dog-paddle. Left calf began cramping; he could not quite reach down to massage it. The pain boosted at his foot arch like a sharp metal jodhpur strap. He unbuckled the belt; on a third attempt he managed to lob his insect suit over the five-foot-high rampart. He alternated arms, inserted fore and middle fingers of his left hand into the knothole. He dangled there. The water was warm and it flumed pleasantly under his spine. There was a susurrant rustle where it combed through a torrent of creeper vines that poured off the drawbridge brink. Fish pocked the surface around him: as if the river had just come to a boil.

  He could not wait. It was probably three o’clock: Priest hoped to reach the Hudson before nightfall. He had to scale the wall. His insect-suit equipment was on the island; he needed an hour’s genuine rest. He began to thrust upstream, paddling at times, scraping along the wall with the slight friction of his toe and fingernails. A seagull landed on the ledge above him. He discovered a larger knothole; he rested, his entire hand grasped in its D shape. Then he pushed off. He hesitated, paddled back. Priest had felt small uncertainties in the wood. He reinserted his right hand and, with left palm braced against the bulwark, he wrenched outward. The wood shivered. Priest pulled again. He heard creaking. Head against the boards, he waited until his strength returned. He changed hands, but the left was weaker. After a moment he let his knees float up, then with half a somersault, he brought his bare feet against the wall, straddling the suspect board. He pulled, eyes closed. It moved outward as a door would, two inches ajar. He wedged into the crack, levering with hands, butting with temple. The plank split on a line the shape of a lightning bolt, held in place only by thin wood slivers. Priest wrestled it away from the bulwark. It floated downstream. Behind, he saw a labyrinthine, frenzied hive of ants. The sunlight had stunned them; thousands of gray-white eggs, pontoon-shaped, dropped into the river. The wood underskeleton of the island was rotted. Horizontal boards had been placed at foot-wide intervals. It was a ladder.

  The ants swarmed: their eggs vanished, drained down into the artificial island’s heart. Priest inhaled. His ears imprisoned a rushing sound; they were skinned over by membranes of water. He fingered a rung eighteen inches above his head, breaking off loose wood fragments. He tried his weight on it. The board held. Priest thrashed out with his feet and heaved the other arm alongside. He chinned up, running clumsily to the water’s surface. His soles captured a rung. Pointed splinters wedged under his big toenail. He was out of the water; gravity shoved down, his spine curved. Priest’s own reconstituted weight winded him. Carefully he worked upward in the narrow chimney, then his stomach folded over the island edge, forehead pushed between the tight pulpy cattail roots. Priest gasped. Clutching fasces of stalks, he pulled upright. He barged ahead, leaned into the cattails, letting their spongy resilience support him. He wanted a clearing to lie down in. The cattails seemed to thin several feet beyond him.

  He staggered forward. He fell headlong into the pool. It was threaded with life. Priest’s fear drove him, thrashing, above the surface. His right fist came out. It was clutched by gray, inch-thick eels: terrible new fingers on it. Priest went under. Horror took co-ordination from his arms and legs. A terrific, tarry stench rose. He could not swim in the roped mass. Eels were dying of their own population. The water was tinted black/purple with excrement. Panicked, too, the eels clung to his lower body. He was concerned for his privates. His fingers grabbed there. He sank again; Priest shouted. And the seagull, hearing a human voice for the first time, flapped up, toward the ocean.

  The 155th Street viaduct had collapsed halfway. Priest examined the terrain. Three blocks left, under Coogan’s Bluff, the viaduct began again, a precipitous, hundred-foot high cliff at that point. On either side of it there were insubstantial square spiral staircases. He saw no other means of ascending the bluff, then of crossing four long blocks west to the Hudson. It was serene on the Harlem River shore. Priest guessed that the viaduct had fallen recently. Creeper growth had not yet met a
cross the jumbled moraine of concrete and asphalt and girdering. An ancient glue factory stood opposite. There were limp, frayed Guard flags—the globe on a field of green—above it. Priest had seen no guardsmen. Across the viaduct a cluster of development apartments, their four wings forming crosses, were trousered with the creeper to half a thirty-story height. South, smoke from the fire drifted, attenuating, over the Triboro Bridge. It had not traveled nearer.

  Priest drew his insect suit on. He was nauseated. In his swim from the island, he had swallowed water. The absorbency of stomach linings had atrophied: water lay in an active blister beneath the skin of his abdomen. It shifted when he moved; Priest remembered the carpenter’s level in his father’s toolbox. He leaned over the concrete riverbank. The bubble of water under him threatened to rupture. It was painful: a pain that involved his spine’s full length. He picked up a stick and worked it into his throat, played there coyly, exciting dormant reflexes. Water came up. Priest turned onto his back. It was six o’clock. The sky had cleared: diagonals of sunlight crossed below it, but the blue dome was not refreshed; it darkened.

