Birth of a Bridge

ORCHESTRATING THE TRIAL AND ERROR

JOHN JOHNSON, A.K.A. THE BOA, IS A MAN OF medium height, hairless body, weightlifter’s torso and Asian complexion, strong neck, thick eyebrows above little slitted eyes, no lips, pointy teeth, grey tongue. He takes over Coca’s city hall in January 2005. He’s been elected; now he invests in his image. Puts away the black satiny shirts and fedoras, acquires a tailor on Savile Row, orders a dozen custom suits in anthracite grey. Goes on a diet, gets hair transplants, pays for a beautiful smile, takes up golfing. Far from seeing his new position as retirement with an unobstructed view of the leisurely pension of corruption, he is suddenly seized by grandeur. He remembers his campaign slogans — phrases concocted by professionals, powerful formulas that smack like flags in the stadiums and the town squares, twelve-foot-high watchwords that lend power to his voice, give him the chin of an orator — and speaks them softly into the golden night, standing on the balcony of city hall, which in his mind is a gangway revealing him to the world; he imagines an appropriate gesture and, galvanized by his own words, captivated by the marvellous promises he made to the crowds, the blood rises to his head, his heart beats wildly: he will become the man he said he was, he will — he’s deciding it right now. From now on, he treats fortune like the useful gadget of respectability and doesn’t think about anything except making his mark. He will impact his time — people will remember him.

A FEW WEEKS after his election he takes a trip to Dubai. It’s his first journey off the continent and he’s in a state. On the plane, he takes sleeping pills, drinks champagne, tries to smooth-talk the flight attendant, and falls asleep just before they land. He’s ushered into a special lounge at the airport and then into a white limousine with tinted windows; another limo will follow with the bags and the people who make up his select cabinet. What he sees on the drive from the airport to the city fills him with a simultaneous sensation of euphoria and crushing defeat.

The cranes are the first things to gobsmack him: clustered together in the hundreds, they overpopulate the sky; their arms are fluorescent laser-sabres brighter than any Jedi warrior’s, and their pale halo crowns the construction-site city with a cupola of white night. The Boa cranes his neck to count them all, and the man in the white dishdasha sitting next to him tells him that one-third of all the cranes in the world are requisitioned here: one in three, he repeats, one in three is here, in our city. His tiny mouth, accentuated by a thin line of moustache, says very quietly, we are building the city of the future, a Pharaonic undertaking. The Boa says nothing more. He salivates, bewitched. The proliferation of towers stuns him — so numerous you’d think they were multiplied by a fevered eye, so tall you have to rub your own eyes, afraid you might be hallucinating — their white windows like thousands of blinding little parallelograms, thousands of effervescent Vichy pastilles in the faded night: here people work 24-7, the workers are housed outside the city, the changes of shift happen via shuttles — the man whispers each piece of information, escorting the Boa’s surprise with great delicacy. Farther on, he points with a waxy index finger to a building under construction, already a hundred storeys high, and says: This one will be 2,300 feet tall. The Boa nods his head, suddenly inquires about the height of the Empire State Building, the Hancock Center, and the towers in Shanghai, Cape Town, and Moscow, he’s euphoric and stupefied. Thus, in Dubai, the sky is solid, massive: ground to develop. The drive is long in the long car, the sea takes its time to arrive, the Boa waits for it: flat, unaffected, heavy black oilcloth whose edges are erased by the night, and he is startled to discover that it too is constructed, rendered solid, crusted over, and apt to become the base for an artificial archipelago, a reproduction of the world map (Great Britain selling for three million dollars) or a luxury housing complex in the shape of a palm tree: thus the sea too is ground to develop.

The Boa arrives at his hotel bowled over, cheeks red and eyes bugged out, he has a hard time falling asleep, the night is too bright, as though filtered through hot gauze, and he is far too excited — the Burj Al Arab is one of the tallest hotels in the world, an immense sail made of glass and Teflon, swelled before the Persian Gulf which is completely black at this hour, and closed as a chest that raggedy pirates armed with AK-47s might try to steal. When he wakes, the Boa is convinced he’s found the inspiration that was missing for his mandate. A mastered space is what offers itself up to his gaze — a space, he thinks, where mastery combines with audacity — and that is the mark of power.

AT MID-MORNING, the man who had welcomed him the day before comes to pick him up and guides him around the city. His keffiyeh floats out calmly at his back like a mage’s cape any time he quickens the pace — no one knows, except me, that he has sunk into a dire melancholy, that he shepherds officials around in order to flee the palace; no one knows that he plans to return to the desert to live with the oryx, the fennecs, and the scorpions; that, stretched out inside a tent lightly ventilated by the desert breeze, he will write poems and smoke a narghile; no one knows that he spits with rage into the mirror that reflects him — him and the wide hall of his villa that is just as empty and marbled, just as huge, inert and senseless as the rest. The Boa rushes along, his cardiac rhythm speeds up with pleasure and exhilaration. The city appears as a consumerist phantasmagoria, a gigantic ghetto for nomadic billionaires, the model of a virtual universe where you can lose your mind: strange combination of hotels with ostentatious pomp, shopping malls with unmatched opulence — the largest duty-free mall in the world, with miles of shop windows, brand names that assault, conjuring desire and striking an exclusive clientele of Arab princes, Anglo-Saxon rock stars, Russian oligarchs, and Chinese industry leaders — and extravagant theme parks — an indoor ski hill with a snowy summit, mechanized lifts and a polar bear, an Andalusian-style spa, a Nubian village, an underwater hotel, and a giga-zoo. The Boa loses himself in space-time. In the very near future, we will have attained the grand number of fifteen million visitors; the accompanier states these facts in such elegant English that the Boa has difficulty understanding, he’s losing his grip, he succumbs, stammers in a continuous loop when I think that twenty years ago there was nothing here, nothing, just a little patch of desert, a sandy bit of Earth’s crust, and not even any oil — and now what? Paradise.

He’s driven to the palace a little before noon for a short audience with the emir Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum — the man the Boa unwisely calls “my counterpart.” He waits for three hours in the antechamber, using the time to imagine partnerships between Coca and Dubai; he mulls over ideas while behind the thick, padded door, sheik Mo nibbles pistachios with his minister of war, murmuring a few questions about the technical and military capacities of the Rafale jets showcased the day before on the tarmac at Bourget, in Paris. Finally the Boa is received, and here he is, perfumed little guy in a room paved with marble that reminds him all at once of Grand Central Station in New York. He is bursting with an idea, the horses, and his step is full of drive. From a ways off the sheik looks massive and immaculate as authority itself, but his form becomes more and more human the closer he comes — the akal of his keffiyeh falls a little over one ear, making the monarch’s head a bit lopsided. The Boa greets the prince according to protocol — above all, don’t get too close to the sacred body of the sheik. Then the latter snaps his fingers, has a new bowl of pistachios brought to his guest, and here they are seated fifteen feet from each other. So, the horses. The Boa, instead of fawningly paying his respects, tells the prince about his wish to develop stud farms in his city, Coca. The sheik frowns, doesn’t know where this energetic little being comes from, has never heard the name Coca, and nods his head, very calm. The Boa winds up, gaining momentum, the high plains to the east of the city are among the best pasturages in the world, the grass is marvellous and the water is pure. This is a subject that the sheik enjoys: he is a horseman, had his chance to shine in the competitions, and the royal family owns the largest stable of thoroughbreds in the world, magnificent animals bought for their weight in gold, most of them at the yearlings auction in Deauville. The conversation flows in this way for more than four minutes, a record, and finally the sheik agrees: a collaboration begins to take shape. The Boa cuts the inside of his mouth while violently crunching a pistachio.

IN COCA, what is now called the Dubai Trip creates a buzz. Its influence can be measured in the feverish urbanism that seizes the city. From then on the Boa is crystal clear about the single goal for his city council: put an end to three centuries of conservative prudence, once and for all get rid of the stranglehold of old money that reigns in the affluent downtown neighbourhoods, cut down the dynasties of the Cripplecrows and the Sandlesses that have been rubbing shoulders incestuously for the past two centuries, between satin sheets and plumes of cigar smoke — rather than being leaders of the city, they are masters over it. He wants to be done with their erudite conceit, their culture, their archives, too much Europe here, too much Europe, he repeats this time and again, heavy identity, sticky traditions: it stinks of death! He gets to work busting open the city centre, breaking its hard pit, its historical pit, pulverizing its meaning and scattering it to the periphery. The old buildings and bourgeois neighbourhoods, traces of the origins and symbol of the pioneers’ values — physical courage, a spirit of conquest, work, piety, monogamy, and all other qualities that glorify rootedness — are removed to museums: dust is what suits them best, sneers the Boa, his action is oriented elsewhere, out of range of patrimony, far from all the old fictions that begat the city plan. I’m going to air out all that. I’m going to free the city and put it on the world map. An era of grand manoeuvres follows, in which manila envelopes circulate containing wads of new bills that crinkle like biscuits.

In less than three months, the Boa manages to have Coca declared a free-trade zone by the Senate and twinned with Dubai; obtains, from the state bank — now under control of his own investment company — a loan at a low fixed rate for a large-scale city planning venture, and grants the municipality a lease of fifty years for each main facility. His private collusions in municipal projects alarm his shrewdest and most servile collaborators alike, but not one of them says a word and everyone knows why: the Boa presides over a fortress built on insider influence and he controls all the entrances and all the elevators, he is strong, rich, and not too concerned about the price one has to pay in order to remain in the good graces of the city’s respected institutions and organizations. Anywhere he can, he uses the tactics of the carnivorous reptiles he’s hunted since he was a child, and deploys such discreet strategies that only those who have a darkness to match his own can detect the long-term predatory power — these rare few, rendered speechless and weak, run for their lives — and then, buoyed up as he is by microscopic advantages that accumulate and activate one another, with the icy brutality that is his trademark, the Boa shifts without warning into attack mode and strikes. Those who might have tried to stand in his way are publicly mocked, dried up, simple-minded, sad. They don’t understand anything about the ways of the world. He’s sorry, but he eliminates them — what else do you expect, really, what do you want me to do? The implacable machine that’s running now at full throttle slowly suffocates them. After all, isn’t the Boa acting for the good of the city? Doesn’t he put himself entirely — himself, his companies, his screens, his men, his dogs — at the service of his fellow citizens? He has ideas for Coca — he was elected and he’s a man who keeps his promises: he is John the benefactor.

FROM THEN on, he commands the territory by ukase, walking slowly around the huge maquette of the city he’s had installed in the middle of his office — a general on a campaign planning strategies, that’s what he makes you think of — chest leaning over his scaled-down model, hands crossed behind his back, examining a portion of cardboard and then suddenly grabbing a wand and ordering an internet city here, a media city there, a shopping centre here — a maze of malls paved with porphyry and adorned with fountains and cappuccino kiosks — a multi-purpose stadium here, a skating rink in the shape of a flying saucer there, an underground multiplex with fifty rooms, a cinder track on the roof of a row of low-rise buildings, a casino under a glass bell. He wants transparency, plastic and polypropylene, rubber and melamine, all things provisional, consumable, disposable: everything must be mobile, light, convertible, and flexible. Supercharged, he devotes himself to the manipulation of giant Meccano that he reconfigures daily, intoxicated by the infinite scope of new formal possibilities, by the hubs he draws, by the work sites he carves out, by the activity centres he defines and positions on the map. He has only one idea left in mind: to pull Coca out of the provincial anonymity where it has been sleeping peacefully and convert it to the global economy. He wants to build the city of the third millennium, polyphonic and omnivorous, doped up on novelty, shaped for satisfaction, for pleasure, for the experience of consumption.

AND YET there’s something that wounds his pride: isolated as it is, Coca’s energy is rationed and dependent upon the coastal cities. The investors have fled for this very reason — it’s impossible to squeeze development out of a stingy little dump with a tight-assed population where spending is watched so closely. Moreover, the oil tankers that supply the city and its few industrial sites only come grudgingly up the river to the storage tanks downstream — the Boa sees condescension in this — isn’t he paying them cash, for Christ’s sake? He fulminates, mulls things over — alone at first, because he’s convinced that his people are incapable of coming up with a single idea. One evening a documentary on biofuel is on TV. It’s a revelation — he’s hooked by the subject and proceeds to study it in depth. Corn grows abundantly in the valley, and Coca has thousands of acres of preserves — the high red plains and the forest, whose edges could be cleared out, plus the interior of the massif if the Natives “play the game” — just don’t screw us over, that’s all I ask of them — this is how the Boa talks to himself. At the end of a brisk council meeting held at the beginning of March, he decides to convert the city to ethanol. An independent port will be constructed upstream at the oxbow in the river, a terminal with the capacity to hold ships of all tonnages and the corollary refineries. Fuelled thus, the city will export the surplus of energy to the coast, reverse the trend and shine at the forefront of global eco strategies. Coca, the green city! The Boa rubs his hands together, delighted with his coup, he’s done well. Now he just needs a bridge. A bridge by which they can enter the forest and reach the fertile valleys southeast of the mountain range, a bridge to connect the city to Ocean Bay.

The old Golden Bridge is in the crosshairs. The thing is narrow, it strangles traffic, causing irritation, middle fingers brandished through car windows, slowing the pace and putting business in peril. It doesn’t suffice. The Boa can’t even look at it anymore without flying into a rage. I want to be finished with the slow, the old, the broken down. I want it destroyed. I want it tossed in the trash, the rubbish; I want it to fall into decay, to be torn to shreds. Certain associations, however, are up in arms. Petitions circulate to save the bridge — it’s the soul of our city, a piece of our identity, it holds our memories — deploring the homogenization of cities, all the fast-food joints and clothing-store signs identical from Quito to Vladivostok, specificities of identity caving under capitalist pressure, globalization contaminating the tiniest bit of sidewalk and harmonizing every storefront. The Boa is dumbstruck — he hears but doesn’t understand, doesn’t see the problem, appeals to the desires of youth and modernity: enough! What a drag! What’s wrong with wanting to move forward? And anyway the old bridge is falling into ruin and the river beneath its piers is dark, putrid. Rust wreaks a toxic leprosy on the beams and girders, the wood of the deck is cracking, you can feel it move. The Natives ended up colonizing the little covered stalls lining the bridge deck, tiny little alcoves where they coagulate for entire days, heaped together smoking or half-heartedly selling all kinds of jewellery, charms, pipes, trinkets. Little pieces of crap for little budgets, thinks the Boa: I want it gone.

SO THE BOA wants his bridge. Not just any arch, not just any viaduct hastily dreamed up but a bridge in the image of the new Coca. He wants something large and functional, he wants at least six lanes — a freeway over the river. He wants a unique creation. Scans his debtors, his acquaintances, expresses his desire but no one sends back the interpretation he’s waiting for. In secret, he grabs a piece of paper and a pen and does some sketches of his own, but no matter how fast he draws his lines, trying to capture a pure form — ridiculous at the moment, and touching: dishevelled, maladroit, and miming the gesture of the artist — he can’t quite get it. One of his councillors cleverly suggests that he launch a contest. Such a subject requires expertise, prestige, an architect whose glorious career will carry the ambitions of the city as high and as far as possible. The Boa sees himself as a Medici, a princely patron in a velvet cape, likes himself even more, and far from taking offence, he accepts that a foreign glory could come to build upon his land, thereby raising his own glory higher.

