The Bridge

by D Keith Mano

  The two cables waited above him. They were moored to the northern and southern comers of the tower. On the northern face a third cable drooped down, past him, over the precipice—a vast trunk drawing up water. The two cables had been anchored a few yards below the topmost girderwork. Priest guessed that they were at least two hundred feet above the roadway. He swallowed: the voice in his ear was interrupted by static. Priest could see no safe means of passing from tower structure to cable. He wiped glove palms over plastic temples. A fresh breeze blew: four hundred feet above the Hudson it would be dangerously stronger. There was movement in the cables. Priest knew that his body would want to crawl backward, along the cable’s downslant. A headlong approach would terrify him; he could already imagine the dread illusion of overbalancing. Yet he would have to crawl head first. Beyond the midpoint he could never work backward up the long incline to New Jersey. And he could not turn around. Priest began creeping away. He dared not delay. Yet he was unable to stand until he had crawled more than twenty feet from the edge.

  Priest chose the southern leg of the tower. It had tremendous geometry: rectangles were stacked, each more than thirty feet tall, each braced comer to comer by a giant X; eight rectangles from roadway to summit. The metal was piebald now, brown/zinc. Areas of old paintwork had bubbled, then cracked open, fragile egg ends. On the tower’s inner wall Priest found an unhoused elevator shaft. Six cables dangled down out of an astonishing perspective; above, they were braided together by optical laws. Priest stuffed the mask into his thigh pouch, then retied both bootlaces. The right ankle distressed him. He had overexerted it the day before. The ankle barely fit his boot now; rubber was swollen, the lace holes squinted. He hadn’t removed the boot; Priest knew it wouldn’t go on again. Priest grasped one cable in his gloved hands, transmitted a shiver of decreasing amplitude two hundred and forty feet up, into the tower’s skull. Priest began to climb. He loped up in thirty-foot jaunts.

  Powerful arms bore the weight of torso and abdomen and thigh; his left heel picked out footholds, stepping from rivethead to rivethead on the X. At the top of each rectangle he rested five minutes, staring only upward, his body hammocked between cable and I beam. For every fifty feet of altitude the wind’s velocity doubled. Cables rang, human soprano voices in an empty metal chamber. It was almost nine o’clock.

  Priest gazed out, panting. He was on the fifth rectangle, one hundred and sixty feet above street level. His hands burned: shavings of rubber curled from the glove palms. Exactly below the tower arch, on the broken roadway, Priest saw a circle. It was made of bodies, perhaps three dozen. Insect suits were black, but a crimson epaulet marked each shoulder, an insigne of the Northern Lesbian Communes. They sat, feet into the circle. Then legs spread by some ritual instruction and the circle seemed to sphincter out, a lazy, drugged pupil. Priest climbed again. His belly and groin muscles ached as they threw his feet up along the corroded girdering. On the sixth rectangle’s top he rested longer. Priest was overheated: chill gusts caused him to shiver. He saw now that the women had shaped a gauntlet. A single figure stepped between. She was naked. She walked out of the gauntlet with the over-large, adamant steps of a drunkard, toward the precipice. She had time to stride twice in mid air. Then she was gone. Priest gasped. The elevator cable bellied away from the tower. His feet scraped off the I-beam. His shoulder bones cracked, gunshots. He hung for several seconds, kicking crazily for the sill. When he stared down again, the circle had begun to re-form.

  The last rectangle was smaller. The tower had slimmed at its summit. Priest could see pulley mechanisms of the elevator just above him. He looked out. The metal gridwork, X overlapping X, grouted intricate mosaics of the Manhattan prospect. The sun rayed through a cloud’s moving transom, spotlighted a mile-square sector beyond Central Park. The fire still burned; its smoke attached a dark pseudopod to the cumulus clouds above. When the wind blew, it uncovered spiky artichokes of flame. Priest could see the Triboro Bridge towers to the south, but he did not know what they were. Priest inhaled. He let his legs dangle; then, as children pump a swing, he kicked his body in higher and higher arcs toward the I beam. He let the elevator cable go. He legged across the I beam saddle. Testing his will, Priest glanced into the elevator shaft. His reaction was oddly neutral: the confusing perspective of metal crossing, recrossing, was outside his fears comprehension. For the first time he felt optimistic. He hopped along the girder in modest efforts, pushing up on his wrists, until he had reached the tower’s New Jersey face.

