by Jean Echenoz
In the early days of 1980, as Gluck was flying to North America to complete his collection, his 747 helped him perceive a fresh parallel. When you get down to it, beyond sharing the privilege of shooting through the air and making sport of altitude, planes and bridges reflect the same mystery, mobile or not, depending, and one that even when explained remains unclear: despite a thousand explications of how an airplane can fly, you’ll still think this heavier-than-air plane, even when you’re inside it, must be a miracle—and you’re not buying it. Same thing with a bridge: engineers can kill themselves showing you the principles of the pier and the beam, the arch and the suspension cable, and you’ll still always wonder how it does that, how it hangs on, how it manages to stay up when you go over it.
Having arrived in New York where it was quite cold and where, from the Williamsburg to the Triborough, such puissant mysteries abound, Gluck naturally had his heart set on admiring the Verrazano, the last large suspension bridge built in the country, in 1964, and the world record holder for the longest suspended span. Standing out in the snow during a conversation—initially technical in nature—with a local engineer, Gluck for once eventually touched a bit on his life, the professional side at first, then, gradually, the private one. Indeed, it is better, if you truly want to wax confidential, to do so with perfect strangers, preferably foreign ones because you speak more evocatively of your anguish in a language you haven’t mastered, a handicap that drives you straight to the point. Pacing up and down, Gluck had thus described in faulty English his past, his bereavement, the burden of his loneliness, and even the qualifications of a longed-for ideal companion. He had spoken with no expectations, with no other perspective than that presented by the shores of Staten Island, veiled in an icy fog at the other end of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I see, the engineer had said, I understand. Give me your address.
Back in France, Gluck received a letter twelve days later. The engineer had stuck his neck out and alerted a woman of his acquaintance—a little younger than Gluck (although thank god not too much), living in Spring Hill to the north of Tampa—who, like him, had recently lost a spouse, was just as eager as he to escape her solitude, and whose name was, why not, Valentine Anderson. After sacrificing an entire pad of letter paper, Gluck forced himself to write an acceptable reply before leaving on another trip.
This time he was going to study the site of a future bridge in Sicily, twenty years in the planning and potentially the longest suspension bridge in the world: although the bridge was at risk—situated in a highly active earthquake zone, fought over by architects, hated by local ferryboat companies, coveted by the Mafia—it would one day finally link that island to Calabria. When Gluck got home, he found another letter, with a stamp featuring some pelicans in flight that had been canceled in Palm Harbor and, inside the envelope, a photograph of Valentine Anderson that wasn’t bad.
They continued to correspond throughout the winter; then came the spring, which they both thought would be a good season for meeting at last. With this in mind, Gluck examined his travel schedule. He had planned to visit Yugoslavia, this time to attend, at the end of March, the inauguration of the Krk bridge, notable for possessing the longest concrete arch, a new world record he couldn’t pass up.
Once the mechanical-doll officers at Krk, in their starred caps and uniforms weighted with several rows of medals, had cut the ribbon for this new bridge, to the accompaniment of the national anthem, “Hej, Sloveni,”3 in a wind that set their chest medals waltzing and played havoc with the musicians’ hair, Gluck took time to admire the interplay of colors of the milk-white arch supporting its chalky deck beneath a Nattier4 blue sky before he went on home. During the month after Krk, Gluck had intended to visit the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which he’d never seen and, as it happened, was right in the state where Valentine Anderson lived, so that worked out not too badly.
He made an appointment with her to meet at the bridge on a May morning; they’d each arrive by opposite ends and could rendezvous in the middle. But no, after all: maybe too complicated, meeting there. Fine, let’s say at the south entrance to the bridge. In any case that seemed a good idea, certainly a good time of year, because the weather would surely be very lovely the way Florida always is in May.
•••
In the early hours of the morning on May 9, all over Florida, the weather was not looking so lovely after all because a storm had sprung up west of the Gulf of Mexico and begun moving toward Tampa Bay. This disturbance was not exceptionally large, yet it had started producing in its travels enough lightning to make the meteorologists of the coastal stations worry about its electrical strength and decide to take basic precautions.
