by Iain Banks
We stay eyeball to eyeball for a few moments longer. Then the doctor breaks off, sitting back and making a sighing noise like the air going out of a fake leather chair. He makes some notes.
'How are your investigations going?' he says matter-of-factly.
I sense a trap. I watch him through narrowed eyes.
'What investigations?' I ask.
'Before you left hospital, and until quite recently, you would always tell me about the investigations you were making; you told me you were trying to find out things about the bridge. It seemed quite important to you at the time.'
I sit back. 'I did try to find some things out. But-'
'But you gave up,' the good doctor nods, notes.
'I tried; I wrote letters to every office and bureau and department and library and college and paper I could find. I sat up into the night writing letters, I spent weeks sitting in antechambers and waiting rooms and reception areas and corridors. I ended up with writer's cramp, a bad cold and a summons to appear before the Hospital Out-Patients Living Allowance (Abuses) Committee; they couldn't believe the amount I was spending on postage.'
'What did you discover?' Dr Joyce is amused.
'That there is no point trying to discover anything worthwhile about the bridge.'
'What do you call worthwhile?'
'Where is it? What does it join? How old is it? That sort of thing.'
'No luck?'
'I don't think luck had much to do with it. I don't think anybody knows or cares. My letters all disappeared or were returned unopened, or with replies attached in languages I couldn't understand and nobody else I was able to contact could fathom.'
'Well,' the doctor makes a sort of balancing motion with one hand, 'you do have a problem with languages, don't you?'
I have a problem with languages, indeed. In any single section of the bridge there are anything up to a dozen different languages; specialised jargons originated by the various professions and skill-groups over the years and developed and added to, altered and refined to the point of mutual incomprehensibility so long ago that nobody can actually recall the process taking place or remember a time when it had not yet begun. I, it was discovered when I came out of my coma, speak the language of the Staff and Administrators: the bridge's official, ceremonial tongue. But whereas everybody else speaks at least one other language, usually in connection with their work or official position, I do not. When I am amongst the bustling crowds which inhabit the main thoroughfares of the bridge, at least half of the conversations going on are quite unintelligible to me. I find this redundancy of languages merely annoying, but I imagine that to the doctor's more paranoid clients the plethora of tongues must seem almost definitively conspiratorial.
'But it's not just that. I looked for records concerning the construction of the bridge and its original purpose; I looked for old books, newspapers, magazines, recordings, films; for anything which referred to any place off the bridge, or before it, or outside it; there's nothing. It's all gone. Lost, stolen, destroyed or just misfiled. Do you know that in this section alone they've managed to lose, to lose an entire library? A library! How the hell do you lose a library?
Dr Joyce shrugs. 'Well, readers lose library books -' he begins in a reasonable voice.
'Oh for God's sake man! A whole library? There were tens of thousands of books in it - I checked. Real books, and bound journals, and documents and maps and ...' I am aware I am starting to sound upset. 'The Third City Records and Historical Materials Library, missing presumed lost for ever; it's listed as being in this section of the bridge, there are countless references to it and cross-references to the books and documents it contained and even reminiscences of scholars who went there to study; but nobody can find it, nobody has ever heard of it except through those references. They're not even looking for it especially hard. My God; you'd think they'd send out some sort of search party of librarians or bibliophiles or something. Remember the name, doctor; give me a call if you ever come across it.' I sit back, folding my arms. The doctor makes some more notes.
'Do you feel that all this information you are seeking is, or has been, deliberately hidden from you?' He lifts one eyebrow in interrogation.
'Well, that would give me something to fight against, at least. No; I don't think there's any malice behind it all, just muddle, incompetence, apathy and inefficiency. You can't fight that; it's like trying to punch mist.'
'Well then,' the doctor smiles glacially, eyes like ice gone blue with age, 'what did you discover? Where did you stop, give in?'