WAS IT BETTER TO CLUTTER UP THE EARTH RATHER than the sky? Was it best to demonstrate strength, opt for a powerful creation, a combination of massive, heavy pieces like the bridge in Maracaibo? Was it best to choose a transparent, ethereal work, a construction that concentrated the material into only a few elements, an option with finesse, like the Millau Viaduct? Was it best to open a city up or weld two landscapes together, to defer to nature, use its lines, and incorporate the structure into it? The Boa can’t decide, he wants everything. He wants innovation and reference, a flourishing enterprise, beauty, and the world record. A man arrives with the solution. His name is Ralph Waldo, he comes from São Paulo: an architect who is both famous and a mystery. He enters the room for the contest auditions, hands free and calm alongside his body, and describes the form that gathers the areas together: to illustrate the adventure of migration, the ocean, the estuary, the river, and the forest, the vined walkway above gorges and the span that plays above the void, he has chosen a highly technological hammock; to demonstrate suppleness and strength, flexibility and resistance to seismic shifts, he has chosen a nautical web of cables and massive concrete anchorings; to symbolize the ambitious city, he has chosen two steel towers planted in the riverbed, skyscrapers power emitters energy catchers; to evoke the myth, he has chosen red. That is, a suspension bridge of steel and concrete. The architect announces measurements comparable to those of the longest suspension bridges in the world, most of them estuary or ocean channel bridges. Length: 6,200 feet; centre suspension span: 4,100 feet; width: 100 feet; height of the deck above the water: 230 feet; height of the towers: 750 feet. A delusion of grandeur, like an enormous desire contained within a very small body. Just the presence of the bridge in the heart of Coca, Waldo assures them, will make the city seem bigger, more open, and more prosperous — a simple trick of proportions in relation to the harmonics of the space, the perception of a crossing greater than that of a bridge, an optical singularity.

GIVE ME THE PLANS AND I’LL BUILD YOU WHAT YOU want, whatever it is, even a bridge to hell — Diderot’s smoking in his office on the twentieth floor of the Héraclès tower, La Défense district, Paris, in front of the bay window, a black mass backlit against the baby-blue pane, large-format man overlooking a confetti capital electrified by Friday night departures — give me the plans, goddammit, the plans, that’s all I need.

THE CHAIRMAN and CEO of Héraclès, interrupted in his flummeries, stepped back and smiled, flinging a folder onto the table, and at the blunt sound of cardboard against the wood — a smack that echoed in the room like a starter’s gun — Diderot took an enormous breath, inflating his rib cage exaggeratedly, and furtively lowered his eyelids: it was happening, the site was his. He didn’t turn around right away towards the messenger, rather savoured the good news: he wouldn’t end on the construction of a new wing in some famous private museum, the addition on a nuclear power plant, or the digging of an umpteenth ultramodern parking lot in a provincial city, no, the men from Comex (the board of execs at Héraclès) were giving him a bridge to close his career, a coronation, managerial shenanigans — he would keep his mouth shut, contain his disgust, would let them come congratulate him, pat him on the shoulder, conclusive slaps that would make him want to smash his fist into their hypocritical faces, but he wouldn’t do anything, would take what he could get, a bridge, would mime docile pride and, as for the rest, the crown and the cajoling, that would all be postmarked return to sender: all he cared about was the work to be done. Of course they would talk within the company, gossip about him getting the field marshal’s baton, Héraclès owes you a lot, thank you my friend, and the young engineers who had rushed into the ranks at the announcement of the opening of the site would have no trouble grumbling in the hallways ’cause, shit, Georges Diderot may have been a legend, but he’s old now, his management methods are frankly not clean cut and he’s not from the inner circle — not a young jackal from the famous École Polytechnique (the X) with ants in his pants, not a showman from the prestigious engineering school les Mines or head of the class at the ParisTech, not a supersonic brain lubricated with force diagrams, functions with multiple variables, derivatives, strength-of-material analyses, Euclidean spaces, and Fourier series. Diderot’s was a complex career, difficult to follow, more lateral than vertical, hybridized to the extreme with all kinds of skills, a mix of freelance star and in-house engineer come in through the back door and ended up reigning over Comex, a guy who smokes in the elevator, who calls janitors and CEOs alike by their first name.

WHEN DIDEROT finally turned around, the man who he ironically called the Grand Chief was in the doorway of his office, and with a raise of his eyebrows indicated the folder, you’ve got some reading to do. Inside the mundane cover were the results of the first surveys done by geotechnicians in Coca and the specifications for the work. Seated at his desk, Diderot flipped through the surveys — which were ordered in reverse.

On the first sheets, he recognized his language, he was at home. Measurements, tables, graphs — these results gave a precise illustration of data from probes recently placed on the ground in Coca, homing devices armed with little explosive charges whose deflagrations were analyzed — noise and propagation of shock waves — in order to understand the reality of the material, its internal morphology, the content of its constitution, its potential. For Diderot, these notes held something terribly moving: it was like reading what reverberates from the little taps of the white cane that the blind person makes against the ground simply in order to walk upon it — but here they had to construct their own white canes, so that they could be trusted — invent them and then manipulate them with care so that they hit the ground correctly, with clean, sharp little taps. This was the perceptible, tender description of a gigantic trial and error and it contained exactly what he loved — this resembled real life.

NIGHT HAD long since fallen and the tower emptied out when he finally took a look at the quantitatives, numbers that lined themselves up or lay themselves out in columns over several pages. Numbers that speak only of themselves, the young ones (formerly moles running through the corridors of graceless high schools) would have said; numbers that have to be coaxed to speak, Diderot would have retorted, rubbing his hands together. These measurements involved other things besides themselves, a certain temporality, an organization of the work. A million cubic yards of concrete. Eighty thousand tons of steel. Eighty thousand miles of cable. Diderot absorbed these figures without letting himself be impressed, whispered them to himself, and quickly translated and prolonged their meaning: planning the construction of an on-site concrete mixing plant and anticipating the delivery of its components — cement, gravel, water, sand — foreseeing the steel supplies, coordinating their transport to Coca, and above all, once they reached the Pontoverde platform, having them brought to the bridge site beside the river. There would be quarrels among the engineers — the partisans of the land route would argue for the construction of pathways — roads or rails — that would avoid lengthy and expensive load changes, since the metal would be loaded at its production sites in the steel factories of Blackoak Inc. in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and unloaded directly at the foot of the bridge piers; while those partisans of the marine route would argue for the smoothness and convenience of floating barges that would migrate along the river, and these latter, Diderot among them, would win out.

DIDEROT GOT up again and went to the window. A bridge man again. Good. He exulted in silence — building a bridge is still a source of elation, even in a stinking hole like Coca, a dump that no one’s ever heard of. The ultimate job for an engineer. He paced in front of the bay window, then pressed his burning forehead to the pane that crackled with lights of the night like paper on fire, and already the thought of disconcerting his entourage amused him, they were so quick to compliment him; the thought of thwarting this childish admiration because, come on, the symbolism of the thing — the link, passage, movement blah blah blah — went straight over his head, he didn’t give a rat’s ass: what really excited him was the technical epic, putting individual competencies to work together within a collective project; what thrilled him was the sum of decisions contained within a construction, the succession of short events leading to the permanence of the work, its inscription in time. What filled him with joy was to operate the life-sized fulfillment of thousands of hours of calculations.

SITE MEETING — SOMETIME AFTER SEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning and Diderot is talking, standing mountainous at the end of the oval table. Bare room, thin partitions, thin carpet hastily placed, smell of glue, smell of new, freeze-dried coffee, classroom chairs dragged in. These accommodate some fifty individuals, among them Sanche Cameron, the crane operator, and Summer Diamantis, the girl in charge of concrete — Diderot watches these two surreptitiously, the boy with the dazzled face, the girl who takes notes without lifting her head. He directed the comment at them when he said, fingers joined in a bouquet over his chest, hey, rookies, call me Diderot.

HE CLEARS his throat and begins in a loud voice. Okay, let’s get started. Plan of action: one, dig the ground — he lifts his thumb; two, dredge and clear the river — he lifts his index; three, get started on the concrete — he lifts his middle finger. Turns to pull down a wall-mounted screen, starts up a laptop, turns back, slowly surveys the audience, and then slams down the first words.

So, dig the ground. He turns to the geotechnical map projected on the screen, takes a zapper from his back pocket: two types of soil coexist here. One — a red point of light lands on the map, perfectly synchronous: Coca side. The limestone plateau of the high plain. Arid on the surface, fractured farther down — hard, with a tender heart, it’s the trick of the cream filling, we know it well, we’re not crazy about it, but it’s better than the opposite, right? The room agrees, laughter erupts, soft and complicit. The problem — Diderot whips around without a smile to look at the audience — we’ve got limestone rocks sitting on marly clay that could cause landslides. Be very careful. Two — same choreography: Edgefront side. Damp and inhabited ground, roots to tear out, we’ll have to pierce the glebe and go deeper to get to the mineral in order to have a strong foothold for the foundation. So, two types of ground, which is where we get two types of material, but one single strategy: the Neolithic gesture! In other words, cleave the ground — and as ever he joins the action to the word, the blade of his hand slices the space in front of him, he brings the scene to life, he likes theatre. Finally, he recapitulates in a loud voice pointing two red spots one after the other on the map: we’ll start by making two holes in order to anchor the bridge. Got it? Good. Moving on. Dredge the river — Diderot continues while the map changes on the screen: we’ll proceed as usual, we’ll send in the dredger, clean it out, remove the sludge, stow the biodegradable materials in clearings here, and here — two consecutive shots of the zapper in the forested area — and put the contaminated materials on a barge that will travel all the way back downriver and shove this shit four thousand feet down into the ocean. There you have it. We signed agreements with the municipality, it has to be done. And back there it’s not over, we clear out the river, dig the channel again, enlarge it all the way up to the future port, and then we consolidate, we raise the embankments where the steel cables will be anchored, and we dig, we dig the river bottom to embed the towers.

Notes being taken in notebooks and spidery scrawl of the men in light short-sleeved shirts, it’s hot, they open the portholes to let in some air, the room swells with the clamour of the outside — zooming on the freeways, hubbub of the stock market, panic of wild ducks, putt putt putt of motors on dinghies out on the river, barking of dogs, gunshots — and Diderot’s voice coils with all this without drowning it out. Funny soundtrack, thinks Sanche Cameron who had closed his eyes for a moment, since he didn’t close them at all last night, seized as he was beneath the sheets by the restlessness that had overtaken him, so happy that the site was starting up, that the grand life waiting for him there was finally beginning. He slants a glance sideways at Summer as she tries desperately to write everything down, tells himself it’s just like a girl to be meticulous like that. Diderot has started speaking again.

And now, the concrete. Your domain, Diamantis! — he turns towards Summer, their eyes meet, the girl immediately sits up straight in her chair, Diderot spreads his arms and makes circles in the air, he adds flatly: you’re responsible for feeding the site, Diamantis, you’re in charge of perpetual motion. Then he retracts the screen with a sharp movement the way you’d pull on a blind, turns off his computer, and circulates copies of a handout detailing phase one of construction. Since no one has spoken any questions aloud, everyone leans over their documents, comments to one another about the technical data, and then the surveyor confirms the plan measurements, the steward presents the menus for the first two weeks, they ask about beer at lunchtime — one 473 ml can per worker — and Diderot cuts them off, forget it, white with rage. Get out, all of you. Meeting’s over.

Summer Diamantis has only one idea in mind: to go see the mixing plant. Shuffling of papers, repositioning of chairs, she holds herself apart at the end of the table, dawdles, pretending to read over her notes, waits for the men to finish leaving the room, and now some of them turn towards her from the doorway, see you tomorrow, Diamantis! And ready to roll, eh, Diamantis!

IT’S ALMOST nine o’clock in the morning when she leaves the building and the heat takes her by surprise, the hot breath of it, and though nothing budges in the sky, a cushion of burning vapour grabs her by the nape, already she’s mopping her forehead. She sets off across the site, a hundred yards on the diagonal, rocky ground the colour of plaster, crunch of her steps in the silence; she continues past the cranes and the parked vehicles that gleam, the bluish sheds; steps over pairs of rails and goes round the water tanks; the earth smokes in her wake and quickly coats her ankles in a fine flour, not a living soul on this side, nothing, it’s crazy, she looks at her watch mechanically, thinks tomorrow at this time we will have started, continues on her way, throat tight, step growing firmer, silhouette precise against the backdrop of the tidy site, hand soon held as a visor at the level of her eyebrows; she speeds up, repeats Diderot’s words to herself, maxillae strained by a smile that clogs her mouth since she doesn’t open her lips (too restless, she too) — he’d said: the concrete, Diamantis, that’s your domain — she’d nodded her head in all seriousness, yes — the plant, the towers, the bins, the drums, all that, that’s you — his gesture was wide and his voice loud, he’d looked her deep in the eyes, he’d designated her place. All this, she sees it now that she’s reached the plant, all this takes up about a hundred yards by sixty — in other words, a fair portion of territory, edged by a quay on the river. Summer immediately begins to familiarize herself with the internal organization. Her eyes move from the river to the quay, from the quay to the giant mounds placed in the centre of the space — cement, gravel, sand — following the line of the conveyor belts that link the materials cone to the blood-orange concrete towers, notes the mixing buildings, walks past the control room, inspects each of the twelve mixing trucks, drums aligned neatly and ready to go, lingers by the recycling pit, the basins for water treatment and reuse of aggregate and waste concrete. Panoramic tracking shot, traffic plan, Summer takes in the validity of the organism: an open-air factory, a concrete factory. So all this is me?

IT’S UNDERSTANDABLE that she would have her doubts. Although the Coca bridge had selected her, Summer had not always been chosen. This contract redeemed in one fell swoop a particular event from her childhood, an event that was labelled a core trauma by a psychologist who coloured checkerboards on graph paper during their sessions: when her mother left, she took Summer’s little brother with her, in her arms, and left Summer behind. Not enough time for two children, not enough money either, not enough space in the one-bedroom apartment in the chic suburb of Saint-Raphaël where she was going to start a new life. Rationality, then, pragmatism, you’re big enough, you’re seven now, my darling, my darling, she murmured, and also the little girl was so much like her father, didn’t need anyone, so brave and other suspicious caresses on top of her head. Thus Summer stayed with the ex-husband who had asked for it — since he’d fallen into an admirably regimented and quite sincere polygamy. So you’re stuck with me, then, he said to her the night they found themselves alone at the kitchen table before a Pyrex dish in which a shepherd’s pie was getting cold. From then on, it was Saint-Raphaël during school holidays, her mother didn’t ask much of her. Neither did her father, in his own way. The little girl was left in peace. At least we’d like to believe that. Would she have had to be born as a boy in order to be chosen by her mother? Would she then have had to replace, for her father, the pudgy little male carried off to the French Riviera? We can see that she brought herself up as a boy, or rather how she imagined a boy should be raised, which led her to consider optional and even random phases as mandatory. She equipped herself in such a way as to compensate for the lacking maternal touch: soccer and video games, comic books and sci-fi novels, math, physics, and industrial design. Always dressed the same — jeans, a jacket, not many colours, hair in a ponytail — she learned to take apart a moped motor and then put it back together; during parties she took her place by the stereo and DJed rather than lining up against the wall at the first bars of a slow song, drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney — Marlboros, you guessed it — cowboy for cowboy, she’s an expert on westerns, unbeatable on questions of all the Rios and all the Rivers, which will end up being very useful, as we’ll see. Tough, concise, indefatigable, dry-eyed girl of steel — someone you could count on, in short, someone you didn’t have to baby — how’s it going, big girl? What are you thinking about? It was so obvious, so clumsy, that no one saw through her strongman poses, this outrageous sham — especially her father, caught up in a multiplex harem from which he struggled to extricate himself, and who congratulated himself each day for this child who asked so little of him, didn’t make demands, wasn’t into drama, never cried; a girl, finally, who was so little like a girl is what he thought, watching from the window as she left through the garden gate, a good little soldier, yes, how lucky he was. We can understand how Summer, encouraged in this way, began to see kids her age as lesser beings. She hastened to escape their obsession with love, their interminable confessions, their masochistic laments, the acidulous fragility they put on so willingly in order to seduce. In so doing deprived herself of their skin, their laughter, their nocturnal complicities, their solidarity — foolishly deprived herself of their sweetness. And decided for herself, at thirteen years old, one day when she let herself be felt up at the movies by a boy who she liked but who didn’t care about her one bit, she knew it — he kneaded her breasts shamelessly, slid his hand up between her thighs, and scraped the roof of her mouth with a harsh tongue — decided that love, okay, fine, but let’s not get carried away. Not at any price. Thus deciding something for herself, to do it for the rest of her life without glutting herself on hogwash like the heart has its reasons blah blah blah — love allowing us to make all kinds of stupid moves, to lose our time, to surrender our skin, to clash and wound the better to devour each other immediately after, to scream in stairwells, to call each other at all hours of the night, to drive drunk through the hostile countryside, ’cause that’s how it happens, that’s the only way — yes, for a girl so young to judge love like this, coldly, clear-eyed, was certainly surprising. She zigzagged between boys. They found her hard, cold, proud, and all in all not very feminine. These were their reproaches. It’s hard now to measure the incredible strength she needed to call upon in order to maintain her independence and the splendour of solitude, to choose that she would never again be placed heart pounding on the scale, or “stuck” in second place for lack of being chosen. At twenty, she looked affectivity up and down with a free smile — what does a free smile look like? What does it look like, Summer Diamantis’s beautiful smile?