It was getting close to seven thirty. Captain Ray Bunter, an experienced harbor pilot, had therefore been sent out on his fifty-six-foot Skimmer of the Sea to escort the hulking Summit Venture, a bulk carrier built four years earlier in Nagasaki. Bunter’s job was to guide the cargo ship, designed as a phosphate freighter but sailing empty that day, through the dangerous waters of the bay but especially between the piers of the bridge between Saint Petersburg and Palmetto. As for this bridge, opened in 1954, it was a steel cantilever structure that answered to the name of the Sunshine Skyway even though the sun and sky, for the moment, seemed forgotten by land and sea.
On this bridge, among the stream of vehicles flowing from its northern entrance, a beige Oldsmobile was carrying a man and his dog without either of them noticing behind them, barely visible in the rearview mirror, the white Chevrolet with a black accent stripe. The Chevy, an Impala “bubble top,” was advancing to the beat of “One Step Beyond”—covered by the band Madness, 28th on the charts that week—on the car radio and in time to which, on the steering wheel, were tapping the polished nails of Valentine Anderson.
As for Gluck, disappointed by the lousy weather, he was waiting at the south end of the bridge. After flying into Orlando the day before, he had picked up his rental Caprice Classic at the airport, then headed down to Bradenton, where he’d stayed overnight at a Marriott. The darkness of that night was prolonged by that of the storm as Gluck, up early, reached the entrance to the Sunshine Skyway. He drove to some flat ground set up as a parking lot a hundred yards from the bridge and bordered by three shacks. He stayed in his car at first, watching the traffic through the murk; then the drizzle that had fallen since dawn deteriorated into pounding rain, sweeping across the bay in violent and erratic bursts of wind. Before leaving his car, Gluck turned up his coat collar and equipped himself with a hat and umbrella beneath which he made his way to one of the shacks, where he got himself coffee and a doughnut. After consuming these under the shack’s awning, he walked over to the south entrance of the bridge, carrying the umbrella emblazoned with the heat-bonded logo of the Marriott, and began to wait; the rendezvous would be there.
The way Captain Bunter saw it, the Skimmer of the Sea was on a routine piloting job. This was hardly his first freighter, no matter what its size. Matchless in his ability to blaze a trail for them in his light craft, he had always known how to guide vessels of the highest tonnage among the shoals of Tampa Bay and the winding bends of its channels. Meanwhile, on the deck of the Summit Venture, three men in slickers kept an eye on the marking buoys strategically set out by the crew of the pilot’s boat to show where the freighter should turn in the fairway.
With the sky gone black and the sea fading beneath the streaming heavens now raging rinforzando, visibility was approaching zero. The ship continued to advance, however, even though the man at the wheel no longer saw anything around him but a vast sheet of rain, while Gluck was having increasing trouble clearly distinguishing the lines of cars that, disappearing onto the bridge, passed those leaving it at a pace steadily weakened by the foul weather. Even the rumbling of car motors was fainter, now confused with that of the battering storm, and horns grew too discouraged to honk.
Through opaque glass furiously swept by long windshield wipers and weeping with condensation inside the cabin, Captain Bunter
at his helm suddenly saw looming before him—out of nowhere, almost close enough to touch—a vast dark mass. It was a main pier of the Sunshine Skyway and, driven by winds and currents, he had come upon it much sooner than expected. The captain had time only to shout for engines full astern, but too late. Blindly following in the wake of the harbor pilot—who only just managed to skirt the obstacle—the Summit Venture plowed hard into a support piling of the southbound span. The bridge did not immediately react too badly: as the freighter rebounded slightly from the collision before stopping dead in the water, a few chunks of concrete and steel began falling around it, some of them crashing straight onto the bow, where they undertook to damage the sheathing and bash in the deck beams.