  The great cable wallowed above him. It was a yard in diameter. Priest stood upright on the girder, hands reaching up toward the X’s transept. He climbed its slant, crouched, feet splayed out for balance, yanking with his arms. He crawled over the girder on its inside face and sat in the upper crotch of the X. Standing gingerly, he could now pat the cable’s bulged flank with his fingertips. The wind bothered him: its pummeling gusts were erratic in force, in direction. He climbed as high as he could on the X’s upper right leg, then stood, holding the top frame of the last rectangle by pinches. The cable bottom was level with his right shoulder. He hung, spine slightly arched outward over the river. Priest flexed his knees, practicing the leap he would have to make. His right ankle buckled, but Priest had no choice then. He could not descend.

  Patiently, clutching the girder with alternate hands. Priest shucked off his gloves. He jammed them into his right thigh pouch. Then he transferred papers, stone, mask from vest pockets to left thigh pouch. He would have to crawl on his stomach for hours, across more than half a mile of cable. Priest shuffled several inches higher on the slanted X girdering. He waited for the wind to subside. Curious then, he caressed the cable’s surface with his right hand. It was warm, corroded in tiny, slick balls of rust. He brushed there, procrastinating. Priest gazed over his shoulder. Despite its thickness the cable danced above the river; it seemed a child’s jump rope just come to rest, full of tiny, dodging motions. The Hudson was featureless as pavement, dark gray, for now the sun had gone in. It was, to Priest, an emblem of annihilation. And he leaped.

  Priest’s body had surprised him. As he swiveled in mid-air to face the cable, his mind was still conceiving, still preparing the act. He hovered, arms upraised, in mammoth emptiness. Then hands slapped down/over the cable’s hump and held, his forehead just above the highest arc of its circumference. Legs kicked. It wasn’t enough: his left hand slipped. Priest opened both palms to gather friction from the rusted metal. He did not dare kick again. There was elastic life in the cable and it startled him. The wind toyed with his dangling lower body; gusts pressed his stomach against the cable, then peeled his legs and groin away. His shoulder caps and the insides of his elbows began to ache. Cheek against metal. Priest whimpered, and his ear, hearing fully a half mile, was answered by the roar of resilient metal. In a few seconds. Priest knew, he would fall. The idea, abstracted, was pleasing to him. Priest thought, I will scream then; oh, I will scream. No one can stop my scream. But one eye glimpsed: the huge tower became slim-waisted, plummeting to the roadway, plummeting again to the river. He could not end that way; his body would not consent. He imagined his own fall and it was like death by shrinking. A dot, splashless, gray, absorbed into the gray of that wide slate surface below. He sobbed.

  Turning his face cautiously on the corroded flank—cheek/ chin/cheek—Priest looked left, then right. Near his right hand there was a raised spine, where sections of sheathing had been riveted together, no more than an inch high. By reaching for it he might lose his tenuous grip. Priest would have to grope quickly, blindly. The wind bellied under him, lifting. He groaned: both hands had slipped downward. He waited until the wind reversed direction. A strong puff shoved at the small of his back, locking chest momentarily against the cable. He squirmed upward, flailing out with his right hand. He dropped. His fingers rushed, gripless, over the spine. Then thumb and forefinger hooked on a rivet. It was a precarious hold. He could not wait; his stamina was going. Priest’s hand closed, his entire weight sup
ported on left palm, on right thumb and forefinger. He wrenched up, kicking. The uneven rivet slashed his thumb’s ball. But he had made progress; his left toe, hurdling up, had touched the cable’s underside. He threw himself upward again and, at apex of lunge, released his precious, pinching hold. His right hand sought wildly and captured a rivet three inches higher. His toe scratched at the rusty cable, then dropped off. The weight of lower body, released suddenly, dislocated cartilage in his shoulders. He gasped. He tasted blood under his tongue. But Priest had advanced upward. Now his head was above the cable’s crest; he could see his own hands.