'I discovered the bridge is very big, doctor,' I tell him. Big, and rather long; it disappears over the horizon in both directions. I have stood on a small radio tower atop one of its great summits and counted a good two dozen other red-painted peaks hazing off into the blue distance towards both the City and the Kingdom (both invisible; I have seen no land since I was washed up here, unless one counts the small islands which support every third bridge section). Tallish, too: at least fifteen hundred feet. Six or seven thousand people live within each section, and there is probably room - and over-designed strength in the primary structure - for an even greater density of population.
Shape: I shall describe the bridge with letters. In cross-section, at its thickest, the bridge closely resembles the letter A; the train deck forms the cross-bar of the A. In elevation, the centre part of each section consists of an H superimposed over an X; spreading out on each side from this centre are six more Xs which gradually reduce in size until they meet the slender linking spans (which have nine small Xs each). Linking the extremities of each X, one to another, then produces a reasonable silhouette of the general shape: hey presto! The bridge!
'Is that it?' Dr Joyce asks, blinking. '"It's very big," is that all?'
'It's all I needed to know.'
'But you still gave up.'
'It would have been the act of an obsessive to go on. Now I'm just going to enjoy myself. I have a very pleasant apartment, a quite reasonable allowance from the hospital, which I spend on things which amuse me or which I find beautiful; I visit galleries, I go to the theatre, concerts, the cinema; I read; I have made some friends, mostly among the engineers; I play sports, as you might have noticed; I'm hoping to be admitted to a yacht club ... I occupy myself. I wouldn't call that rejecting anything; I'm right in there, having a great time.'
Dr Joyce gets up, surprisingly quickly, throwing the notebook onto his desk and going to pace up and down behind it, oscillating between book-clogged bookcases and glowing blinds. He cracks his knuckles. I inspect my nails. He shakes his head.
'I don't think you're taking this seriously enough, Orr,' he says. He goes to one of the windows and draws the blinds back, revealing a bright sunny day; blue sky and white clouds.
'Come here,' he says. With a sigh and a small oh-all-right-if-it'll-keep-you-happy smile, I join the good doctor at the windows.
Straight ahead, and almost a thousand feet down, the sea; grey-blue and ruffled. A few yachts and fishing boats speckled about; seagulls wheel. The doctor points to the side, though (one side of his office juts out, so he can look along the side of the bridge).
The hospital complex of which the doctor's offices form a part stands slightly proud of the main structure, like an energetically growing tumour. From here, at such an acute angle, the bridge's elegant grace is obliterated, and it appears merely cluttered and too solid.
Its sloping sides rise, russet-red and ribbed, from the granite-plinthed feet set in the sea nearly a thousand feet below. Those latticed flanks are slabbed and crammed with clusters of secondary and tertiary architecture; walkways and lift shafts, chimneys and gantries, cableways and pipes, aerials and banners and flags of all shapes, sizes and colours. There are small buildings and large ones; offices, wards, workshops, dwellings and shops, all stuck like angular limpets of metal, glass and wood to the massive tubes and interweaving girders of the bridge itself, jumbled and squeezed and squashed between the original structure's red-painted mem
bers like brittle hernias popping out between immense collections of muscles.
'What do you see?' Dr Joyce asks. I peer forward, as if asked to admire the detail brushwork on some famous painting.
'Doctor,' I say, 'I see a fucking great bridge.'
Dr Joyce pulls hard on the cord, snapping it at the top and leaving the blinds open. He sucks his breath in; he goes to sit behind his desk, scribbling in his notebook. I follow him.
'Your trouble, Orr,' he says, as he writes, 'is that you don't question enough.'
'Don't I?' I say innocently. Is this a professional opinion or just a personal insult?
At the window a window-cleaner's cradle is lowered slowly into view. Dr Joyce does not notice. The man in the cradle taps at the window.
'Time to have your windows cleaned, I think, Doctor,' I tell him. The doctor looks up briefly; the window-cleaner is tapping alternately at the window-pane and his wrist watch. Dr Joyce goes back to his notebook, shaking his head.
'No, that's Mr Johnson,' he tells me. The man in the cradle has his nose pressed against the glass.