  A good breeze had begun to blow toward the river; mosquitoes could not judge their approach. But the bees were ballasted, and there was a species of heavy, black-green fly that had evolved with the creeper; the flies hung in grape bunches, adhering to each other on the underside of leaves. Their detritus and eggs were indistinguishable: white, glutinous. For breeding they preferred the human scalp. Priest hated insect sounds. He understood their stinging; he appreciated its necessity. But the sounds perturbed him. The strident warble of mosquitoes, varying only with distance; the bees’ monitory drone; liquid sputterings of the blue-green fly. He did not understand that: he associated it with madness and death. In her final days, an unvaried humming had come from his mother’s body, not precisely audible, but there at his fingertips when he touched her forehead.

  Priest cowled his head, tucking ends of hair in. The musk of eels permeated his insect suit; his chest, in the suit, had their texture. He mouthed the word, eel: the word, too, was teleost and sinuous. Priest remembered the shout. He punched his face once under the cheekbone, ashamed of weakness. The island had been hollow, rectangle within rectangle, but the pool, though profound at its center, had a shallow, stepped end. Once over his fear. Priest had been able to walk out. The eels had sucker mouths in a column, ocarina stops, under the tail. His thighs and loins had become shaggy with them. Out of water, however, the sucker mouths lost vacuum. The eels dropped off. Priest swathed his right ankle with the elastic bandage: alternately around instep, around heel. He worked into the shin-high rubber boot, then flexed his ankle. The bandage was restrictive: his small toes were starved of blood. He unwrapped the ankle, distributing elastic more evenly over foot, around lower leg. Priest stood.

  He walked parallel to the viaduct’s debris. Some stanchions had remained upright, holding crow’s nests of the old roadway. Priest hurried. He sucked his stone. The river water had made him hungry. The left staircase, on the south, appeared corroded halfway up: broken steel was braced by the creeper growth. Priest stared across the rubble. A car had fallen; it stood upended, fenders elbows, some human figure hand-standing. The northern staircase seemed sound. Something fell from the brink of the viaduct. It was solid, perhaps a stone. Curt, muffled echoes rang beneath the remaining length of the structure. Priest thought he saw a face peering down. He backed under the first whole arch. Above, many bats hung, teats of a bitch, from the riveted metal supports. Priest smiled, then touched his check. He was afraid of heights.

  Priest gazed downtown along Eighth Avenue. He could see three miles into the city, to the smoke wall. At its base the smoke was more active, darker, producing there a braid of perfect billows. He could not see flame. Priest’s vision was good; he had never developed the red/green color blindness endemic since the E-diet. Creeper had drifted in comers of Eighth Avenue. Building walls appeared to slouch near the street. A pack of animals loped uptown, now perhaps ten, perhaps five blocks away. Priest could not be certain if they were cows or wild pigs or dogs: the perspective was deceiving, without reference. Priest turned, then stepped up onto the viaduct wreckage. He began crossing toward the northern staircase.

  Priest hesitated. A storefront door was pushed out on 155th Street, opposite the viaduct. It had been a barbershop once, in an era when hair and beard trimming were permitted. The reds/whites of its pole were stark in contrast with the omnipresent dark green; for some chemical reason the creeper had not rooted on it. A display window had been neatly etched by the vine’s acids; strips had fallen out. The guardsman shoved through. He was a gnome. His legs had been bowed severely; they walked in arcs, straddling, as though set to shinny up trees. Priest ducked, then sidled toward the Viaduct, but he had waited too long. The guardsman signaled peremptorily. With reluctance Priest hobbled toward the barbershop, one forefinger slitting along his identity pocket. On the guardsman’s left cheek, blue-green flies adhered, making a second sideburn. His mask was unsnapped; his hood lay rolled behind his neck. He did not brush the flies off. Priest noted that his pupils were swollen, furred. The guardsman moved deliberately, watching each hand, each finger on each hand, while it functioned. He examined Priest’s card with stupid concentration. There was caked blood on his beard. Unconsciously, anaesthetized to pain, he had been devouring his lower lip: one comer was gone and a worm flap of skin protruded. Stun cans hung outward in their holsters. Priest presented the doctor’s safe-conduct. He was worried: the writing had been blurred by river water; the guardsman, however, thought this a trick of his own unfocused vision. He nodded, nodded. He touched Priest’s forearm and spelled a short phrase, repeated it. The guardsman laughed; his breath was sugary. He handed back Priest’s papers.