She liked school and sports, she liked competition. Had tried taking part in other selections where she excelled too often without winning: any time there were only two candidates left, a mute panic drilled into her solar plexus and paralyzed her momentum, and they picked the other one. A token finalist, rarely the champion, Summer got a label: it was confirmed that the choice of her mother, whose heart (and the square feet of plush carpet that went with it) she failed to win, had resulted in a failure complex: she often stayed slouched on the players’ bench, even if she did so elegantly. Her father, immune to these analyses, suppressed such propositions with ever the same bored silence and rewarded his daughter every morning with a debauched British smile yawning vaguely no big deal. Then came the Blondes who don’t take any bullshit and who beautifully inked out this jinx the way you’d push a lock of hair back from your forehead sharply, for more visibility, more presence, and more joy. They made Summer part of their club one July night while all three of them were spread out on the grass in the stadium, their bodies arranged in arrows in front of the end zone, after Summer had blocked their penalty shots with happy approximate dives. There was no question of second place: they needed a third to share the cost of a rental in Manchester in August. Summer had seen them before around the club, had envied their blondeness, their heads held high, and had admired their getups even though they had also irritated her with their hysterical giggles, the showy complicity of girls. James Diamantis must have watched the scene from the terrace of the lodge, radio glued to his ear, cigarillo under Panama hat, and when his daughter came back, he delicately inquired about what she would be doing in August, put a hand in his wallet, and gave her a nice pile of money.

A YEAR GOES by and Summer is admitted to the National School of Public Works. Her father takes her out that evening to celebrate her success — he had these conventional gestures that he dispensed with the ostentation of one who wants to appear as a man of principle, in spite of his debauched life. The scene takes place in a dance hall on rue de Malte: flattering chiaroscuro, champagne, “It Had to Be You,” the passably decadent paraphernalia of an aging womanizer, this is what Summer thinks with her legs tangled under the chair. Before the floating islands arrive, James Diamantis places a construction hard hat on his daughter’s plate, looks at her with a rare tenderness, says you’ll have to start thinking about taking better care of yourself. Summer shakes her head, laughing, embarrassed, goes to the washroom, puts the hard hat on, looks at herself in the mirror, hands against the edge of the sink, thinks she looks awful, feels manipulated. And while the crooner slicks his hair back with brilliantine backstage before starting the second set, while her father listens to the messages on his cellphone, Summer, red, hurt, and feeling as though her brain has been slapped, grows drunk with rage and breaks the mirror with great swings of the hard hat.

IN HER LAST year of grad school, Summer chooses concrete as her specialty. People around her laugh, grimace, concrete, that’s not attractive, not even a little bit sexy, what is she trying to prove? Are you sure, Summer? James asks her one day from his far-off planet and she, foolishly emboldened by the question, answers swiftly that, yes, quite sure, when she’s specialized it will be easier to find work. You have such crazy ideas! James turns the pages of his paper, she’s stuck there, furious, dries her lacrimal canals by sticking her index fingers in the corners of her eyes. More months pass and in the spring, the concrete gets its revenge. A dinner on the terrace, a candleholder, six place settings, wicker chairs, a short stool for James Diamantis in a new Panama hat — he’s prepared the meal, let the wine breathe, cut a bouquet of wisteria, brushed his hat. The guests are their neighbours. Summer feels pretty, she talks, she drinks. This young lady is studying concrete, believe it or not; James serves the wine in unmatched glasses. A guy is there who Summer thinks is cute. He asks her what she does. Public works, I’m a concrete engineer. Oh. The guy lifts his head. His eyes screech over her and she knows now that they will spend the night together. He is amazed. That’s exactly what I would have wanted to do, something strong, tangible, a job that’s in direct contact with the real.

SUMMER WALKS away from the plant and reels towards the river, heart suddenly heavy, approaches a little stretch of green at the end of the quay, tufts of grass have cracked the asphalt, the water laps against the bank, she crouches down, pushes up her sleeves and redoes her ponytail, shakes her head, looks at the opposite bank, impenetrable, throws three stones in the water hup hup hup, a hummingbird manoeuvres close to the river, turquoise speck above the golden-brown liquid, I’m here now, I’m here now, she closes her eyes, I’m here, then stands up, dizziness, thinks hunger, jetlag, thinks tomorrow I have to be in good shape, knows finally where she is, black veil for a moment and then again the ecru sky.

AT THE OTHER END OF THE PONTOVERDE PLATFORM, Sanche Alphonse Cameron is also getting his bearings. His “office” is a windowed cabin, six feet square, set at the top of a tower crane, a translucent box more than a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. He reaches it via an elevator that slides up and down the mast, but some days, to be mischievous (read: to impress the crowd), he climbs two by two the bars of a hoop ladder without pausing on the landings. I’m staying in shape is what he claims when those on the ground are alarmed to see him rise, frail little guy, all the way up the structure. Once inside his cab Sanche sits at the console, back straight against the seat, and carries out the steps of taking his position — checks the control panel (headlights, joystick, walkie-talkies, function displays and graphic readouts, anemometer, push buttons); checks the brakes and the safety system; settles his hands on the controls and concentrates. He spots Summer crossing the esplanade, follows her determined silhouette with his eyes, watches her disappear behind the machines parked near the plant and then re-emerge at the water’s edge, the blonde straw of her hair smooth in the sunlight, what’s she up to?

He likes it in this technological enclave where his small size no longer causes him grief, since he is now a hundred and fifty-six feet four inches tall, since he is massive; he’s comfortable in this paradoxical chamber that incorporates him into limitless space, while each movement is controlled to an eighth of an inch, in front of this dashboard that endows the tips of his fingers with an insane amount of power since each thrust of the joystick is a matter of precision, minutia, vigilance; he feels at home in this cramped room where, eight hours a day, the exemplary nature of Imperial units is proven, a system that calibrates space in relation to the human body, in relation to the foot, indeed, to his abdomen, to the jut of his nose like an eagle’s beak, to his long slender feet and his baby giraffe’s eyelashes. From up in the crane cab, Sanche casts a panopticon eye on the site and surroundings — this confers upon him a new sense of power from an ideal distance. He is the solitary epicentre of a landscape in motion, untouchable and cut off, he is the king of the world.

And yet, in the beginning, he lived on Earth like everyone else, and more precisely in Dunkirk — proletarian concrete, harbour industry, family tourism, cool cheeks and wind on your forehead, dunes and light beers — where he was born in the municipal hospital one Sunday in November 1978, the sole offspring in a late brood. It was a miracle: no one would have bet a cent on his mother, forty-two years old; she herself had long since stopped lighting candles to the Virgin, rubbing her belly with castor oil, or wearing red undergarments — she herself had stopped believing. The baby had barely uttered his primal cry and even though he presented a skinny little body accompanied by a disturbing face — flattened forehead, wrinkled yellowish skin, two black marbles that never blinked — he was already praised to the skies. He was the first and the last child, beauty itself and love personified. Amen, amen. But the father — what did he have to say? Nothing, precisely; he lay the stones of his dry silhouette against the counter of a seedy bar and kept quiet, dumbfounded by his paternity and even more flabbergasted by his wife — a girl from Alentejo who he met in a parish youth group and who had never had anything but conjugal attentions for him, an unvarying assortment of heavy meals, starched shirts, submissive nods of her head, and dominical sex — he remains prostrate, like the reckless driver caught by the patrol and stripped of a chunk of cash. He is no longer the master of his house: strengthened by her child, his wife has become a different woman, she radiates new strength. Rules the house, holds the purse strings, decides on the priorities, sings out loud. An end to the trembling hands and the little voice that begged for grocery money at the beginning of the week, an end to the sad evenings waiting for her old man, an end to shame and regrets. Life’s course now hinges on a single axis: the child will be dressed like a prince, housed like a master, fed like a prelate: they’ll bleed themselves dry. The father drives heavy loads between Dunkirk and Rotterdam or Paris, he’s often absent, so the mother has free rein. Accumulates as many hours as she can to bulk up her wad: in the morning, housekeeping in the offices of the port, at noon the cafeteria of a private school downtown — she feeds her boy there before lunch is served, keeping aside the best pieces of meat for him, pinching the best fruit, doubling the portions — and in the evening takes care of the two little daughters of a bourgeois couple next door, children she observes with interest, and bases his education on them. She brushes Sanche’s hair till it shines, drives him to the library, speaks to him in fine French. Enrols him in the same classical dance classes that the young neighbours go to — he is a little prince in white tights, held up as an example. Sanche is a frail, solitary, and precise child; clothed in ruffled wimples and royal-blue velvet knickers, he bounces around the living room. The father can’t stand it, yells at his wife, you’re making him into a little faggot, so he drags the child to the stadium on his Sundays off, Sanche is happy to please his father but catches a chill in the bleachers, a cold and an earache: the couple quarrels. At eleven years old, when people ask what he wants to do when he grows up, Sanche hesitates solemnly between a conductor and an archaeologist, ambitions that junior high erodes inescapably, that high school (private schools, his mother knows other housekeepers there) strives to tame: the boy is a good student, he needs a real job, why not the construction industry? With this direction, the boy keeps mum, the father is satisfied, the mother desolate. One morning she buttons up her black silk dress, belts her Alcantara coat with the rabbit-fur collar, and goes to deliver three determined knocks on the principal’s door: her son is Portuguese, does that mean he has to become a mason? Well-argued protestation and cold anger shaded with the suspicion of racism: they’re keeping us down. The two-faced principal reassures her, construction presents a Pleiades of occupations — positive impact of the word Pleiades on the mother who sees sparkling brilliance, and perhaps even a little bit of heaven — and finally, after obtaining a bachelor of technology, the crane reconciles everyone, tall and flamboyant, a centrepiece. Operating one requires superior qualifications, an eagle eye (a vision that resists glare and perceives relief), a fine ear (auditory acuity in a noisy environment is tested before getting a job), and the cold blood of a marksman. The becalmed mother accepts the crane, and sees in it an aristocratic position, one where you stay clean, sheltered, detached, with dry feet, high above the mass of workers who swarm below with their hands in the muck, sees it as a good position that could possibly come with middle-management status, while the father slips a word in Sanche’s ear, you’ll be cushy, free, no boss on your back, and adds as he puts an arm around his shoulders, complicit for the first time: like me in my truck.

Sanche suffers from neither vertigo nor the difficulty of working alone in a small space; he has a sense of balance and of responsibilities, a sense of safety — cranes are dangerous — and last but not least he’s blessed with an incredible capacity for concentration: he’s found his place. He learns to drive and operate cranes — lattice boom truck cranes, crawler cranes, telescopic cranes of all tonnages — he takes the related training courses for drillers, for equipment managers — he heads a team of thirty people on the site of a tunnel in Luxembourg — and goes overseas, Nouakchott, Mauritania, where he oversees loading and unloading operations between boats and the oil-rig drilling platform. It’s here that he meets the man who introduces him to politics, and who he listens to at first simply in order to beat the boredom that comes when the breaks are long, when weariness takes over from fatigue. The man works on the rig, he’s Portuguese like Sanche, took refuge in France during Salazar’s wars. Over a couple of sleepless nights, while the warm and salty ocean air corrodes their skin just as it oxidizes the steel ladders, he introduces Sanche into a new immensity that echoes like a cathedral: the Revolution. His voice captivates the crane operator at first, black flow exploding everything in its passage — fuel like the oil they’ve come to extract off the coast of Africa. Words spin in the atmosphere, high-powered lassos able to capture the substance of thoughts, with a flick of the wrist capable of bringing to mind recalcitrant concepts that seem rather outmoded in this early twenty-first century. Sanche is drawn to the theory immediately, sees clarity in it, and power; he pronounces certain words for the first time, words like peoples, dialectic, collective, alienation, emancipation, words like capital and oppression, expressions like historical materialism or enlightened avant-garde of the working class, he turns them over on his tongue to feel their weight, their thickness, to appropriate them, as though these magical terms were the revelators of the world’s logic, of its form, its mechanism, its flows, and its future. He takes all he can from this, it’s a good warm-up, this is what he tells the man over their last handshake at dawn one morning in November, when the ardour of the all-night discussion has dried out both their mouths. After that, he returns to France, and his jobs are back to back without any time off; he becomes one of the best files in the temp agency that manages his career. And now: the bridge.

IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF THE BRIDGE, THE FIRST morning. Polaroid dawn. Blacks that lighten and whites that get darker, progressive pigmentation of all the greens — fluorescent, emerald, pistachio, olive, forest, lime, turquoise, Wrigley’s Doublemint, spinach and malachite, chartreuse and mint cream — becoming fixed on the retina, and the river is there, supple, calm folds, long fluorescent grasses stretching out on the surface, thickets drift, as do cans and bottles: the water is milky and dirty.

Diderot has walked around the perimeter of the Pontoverde platform which is his domain from now on, a surface of two square miles, cleared out, asphalted, open to the river via a long empty quay and striated with rails that link hangars, workshops, maintenance and repair shops, team facilities, engineering offices, cafeterias, and locker rooms. And now he’s smoking a Lusitania. In profile he really does have a big nose, a prominent chest; his Ray-Bans are pushed up on his forehead and his shirt is untucked, he’s ready to go, he’s exactly in his element, and at the bottom of his pocket his hand taps a secret tempo. It’s the peak hour, the hour before all hands on deck, the hour of silence before battle, and the moment the skier stands poised at the top of a steep run — evaluate the slope before launching forward, visualize the route, go over the difficulties, the turns, the bumps, the hollows, the patch of black ice just after the twelfth gate, take note of possible acceleration zones, the exact flexion of the knees needed to jump and then glide on the last curve, the exact thrust of the chest, balance of the head, position of the arms — the hour of meteorological worry, and Diderot has his preferences, knows what he needs: continental climate, dry and rough winters, hot summers. For a man like him, there’s nothing worse than rain, wind, and storms — nothing worse than mud.

ON THE OTHER side of the gates, the men are already waiting. The newcomers and the local workforce, silent types with hair in side parts, cigarettes dangling, clean hands, and lunch boxes tucked under their arms, guys in tracksuits, baseball caps front to back, visors at the neck or a hood hanging between the shoulder blades, young guys with cheap sneakers, a handful of women — but it’s confirmed that there are no kids there, contrary to the rumour and the alerts from international organizations. Among them, in priority, are Natives aggregated in groups of three or four, solid, with closed faces, hired in large numbers since they’re immune to vertigo and used to the climate, to parasites, familiar with the terrain because they’re at home — the Boa had ordered their presence on-site, a neutralizing strategy. Of what awaits them, they know little. The unemployed Natives who had applied had asked about the qualifications to emphasize — which ones? And the hiring agent, the one who typed the names into the computer before handing over magnetic ID badges that allow them access to the site when swiped through the time clock, had pinched his biceps: qualifications, my darling, involve three things: muscle, muscle, and more muscle. No one had laughed, and everyone had showed up.