'Another patient?'
'Yes.'
'Let me guess; he thinks he's a window-cleaner.'
'He is a window-cleaner, Orr, and a very good one; he just refuses to come back in, that's all. He's been on that cradle for the last five years; the authorities are starting to worry about him.'
I gaze at Mr Johnson with new respect; how agreeable to see a man so happy in his work. His cleaning cradle is worn and cluttered; there are bottles, cans, a small suitcase, a tarpaulin and what may be a camp-bed at one end, balancing a variety of cleaning equipment at the other extremity. He taps on the glass with his T-shaped wiper.
'Does he come in to you, or do you go out to him?' I ask the good doctor, walking over to the windows.
'Neither; we talk through an open window,' Dr Joyce says. I hear him putting the notepad away in a drawer. When I turn he is standing looking at his watch. 'Anyway, he's early; I have to go to a committee meeting now.' He mimes something like this to Mr Johnson, who shakes his wrist and holds the watch up to his ear.
'And what of poor Mr Berkeley, upholding the law even as we speak?'
'He'll have to wait, too.' The doctor takes some papers from another drawer and stuffs them into a thin briefcase.
'What a pity Mr Berkeley doesn't think he's a hammock,' I say, as Mr Johnson hoists himself up out of sight, 'then you could keep them both hanging around.'
The good doctor scowls at me. 'Get out of here, Orr.'
'Certainly, doctor.' I head for the door.
'Come back tomorrow if you have any dreams.'
'Right-oh.' I open the door.
'You know what, Orr?' Dr Joyce says seriously, clipping his silver propelling pencil back into his breast pocket. 'You give in too easily.'
I think about this, then nod. 'Yep, fair enough doc, you're right.'
In the outer office, the doctor's ghastly receptionist helps me on with my coat (he has brushed it while I was in with the doctor).
'Well Mr Orr, and how did it go today? Well I hope. Yes?'
'Very well. Considerable progress. Great strides. Meaningful discussion.'
'Oh that does sound encouraging!'
'Literally incredible.'
I take one of the grand main elevators down from the hospital complex to street level above the train deck. In the great lift, surrounded by thick rugs, tinkling chandeliers and gleaming brasswork framing polished mahogany, I take a glass of cappuccino from the bar and sit down to watch the resident string quartet, framed against the outer windows of the huge, slowly descending room.
Behind me, round an oval table inside a roped-off rectangle, twenty or so bureaucrats and their aides are discussing a convoluted point of order which has cropped up during their meeting, which - according to a placard on a small stand just inside the roped-off area - concerns the standardisation of contract specifications in invitations-to-tender for locomotive high-speed bunkering channels (coal dust type, fire prevention in).
From the elevator to an open street above the main train deck; this is an avenue of walk- and cycle-way, metal-decked, which forges a comparatively straight path through both the bridge's own structure and the chaotically unplanned additions of shops, cafes and kiosks which clutter this bustling level.
The street - rather grandly called the Boulevard Queen Margaret - lies near the outer edge of the bridge; its inside buildings form part of the lower edge of the ziggurat of secondary architecture piled inside the original framework. Its outer-edge buildings abut the main girders themselves, and in intermittent gaps offer views of the sea and sky.
Long and narrow, the street makes me think of ancient towns, where haphazardly thrown together buildings jutted out towards each other, tilting over and enclosing both the thoroughfares themselves and the swarming crowds they contained. The scene here is not so different; people jostling, walking, bicycling, pushing prams, hauling carts, carrying sedan chairs, straining on trike-vans, chattering in their various languages, dressed in civilian clothes or uniforms, and forming a dense mass of confused motion where people flow in both directions at once, and across the main stream as well, like blood cells in an artery gone mad.
I stand on the raised platform outside the elevator halt.
Over the noise of the milling people, the continual hisses and clanks, grindings and gratings, klaxons and whistles of the trains on the deck beneath sound like shrieks from some mechanistic underworld, while every now and again a deep rumble and a still more profound quaking and rattling announces a heavy train passing somewhere below; great pulsing clouds of white steam roll around the street and upwards.