  He had to wait for the wind. The cable rolled, a vessel coming about in small, deep swells. Priest needed to hike his left foot up, to create leverage for his lower body. But now the wind opposed him; it crowbarred at his hold. Legs blew backward and their knee joints bent up behind; heels spanked buttocks. Abruptly the wind reversed: Priest felt a boost at his crotch. Desperate, he kicked up again. His right hand closed on the next rivet. His left toe found purchase, held, then pushed up. He was on the cable: in eagerness he almost toppled over the far side. His nails bent, clawing. Then he crushed his body to the cylinder, arms and legs straddling, embracing. Priest fought an eerie sort of unconsciousness. He yawned. He wanted to sleep: his mind was distancing terrible perceptions. Then he saw and understood the river. Unimaginable height had turned its softness to granite. He saw and understood the treacherous rope he would have to cross. Now, momentarily safe. Priest was afraid for the first time. He began to tremble. Knees and elbows beat at the sheathing. His tongue curled throatward: teeth chattered until he thought they would break off at the roots.

  The sheathing was packed with sound. It boomed into Priest’s flattened ear as wind shouldered against the cable: thunderous pealing of shaken metal sheets. Priest gazed west, down the incline. Long perpendicular waves traveled at him from the New Jersey shore: they grew in height over mid-river, then slackened, yet were powerful enough near the tower to toss his hips a full inch off the sheathing when they crested. His legs lay slightly higher than his head: Priest had an appalling sense of headlong overbalance. There was great turbulence over the river. The wind chopped at him sedulously, chiseling here and there under his body. He could not anticipate it. The cumulus clouds had become thunderheads; they opened to show black inner cores. The cable was in agony, unguyed by its vanished roadway. Priest did not think it would hold many more days.

  Gingerly, unwilling to raise his torso more than two inches above the cable. Priest zipped open his insect-suit front, then uncoiled the creeper vine. Using teeth and the fingers of his right hand, he knotted the thinner vine end around his left wrist. Then he dropped it over the cable’s southern flank. It dangled, jiggling in eddies of wind. He swung the vine through gradually increased pendulum arcs, waiting for a southwesterly gust to help him. Then he whipped the vine upward. It curled around the cable’s underbelly and slapped the back of his groping right hand. He paused, tried again. His fingers caught the thick end, but they were stiff and lacerated from their punishing hold on the rivethead. He bungled the grip. Priest hesitated, panting. He felt incontinent; he pushed down on his empty bowels. There was a twinge from some unnoticed strain between his legs. He cheated toward the right so that he could judge with his eyes. This time he pinned the creeper vine under his palm and drew the slack securely to him.

  He used his knees, rising up, lunging a foot or fifteen inches forward, slackening the vine’s grip, sliding it ahead. Wind slugged at his exposed flank as he hunched above the cable on all fours. His knees were chafed raw by the rusty, pitted metal surface. He progressed a hundred feet; then the vine caught. It hooked below on a bracket stump: one of the sheared support anchors that had held the bridge roadway up. He released the vine from his right hand. He slithered six inches past the obstruction. Head pressed against the metal, Priest began to whip the vine up to his right hand again. Fifteen times in three hours he was halted by the vine; fifteen times he stubbornly repeated the freeing process. As he crawled downward, the cable’s undulations increased. It sidewindered; simultaneously it rose and fell. The bucking turned vicious: at times he was secured only by the vine. He became seasick and retched aridly. The material of his insect suit had worn to tissue; then the insides of his thighs were naked. Then his skin began to wear away. It was necessary now to predict the rollers, to watch them form below the New Jersey tower. He dared push forward only in the troughs. And the terrific crashing grew, reverberated as he neared the river’s center: a thousand steel vertebrae slamming together.

  It began to rain. Drizzle glossed the sheathing; particles of rust floated in a slick, superficial colloid. It lubricated the front of Priest’s insect suit. There was no friction. He tobogganed down the cable slant without effort, twenty feet at a time. Once, he skidded the full length of a single tubular sheath, stopped abruptly as the vine snagged below. Explosive drops pelted down. He could see whitecaps on the river; they seemed spread wings of gulls. The city had been enveloped; mist bubbled down/over the brink of the Palisades. The rain continued; then the heavens seemed to inhale, a great diaphragm held taut. It was suddenly cold. And hail fell. The cable howled with shrill, infernal hammering percussions. Ice bits were big as silver dollars, their rims clipped and lumpy. Now the wind was single-minded; it blew at fifty miles an hour from the southwest. The cable bellied outward, a hammock swinging. Priest grasped the vine fearfully. Twice the cable arced so high that he was suspended sideways above the Hudson. His left ear and temple bled—opened by the hailstones. Then a bolt of lightning struck the northern cable. Blue glows flooded its length from tower to tower. Priest thought it was beautiful and expected death.