  The guardsman tottered backward on his heels, elbows rowing for balance. Then he swiveled. He was crouched by the grotesque warp of his legs, as men begin to lift a heavy object. He stumbled toward Eighth Avenue. Priest wadded the papers into his pocket. Guardsmen, he knew, had easy access to the E-diet narcotic. Hands on knees, the guardsman stopped. Then he settled forward ungracefully, buttocks up, into the creeper bed. He sucked his thumb there; perhaps he ate it. Priest heard barking. The pack of animals was now only one block away; they were not cows or wild pigs. Priest hurried over the debris. Creeper had choked the metal staircase skeleton. Priest remembered the roots that would jam ceramic drainage pipes on Sebastian Priest’s farm. He parted a drape of vines at the entrance; he used his pelvis as a lever, drew hinge sounds from the thick, horny vines. Ahead, squirrels scampered agilely up; they stopped to grind their teeth. The twisting staircase was a nest. Priest walked prone, on his back, on his stomach, swinging through the mesh trapeze. His progress was easier when the staircase had doubled once back on itself, but the landing floor had fallen out and Priest was forced to bridge it on a latticework of fragile vines. His left leg snapped through to the knee; he hung from his armpits over the street. Priest’s breath exploded the snaps of his mask open. His eyes could not countenance the long drop; they flickered up/under his lids.

  Mary was fourteen when she discovered a monocular cave on the cliff face, nearly two hundred feet above the ground. As some complex sinus might, a rock chimney wound from the forehead of Bull’s Hump, downward to this single eye. Rudimentary steps had been chiseled into its sides. At bottom of the sinusway, a slate ledge lipped the cliff, thirty yards to the cave mouth. The ledge was fractured, powdery: each crossing diminished it. At best it had been six inches wide. Inside the cave, under a decade’s accumulation of dust, they found a skeleton, two rotted mattresses, empty food cans, some pre-Era coins, and a Bible that had been the bassinet of young rodents. An area from Bull’s Hump to the Hudson was a stronghold of Christian Nihilist fanatics just after the Decree. Mary and Priest, on easy terms with death, had tossed the skeleton, bone by bone, into pine boughs below. Though the ledge passage had horrified Priest, Mary and he lived there throughout the summer. Mary had no fear; Pries
t was ashamed of his terror. She sensed it: whenever they had ascended the chimney. Priest, in a terrific reflex, became foolish and reckless. Once he had captured a rattlesnake with his bare hands, shaping it into a scarf, a belt, a jump rope. Mary was afraid of snakes, and Priest had satirized her fear.

  Their last visit had been in November, after an early, wet snow. Mary went first: she used handholds perfunctorily. The concavities of her naked body complemented elbows and dimples in the cliff façade. But Priest’s weight had loosened shale. The ledge dropped out behind, delayed reactions that scurried after his feet, a deadly, hot fuse. Fear made him nimble. He hurled his body to the wider cave apron. There Priest shammed an ankle sprain, the same ankle, he remembered, that now troubled him on the viaduct staircase. Only a few honed shale blades remained of the ledge. Mary, who weighed less than ninety pounds, clambered over the cliff wall, hammering at stone supports with her heel. She thought Priest could negotiate it. Priest said no. He flexed his ankle; Mary did not challenge him. After two days she had scavenged enough sturdy rope in New Loch, then noosed it to a scrub pine fifty feet above the cave. Rock stubs held when Priest crossed. They had embraced once atop Bull’s Hump, but later Priest had disguised impotence with a specious anger. Two days after, as Mary watched, he rode a log over Lenape Falls. Still wet, bleeding from the nose and ears. Priest had made savage love.

  Above the fourth landing, a thousand butterflies slept. Priest detached his mask. He scrubbed insect corpses from the mesh with his thumbnail. He loitered. He didn’t yet want to disturb them. They were monarchs: upper rinds of wing light reddish brown, white center spots leaded by dark arteries. The wings were shut, harp-shaped. Set in green creeper niches, they seemed eyes of a peacock’s tail. Priest inhaled. Then he heard the dogs. He unshuttered creeper, peered over the inner rail, toward the river. At first he was blinded by a contrast of penumbra beneath the viaduct, sunlight beyond. He saw the gnome guardsman trudge: heavy steps. Dogs clothed his body. Languidly he raised arms to shoulder height, some man shrugging on a bulky overcoat. Then the guardsman was down, his form obliterated by feeding dogs. Others waited impatiently; they nipped at haunches of the eaters. Priest watched one dog; vomit a tough shred of green fabric. Priest barged upward, breaking the creeper reredos. Butterflies woke. They hurried in front of his face, bHnking for him, as though he saw through veined, sun-dazzled hds.