Above, where the sky ought to be, are the distant, hazily seen girders of the high bridge; obscured by the rising fumes and vapours, dimmed by the light intercepted outside them by their carapace of people-infected rooms and offices, they rise above and look down upon the rude profanity of these afterthought constructions with all the majesty and splendour of a great cathedral roof.
A frenzied chorus of beeping swells from one side; a black rickshaw pulled by a young boy rushes through the crowds, which part for it. It is an engineer's cab. Only important officials and couriers of the major guilds are allowed to use rickshaws; merely well-off people are permitted to use sedan chairs, though in practice few do because elevators and trams are quicker. The only other alternative is to cycle, though as wheels are taxed on the bridge, the only affordable conveyance of this type for most people is a monocycle. Accidents are common.
The fusilade of honking which precedes the cab emanates from the uniformed rickshaw-boy's feet; in the heel of each of his shoes there is a small horn; people know the sound and are warned.
I repair to a cafe to think about what I shall do after lunch. I might go swimming - there is a very pleasant, uncrowded pool a couple of levels down from my apartment - or I might phone my friend Brooke, the engineer; he and his cronies usually play cards in the afternoon when they can't think of anything better to do, or I might take a local tram and go in search of new galleries: I haven't bought any paintings for a week or so.
A pleasant tingle of anticipation runs through me as I contemplate these various agreeable ways of spending my time. I leave the cafe after a coffee and liqueur and rejoin the busy press of people.
I throw a coin from the tram I take back to my own section of the bridge as we cross the narrow linking span. It is traditional to throw things from the bridge, for luck.
Night. A pleasant evening behind me spent swimming, dining at the rackets club, then taking a stroll down at the harbour. I am a little tired, but watching the tall yachts bobbing quietly in their dark marina has given me an idea.
I stretch out on the chaise-longue in my sitting room and consider the exact form my next dream for the good doctor ought to take.
Decided, I prepare my writing table, then go to the television screen built into the wall behind where I will sit; I work better with it o
n, talking quietly to itself. Most of the programmes are dross, intended for the unthinking - quiz shows, soap operas, and so on - but I watch occasionally, ever in hope of seeing something which is not the bridge. I find a channel still broadcasting - a play, apparently set in a mining community on one of the small islands - and turn the dialogue down to a murmur, loud enough to hear but not make out. I take my place at my desk, pick up my pen. The television starts to hiss. I turn round. A grey haze fills the screen, white noise issues from the speaker. Perhaps the set is faulty. I go to turn it off, but then a picture appears. There is no sound; the hiss has gone.
The screen shows a man lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines. It is in black and white, not colour, and grainy. I turn up the sound, but only a very gentle hiss emerges even at maximum volume. The man in the bed has tubes and pipes appearing from his nose and mouth and arm; his eyes are closed. I can't see him breathe, but he must still be alive. On every channel the picture stays the same: still the man, the bed, the surrounding machines.
The camera looks down and across at the bed; it shows part of a wall, and a small unoccupied seat at one side of the bed. The fellow looks at death's door; even in monochrome his face is terribly pale, and his thin hands - lying motionless on the white bedsheet, one with a tube attached at the wrist - are almost transparent. His face is thin and battered as though he's been in a bad fight. His hair looks mousy; a small bald patch sits on the crown of his head. On the whole, a rather short, grey, ordinary-looking man.
Poor devil. I try changing channels again, but the picture remains. Perhaps I have a crossed line with one of the hospital cameras used to monitor very ill patients. I'll call the repair people in the morning. I look at the still, silent picture for a little while longer, then switch the set off.
Back to my desk. I have to prepare my next dream for the good doctor, after all. I write for a while, but the lack of background noise is vexing, and I have an odd feeling, sitting with my back to the dead television. I take my pen and papers to bed and complete my next dream there, before falling asleep, where - if I do dream - I don't remember dreaming.
