New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  Before he got away, he felt her whisper, “Why not me?”

  “Because you put out,” he said, and then wished he’d just cut his tongue out when she jerked, slopping coffee across her knuckles. He retreated behind the desk and his own cup, and settled his elbows on the blotter. Her survivor guilt was his fault, too. “It only wanted virgins,” he said, more gently. “Send your boyfriend a thank-you card.”

  She swallowed, swallowed again. She looked him in the eyes, so she wouldn’t have to look past him, at the memory of her friends. Thank God, she didn’t ask. But she drank the rest of her too-hot coffee, nerved herself, licked her lips, and said, “But Gina—Gina was … ”

  “People,” he replied, as kindly as he could manage with blood on his hands, “are not always what they want you to think. Or always what you think they ought to be.”

  When she thanked him and left, he retrieved the flask from his coat pocket and dumped half of it into his half-empty coffee mug. Later, a TA told him it was his best lecture ever. He couldn’t refute her; he didn’t remember.

  Melissa Martinchek showed up for his next Monday lecture. She sat in the third row, in the middle of two empty desks. No one sat beside her.

  Both Matthew and she survived it, somehow.

  The Brooklyn Bridge was dubbed “The Eighth Wonder of the World” when it opened in 1883. It is made of more than granite, steel, and concrete. The men who built it sacrificed sweat, blood, health, and even lives to build it. But perhaps one builder gained something very special indeed.

  CAISSON

  KKARL BUNKER

  The first time I saw Mischke was in the winter of 1871, and he was on his knees making cooing noises at a baby. The baby was on the lap of its mother, a plump young woman whose expression made it clear she didn’t know quite what to make of the oversized bear of a man who was tickling her infant’s cheek with a calloused finger. The woman had entered the noisy tavern a few moments prior, and had sat at one of the tables after speaking a few sharp words to the barkeep. Her presence had attracted some attention, as it was a rare thing to see a woman in one of these New York taverns. But the man on his knees hardly seemed to notice her; he was only interested in the baby. For its part, the infant seemed quite happy with his new friend, laughing and flailing a fat little arm as he tried to catch the finger tickling his face. After a few attempts he succeeded, his hand clamping down on a great log of a forefinger it could only half encircle. At this the man’s enthusiasm redoubled, and he launched into an excited monologue that included a few phrases of Polish along with the clucking nonsense syllables. I recognized the eastern drawl of Kresy dialect, close enough to the Mazovian Polish I grew up with to give me a sudden ache of homesickness. Then another man approached. He looked down at the Pole with disapproval, but immediately the woman launched into a tirade at him, snapping out a string of angry words in Irish-accented English that was too fast for me to follow. The couple left, and the big Pole got to his feet.

  I was new to this country, and I felt always on the edge of being overwhelmed by the strangeness of everything. I slept in one of the many small rooms above the Nassau Avenue tavern I was in, and five other men shared the room with me. We were all strangers to one another, and it was clearly the tradition that we continue to treat each other as strangers, even as we unrolled our sleeping pallets side-by-side, so close they almost touched. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that being strangers to each other was the rule for all people of America. The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn where I lived was largely a mix of German and Irish immigrants, with a few Poles like myself, and a dozen or so other nationalities beginning to sprinkle in. So everywhere I turned there were people not like myself, and I felt like a small fish tossed into an alien sea.

  And this new man, in spite of the familiarity of his language, was a strange-looking figure even in a country of strangers. Like the crude wooden tables and chairs around us, he looked like something banged together by a peasant carpenter. He was coarsely chopped and chiseled and sawn, the various mismatched pieces of him held together with pegs and nails. His nose was crooked, and one eye was always open wider than the other. He hadn’t shaved recently, and his hair looked like it was hacked off with a pocketknife. His face was craggy and lined in a way that made it impossible to guess his age.

  I was sitting at a long table a few feet from where the Irish girl had sat to wait for her husband. As the man I’d been watching stood, I called out to him in Polish, shouting over the background noise. “I think you must have a well-loved little baby of your own at home.”