When the doors open, they move forward onto the site like a Roman tortoise. There are nearly eight hundred of them. Mo Yun is there, ready, a clean T-shirt over his hollow chest and miner’s glasses around his neck, he looks all around him, trying to imitate those who surround him — only knows the words that ricochet off of kitchen sinks — and floats in the crowd like he floats in his blue-collar overalls nabbed at a thrift store for fifty cents, standing on tiptoe, head back so he can breathe more easily, so light that the human mass lifts him from the ground and moves him, so thin that he’s carried along by the crowd, and among others by Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo, who force their way forward a few feet from him, don’t want to let themselves be pushed around, outdistanced — the day before they had been able to sell part of their loot at a cruddy apartment in the Church district, a woman had weighed the gold on an electronic scale while a Doberman licked her feet, and once they’d pocketed the thin wad they immediately blew it all at the arcades, got all excited drinking warm beers at the consoles, laughing like kids with their hands on the joysticks, then went to catch the ferry to Edgefront when night had fallen, once their pockets were scraped down to the last quarter, and there, on the other bank, they had bummed around looking for some digs, some little squat where they could sleep, and without really knowing it, disoriented, they had walked towards the forest, that same forest that had held them like a fishing basket, the same one they had fled — and farther back, at the rear of the multitude, Katherine Thoreau moves forward, cellphone to her ear, tells her sons to buckle the little one well in her stroller if they go out along Colfax and reminds them to read, not to stay slumped in front of the TV all day, not to fight. And brushing past her without seeing her, Soren Cry, suspicious, hooded eyes, shady complexion, switchblade like a comb in the back pocket of his jeans.

All of them reach the workers’ facilities after beeping their sesame at the front gate, and once they get to the locker room, take possession of the metal locker where they hang their clothes and grab their hard hats, mandatory since the construction of the Hoover Dam in Colorado and then the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in the mid-1930s. They settle in and groups form instinctively: those who speak the same language, those who travelled here together, those who come from the same town — including the guys from Detroit, who were driven out of the city when the car factories closed down, twenty of them, young, a fearsome gang, it’s as though a chain riveting their working strength to mechanized procedures had broken clean and liberated their gestures, so they take up space in the locker room, take big steps and windmill their arms, talk loud — and finally those who found themselves side by side in front of the gates and offered one another a light for their smokes. The Natives also gather together in a corner of the room, they’re grey beneath the neon lights, slow, chests tattooed with foliage from shoulder blades to waists, they speak together in low voices. And then the siren sounds — now it’s time to go.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HUGE WASTELAND THAT borders the river, a man shouts in a port voice, Anchorage One, Anchorage Two, and so on until Anchorage Six. Men jump from shuttle boats that have carried them along the river to here, move forward on the quay built roughly against the edge of the bank, and form small teams that walk towards the end of the work site where two enormous stationary machines sparkle in the sun.

ANCHORAGE. ANCHOR the bridge. Dig to ensure solid foundations for the structure: two holes in the riverbed to plant the piers that will hold up the towers, and another hole on each bank — thirty million cubic yards of concrete will be poured before the cables are placed.

Tackle the bridge from below, then, start from where it’s darkest, dirtiest, most elementary, begin in reverse, advance by receding, start by subtracting, digging, emptying, smashing. Work like a dog. We are dogs, this is what Diderot thinks as he docks in the Zodiac and it hits him once again that in order to create a work, to erect it before the eyes of the world, to make it rise up from the ground, you have to first stick your head into the dirt and the depths of the ground. And Mo Yun, who’s wiping his precious glasses on the fabric of his overalls, says exactly the same thing to himself, because he’s one of those who thinks first about the hole before evaluating the structure. He remembers that there were not always mines in Datong, they didn’t just appear one fine morning as though issued from a divine breath, chasms nearly seven hundred feet deep buttressed like cathedrals, complete with open-wire cages to carry men and mine-cart tracks down, no, these gigantic caverns had to be built, and one day, walking between his parents in the red mud that coated the city streets as soon as the first rains came, an idea had seized him, alarmed him, and with his feet sunk in the ground of the People’s Square (transformed into a thick and viscous wading pool), he had asked his parents: what was here before? What was here, even before Datong shone as a first-class industrial city of the People’s Republic? The man and woman, of the same height and wiry build, had frowned, and then remembered, as through a haze, emerging for a moment from the coma of labour — yes, they had known the city when it was still covered in green, the suburbs where miserable little troglodyte hovels had proliferated, the skinny fowl and the little grey pig, they had known the ground when it was intact, but were sincerely puzzled by their son’s question, because that was a long, long time ago; it was another time, a time before the Revolution — in other words, before the light of Reason had shone across the country; that was the prehistory of humanity and they lowered their eyes chastely, surprised, it’s true, they had been among those who had built the tool that rendered them useful, that had made them into agents of Progress, with their own hands they had made the iron cage that had thrown them below, they had dug the holes.

Mo looks at the field and looks at the men, fear sweeps the ground out from under him, his head spins, and he has to fight the urge to run away. Before him, the excavators warm up their motors and set themselves in motion, slowly, mechanical mastodons capable of digging a hole the size of a football field and eighty feet deep in a single day. His eyes widen and he stifles a cry, he thinks he recognizes them; they’ve travelled all the way from the open-pit mines, all the way from Datong, from the crucible of black mud that he’d left behind. They’ve found him here, crossed the ocean and come up the river at a high price, in dismantled pieces they’ve come to remind him. The men assembled are admiring them, ah, the heavy artillery of Pontoverde, while Mo is seized by a nightmare, stunned, no longer hearing the foreman who harangues them as though they’re an army heading into combat — boys, we’re attacking the anchorage phase, we’ve got a bridge to build, a bridge that will be the most beautiful bridge in the world — Mo panics, tucks his head down between his shoulders, and moves forward to dissolve into the Anchorage Five team.

A HUNDRED and fifty feet from Mo, Soren Cry’s head also spins — crazy, all these guys in a daze — at the first shout of anchorage. But it’s not the proclamation of the inaugural phase of construction that he hears, not these orders shouted as though they were performing a military manoeuvre, leaving the barracks, not this bombast meant to galvanize the workers: it’s the call of a wolf that tears at him, and with it the shame of having been thrown out of paradise lost. In another life, Soren Cry had lived in Anchorage, Alaska — he would speak of it like this, he would say “in another life,” because this past no longer belongs to him, he can’t even tell the story, but oh he feels it like a burning brick in the back corner of his brain; he had liked his life there, felt no different from the other guys who passed through the place, men disinclined to conversation, seasonal workers whose focus was hardly distracted by bowling, beer, and sex. Soren works as a carpenter first, on a boat-building site. After three days, he calls his mother from a telephone booth at lunchtime — an extraordinary gesture for him, since he doesn’t really speak anymore — clears his throat and says: I’m gonna stay here, this is the city for me, I think it’s gonna work out. At the other end of the line, the woman with her hair in pale-green rollers and a housecoat the same colour nods her head without really knowing what to think, this enthusiasm is suspicious, doesn’t sound like Soren — so incapable she is of seeing the possibility of such a conversion in him, she imagines at first that he’s in the clutches of a sect, drugged, in danger. Meanwhile in Anchorage, Soren likes living far away from his mother, loves the blue light and the glassy cold. The darkness that bathes the streets eight months out of twelve saves him from his own ugly face. It gives him a second skin that protects, a camouflage that hides: he dissolves into the polar night with a newfound joy and quickly gets used to this place, this wild life where men live side by side with great furred mammals: bears make garbage out of houses, linger in the change rooms of stadiums, swagger on the shores; moose hang out in the parking lots of supermarkets; grizzlies venture right up to the doors of the McDonald’s; and finally, above all, there are wolves. Death prowls, men are armed, all around are enormous and carnivorous animals, and Soren feels more alive here than he has anywhere else and makes his way among all of them. Once the construction is finished, he becomes a warehouseman in a fish factory, then a bus driver. In the end he knows the city like the back of his hand, the smallest street, the most unremarkable suburb. He drives his little yellow four-wheel-drive bus, picks up kids after school, helps the disabled, even waves to the old folks. Often after his shift, when night has fallen, he drives north, gets out of the car, and moves forward into hostile nature. At the foot of the first ice hills, he listens to the rustling of space, becomes part of it. Listens to the wolves. Calls to them. Then one night a woman is there, recording the pack, crouching in the dark. These human cries are wrecking her work, she shouts at him in the night. In the end they find each other in the darkness — she’s a researcher in a zoology lab, he knows the place well. Soon she comes to live with him in his one-bedroom apartment where the electric heat dries out their hair and makes their eyes red. Soren cooks for her, they drink quietly and go out on farther and farther excursions into the wild. And then it all goes to shit. One morning, Soren flees the city, takes the first plane for Chicago, gets on a Greyhound, eyes glazing before the dreary, muggy countryside that comes back to him all at once, sticky as fate. He heads towards Kentucky. The next morning, seeing him come through the door of their house, his mother understands but says nothing. He sits down on the couch, takes off his shirt: his winter coat is spattered with brownish stains and so are the bottoms of his jeans. She doesn’t ask any questions, just stuffs everything into the washing machine and turns it on, so happy he’s home.

THE EXCAVATORS churn up the ground, the men dig, and they’re off. The field seems to offer itself up without resistance, loose, cleared now of all human habitation, though the imprints of geometric shapes in the earth attest to the fact that, until just recently, this ground was occupied. Strips of thick grass border these bare surfaces, traces of tires brush them, some tracks layered so thickly they leave crevices in the earth; there are several stinking pits, hearths covered with fine-grained ash, and if you look closely, if you pay attention as you lean closer to the ground, you can still find lots of things here to fill a trash can.

Diderot trips over a deflated soccer ball and tucks it under his arm. He knows little about the expropriation campaign that preceded the start of the project. On this field, for example, the inhabitants had been reluctant to leave, complicating the task of the men from Pontoverde. The latter had protested at first — no one here possesses the least title of ownership, in fact these people are nothing but squatters who, after years, put their mobile homes up on concrete blocks, slapped a roof onto their sophisticated tents, weatherproofed their wood cabins — like the second little piggy’s house — dwellings all rigged up with satellite antennae on the roofs. Nothing worse than squatters’ rights, the Boa had cursed, scratching his head, we’re screwed. Pontoverde had finally hurried in an armada of super-technical young lawyers armed with laughable repossession notices, but the people were dogged and quick, they knew their rights, the jurists didn’t have a leg to stand on and the furious Boa demanded they be sent home: he would do the negotiating himself. New, functional lodgings in the suburbs of the city were offered to the inhabitants. Some of the women went to visit them, suspicious, haughty, inspecting the taps, testing the switches, flushing the toilets. They came back spitting no, rather die than leave their homes. Cameras were set up in the field and before long these families were given the chance to speak every evening. Their refusal to submit was praised, as were their contempt for modernity and their freedom. The sausages speared on sticks and cooked over a wood fire, barefoot kids growing like wild grass, the warmth of community against the anonymity of prefabricated houses, urban solitude, and individualist instincts. These images warbled of endless holidays, the coolness of poor-but-happy princes: the inhabitants of the field became heroes. According to the Boa, all this was a bluff, and the bids rose higher. He smiled: would they really prefer their potholed strip of grass on the river’s edge to a new duplex, these tribes, these huge families, these marginal, long-haired characters? But soon, weary and fearing the negative effects of a police raid at dawn, billy clubs in hand, evacuating the dwellings and pushing screaming families into vans before work on the bridge even began, the Boa turned again to Pontoverde. The company would compensate the inhabitants, pay for the moving costs, and find housing for everyone downtown.

A MILE TO the south, Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo jumped onto the dredger, side by side — these two are joined at the hip, sleep under the same blanket at night, drink from the neck of the same bottle in the same tin shack hidden on the green bank — watched the movement of the group on the beach behind, and were soon spotted by the engineer Verlaine, who took down their names in a spiral notebook before leading them through increasingly narrow passageways into the machine room where the din was so loud no one spoke anymore. Duane and Buddy had never been in a boat of this size — the dredger is a hefty vessel, some hundred feet long, fifty wide, equipped with a hydraulic drilling machine capable of digging up to sixty feet deep, attached to which are vacuum tubes and discharge nozzles; these two only know dugouts propelled by motors borrowed from speedboats whose owners tanned dark in the Fifties, off the coast of Florida, water-skis bikinis fishing all with big jugs of rum coconut whisky lots of quick turns and vertical jets of water like celestial rain; they only know pistons unscrewed quickly, brokedown cars where you’d attach an axle and a propeller, and Verlaine’s aware of this, the guys they send him are always the same — there isn’t a single one who has a clue, he seethes; conversely, Verlaine himself (who’s sometimes seen in the Gare du Havre when he goes home to visit his two sons) only knows service boats, dredgers, tugboats, the barge that never leaves port and hobbles along in the canal on one foot, lame, with a measured step. Duane and Buddy are appointed to control of outflow — they keep an eye on the regularity of flow in the pumps, make sure the motors don’t overheat, it’s a job that requires a good ear, and these boys have two each (so at least they aren’t deaf); you have to hear when it shakes, when it drags, and when it gets tired, Verlaine explains all of this to them in rudimentary English, and at every chance he gets joins the action to the word.

THE DREDGER advances slowly in the river’s current, heavy and stubborn; it clears out, scrapes, sucks, scours the riverbed of all the shit that’s been thrown there, that’s still thrown there, day after day; blasting the channel, it’s hailed as the marvellous irreplaceable scullery maid, as its enormous drill with three heads — three times the strength and power of the best deep-water oil-drilling rig — digs into the rock to carve out a passage for the hulls of majestic ships, freighters, and state-of-the-art oil tankers. The two boys take a step back in front of the tanks where the riverbed is poured out, blackish sludge of sediment risen from the depths, ageless alluvium, no sparkle in there, nothing, still they watch for a section of a wreck, a piece of iron, some human debris, maybe a skull, yeah, a skull or a chest full of gemstones, a treasure, yeah, that would be awesome. They’re getting excited, grinning, seeking nothing, hoping for nothing, not even luck, for the future has no form for those who live day to day, with no other weight on their shoulders than the weight of youth. They hold out their hands with vast palms and able fingers, always ready to take the next gamble, to make a little cash, always ready to take off on the next bullshit plan.

IN THE FOURTH week, the divers show up. There are fifty of them. Their aura precedes them, plume of anguished admiration, and when they get out of the black vans from the Deep Seawork Co., jumping out one after the other in agile bounds executed at regular intervals — Navy commandos when it comes to projects — everyone scrutinizes their faces the colour of Dove soap, their heroic faces. After which their reputation pushes its way through the crowd of assembled workers, the waters part, the divers advance in slow steps, relaxed, large sports bags slung over their shoulders. Among them, the deep-sea divers get the most attention: amphibious creatures twenty thousand leagues under the sea, they elbow dragonfish, moray eels, and lantern fish, graze stray jellyfish migrating towards the surface, caress the bellies of cetaceans, and tug on the moustaches of seals, are blinded by plankton suspended in the bars of light, marvel at the coral, collect strange algae; multiplane workers, they walk helmeted with heavy feet upon the earth’s crust, a hookah giving them something to breathe from the surface; frogmen who dive with webbed feet, a reserve of oxygen attached ad hoc to their backs. These are mutant men, and the darkness of the abyss is their office, their factory, this is where they toil, repair, weld, smash, explode, dynamite the riverbed, pulverize the sedimentary layer, cut the banks anew, level the shallows; this is where they assist with the drilling operations launched by the engineers above water, activating a satellite system on the surface able to integrate the least variation in the earth’s curve, they control the extraordinary precision of the work — they are as meticulous as box hedges planted in a French garden. Underwater, their lungs inflate, bit by bit hold the compressed air; their rib cages crack under the pressure, their hearts are heavy inside, but little by little they adapt and beat more slowly, and their malleable bodies hold up.

DIDEROT GREETS them personally, shakes the hand of the team leader for a long moment, a small man with a waxy pallor who he recognizes from projects in the Port of Busan, South Korea, where reinforced seawalls had required powder, he’s very pleased they’re here: internationally renowned divas, the boys from DSC are mostly old minesweeper divers cast aside by the army and who now transfer their experience from one site to another — and their participation comes at a pretty penny — Pontoverde must have stretched the cash, quality doesn’t come cheap.