  He was stalled there for twenty minutes. Then sunlight barged through the last, ragged sheets of drizzle. A fleet rainbow leaped from the Palisades; it shot between retreating buttocks of a cloud. At once the cable began steaming. Its insane gallop subsided to regular, profound swells. Priest unhooked the vine, secured it again; started edging forward. By two o’clock he noticed the first true upslanting: he had accomplished half the distance. But it was difficult now to move forward. The metal was still slick in places; gravity worked against his weight. Pain in raw inner thighs had paralyzed his calves and shins. Yet Priest felt that the worst was past. The grim sensation of overbalancing had gone, and the cable’s hill protected him somewhat from wind. His vine caught. Priest lay one ear flat on the metal sheathing and dropped it free.

  He heard groups of sound. They punctuated the monotonous, long grinding of metal against metal. Priest clutched the vine end. He lashed it around his right wrist, but hesitated before moving. He was puzzled; he pressed his other ear to the metal. He identified a crude rhythm: scrape, chunk-chunk, scrape, repeated. Not loud, yet with clear persistence. Priest prodded knees into the cable, ascended several feet. He stopped to listen again. Then he jerked onto all fours, nearly upsetting balance. He cursed under his breath. There it was; he gazed up along the cable slope. A head and a pair of shoulders; they were moving toward him. Priest pounded at the sheathing in fury, but the other figure did not see him. It moved relentlessly, cheek to metal, perhaps a third of the way across. Two hundred feet from Priest. And Priest lunged upward; he meant to contest every yard of the cable.

  They almost butted head to head. It was a young boy, no more than seventeen years old. He ducked backward; he cowered. The boy appeared incredulous, astonished; he hadn’t seen Priest before. Wind stiffened his hair, long, black, and lifted it straight up as if on a hinge at the part line. His nose was beaked; it had flaring nostrils that pulsed open and shut, fearful. Priest saw no vine or rope. The boy was trusting balance; he had started down after the thunderstorm. His eyes crossed, then closed. He burrowed face into the hump of his right shoulder. Corrosion had rouged one cheek. Priest mouthed, “Back up. Go back.” The boy wet his lips; there was a stone in his mouth. He had not understood. Exasperated, Priest tried to indicate with his shoulders: yet it was foolish, he could never
back to the New Jersey tower. Apologetically then the boy extended one hand to catch Priest’s left wrist and forearm. He began chatting with fingertips. Priest yanked his wrist away; the boy chased it. From fierceness in the grip, Priest guessed his terror. Then the hand relaxed. Priest made the slash sign, “No”—he could not comprehend. But the boy interpreted his response as a threat.

  Priest lipped, “Climb over me. Climb over me.” His thumb, held down by the vine, jabbed in half circles toward the New York shore. But the boy was apparently unconscious. His small mouth gaped amazement. Gaped, remained open as his eyes were open, stunned, immobile. Priest was sickened: he knew suddenly, vividly how the boy would look in death. Priest tried to smile encouragement. Then wind rolled the boy’s long hair down and he was eyeless, masked above the stupid mouth. The cable reawakened. Long swells began to snap off at their crests, each a shuddering, quick drop. The boy’s slim rear hopped, hopped again: he slid several inches forward. Priest backed reluctantly. He wanted to strike out, to close that imbecile mouth, but the vine occupied both hands. A black cape swirled from the Palisades. It dipped once, the dip repeated through several hundred yards. Priest saw a crowded flock of sparrows. They furrowed under the cable, and, just beneath, a staccato, indignant chirping spattered up. They were startled by the presence of men in their element; formations became disordered below him. But their twittering had aroused the boy. He lifted himself slightly on elbows, turned his face so that hair poured down/over his left ear. One eye emerged. Priest said again, “Climb over me. Climb over me.” In agitation he dropped the vine from his right hand. Deliberately then he made several passes with his arm, backward, over one shoulder. The boy understood at last and was dismayed. He shook his head. He was afraid. Priest covered the boy’s left wrist, tapped: “Please, please, please.” The boy shook his head again. Furious, Priest grasped slack of hood behind the boy’s nape. He pulled toward him, but the boy lay flat then, a dead weight. Priest released him. Despondent, he rasped his forehead against the sheathing.