  I knew before the words were fully out of my mouth that I’d made a terrible mistake. The man looked down at me, and while his face was as immobile as stone, he seemed to turn gray and crumple in on himself as I watched. He pulled out the empty chair across the table from me and sat down slowly. For a long time he stared at me with an expression I found frightening, until I realized he wasn’t truly looking at me at all, or at anything else in this world. Finally he made a hunching, rolling gesture with his huge shoulders, as if throwing off some great weight. Then he turned and bellowed out to the bartender, calling him by name and asking for vodka and a bowl of cabbage soup. When the bottle and a glass were delivered to the table Mischke poured the little glass full and then emptied it in two swallows. Only then did he look at me— really looking at me now—his eyes scanning my face. “Mazowsze,” he said, guessing the general region of my origin from my accent as I’d done with him. “Warsaw?”

  “Kutno,” I corrected, and then I stuck out my hand in the American fashion. “Stephan Dudek.”

  He took my hand. “Mischke,” he said. In all the time I knew him, I never learned his first name.

  A bowl of soup and a slab of bread were brought to the table, and Mischke began to eat. A few minutes passed without him speaking or looking at me, and I began to wonder if he’d forgotten about my existence—if the few words he’d shared with me were all I would ever get from him.

  But then he looked up, his eyes meeting mine. He jabbed a finger in the direction of his soup bowl. “I showed the cook here how to make kapusniak,” he said. “It’s not bad.” He twisted around in his chair and yelled the bartender’s name again, demanding another bowl of soup “for my countryman.” Then he looked me over, examining what he could see of my body as well as my face. “You work in the docks?”

  I nodded.

  “You look like a strong man, and healthy.” He’d switched to English, and I got the feeling he was repeating something he’d heard in that language. He refilled his vodka glass and took a sip from it—an oddly delicate gesture on a man of his size. “You want to make two dollars and twenty-five cents a day?” he asked. “Come with me tomorrow, I’ll get you a job working on the bridge.”

  My face must have taken on a silly expression, because Mischke broke into a ragged grin. Two dollars and twenty-five cents was far more than I earned on the docks, but … “You mean on the towers?” I asked. I was thinking of the dizzying height of the Brooklyn tower, only half-finished, I’d heard, and already it was taller than any other man-made thing I’d ever seen.

  “Nah!” Mischke growled. His voice was full of disdain, as if he considered wrestling huge blocks of granite into place hundreds of feet in the air to be work for boys. “Not the towers. The caissons! The Brooklyn side is all done, but on the New York side there’s still months of work.”

  “The caissons!” I echoed.

  “You’ve heard about them?”

  “I’ve heard a little,” I said, not adding that what I’d heard sounded both terrifying and incomprehensible. “But I don’t understand it too well. Something about working under the water?”

  “Yes!” Mischke said with a kind of wild delight in his eyes. “Under the water, but not in the water! I’ll explain.” He took hold of his soup bowl with both hands and slid it toward me a few inches. “It’s like this: Here is Brooklyn.” He stabbed his thick forefinger down on the table between himself and his soup
bowl. “And here is New York.” His finger thumped down on the opposite side of the bowl. Then he pointed into the bowl. “The soup here is the East River; a big, wide river, you know. So. To build a bridge this big, first you need two towers, one on each side, but both of them in the river, not back here on the shore. The towers will hold up the bridge, okay? Aha! But how to build a stone tower that has its foundation deep down in the water of the river?” He held two fingers together and poked them into his soup, down to the flat bottom of the bowl. “That’s the problem!”

  When you order vodka from a bar in America, they give you a little doll-sized glass to drink it out of. Mischke picked up his glass and emptied it into his mouth. Then he held it upside down over his soup, lowering it slowly toward the surface. “Imagine this is made of wood,” he said, tapping the glass with a finger of his left hand. “Imagine it is big. Very, very big. But it floats, see?” He held the glass so it was just skimming the surface of his soup. “Now. You float this out to the right place in the river, and then you start laying blocks of stone on top of it. More and more stone. You start building your tower. You know what happens? This thing”—he pointed at the glass—“it sinks. The more stone you add to the top, the lower it sinks in the river. Enough stone, it goes down to the bottom of the river.” He pushed the glass down to the bottom of his soup bowl.

  “Clever,” I said.

  He leaned closer to me suddenly, glaring with his mismatched eyes. “Wrong!” he said. “Not clever, because that’s not the end of it.” The wider of his eyes relaxed, while the narrower one kept up a skeptical squint. “What’s at the bottom of a river, Dudek? Mud, that’s what! These towers that will hold up the bridge, they’re going to be tall, huge! Taller than the Trinity Church when they’re done! You want to build something like that on mud?”