Their plan: prepare the riverbed for the foundations to come. Knock down the base rock, locate the flaws, then break the crust with explosives — dynamite will be tossed down from the surface in fat steel pilings. The divers will work blind, the waters are murky here, muddy, full of alluvium, they’ll have to be prepared for strong currents, for strange centrifugal swirls and unpredictable draughts from gas escaping, from the resurgence of springs, or from climatic hazards that can swell the water’s rate of flow and speed its course. Diderot warns them of all this in a low voice in the intimacy of the meeting room. Then, he continues, we’ll hammer sheet piles into the bedrock and line them with concrete so that, once sealed and weatherproofed, they will form cofferdams, each of which can contain nine million gallons of water, then we’ll pump out these giant pockets before pouring a hundred cubic yards of concrete into them and they’ll become the indestructible sheaths for the towers to come. A herculean anchoring.

IT TAKES A FULL DAY’S DRIVE ALONG THE LOGGING road and then a walk for several hours along the path to reach the Native village. A pathway furrowed by rains and full of potholes, obscured by huge toppled trees, disappearing at times beneath giant ferns or even the carcass of an animal. This route has its dangers — the risk of being attacked by a carnivorous mammal is high, and the risk of getting lost is even higher. Better to take a motorboat upstream from Coca, then switch over to a dugout and paddle the two days’ journey to the village. To arrive at the end of the day, when the children are swimming in the river, splashing each other playfully, some diving in the waterfalls and others fishing with blowpipes; when the men are strolling and smoking, the women are talking, while the evening air settles with an incredible softness. This is also the time of day when Jacob makes the coffee, spooning grinds and pouring water into a large Italian coffee maker placed on the fire pit in front of his house, and he waits there, for the coffee to heat and for the villagers, his friends, to stop by and drink it with him in white tin mugs.

THIS PARTICULAR evening, hearing of the construction of a motorway bridge over the river, Jacob is seized by a tremendous fatigue. He swallows his coffee in small sips, his gaze running over the surface of the water, opaque now, and reflecting, through the green canopy, fragments of a spilled-milk sky. In the spring, it will have been twenty years that he’s been coming here, for long stretches at a time; twenty years that he’s been studying this small community besieged by history, and doing its utmost to ignore it. He’s changed a lot, of course — the young intellectual, fresh from Santa Fe, armed with his belief in the power of ideas and determined to describe this precious alveolus of unchangingness with rational transparency, has little in common with the man who, this evening, thinks that a society cannot be deducted from a system, and for whom living here one semester out of two means investing in a different way in his own existence. The matching half of his year plays out in Berkeley. A few men from the community have arrived by now, and are drinking coffee with him, joking around; passing women greet them, their hair smoothed back from their foreheads and held with obsidian combs, their faces wide, cheekbones full, they laugh, hip to hip, one of them pregnant beneath a large white T-shirt emblazoned with the Los Angeles Lakers logo. Jacob lights a cigarette — never could bring himself to smoke anything but lights — he knows perfectly well how intrusive roads are, is aware of the probable degradation of the forest, the planned disappearance of the Natives, and has already been struggling for a long time against nostalgia: he won’t be the herald of an academic ethnography, and he won’t be a pitiful scholar; no, he’d rather die than that. And yet, in this moment — the coffee hour, peaceful hour when fullness is so complete it hurts, like a stone in the belly — when the heart feels squeezed inside the rib cage — he’s thinking only of his life, his life here and now, and his greatest emotion is for this present, wearing thin. His fatigue comes from this. He places his mug down on the white wicker table and goes inside to lie down. He needs to sleep.

WE MIGHT ask how Jacob got wind of the story of a bridge in Coca — we could imagine the murmur of the construction site travelling all the way to him, slipped between the scales of a fugitive trout, hidden beneath the wings of a junco or perched on the petiole of a hardworking ant that made its way right to the heart of the massif via some network of underground tunnels. But really it was just men, always the same ones, who’d come upstream from Coca — people like you and me — bringing the news. These guys trade with the villages of the “interior,” know how to reach them without danger, branching off into one arm of the river, then another narrower one, and another still, following a path that only they know in the aquatic labyrinth that webs the forest. It’s they who, among other things, bring Jacob his bricks of coffee and his cartons of smokes. And this evening, like every other time, they docked their boat in front of the village houses, unloaded bundles of clothes and blankets, cases of canned goods, batteries, a television and two radios, then went like everyone else over to Jacob, who’d seen them coming and held out mugs to them, lifting a hand in the air — hey guys, come on over, come over here. There are three of them — two brawny guys and a teenager with an orange cap, and they come, shaking hands with “the professor” — that’s what they call Jacob — then the two older ones give instructions for the transaction, quantities that Jacob translates using categories like a little, a bit more, and a lot, and the Natives start bringing out the baskets — baskets of a rare beauty, woven baskets whose round bellies depict the cosmos, very high-quality baskets. This is when the young one with the orange cap starts talking about the bridge in Coca — soon we won’t be coming anymore, it won’t be worth it, we’ll load up a truck and all this will be done in a day’s work, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! He has his hands in his pockets, concludes by saying that’ll be faster, huh, we won’t have to sleep outside anymore, and he smiles while kicking at the pine cones that carpet the ground; and Jacob, who has been watching the coffee maker, turns, looks him deep in the eyes and asks softly, controlling his surprise and feigning nonchalance, oh yeah, is that right, they’re building a bridge in Coca? The boy takes the bait and goes on, yeah, an awesome thing, six lanes they say, it’ll give us some breathing room, they’ve already started, they’re planning it out, you’ve gotta see it! Jacob hands him a metal box while a few yards away the men load the baskets into the boat, careful to cover them with plastic tarps, sugar? He speaks so sharply that the boy jumps and takes his hat off quickly, his hair’s ginger, as orange as the fabric of his hat, he splutters, yes, two cubes, and when Jacob hands him his cup, he takes it in one hand, holding it against his chest like a man, and squares his shoulders. The men have finished loading. One of them looks at his watch — a ridiculous gesture in these parts — and says, time to hit the road, let’s go. They want to stop for the night in another village, shaking the professor’s and the Natives’ hands — the youngest doesn’t dare look at Jacob, vaguely aware of having said too much, of having been the bird of ill omen — and hop into their boat that rocks gently. The kids see them off, shouting between branches or clinging onto the hull; the men in the boat don’t pay them any attention, occupied with manoeuvring the boat out, and finally the kids wade back towards the banks, and it seems then that the trees bow down towards the river, that the long grasses draw in along the banks, supple as elastic, and once again it’s the village that smokes, calm that hums in the forest gangue, this infinitely dilated realm at the heart of nature, this little pocket of time: the cleft of life that Jacob has chosen.

THE NIGHT is far along when Jacob leaves his house and walks the length of the river, getting farther and farther from the village. The blackness is thick, dense, saturated with matter and noise, and Jacob uses his ears to navigate. The starlight barely passes through the canopy — too many zigzags, too many ricochets to perform — but when it does penetrate, there are shinings soft as paraffin that touch a stone, a leaf, a point of water, providing shadows to Jacob’s body, a third dimension; in other words, something with which to construct space, something to help him move forward. At the base of a tree, cold and damp, is a dugout. Jacob unties it, pulls it to the water, climbs in. He pushes off from the bank with the end of his paddle and soon he’s floating through the wood. Though he knows the way, he’s never left the forest at night, alone — a sensitive operation, similar to astronauts’ excursions into space, when excitement and terror combine deep within the same gut.

SLOWLY, JACOB glides through the humid woods, alert, on his guard. Knows he should turn when the sound of the water rises — a sign he’s coming close to a stronger, faster current. It would be a mistake to trust the regularity of his movements, the care he takes not to hit the surface of the water too violently, precisely to avoid a slap and the clamour that might prevent him from hearing — even for a second — the murmur of the massif; a mistake to trust the precision of his movements, his buttocks contracted inside the boat, his chest held straight, his face open, and his eyes that work to tear through the aniline night — it would be a mistake to trust all this because it’s a fever that makes him do it. A black fever, sprung from anger, a suffocation of bile.

THOUGH HE never managed to find sleep that night, he had at first stretched out on his back in bed, completely still, eyes closed — then turned on his side, changing tactics, but the face of the red-headed kid, announcing the construction of the bridge, kept coming back to him wide and vivid as a screen, disproportionate, then a shot of his feet, his hands in his pockets as he kicks at the pine cones, or laughing at the kids who see them off from the water waist deep when they’re about to leave, tapping their knuckles to make them let go when they hang on to the edge of the boat; and Jacob hears him repeat that expression like a fatal omen, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail; and when he finally got up, wanting to grab his book, the jinx of dizziness washed over him, he swayed, his legs turned to jelly, he was sweating like crazy — and we should specify that what poured out of him and trickled down his body was nothing like the liquid he secretes in the sweat lodge when he’s invited, no, this was venom, a bitter, animal liquid, concentrate of spite and rancour. Once he felt steady, Jacob remained upright for a long time, stiff as a stake in the middle of his house and suddenly — like a match struck — prey to the explosion of his will, he got dressed and left.

JACOB ROWS for another day and another night in the visceral forest. He cleaves the peat moss, parts the mangrove, dodges the waterfalls. Fever and anger serve as fuel and fact and he speeds along, drinking nothing but resinous alcohol from a plastic flask, not eating or smoking, he twists in the rapids, surfs the current; by day catching glimpses of deer, wild boar, but not a lynx in sight; bumping into a group of students rafting who are whooping it up so loudly they hardly notice him, narrowing his eyes at a few Natives gathering stones from the shore, men from other villages, holding his breath at night, when the shadows lengthen poisonous, absolutely inhuman, when he feels he’ll suffocate, succumbing to the nocturnal beauty, fascinated, eyes rolling back, lips dry, the desire to scream strangling his larynx. He doesn’t sleep. He’s gathered the tension in his body as though condensing material into a cannonball — he holds himself slightly forward, concentrating on capturing the smallest flux in the water that could speed his course and carry him forward effortlessly, focused on loosening the energies around him, on recycling his anguish and agitation into each of his gestures, and strangely his exhaustion vitrifies his fury, keeps it intact.

AT DAWN on the second day, when the buildings of Coca rise up suddenly perpendicular to the surface of the water, it’s a different man who paddles out of the woods, a man beside himself. The sun rises, ricochets off glass and steel facades, iridesces the shimmering rainbows of hydrocarbon slicks that ring the waters, and the triangular plates of metal festooning the edges of the dugout — like a set of open jaws — sparkle in the light.

Catching a glimpse of the dugout as they pass, drivers speeding along the banks at this early hour widen their eyes in the rear-view mirrors, slowing dangerously, and later, arriving at their offices, head towards the tower windows to watch the guy’s progression, call one another over, check it out, there’s a strange one down there, see him? And, upon waking, riverside residents raise the window blinds and end up going out onto their balconies. It’s not the dugout that shocks them, no, there are lots of those around here — rather, it’s seeing him, this livid man who rows with his back straight as a rod, his black tie like an Ottoman sabre across his chest over the white shirt, the dark velvet scholarly jacket, the white socks peeking out of moccasins — where’d this guy come from?

COMING UPON the anchorage sites on both sides of the river, and struck by the enormousness of their surface area and the multitude of machines, Jacob slows, holds the paddle horizontal and throws his head back, throat taut as a bow; he floats slowly on the calm water, minuscule wavelets explode softly against the hull — a freeway over the river, six lanes, the sky is the colour of votives.

He takes a long breath and sets off again, with great strokes of the paddle in the river, splash splash, sounds that punctuate his progress, and finally passes the river shuttles, pot-bellied as teapots, armoured with divers and workers who move lively over the anchorage sites, their wake lifting the dugout that pitches, vacillates; sprayed, Jacob reawakens and suddenly spots a large stretch beside the bank that sparkles, silvery, and goes closer to see better. Dead fish float in the dozens, thrown up from the depths by the explosions, their eyes open and staring. Anger seizes him again, exhaustion leaves his body, he glides along beside the stinking, macabre pool, lips pressed together so as not to scream, and each stroke of the paddle injects him with new energy to carry on. Soon he comes in sight of the long quay of the Pontoverde platform, where silhouettes cram together onboard a final shuttle like the ones he passed earlier — same colours, same initials. Here it is, he thinks, suddenly rowing like mad.

He moors his dugout under the concrete mixing plant, beside the wasteland, and drags himself out of the hull. The sky has turned grey from the coal. He clambers up the bank, clinging to handholds, then pulls himself up straight — and surprisingly, he doesn’t faint. He’s hungry, thirsty, wants a coffee. Summer Diamantis, who at this moment is walking towards her batch plant after the daily site meeting, frowns at the sight of this vaguely disturbed form, crumpled clothes and bare head, and turns as she’s passing with a mechanical torsion — who’s this guy without a hard hat? — yet doesn’t slow her step — what’s occupying her mind at the moment are the latest concrete mixing trials. So much so that Jacob is able to walk the entire length of the esplanade with a confident stride, right up to the main building, without being stopped. The rain begins to fall. This is when Diderot pushes open the door, anxious about the sky.

From the top of the three short steps that lead to the door of the building, he asks the guy in front of him, who he takes immediately to be an intruder, you there, what are you doing here? Jacob has come to a standstill at the bottom of the stairs, says flatly, are you the one in charge? His arms rest by his sides but the milky blue of his eyes worries Diderot just as much as the sky that melts now and coughs up rain in big warm drops, what a mess. The one in charge of what? Diderot speaks without aggression but with impatience, and begins to step heavily down the stairs to talk to this guy — but he’s stopped on the second step by Jacob’s hand that comes up against the centre of his chest, the long knotted fingers spread wide over the fabric of the shirt that grates, the palm made metallic by its hardness, are you in charge of this construction site, yes or no? Diderot freezes. His eyes scan Jacob from head to toe, rapidly, without noticing any suspicious bulges where a weapon might be concealed, and he pushes the hand away firmly, begins to step down to the last step, saying yes I am, what’s it to you, and with these words, the hand that was pushed away comes back hard against his stomach, gathered into a fist, bang. The blow catches Diderot off guard as does the storm that he hears rumbling far off and he folds over, staggers, then collapses against Jacob, who falls backwards and the two men roll on the ground. They lie there a moment, inert, long enough for the rain to speckle their clothes with dark spots that quickly cluster into a single patch, long enough for the esplanade to become glazed and transform into mucky clay, till finally they make a move to stand up. Diderot turns to his side and uses the ground to press himself up while Jacob, already standing, teeters on skinny legs, the knobs of his ankles protruding under the white cotton of his socks, easily visible beneath pants that are too short. He’s the one looking down on Diderot now, dominating him with his height and a body that’s ten years younger. But in the next second he doesn’t stand so tall — taken by surprise at this primitive move, a punch, a jab straight to the gut, when all he wanted — he’d swear it — was to sit down at a table and discuss the thing with this big man, he seems like a good guy, explain his point of view calmly, show him how this bridge he’s building will bring destruction and extinction, how he’ll be part of tragedy and loss, and how directing this thing makes him a kind of killer. Instead, as though the rain drumming down had harassed his thought, preventing it from forming into a possible sentence, as though the soaked, muddy esplanade had sucked his words deep into the cesspool, he takes a breath and spits, bastard! There’s brutality in this hirsute body gripped by violence, in this voice that insults and hurls even though the body is stiff, but it’s a brutality that Diderot doesn’t calculate, suddenly bristling, seized by fury, this nutso better not piss me off too much, is all he thinks to himself. Once he’s up, the pain in his stomach hooks him again, it kills, and this annoys him, he’s the one in charge. Head down he ploughs into Jacob like a bison, like a locomotive, a squall of muscles and fat, the blow is violent, Jacob gasps, suddenly breathless, takes a step back, and once again is flat on his back. The spongy ground welcomes him with a hiss of sludge. Diderot steps forward and stands over him now, enormous, one leg on either side of him, you have two seconds to get lost, two seconds before I call someone. But Jacob, who he thought had been neutralized, down for the count, rears up again, grabs him by the ankles with his two tense hands, pulls him forward, and Diderot falls on his ass again, splash. It’s a fight, then. The two men hit each other in succession, one after the other, an interval of a couple of seconds between each clout, a breath between each slap, one after the other they grab each other by the collar with one purple fist while the other gathers into a ball of force, pulling back behind a shoulder and hurtling forward like a projectile against the cheek, hooking the nose, the ear, the brow; they bash each other, both slow and heavy, clumsy, and it’s crazy to see how they resemble each other now, their clothes the same colour because of the mud, eyes blistered, crimson and sweating under the deluge. If you’d been there to see the combat — the bridge against the forest, the economy against nature, movement against immobility — you wouldn’t have known who to cheer for. In the end, Diderot, finished, steps back staggering, turns halfway, but Jacob’s voice behind him holds him still: look at me, asshole. Diderot freezes, hesitates to turn again, turns, you talking to me? Jacob stands, filthy, holding out a knife he just pulled from his sock, shitty little knife that doesn’t scare Diderot but whose blade is rubbed with lemon-yellow sharpening ointment, a thick paste acting on the steel blade like resin on the bow of a violin. You talking to me? Diderot takes a step forward. Yeah, Jacob has lowered his hand and now he states in a formal voice: I demand that the work be stopped — his glottis goes up and down his trachea but his eyes don’t blink. Don’t be ridiculous, Diderot sighs, now get out of here. He shivers, the rain intensifies, and the air cools off. The guys on the site must be wading in this shit, we’ll have to be careful of landslides, risks of rising water levels, he has to go now, pivots to call the guards, he’s back to the bottom of the three steps when he hears a noise at his back again and whips around, exasperated. Brilliance of the blade, a burning in his side, blood that spurts, a thousand candles. Jacob disappears.