Shaken by the impact, the Sunshine Skyway at first kept shedding elements of its superstructure, with girders and beams plummeting and sailing heavily around the vicinity. These black shapes in the gray air were hardly recognizable, massive dark lumps no one had the heart to identify—or the time, either. The noise of their fracture and fall was not yet clearly discernable, amid the clamor of the churning waves and howling wind, but when the support pier began to collapse, it did so in a violent concert of erratic booms and snapping ruptures, vicious screeching and deep groans amplified by an avalanche of braces, traverse beams, spacers, pieces of metal as sharp as a guillotine blade and bolts the size of baby carriages.
These details would disintegrate into a major uproar, a chaotic choir, an industrial din fusing together all individual material wails when—desperately bent to the limit of its resistance—a monumental stretch of roadway collapsed into the bay. For with the gigantic clamor of a monster wounded to the death, with polyphonic cries of horror and chagrin, suffering and fury, that area of the southbound span came apart in two phases.
The fall of a first section had tumbled six cars, a pickup, and a Miami-bound Greyhound bus 165 feet into the water. A second section of the roadway held on shakily for forty seconds while, alone at the precipice within a yard of the edge, there remained only the beige Oldsmobile with the man and his dog, and behind them, the white Impala bubble top with the black stripe. In the fierce wind and blinding rain, these vehicles had just reached that part of the bridge when it began to shake bizarrely. With zero visibility, however, the drivers attributed the phenomenon to the weather and kept going, but staring automatically at the windshield, the driver of the Olds abruptly saw a freighter straight down in the bay while there now seemed to be, between him and this freighter, nothing. Stunned at the sight and by the quaking of the roadway, he slammed on the brakes and began to leave his car, advising his dog to do likewise. When the dog refused to follow him, the man made the mistake of hesitating a moment while the roadway started heaving even more frenetically. Then it was the whole world that began to seesaw: more suspending rods had given away, dropping that part of the span and all it carried, flinging the Oldsmobile with the man and his dog and Valentine Anderson’s Impala bubble top through the air. Respectively, they performed a double and a triple salto through gray space before landing right on the Summit Venture, rebounding heavily off its bow to go sink thirty feet into the bay, as the interior of the Chevrolet rocked to the beat of “Upside Down” sung by Diana Ross—and that song, that week, was number nineteen on the hit parade.
Down in the fog where he was, in his corner of the parking lot under the downpour, Gluck was not able to see that all these vehicles, having kept their windows closed on account of the weather, were not immediately swallowed up by the bay. Resurfacing for a few seconds in the crossfire of waves, as if in limbo, they floated a while thanks to their air bubbles, just long enough for the other songs playing on the other radios to end and then, slowly, they went under.
Gluck started his car, maneuvered his way out of the lot, and disappeared in the direction of Orlando and, seven years later, the bridge was replaced by a more solid structure with a cable-stayed main span in the fan design. To make it more visible in all kinds of weather, care was taken to paint it in a livelier color: covering the 435 miles of its cables required three thousand gallons of yellow paint.
NITROX
LET’S TAKE FOR EXAMPLE, sitting in an empty and cubical cell of carceral appearance, a young woman named Céleste Oppenheim. She consists of a lovely tall person wearing her black hair in a pageboy, with an indifferent expression but a penetrating gaze, while her face and figure are striking enough to arouse the immediate interest of absolutely any casting or commercial and fashion modeling agency. A figure all the more riveting, by the way, in that Céleste Oppenheim happens at the moment to be wearing only a white bra and panties, there being no other clothing lying around on the furniture since there is no furniture here, neither chair nor table nor storage unit, only a bed, or more precisely, a couchette bed.
This scanty clothing does not seem to bother the young woman because it is ferociously hot in the no-frills, vapid, windowless cube with sweating bare yellow walls. Poorly illuminated by two neon ceiling fixtures, one of them crackling, the cube is equipped with an outsize radiator that explains all this heat, a washbasin, and that metal couchette bed, a single: rusty, reduced to a bedstead bolted to the floor, covered with a pad of polyurethane foam crumbling at the corners and at one end of which lies a bedspread with gray and beige motifs, folded in six, the other end being at present sat upon by Céleste Oppenheim. The latter shows no emotion when the cell door slides open to reveal two men of about forty: dressed alike in cotton duck pants of the same faded blue and sou’westers (one a candied chestnut color, the other bottle green, both embroidered on the left arm with an insignia in red silk), the men could just as well be two associates as an official with his underling.