  I was new to New York, and hadn’t seen Trinity Church yet.

  Mischke’s voice changed to a gravelly whisper and he smiled like someone making a sly joke. “This is where it gets interesting, young Dudek. This is where you come in. You and me, and the job we do.” Again he pointed down at the glass he was holding up-ended in his soup. “This thing, that’s the caisson. That’s French for box, because that’s what it is, a big wooden box, open at the bottom. It has air in it, right? I push it down into the river, the soup, but the air is still in it, right? Hah?”

  “Right,” I said. “Air.”

  “So what they do, what Colonel Roebling does—he’s the boss, the big boss, the chief engineer, they call him—what Colonel Roebling does, he makes it so men can go down inside here.” He tapped the little glass. “Men go down in there, and they dig. They breathe the air that’s pumped down and they dig and dig, and all the dirt they dig is hauled up and out from inside the caisson, and it—the caisson—it goes down into the mud at the bottom of the river. The men dig out the mud and dirt and rocks from all around the floor of the caisson, and down and down it goes, into the earth, while up top they keep laying on more and more stone blocks. The caisson goes down more, and more, and more … until it is on bedrock.” He thumped his fist on the table. “Solid.” I peered down at Mischke’s upside-down vodka glass, sitting in the bowl of murky soup. “Inside … that box … under the water … under the bottom of the river … That’s where you go? To dig?”

  He was grinning at me, his big yellow teeth showing. “Inside, Dudek! That is the job I got for you. Me, I already worked on the Brooklyn caisson. Now you and me, we go work on the New York side. We go in there and we dig, dig, dig.” He put his free hand near the glass, extended the first two fingers and made waggling motions with them, like the scratching, digging legs of a rodent. “There is more,” he said, his grin becoming uncertain. “Much more for you to know, to learn, to find out. But that is enough for now. You know more now than I did when I started.”

  I had a dozen questions, and probably there were a hundred more that I didn’t know enough to ask, but I said nothing. It was a job, and a job that paid well. Two dollars and twenty-five cents a day was more than any other job I’d ever heard of.

  The next morning I was standing on a sea of stone, half a city block in size. Scattered here and there were huge boom derricks, steam engines spewing out black coal smoke and white steam, and everywhere men busy at a myriad of different tasks. Mischke and I worked the first shift, so the start of our day came at six in the morning. We were in a cluster of about a hundred men grouped around a small opening in the center of the stone plateau. Most of these men had an easy slouch that showed they were familiar with the setting, but a few of us were what the foreman called new guys. “You new guys come with me,” he said. “I’ll lock in with you.”

  “Lock in?” I asked Mischke, not sure I liked the sound of it.

  “It means go in through the air lock. You’ll see.” The foreman led us through the crowd of workers and then down a long spiral staircase. When the steps ended, the outside world had been reduced to a small disk of light above us, and we were standing on an iron deck the size of a big room, surrounded by walls of stone. There was a square hatch built into the floor, and the foreman went over to this, opened it and climbed down through it, calling up to us to follow. One by one we went through the door and down a ladder and found ourselves in a smaller room, this one cylindrical and walled with more iron. There were about ten of us in our group, but there was space enough in the room for at least twice that many. The foreman climbed back up the ladder and closed the door we’d come through, and then called out to Mischke, “Open the valve, Mickey!”

  Mischke turned a thing like an oversized faucet handle, and the room was filled with a howling roar. Air was rushing through the valve, bringing with it a stifling flood of heat and humidity. After a short time I felt a piercing pain in my ears, and it was obvious that others of us “new guys” were feeling it too. The foreman was yelling an English word at us over and over, but I was distracted by the pain and I couldn’t think of the word’s meaning. “Swallow!” Mischke translated, shouting at me. “Swallow, swallow!” Some minutes later the roaring stopped, and the foreman opened another hatch at our feet. Again there was a ladder leading down, and again the foreman went first, then Mischke, then the rest of us.

  It could have been another world, a world out of a fever dream.