PUDDLES HAVE formed now, spread out over the surface of the large Pontoverde platform, fairly large and fairly deep pools, these are the ones making the rain sound, making its splat oppressive. One of them stars outward at the base of the three steps of the main building— men’s boots had pressed into the ground in this very spot, their heavy soles marking the ground — and it’s here that Diderot lies, his eyes on the sky. No one has come out yet to see what’s happening outside — can it possibly be true that they haven’t heard the brawl? Can it possibly be true that, polarized in front of computer screens where forecasts of bad weather appear, and holding their breath as they contemplate disturbances, they’ve gone deaf? Barely three minutes have passed since the end of the scrap and Diderot’s losing blood — his shirt has blossomed red-violet over his stomach, and is dripping scarlet into the puddle; he doesn’t try to extract himself from the mud, doesn’t make a move, relaxed now, calm, and his consciousness, floating in the vague indentations of the sky, repatriates large bells above his forehead that ring out: bastard, bastard!

THE SAME word that Katherine Thoreau yelled with her fist raised at the bus driver after he started driving again while she was hammering on the door, hey, open the door, please, hey! But the little man paid no attention, didn’t look at her: this wasn’t a bus stop, it was a traffic light, a red one, at the edge of a seedy intersection on Colfax. A disaster for Katherine, who puckers her lips as she looks at her watch now and flies into a panic: if she’s not there on time to punch in, if she misses the river shuttles to the sites once again, she’ll take a wage penalty, or even lose her job, for sure, shit, shit. In a rage, she kicks the hydro pole standing there, winces, turns, catches sight of a figure reflected in the glass of a motorcycle dealership, a full-length silhouette, Katherine observes it and then goes nearer: a pretty woman still, forty or maybe a little older, tall, a fuchsia parka too thin to keep the winter out enwraps her abdomen and reveals it heavy — breasts and belly — without much of a waist anymore; acid-wash jeans hug thin legs cushioned by a pair of dirty sneakers, thick brown hair at the roots lightens to flavescent at the shoulders, reddish straw clogged with badly maintained curls, her nails are bitten to the quick and the skin of her hands is dry and lined, a little gold chain with a heart pendant is her only piece of jewellery; it’s not that she’s ugly, or dirty, no — you can see that this is the kind of woman who only owns one bra but who washes her underwear in the sink, the kind of woman who soaps herself vigorously, tongue pressed between her lips — it’s just that when you see her, you sense poverty. Katherine Thoreau stares at her reflection, she’s tired, her eyes adhere, wrinkles deepen in her reddened skin and give her a sad look but she doesn’t think she looks half-bad in the mirrored glass, she’s not done for, with a few dollars, a haircut, wrinkle creams, and some rest, she could still have appeal; but at seven in the morning, she grits her teeth to keep going, to hold on and not get the hell out of here leaving them behind to fend for themselves, the four of them, her depressive husband, her demanding boys, her little girl who’s teething. The night had taken a bad turn: at three in the morning when she couldn’t take it anymore, she got up from the sofa bed to turn off the TV that Lewis’s eyes were glued to, I at least have to sleep if I want to be able to work tomorrow she said in a syrupy voice, a voice that humiliated her husband because, brandishing an ashtray, he suddenly spat out, dammit! I don’t want you to go back to that fucking site, all those guys checking out your ass, I know that’s why you do it, to get them hard, I know it, you think I’m stupid but you better watch it, I’m warning you, and Kate, stunned, thinking of her days — hard hat on her head, visor down over her nose and crammed into a machine for ten hours in a row clearing out the backfill in the anchorage hole, the abominable racket that leaves her dazed when the evening siren finally sounds — had laughed a superior laugh, which conveyed to Lewis his impotence — she might just as well have called him a loser, asked him how he thought he would do it, practically, to stop her from going to work — a laugh that she stretched out with a contemptuous smile, okay sure, I’ll stop going, later guys, I quit, but tell me if you’re not a complete idiot how you think we’d manage? What would we live on? She was planted with her hands on her hips in her polyester housecoat and couldn’t dodge the ashtray when it was thrown against her temple, bang, let out a scream that she quickly stifled with a hand to her open mouth because at that moment Matt, her oldest boy, had pushed open the front door and he was drunk, everyone had bellowed insults, and the younger boy, Liam, suddenly appearing in his pyjamas in the middle of the living room had, as usual, thrown himself sobbing against his mother, and the electric atmosphere had not failed to wake the littlest one, it’s true that they were all on edge and squeezed like sardines into this shitty condo. Later, when they were lying down again on the sofa bed, the little one between them with her soother in her mouth, Katherine had said firmly to Lewis, say you’re sorry, and he’d mumbled sorry then taken her hand across the child, and they held each other like that in the darkness until sleep overtook them.

NOW KATHERINE Thoreau is shuffling along Colfax smoking butt after butt, and when she finally catches sight of the bus she looks at her watch, knows that she’s already late, that the river shuttles will have left. She punches in when the first drops of rain shatter on the ground, then sets out to cross the whole Pontoverde platform to the main building so she can report to management — it’s humiliating to have to go ask a favour, a late slip, like a late-night college girl, like a slacker chick. The place rumbles beneath the volley of rain, ominously emptied of workers. Katherine Thoreau moves forward beneath the downpour, her shabby, non-waterproofed parka quickly saturated and heavy, water running inside, down her chest and her arms, down her neck, her sneakers fill with water and her socks splash around inside. She lowers her head and her hair hangs in front of her face in streaming strands as the water crashes down, she peers ahead through the strands and then concentrates on her feet in order to avoid the little pools forming quickly all around, it’s a long path to the building, it’s long and suddenly seeing the water splashing out from her soles Katherine says to herself, this is it — this is my life, it’s taking on water, it’s leaking out everywhere, it’s all going to shit, Lewis and his bullcrap, the children who worry her, Billie in front of the TV all day beside her dad, Matt who stays out all night and hasn’t smiled in weeks, and Liam who cries every day, she thinks of them and tells herself she’s not gonna be able to hold on much longer — that morning she’d gone to ask the neighbour to check in on the place around lunchtime, the boys would be at school, and her husband was crippled, yeah, an accident at work, she has a little girl and can’t afford yet to put her in daycare, would she be able to go check that everything was okay? And the woman, a matronly black woman with an unbelievable goiter and pink eyes had looked at Katherine sullenly and then said, okay, I’ll go, and without missing a beat had named her price, ten dollars, and Katherine’s eyes had widened, for that price you’ll make lunch for the little one, you’ll change her, and put her down for her nap, and the neighbour had said, okay, and the bargaining was done, but now Katherine was doing the sums: the neighbour’s price was too high — she’d have to change that if she didn’t want to hand over her whole paycheque.

From very far off, she’d seen the two figures grappling in the mud until one collapsed to the ground and the other fled towards the concrete mixing plant, and Katherine had parted her dripping hair to see better and quickened her step. Now, she bends over Diderot, groggy in the puddle, kneels to take his head in her arms, and says quietly, it’s going to be okay, then screams over her shoulder, help, someone’s hurt! Help! Her voice carries, she turns back to lean over him, murmuring breathe deeply, breathe, the strands of her wet hair skimming Diderot’s face like Chinese paintbrushes, and, tickled a little, he opens his eyes, stammers, who are you? But people are hurtling down the short staircase now, big dry shoes, men armed with rolls of white paper and blankets. In no time at all Diderot is carried to the first-aid trailer and they turn to Katherine asking what was she doing here at this time, for God’s sake, late again, Thoreau?

THE SITE IS IN FULL SWING. A MUTE UNFOLDING at first, clandestine even — no one in the city could have guessed what was cooking on either side of the river; no one could have suspected what was going to emerge from the ground, except perhaps to get up at dawn and wonder about certain buses hurtling past full of guys squeezed in like sardines, that pass again in the opposite direction at the same speed when night falls; except to get an eyeful of the shuttle traffic on the river. There was no fanfare for the placing of the first stone, no Boa photographed trowel in hand and provisional smile before an audience of dark suits and towering half-naked women on stilts who whisper to one another in a language where the Rs roll over one another headfirst as though they were tumbling to the bottom of a well; there was not a single notice posted on a wall or a telephone pole, in the halls of the subway, nothing, there was no sign. The Boa had taken care to have the immense Pontoverde platform placed south of the city and to forbid any publicity about the work so as not to alert Coca’s inhabitants and users — his electorate, his clients — to the disruption inherent in this kind of construction — the disembowelling of favourite views, dust, noise, heterogeneous pollution, traffic jams, resurgence of carjackings, influx of poverty-stricken populations looking to glean what they can at the margins of the site. The bridge began to impose itself in camouflage: the drilling sites were closed off with plywood hoardings covered in trompe-l’oeil panels designed to seamlessly match the neighbouring buildings, nearly invisible except for the skull inside its red triangle pirating each doorway.

The percussion of the bulldozers would fuse with the shocks and usual hammerings of the inner city, with the smoke of car motors and the gusts of dust. Lemon-yellow smog soon hovered over the city. The bridge men continued to arrive from all around — they were suddenly in the majority in the bars, where they often left a good quotient of their pay — in this way identical to newcomers who were always looking to buy a round in order to make some contacts, counting on inebriation for business ideas because, dammit, here they were, in the right place at the right time.

NO ONE saw a thing. In the first weeks, the inhabitants came and went in a city that was just as sparkling and fluid as ever, business was juicy with fat dividends, ice cubes clinked together gently at the bottom of bronze whiskies chin-chin while girls with the corners of their eyes tattooed inhaled speedballs — coke + baking soda — before heading out on the prowl in bras and denim miniskirts in the underground parking lots of big luxury hotels; piles of glitz were poured out and sold by the mile, cosmetics overran window displays, sixteen-year-old kids made a fortune at roulette using a system they unearthed on the internet, the bridge was being built, the bridge men and women didn’t lift their heads anymore, worked huddled over the necessary gestures, each day fulfilling quotas of square yards, cubic yards, and requisite tons on the phasing charts, yes, the bridge rose up, it began from the lowest point, the deepest, a depth that no one in Coca could begin to imagine, it was anchored in holes calibrated to an eighth of an inch that pierced one by one the strata of sedimentation, rested upon the heart in the mille-feuille of memory, was sustained by the darkest, heaviest glebe, a thick paste that sweated its rivulets of archaic juice, dripped plop plop plop, and it echoed as it would in a dungeon, glistened in the beams of headlamps while hard-hatted heads bent down to examine it and then stood again, faces blackened, eyes popping, here we are, here we are, the asshole of the world — this shouted in all the languages, we’re almost there, a little lower, another yard, go on, you can do it, teeth gleaming in the darkness, enamelled like so many fireflies, everyone shouting, walkie-talkies crocheted to their ears, farther, farther, go on, keep going, deeper, farther into the hole, while above, way up above, at the surface of the world, in the dazzling sunlight and the glare of deluxe hi-gloss sedans, there were still high heels clack clack clack, sculpted rubber tires that rasped the asphalt, moving people who went on living life ignorant of everything that was going on.

BUT IT WAS time to meet, flustered since they’d been caught off guard and losing their heads over the idea that a bridge of such a scale could soon rise up in Coca, panicked at the thought that such a work could change the economy of the city, of the region, and cause their influence to collapse. These are the owners of the four ferryboat companies that cover the Coca — Edgefront routes, sharing the total river transport, and among them, the Marianne — created by a Frenchman when the city was founded, by far the oldest, and which holds the monopoly over Coca — Ocean Bay traffic. The narrowness of the old Golden Bridge, its low capacity, has greatly favoured their development, so much so that at the time when it begins to be dismantled and the Pontoverde work site begins, no less than two hundred boats, from the simplest dory to the largest ferry or speedboat, dither daily on the river, incessant rotations chanted by the sirens, foghorns, or toots of the piston horn that call the latecomers to the dock in time for departure or warn of potential collisions — and they’re numerous, these shocks, these run-ins of hulls caused by alcohol or a fog, a lover’s daydream, a sudden fatigue, Coca’s maritime tribunal ruling on its lot of crashes each week. According to the registers of the chamber of commerce, the total river activity amounts to a billion dollars each year — including two hundred and fifty million in net profit — and agglomerates more than three thousand jobs; the average crew of a double-ended ferry has five people: a shift manager, a crew foreman, a mechanic, and two mariners — and then there were docking pilots, helmsmen, deckhands, boat builders; providers of fuel, electricity, lifejackets, buoys, barf bags, paper towels; there were fast-food workers, ticketing agents, administrative employees, lawyers, accountants, marketing specialists, and publicists, as well as medical facilities for all these people. This is a very juicy business. A godsend. A business currently under threat by the construction of the new bridge. Six fast lanes, wide and paved like a racing track, will connect the city to the continent, will accord it its place in the communication loop beginning at the bay with the plains highway and ending at the fertile valleys and mining sites far on the other side of the forest.

SO, ONE evening at the end of October, four limousines brake in synch in front of an Italian restaurant in Edgefront. Four men with dark overcoats that widen their shoulders but cause them to slope down extract themselves heavily from the cars and greet one another on the sidewalk while the vehicles disappear — an unspoken protocol makes them defer to the oldest one among them, a colossal man, white hair gathered in a ponytail at his nape, mirrored glasses, cigarillo, dark jacket with purple satin lining — he’s called the Frenchman, a direct descendant of that other one, male primogeniture — then plunge inside, straight to the table at the back. A fine wine is brought to them while they wait for the meat, but they’ve barely tasted it before the Frenchman strikes the table with a fist — a gold signet ring, big as a walnut, glints there, vaguely aggressive: all right, we’ve gotta take care of this. The other guys lean in towards the middle of the table — from far away it looks like their four heads are touching, collusion of thick foreheads and cunning ears — the propositions fly: corrupt the security commission in order to cause the closure of the site, buy the ecological lobby and launch a smear campaign against the bridge, bribe the trade union and bet on the outbreak of a workers’ strike. The voices accelerate, it’s a question of not letting themselves get fleeced, of giving the Boa a warning, of “settling accounts” with Pontoverde, and now the quartet talks sabotage and workplace accidents, nitroglycerine and trinitrotoluene, the Frenchman whistles angrily between his teeth, striking his index finger against the table, we need guys on-site, a sucker, a Judas, we’ll buy one, sort it out. The three others approve, and the Frenchman leans back in his chair and concludes, good, we’re in agreement, lifts a solemn glass above the table, arm outstretched, a toast to the success of our enterprise, straight away imitated by his three companions, and with their alliance thus sealed, knots his napkin around his neck — a large square of white poplin — and claps his hands for the plates.