Without speaking or entering, from the threshold they beckon the young woman, who next finds herself in a sort of storeroom, a large, dimly lit space apparently warehousing bags, crates, chests, and other boxes. Making their way among these containers they come to a small open area where, hanging from a rack, is an outfit composed of rubber and metal devices including a mask and flippers. Candied Chestnut indicates to Céleste Oppenheim that she should put all this on, while Bottle Green speaks up politely to warn her that what comes next will not be a piece of cake. His defective elocution, however, as fuzzy as a poorly tuned radio, prevents the young woman from following this speech while she is dressing, distracted as she already is by the complexity of the outfit as well as by her relief—probably—at no longer finding herself just about naked in front of two male strangers. Of the man’s stammered cautions, she basically catches only the words prudence and pressure, that last apparently the main object of his warning.
Once the young woman has donned this equipment, Candied Chestnut hands her a Btex polyester bag with huge zippered pockets while guiding her toward another sliding door, through which she passes to find herself in a new cell much like the other one. The difference being that this one is even more empty, distinctly more humid, and neither heated nor lighted at all, devoid of the slightest furnishing and at the far end of which, exactly matching the shutter about to be locked behind her, Céleste Oppenheim has barely time to glimpse, straight ahead, another closed door. A few seconds later, she hears jets of water hissing all around her in the dark, more and more powerfully until she soon feels her calves, thighs, waist, and then her chest submerged. As soon as the water reaches her shoulders, she lowers the mask to cover her face and waits for the door in front of her to rumble open.
When it has and Céleste Oppenheim is completely underwater, the young woman stretches out horizontally in the prone position and glides through the opening into more blackness. Turning on a large flashlight extracted from one of the bag’s zippered pockets, she inspects her new environment: nothing remarkable at first glance in this icy opacity. Before getting her bearings, she turns to look at the dark contour of the submarine from which she has just emerged and which hovers as she does at a depth of about eighty feet, subjecting her, as Bottle Green had said, to three and a half bars of pressure�
��one of atmospheric pressure while the other two and a half are hydrostatic.
The sub in question is a small one, modeled after the Aurore class of submarines (Q200) built in Nantes between 1945 and 1960 at the Dubigeon shipyard, but twice as small, about a hundred feet long and drawing thirteen feet of water, able to descend to a depth of 330 feet thanks to its diesel-electric propulsion system and as it sinks toward the abysses swimming with increasingly blind and ugly fish, the young woman sees only a teardrop silhouette, a pale blackfin tuna on a darker black backdrop.
The flanks of submarines being rarely supplied with windows, no familiar yellow glow framed—why not—by cretonne curtains sends out any reassuring signal. For a moment the submersible’s expressionless albacorean profile may be glimpsed, diminishing as they each go their own way, and Céleste Oppenheim rapidly finds herself all alone at the bottom of the sea. As her eyes gradually adjust to this biotope, she begins to distinguish a bit of flora, a bit of fauna traversing the flashlight beam from time to time. Among the daphnia and sponges she encounters a bevy of moonfish, a few jellyfish of the Linuche or the pelagic kind, and a member of the “knit-striped” sea snake family. Not far away must roam dugongs and manatees, sharks, rays, and chimaeras1—all creatures that would tell an expert that she is somewhere in a marine environment of the Indo-Pacific. Opening another pocket of her Btex bag, Céleste Oppenheim pulls out a square sheet of plastic printed with contours, axes, and coordinates.
After studying it a moment, then correcting a particular angle of her horizontal progression, the young woman follows her itinerary until she reaches an area of irregular relief which—albeit informed in advance of its position by the plastic document but noticing it only at the last moment—she almost bumps into and which forms a kind of hill or even mountain beneath the waves. Fairly certain of the zone she must now be in, she stops swimming to look around for a peak marked on the diagram, a kind of column supposedly right next to the hill: this is her objective, and it takes her a few minutes to find it.