  It had been explained to us that the caisson was divided by timber walls into six lengthwise sections, and we were in one of these sections. So the width of the chamber was not so great, but the length seemed interminable, the far wall invisible in the misty gloom. The roof was three or four feet above our heads, and the ground we stood on was hard-packed dirt and gravel. At intervals along the walls there were blazing white lights, so bright that it hurt to look at them. But as bright as the individual lamps were, the steamy air seemed to swallow up the light before it had gone any distance. I could see that the walls had been whitewashed at one time, but months of spattering mud had blackened all but the uppermost few feet.

  One of the men standing near me swore in English, and his voice was so strangely thin and weak that we all turned to look at him. He repeated the word, listening to himself, and then laughed, saying that he sounded like his own mother. The foreman spoke to us then, and his voice too was transformed into a thin, wheezing treble.

  We new guys were directed to a shelf where we could stow our lunch pails, and to pegs where we could hang our jackets and shirts. I saw then that the men who had “locked in” before us were all stripped to the waist. Outside it was a chilly November morning, but in this place it was miserably hot and humid.

  And the air … I’d been distracted by my surroundings, but now I realized that I was panting as if I’d been running for miles. The air was thick and sluggish; it took effort to pull it into my lungs and then force it out again, like breathing water. I felt a flicker of panic nudging at the back of my mind: the panic of drowning. Mischke thumped his hand on my back. “It’s best not to think about the air,” he said. “Just breathe the stuff, and you’ll be okay.” Even M
ischke’s voice, as big as he was, became weak and feminine in this place. I was about to make a joke to him about this, but the foreman was yelling at us—as well as he could in his enfeebled voice. It was time for us to work, he said.

  The work was digging. Just as Mischke had described it with his soup bowl and vodka glass, we were to dig out the dirt from under our feet, and from underneath the walls of the massive structure we were inside. Shovelful by shovelful, we dug. We filled wheelbarrows with dirt and emptied them into a water-filled depression at the center of the caisson. A huge pipe ran from this pool up through the ceiling and on to the surface above, and inside this pipe was a clamshell device that lifted the dirt up to the outside world. Rocks too big to be lifted out in this way were broken up by men with picks. Boulders too big for men with picks were blasted apart with gunpowder. But for me and most of the men in the caisson, all we did was dig. Plunge your shovel into the sandy soil, lift it, dump out the soil. Then do it again, and again, and a thousand more times. It seemed absurd, what we were being asked to do—a few dozen men using the strength of their arms to create an inverse mountain, to lower this monster structure of wood and stone into the earth, like a farmer pounding a fence-post into the ground. But Mischke told me that the caisson was measured to sink a few inches every day, perhaps a foot in a week, a few feet in a month, and by these degrees the job would be done. The tower would have its foundation, the bridge would have its tower, and in time, the river would have its bridge.

  So we shoveled.

  At our lunch break Mischke went and sat on a bench that was against one of the outside walls of the caisson. Holding a gigantic slab of a sandwich in one hand, he banged on the wall behind us with the beer bottle in his other fist. It clanged metallically. “The inside is covered with sheet iron,” he said. “They didn’t know to do that with the Brooklyn caisson, so it was just wood. One day—it was when the digging in the caisson was almost done—a worker held a candle too close to the calking fiber between the timbers, up near the roof, and it started to burn. Nobody noticed the fire for a while, and by the time they did, it had eaten out a void inside the wood.” He leaned closer to me, looking into my eyes. “Things do not behave down here like they do up in the world. And fire … fire is one thing that behaves very differently.” He pointed up at the ceiling over our heads. “You know the walls and the roof of this caisson are thick, right? Layer on layer of the heaviest timbers, so the roof is fifteen feet thick. Well, that was a good thing, because the fire was burning through all of that. The place where the fire started was a small hole, no bigger than my hand. But inside the timbers of the ceiling, it was like a living thing, eating away more and more of the wood, hollowing out a big chamber. But that wasn’t the strangest thing, or the worst. Once that fire got started, it seemed that nothing would put it out. We used buckets of water at first, then they brought in a big hose and a pump, blasting water into the hole the fire had made. But always as soon as the water stopped, the fire would begin again. It seemed like it would soon eat away the whole top of the caisson, and all the stone of the tower above us and all the water of the East River would come down on our heads.” Mischke paused to chuckle, and I knew it was the sickly expression on my face that was making him laugh.