THE BIRDS. THEY SHOW UP EN MASSE IN MID-November. Suddenly the sky seems immensely vast and inhabited, flapping; the least flutter of a wing seems to swell it from within like an inflatable mattress, the smallest winged creature’s passage — including bats, dragonflies, or the bee-killing Asian hornet Vespa velutina — intensifies it. Propagation to infinity. One morning you lift the blinds and the birds are there, at rest, floating on the river or scattered over the marshes downstream from the city. Hundreds of dark spots float on the milky water like shadow puppets, hundreds of round heads and beaks mingle in one great clamour. Watching them, you begin to count the number of miles travelled, you recite to yourself the craziest distances — seven thousand miles in one go for the bar-tailed godwit or forty thousand miles in six months for the sooty shearwater; you try hard to identify them, to recognize and name the types of flight and formation, recalling that most of them have followed precise flight corridors all the way from Alaska and also migrate at night, taking their bearings from the stars, the map of the sky unfurled wide inside their tiny brains, their sense of direction more rigorous, more mathematical than a GPS — and researchers at MIT in Boston, in Vancouver, and in the Atacama Desert study the birds for this, baffled and fascinated; it’s moving to think that even the most solitary, most asocial among them has migrated in a group, as though survival depended on finding a collective solution, and you ask yourself again what would we look like, after sketching such lines in the sky, after gliding on thermal currents so high up, sometimes even thirty-three thousand feet above the surface of the earth, piercing the stratosphere, our feathers knitting the cumulonimbus together, outrunning cold and hunger, spending half our reserves of fat in the slog — and at that moment, you tell yourself that a ruby-throated hummingbird is only three inches long and can cross the Gulf of Mexico in one shot — amazing, truly, that they are so precise and punctual: often it’s the same post in the same field where they alight, on the same balcony at the same window, and the children who recognize them charge outside in pyjamas to bring them bread crumbs, rushing, goosebumps prickling their skin, slippers getting muddy but they don’t care, and they turn back towards the house and shout it’s him, he’s here, he came back! They prepare a nest of cotton, straw, and twigs, a shelter complete with pantry and reservoir: a lesson in things.

IN COCA, ornithologists are on the alert. Their binoculars scan the sky or level at the nesting areas: they observe, count, inspect, tag, and untag — wouldn’t be good to miss the newborns; they hold their breath, ready to brandish the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, international treaty ratified in Bonn in 1979 — ready to brandish it, because this year there’s the construction site on the river, and even if the cranes provide new perches for the breathless birds to stop, the experts would already bet that the ecosystem has been disturbed. They’re worried. A delegation alerts the people in charge at the mayor’s office: the degradation of wetlands compromises nesting, threatens the species; a study on the wild swans south of Baku has just proven that the pollution of natural habitats around the Caspian Sea, which forces migrating birds to mix with domestic species, increases the spread of avian flu. These men aren’t kidding around, not at all, and the mayor’s office makes the mistake of ignoring them, turning up its nose at their duds — lumberjack shirts over white tees, clean jeans belted high over their middle, yellow Timberlands, baseball caps, large cases for cellphones clipped to their belts and Siamese twinned to their thighs, Swarovski binoculars around their necks: it’s a mistake to take them for idiots, to make them hang around the deserted halls for hours and then smoke them out with speedy interviews where they’re told that the site’s ecological standards are draconian and make up 17.8 percent of the total cost of the work; it’s a mistake because they’re already getting organized. The first findings vindicate them and they attack — forty-eight hours later the International Court of Justice decrees, after a rapid hearing, that work on the Coca bridge must be stopped during the birds’ nesting period. Three weeks. At least three, three weeks gone. The ornithologists in Coca can breathe again, while back at head office the financial directors of Pontoverde choke on the calculations of what this farce will cost them, aghast to learn that birds so small, so light, little flyspecks of nature, could slow down their superstar construction site; and the communications directors, proving exemplary in terms of their reaction time, immediately come up with a snap campaign — Pontoverde, ecology is our mandate, Pontoverde for your kids — and demand that the teams in Coca send them photos of kids petting birds under the guidance of the bridge’s engineers, smiling at the camera, hard hats on their heads, the company logo clearly visible above their eyes.

THE BOA gets the news instantly, informed by a call from his chief of staff while he’s on his way back from an official visit to Dubai — where the birds are more discreet, it seems to him. And of course he explodes. How is it that no compromise with these cocksucking ornithologists was possible? Couldn’t we have just promised to finance new studies, new tagging campaigns, new binoculars as powerful as astronomical telescopes, new computers? Forehead glued to the bay window of his gigantic office, he watches the birds floating gently on the river for a long time, then suddenly turns and shouts: and the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, isn’t there a single asshole here who thought of that? Is dealing with these ballbreakers more than you can handle? Acres of marshland in exchange for ecological tolerance on the site of my bridge, isn’t it in you to think of a thing like that? He collapses into a large leather armchair and loosens his tie. One of the Boa’s secretaries, believing things have cooled off — stupid kid — starts talking, assuring him that he knows about the bill that was approved by U.S. Congress in 1934, popularly known as the Duck Stamp Act, but the risk with that was that hunters in Coca would just see it as an additional tax. The Boa stares so hard at him that the young man’s voice shrinks and chokes till he’s silent. He says, you, get out of here, leans his head back in his chair, and casts his gaze out the window, far, the farthest possible distance away, into the agitated sky.

THE SAME sky that Diderot examines while he’s out smoking a Lusitania — sick of pacing like a lion in its cage in the meeting room, satellite phone to his ear to mollify the bigwigs at head office who bray like donkeys, furious, the birds, what bullshit, what a fucking pain, we’ve gotta get rid of them, take care of it, Diderot. The situation worries him. Three weeks is a long time. The guys will go bumming around in the city, and the ones who began by hooting about this fowl situation, rubbing their hands together — two or three days to score some cash, to knock about in the city, or play hooky, time off on this kind of site is nothing to scoff at — will soon be disoriented, bodies unoccupied and heads heavy with this idleness, they’ll sleep in, laze around till the middle of the day in greasy barbecue joints, or they’ll sit clicking away, eyeballs swollen in internet cafés from taking in so many onscreen promises of sex, pussies, tits and ass, half-open mouths, and if there’s a glimpse of tongue all the better, they’ll click furiously, most of them geographical bachelors from the universal contingent of mobile workers, and, come evening, the same ones will sweat it out in streets along the river, no pay yet, no cash really to burn, they’ll end up cracking, turning the mattress over to go get drunk or find something that’ll get them high, ’cause it sucks here, we’re doing dick all, and while some get depressed others’ll split in double time, and there you go — a shitshow. Diderot chews the insides of his cheeks and paces up and down, three weeks of forced loafing around means much more than a delay to make up: it breaks the site’s mechanism, interrupts the flow of energy, wrecks the work rhythm. It will be more difficult, afterwards, to reactivate everything; it will be heavier, slower, more painful, like starting to run again after stopping, all the muscles cooled down.

A FORMATION of Arctic tern flies off and nosedives over the river. The bird in the lead suddenly leaves its position, exhausted, and repositions itself at the end of the line. Diderot too feels exhausted: his bandaged side hurts him, a piercing pain bores into him whenever he speeds up his movements and it condemns him to a rigid chest — he moves like an old man, with small steps, torso leaning stiffly forward, and since he’s only mobile from the neck up, his cervical vertebrae clang against one another: looking up has become a torture. Whispers fly that he’s paying for his stubbornness with this — in the days that followed the attack, he’d kept working with the help of morphine injections, without taking a rest or even the time to press charges — he seemed to be redoubling his ardour in order to stop thinking about his wound, and people press their lips together saying pedantically, he’s repressing, not a good sign, but hold back from speaking to him about his convalescence, because he doesn’t engage anyone in conversation anymore and turbines around like a madman, the whites of his eyes growing more and more yellow, his sweat more and more bitter and his words more and more rare. Mad — he gets that way at night sometimes when the bells pass over his pallet and ring out, bastard, bastard! and he wakes up, breathing hard, the back of his neck on fire, legs heavy; he gets up, distraught, and goes to take a swig of alcohol straight from the bottle, any kind, exaggeratedly, but without any pleasure in being drunk, only hoping to go back to sleep like a log and never managing to before dawn: he’s losing ground.

When he gets back to the building, he heads to the meeting room where they’re waiting for him. The news precedes him. The team leaders are tense: so what’s happening, are we stopping work? We’re stopping all this because of a few warblers? For how long? After that it’s not gonna come cheap when we have to play catch-up! One of the engineers plays the smartass, exclaims in a loud voice, well, I’d like it too if they protected my reproductive zone! The room laughs. Diderot waits for things to calm down, coldly announces that the site is shutting down for three weeks, and then he leaves the room.

FLOCKING ABOUT the different sites, the workers are assembled on the esplanade and the team leaders line up in front of them. One of them clears his throat and announces the temporary halt to the work. Three weeks of vacation, guys. There’re birds reproducing and we can’t bother ’em, that’s how it is, guys, that’s nature. Stirring in the crowd, a hubbub, heads turning and necks outstretched as though the bodies were suddenly looking for air to breathe — some oxygen that wouldn’t lie; shoulders undulate, hands fidget nervously inside pockets — and some close into tight fists that soon swell crimson — legs shake, or pace: the air quickly grows tense over the site. And are we gonna be paid? First question to fly. With a worried look the team leaders evade this, they don’t know, hazard doubtful orders — take advantage of it to get some rest, to visit the region, to stay with family, or to find yourselves a girlfriend, huh? There are tons of good-looking girls around, eh, whaddya say? But the guys laugh bitterly, nice try: why not say thanks while we’re at it, thanks, boss, why not congratulate ourselves and give ourselves a pat on the back, isn’t life great? What proof do we have that the site will start up again, why don’t we get paid, at least? It’s one of the guys from Detroit who speaks up, a guy with an emaciated face, dry skin marred by old acne scars and red patches, blond hair tapering to a rat-tail at the back of his neck. His eyes are very pale, almost white. He’s suspicious, says he knows these grand speeches by heart, I’ll tell you, I’m not gonna get fucked over twice, and the others behind him nod their heads in approval, yeah, yeah, we’re sick of being had. We want our money now, we want it right now or we pass the buck, we ditch this place for good. His voice carries across the entire work site, cavernous and broken, a violent shake of his head punctuates the end of each sentence and he brandishes a smoke-stained index finger at the team leaders, the nail bitten to the quick and ringed with hangnails. The leaders confer with a look, one of them turns to Summer, we’ve got to send word to Diderot, tell him shit’s hitting the fan, they want their dough, then he says aloud, very calmly, okay guys, you gotta be reasonable — we can’t guarantee that you’ll get your pay today but we’ll do our utmost. How much is that? The worker from Detroit doesn’t let it go — back there, thousands like him had been taken for a ride, kept in the factories with false promises while everything fell apart, and when General Motors began laying off men in groups of ten thousand, it was too late, it was all over, he’s the one who closed the shop and since then has been kicking himself for not leaving before the breakdown, there were fewer guys hung out to dry then and his references were good, he would have got more dinero and been able to get back on his feet faster, and probably would have been able to keep his wife, too, who’d left to go back to her parents’ place with their little girl after the house was seized one Sunday morning, the day of their anniversary, the house and the television, the well-equipped and pretty little kitchen, the three-seater couch, the barbecue, her exercise bike and his fishing rod, the kid’s electronic karaoke machine; the truck sent by the bank was parked right in front of the garage and it sucked up their life from the inside, swallowed everything. It didn’t stop. You couldn’t see anything from the outside but you could hear the sound of furniture and things being heaped carelessly behind the tarps, pushed, piled, and for sure there was breakage, it was like a giant vacuum cleaner that emptied the house, emptied out their life. His wife had watched it all, straight-backed and silent, and then once the seal was on the door, had thrown a big suitcase into the trunk of their beige Rover, buckled the little one into the back seat, and turned towards him, glacial, you’ll at least let me keep the car? How much is your utmost? he asks again, yelling this time. Summer has taken her place in the ranks again with a message from Diderot: we’ll pay them. Once the guys hear the news, some of them form a line to get their cash — among them Katherine Thoreau, Soren Cry, Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo, and the Natives — while the others head for the locker rooms, at a loss. Summer and Sanche are side by side: what about us? Will we be paid or not? It’s Sanche who speaks, see-sawing back and forth from his heels to his toes. Yes, everyone, Summer smiles, everyone will get their cash and meet again in three weeks.

LATER, SUMMER tosses her hard hat into a corner of her office and goes to the sink to drink from the tap, water splashes everywhere — for goodness’ sake, there are cups, everything you need, plus the water in Coca is polluted, no doubt about that; dries herself off with the back of her hand and goes to sit in front of her laptop: no news from the Tiger, whose face has begun to dissolve, his face and body blinking precise at intermittent illuminations, then suddenly grainy, becoming transparent, and so Summer closes her eyes more and more often, even presses hard fists against her lids, worried to think that one day there’ll be nothing left to make him reappear in full force, nothing to counter the progressive erasure of this guy, exactly the way you lift the heavy chain of the bucket in a well of shadows, exactly the way you lift it into the light, the bucket and its fragile, perishable cargo — heave-ho, heave-ho — what does he look like, the Tiger, what is the timbre of his voice, the grain of his skin, the scent of his body, what is the taste of his mouth, heave-ho, heave-ho.

AROUND HER, the plant purrs, the workers — loader operators and mixing truck drivers — labour away, the aggregate flows at a constant speed, well spread out on the transport belts, and this continuous flux of energy gives her security, envelops her like a coverlet, a kind of mental cabin where she now passes the clearest part of her time: the batch plant has become her home, a shelter. With a view of the entire site, she oversees these industrial tools, lowers her eyes to the latest touch screen, follows the production of the concrete in real time, step by step, ready to make the slightest adjustment: at every moment, the variable nature of the aggregate can require modification of one parameter in one of the three hundred and fifty formulations saved on the computer. To those who tease that she’s a brown-noser, mocking her record work hours, seeing an excess of zeal or ambition — with Sanche Cameron at the forefront — or to those, far more pernicious and cruel to hear, who imply that the poor thing, she only has this in her life, nothing more than staring at her desk and reacting to the detection of an anomaly in the test results for the mixer, a trending graph indicating the consistency of the concrete, Summer calmly responds that she likes to be here, in her workplace, at her command post, that the metamorphosis of the material is a spectacle that fascinates her, that things do have to move forward — which is not very convincing at the moment, and they stubbornly see her articulate speech as the mask of her solitude.

Summer examines her work plan, evaluates what these three weeks of interruption will mean for her, the one who remains in charge of perpetual movement — what a joke.

Don’t stop. We don’t stop, this is her first instinct, we don’t stop, we’ll get ahead, we won’t stop until it’s impossible to stock the concrete on the site, we just keep on going, that’s all she can find to say, her mouth twisting over her charts, when two guys knock at the door and ask if they should stop the centrifuges. They frown at her words, and the smaller of them, a thickset Mexican, points out that the whole site is stopping. Summer turns around, looks daggers at him, not us, we’re going to get ahead. The guys back up on the landing and close the door again, she hears them swearing in Spanish the bitch, the hija de puta. Then someone knocks again. It’s Sanche. He pokes his head in the door. You all right? He’s taken off his work overalls and is dressed to go out on the town, a black leather Gestapo-style jacket with visible yellow stitching, pointy shoes, a silk scarf printed with cannabis leaves. Whatcha doing, Miss Concrete?

Summer smiles, nothing, I’m not stopping is all, I’ve got the whole team on my back but I don’t care. I haven’t gotten any other instructions. Sanche smooths the ends of his scarf with an automatic hand, looks at her, shrugs his shoulders, answers that the whole site is stopping for three weeks. Summer remains silent. The darkness grows in the room. The lamp on her desk carves her a ghostly orange face with grey shadows, a jack-o’-lantern on Hallowe’en night, she’s scary, you should stop working, Diamantis, come with me, everyone else is already gone. She shakes her head, concrete is a very complicated recipe, you know, very complicated, we always think of it as a basic material but it’s a surprising substance, tricky, and stopping production requires a protocol — Sanche sighs, pretends to beat a retreat, walking into the door, for god’s sake, bangs his fist against it, deliver me from this crazy woman; she raises her voice now and accelerates the flow; for example, a concrete formulation must be validated by laboratory tests and then by on-site tests, they check its strength after twenty-eight days, and it takes a long, long time to find the right enunciation, the one that will suit every need, the one that will respond to the desires of the architect, the right tint, the right resistance to freezing, to thaw, the one that will endure shifts in temperature, the one that will ensure the concrete doesn’t set too quickly, doesn’t set too weak, her voice fades away softly, she turns her back to Sanche, who’s placed his hand on the door handle and is getting ready to leave as he says, stop, Diamantis, you’re such a pain. Summer whips around. A mixing plant is not a car, it’s a process, it doesn’t stop when you press a button, we have to be sure of ourselves, is that clear?

IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. A BALCONY, Diderot, and before him, the landscape in motion. He holds himself up, leaning against the icy rail, naked, the blanket ponchoed over his head, his chest inclined towards the street where the snow has hardened into slabs now, filling in the length of the sidewalks in dirty strips. Calm arms and sleepy legs, soles of his feet soon sealed by the cold to the concrete floor, he leans, breathes, seeks, down there, leaning his head towards the river which he knows is within his reach, so close that he touches a section between two buildings, the velvety purpled surface of the water appearing beneath the wintery fog: the birds are still there.

Last day without the bridge, thinks Diderot, shivering goosebumps as the landscape unfurls before him at the rate of the rising day, higher, brighter, wider, deeper, with more contrast; as it’s laid out in tiers and terraces — miscellaneous facades and roofs fringed with satellite dishes, underwear, and capitalist logos hung out to dry, raised parking lots, interchanges, triumphal arches, cranes, arrows, domes; as it fragments and assembles itself with the same momentum, which is still the impetus of beginnings, a powerful combination in which, far off in the background, high and grey, stands the great forest of the other bank. His heart, wrung out at the close of a long night, also begins to dilate, in unison with the upward impulse tied to daybreak, which is enough to make the blanket fall to his shoulders, his head out from under the cover, his funny head, the cold sets it aflame like a handful of dry leaves, he feels his heart beating now in his chest, bang bang, beating so hard it tears open the day without a bridge on the horizon, goddamn shitty day he knows it already because after twenty days of forced time off without pay, anguish is what seizes him, creasing his forehead and knotting his stomach; calculations are what colonize his cranium and costs are what stack up. Bang bang. Quick look at the dry sky and he pivots inside, gets dressed quickly, a gulp of cold coffee and no shower, nothing, not even toothpaste, just a new bandage over his scarred middle, the Velpeau bandage that holds him together, a pair of bike shorts moulding his big thighs, and he dons his cycling shoes, three turns of the scarf, thick yellow wool hat, steps over the mess and goes straight out, down the stairs, grabs his bike in the garage, and there he is — outside, alive and well, the scent of the night on his skin, outside outside outside, because that’s the best place to be.

THE TASTE of rebirth. This is the first time he’s been outside in a whole week — the last time he felt this weak he was seventeen and had banged up his kidney in a motorcycle accident, pissing blood and unable to get up; the arrival of the birds, condemning him to inaction, had only worsened his state. A low moment. He’d amassed a long string of days spent stewing, when nothing in him knew how to fend off the sadness that infiltrated his frame — came in through the cleft of his wound, he thought, even though it was completely healed over now, didn’t hurt anymore, just a purpled line of skin with no swelling — and poisoned his blood. He had spent most of his time suffering, obsessing over the man he’d fought, and was already making a thousand plans for the next time he sees him, while down there, on the site, in the slowed-down offices, the guys were glutting themselves on comments: Diderot, idol with feet of clay, paper tiger, felled oak. Some talked about finding the guilty man — Soren Cry took care to throw his knife into the river as a precaution — and got geared up to organize a punitive expedition into Edgefront, into the shady neighbourhoods, because he could only have come from there, could only be one of those guys. Strangely, no one thought back to the testimonies of Summer Diamantis and Katherine Thoreau, who had both spoken of a white man in a tie. The site’s turning to bedlam, dereliction threatens. Work has to start up again tomorrow. It’s time.

BIKE ALONG slowly, first rolling alongside the river, then for two miles follow the black paved path that weaves back and forth beside the frozen river, solid and intense as Chinese ink against the uncertain murk of the static waters, pass the juvenile financial district, effulgent, bristling with cranes that are too red, too high, too new, makes him think of a teenager at the peak of his growth spurt, leave the park on the left-hand side, promise yourself to go hang out there when it warms up, to go see if they barter here as much as people say — an HP printer for a Moroccan ottoman nailed together in Meknes, an issue of the Village Voice for a set of muffin tins, a water pipe for an IKEA duvet — if they deal here, if they turn tricks as much as people say, if they tire themselves out — martial arts under the trees, kites on the meadow, dodge-ball soccer and running everywhere — if they make love amid the vapours of New California Gold, compressed inside acid trips against a background of mind-blowing music, or breaking away to languish beneath the wide green leaves of the banana trees (so soft and welcoming), if you can hear poets in baggy jeans and fluorescent flip-flops droning the language of owls plaited together with that of capitalists, if people organize politically, if they dance on Native burial grounds, if they pray — if in fact the place creates a utopia at the heart of Coca, a clearing where unbridled words fluctuate, a gap where the world could reformulate itself, and Diderot pedals faster and faster, caressing the foliage with his eyes, leaves powdered with snow, the California black oaks against the chalky bronze and golden highlights of the ginkgos, speeds along beside the stone wall that breathes, snowflaky, and rings this park without gate or fence. Gain momentum and roll onto the boulevard that snakes along the side of the valley, inhale and exhale regularly, above all don’t force it, don’t waste your strength, don’t rush, instead climb in cadence, wait to change speed, and when the slope is at a good angle swing onto the plateau without pedalling harder, take advantage of the bends, pass the McDonald’s, the Trader Joe’s, the Walgreens, and the Safeways, and once you’ve reached the top of the boulevard, only then turn right and climb to the circular promontory that advances into space, balcony that overhangs the valley, the city, the river, and the bridge that rises up over the water, dome of the forest behind, get off the bike, unhook the flask, and drink the water that will have taken on the metallic taste that is, for Diderot, the very flavour of Coca, embrace the white landscape, sparkling under the hard sun, and measure how far you’ve come. This is the first stop.

Diderot huffs and puffs, water dribbles down his frozen chin, his face is the colour of a beet, and sweat trickles into his eyes: he would never have believed he could have such a hard time making it up a hill. He’s leaning against the guardrail that drips melted ice, his feet buried up to the ankles in a grimy snowdrift, chin resting in his big paw bundled in a glove, he gazes at Coca at the bottom of the valley: I’m too old for all this, don’t have the body for it, don’t have the shoulders for the job anymore, nor the legs solid or feet nervous enough, and he soon thinks of the little house in the Finistère and quickly shakes his head, no way, the Finistère, dammit, the name alone makes him want to run because here we are at the edge of the continent — there, there would be only his mother like the crust of the earth, his mother in a blue blouse trimming the hedges, her hands between the leaves moving a pair of pruning shears much too heavy for her, his hunched-over mother in the mauve mountains, blue sky, roses, his tiny mother, all dried out except for her cheeks so red and waxed like apples, so brittle, osteoporosis and memory lapses, they’d go walking along the Bay of the Dead (Baie des Trépassés), on the sandy beach where stiffs drowned in the Raz de Sein wash up after eight days, they’d laugh at the macabre toponym and would promptly fall into the trap of the place, its implacable nature, its din; they’d watch the waves forming far off that would swell, powerful, great rolls of rough and nebulous force that pulverized light in their passage and imposed themselves with a kind of absolute fate, like the very first world, the very first proof of days, and maybe he’d even swim naked in the sea, lifting himself up onto his toes and raising his arms with each wave that smacks against his chest, yelling with cold, joy, fear, yelling with his mouth wide open soon smothered with so much oxygen and nitrogen, soon dry and silent, while the little old woman would recite the names of the capes and rocks to herself, her maroon cardigan buttoned to the neck, house shoes buried in the wet sand soaking up sea and crabs, yes, maybe it was time now to go home and set himself up in a part of the earth where there’s no more ground to dig, precisely, not many more gestures to make, a place where he could enjoy the world as it is, the simple perception, head on, without there being a need to add any action, without a need to make anything other than what already exists there, tangible as a pleasing flower that we pick with one simple movement, a pure sensation that would still — just like the motion of the waves, like their knowing and mysterious rolling — return him from the inside and shake out his bones, just a sandbank then, a bit of earth and water, animal exuberance all around and the bitter smell of seaweed, just a cape, a simple, rudimentary place, and leave airports behind for good.

At the bottom of the valley Coca dazzles, and it’s as though the impatience, the avidity, the rapacious desire have been rendered visible. And this peps Diderot up, reinvigorates him. He jumps back on the seat, hup, and in one moment has turned his back on the city and on the future Finistère, spins towards the white plain, his tires whistling on the asphalt again, again the pleasure of being swift, of splitting the air as though it were matter, again the joy of penetrating space headfirst, laid flat over the handlebars in the position of speed, making his body one with the machine, hair and clothes flapping noisily in the atmosphere like so many minuscule flags, and Diderot laughs in spurts, the icy air he swallows dries his throat but he opens his mouth, and his teeth, spoiled by deposits of tobacco, gleam in the sun as his big all-terrain tongue flaps against his lower lip, the air he exhales is exchanged for that of the limestone plateau, it’s a strange vertigo, as though his presence were the only thing that made the space around him exist, as though he were at once the centre and the engine. At this point, it’s ecstasy: the conjugated forces of his body and his wheels propelling him forward with the firmness of a piece of artillery, every swerve seizing his senses. Diderot takes off, glides, lifted, and his thoughts also materialize, roll in his brain, tangible as stones and precise, he’s having clear ideas — it’s always on his bike that everything settles, everything crystallizes.

RETURNING VIA Colfax, nearly noon, a barbecue joint, pickups with snow tires outside, and at the edge of the parking lot, an empty swing that grates dismally on a crossbar: Diderot’s hungry, he goes inside. Dim room panelled in yellow pine, no windows but Christmas decorations in abundance, club music turned up loud — Jefferson Airplane, “Somebody to Love” — and a phenomenal hubbub that finally covers his internal weather, the incessant come and go of servers with hard smiles, weak phrasing. A girl in a cowboy hat welcomes him with a menu in hand, reels off a commercial greeting in the form of a question — How are we doing today? — turns on her heel, leads him between tables populated with beers and men wearing large lumberjack shirts, two or three tables with girl duos, one with a family. For Diderot, a table in the corner and andiamo: triple burger, fries, Coke.

When the door opens, the ray of light whitens the atmosphere and reveals the dust suspended in the room, thousands of particles without mass, without volume, mysteries of matter, and then dark silhouettes enter stamping their feet on the doormat with disproportionate ardour, on the pretext of knocking off the snow that’ll soon turn to puddles. Diderot’s irritated hearing them stamp stamp for ages, bloody racket, raises his eyebrows: a new family has been seated at the other end of the room. There’s a little girl in a high chair, two teens, a woman with auburn hair, a man in a wheelchair. The woman captures his attention. She shrugs off a fuchsia parka, lifts her hair from the hood of her tracksuit, and is now studying the menu while the man in the wheelchair drains his first beer.

At the moment when the server brings their plates — three burgers for the five of them, two Cokes, two beers, they’ll share — Diderot catches the eye of the woman, who greets him with a nod of her head, murmurs something to the man in the wheelchair who also looks up at him, and finally she gets up, crosses the room, and comes to stand in front of his table, her jogging pants are loose, too big for her. Hello, she smiles, a heavy layer of turquoise eyeshadow on her swollen eyelids, clumsy mascara, lilac circles under her eyes, round smacks of apricot blush on her hollowed cheeks, mouth enlarged with a brown line, is it Carnival or something? Diderot puts down his cutlery and without getting up says hello. The woman holds out her hand: Katherine Thoreau, I work on the site, I’m the one who found you knocked flat the other day. Surprised, Diderot gets up — ah! — and shakes her hand, vaguely vexed by the use of the words knocked flat. Now they stand face to face. The woman is tall, her beautiful hair smells like family shampoo and cigarettes, she leans her eyes into his, sage-petal green eyes, softness itself, you’re feeling better, then? Her voice gets a little lost in the din of the restaurant, of the music and the cowboy servers shouting orders, but Diderot’s instinctively tuned in to the right frequency, and he hears her. Great, watch this — he lifts his arms in the air, would have even spun around — a server carrying a stack of dirty plates passes between them, he places his hands back on his thighs, great, no, really, excellent. I see that, she smiles, an exaggerated pout of admiration, her eyes shining now, you came by bike? Diderot clears his throat, yes — he wasn’t thinking of his bike shorts or of his flat little shoes, of his body, and feels suddenly naked and confused, forces himself to round up his memories — the man in the tie, the fight, the pain — but he doesn’t remember her, or that her hair caressed his face while he lay in the stinking muck, steeped in rain and blood, who is this woman? So everything’s great? she asks again, still cheerful, beginning to retreat towards her table — but I happen to know she’s lingering a little, wouldn’t even mind spending the whole day on this side of the room with this man, handsome as a continent. They’re standing straight as totems in the smell of the deep fryer, they’re hot, they shuffle, embarrassing the servers who graze past, held fast in this moment that’s quickly draining away. Great, Diderot watches her, twisting his mouth — how long has it been since he talked like this with a girl? Ignoring the three faces behind her and the little one who’s bawling, Katherine has put her hands in her pockets, there’s interest, she looks him up and down, pretend serious, we start up again tomorrow so better be in good shape, right? She’s pretty now, pretty because of her gaiety, a soft look, beautiful neck, body loose, so pretty that Diderot, looking for a way to keep talking, asks her abruptly: which team do you work on? End of the laughter — an end to the cat and mouse, the parenthesis of joking around and the molecular desire — what we have now, face to face, is the boss and the worker, and it’s as swift as a cudgel blow. Katherine Thoreau freezes and replies, I’m a driver, Anchorage Three. Ah, very good. Diderot bites his lips, thinks, you idiot, you complete idiot, while the woman takes a stronger step backwards, signifying that she’s returning to her table, in a hurry to be done now, but in that instant knocks against the wheelchair, stumbles, spins around. It’s a man Diderot hadn’t seen who’s come up behind her and announces, sugary sweet: your food’s getting cold, dear. Katherine lets out a cry of surprise, immediately covers her mouth; she hadn’t heard anything either, no one can hear anything in here, then she hurries through the introductions while looking away: Lewis, my husband, Mr. Diderot, the boss of the site — she feels miserable as she utters these words, the boss of the site! why not kneel before him and lick his boots while she’s at it! She grows hot with rage, wants to escape for good, but Lewis holds out a cheerful hand to Diderot, oh I see! You’re the one who was knifed by a wacko? Diderot nods, stepping back in turn towards his table, but Lewis insists and rolls closer to him, why don’t you come finish your meal with us, Mr. Diderot? It’s no fun to eat alone, isn’t that right, dear? Katherine, overwhelmed, breathes, let’s not bother him, Lewis. That is when Diderot, like an amateur actor, looked at his watch and then declined, thank you but you see, I’ve finished, I must go, after which he paid, picked up his things, and as he passed the family at their table, waved his hand, a wave that only Lewis returned, the boys just watched him hard, and she kept her turquoise eyelids ostensibly down at her glass of water, ignoring the little girl who wailed and held out her arms, demanding justice, they must have argued over the number of fries and sips of Coke, and now, on the plates, there’s nothing left for Katherine.