Birth of a Bridge

A THIRD LANDSCAPE

WINTER GOES ON FOREVER, A SHEATH OF GLASS. Cold corsets the city. Oxidizes perspectives, clarifies sounds, detaches each gesture, and in all of this the sky plays an exaggerated part. On the river — bleached ashen like the rest — people are at work and the bridge expands. Near the enormous columns that are now like the two indestructible ankles of this whole story, there are now long concrete seawalls reinforcing the banks. Steel is unloaded onto them, carried by rail to the Pontoverde platform, and then transported here aboard barges equipped with icebreakers.

It’s phase two of the site, we’re switching over to height, colonizing the sky. Diderot, in fine form, lifts his glass to no one in particular during a gathering on the work site, New Year’s resolutions formulated by the skin of their teeth on December 31st, mulled wine served in translucent plastic glasses that immediately melt a little — but we know that his glass holds only Coca-Cola. In other words, Diderot’s voice smacks, we’re finished with the holes, the excavators, and the explosions, terminado the digging and the blasting of the ground, heads underwater and feet in the abyss, eardrums shaken by dynamite and the pressure of underwater chambers, the mud and the mire, done with the dredger — Verlaine packed his bag three days before Christmas — the time has come for cranes and arrows, the time of welders, rock bolters, the time of skilled labourers. We begin the raising of the towers: the Coca tower and the Edgefront tower, seven hundred and fifty feet high. Cheers! Shouts fuse together over the esplanade, and one voice distinguishes itself from the hubbub — a vaguely nasal timbre, probably that of Buddy Loo: seven hundred and fifty feet, yeah, kinda like the Empire State Building, eh — an assertion that’s corrected right away by Summer Diamantis — the Empire is taller, ours will be more like the Tour Montparnasse, and she’s barely finished her sentence when Sanche’s voice sounds in her ear, Diamantis, there’s not a single person here who knows the Tour Montparnasse, and without answering him, she migrates towards the wine.

THE WORKERS drink, pace, and comment, glasses in hand, we’re gonna have to climb up there, gonna have to do it, with a mix of impatience and anxiety unbridled by the alcohol. Sanche Alphonse Cameron swallows a smile, arms crossed over his chest, puts on an innocent face: his time has come, and he knows it. Four months overseeing vehicle maintenance was enough for him — now he’s going to gain some altitude. The Coca and Edgefront towers will be identical, each one composed of two immense steel piers placed thirty yards apart; these will be solidly anchored to a concrete foundation and then innervated to each other via crosspiece supports, sorts of gangways that will also serve as platforms to hoist people and materials. The piers themselves will be composed of prefabricated steel girders, bolted one to the other all the way up — requiring a rhythm of twenty-five girders per worker per day, the guys have been informed. With each tower thus reinforced, they’ll rise yard by yard, and the higher they get, the more a mass of cables, pulleys, winches, and hoists will trickle down, and the crane will also progress, unfolding its boom in tempo with the work. Sanche’s crane will work on the construction of the Edgefront tower.

He dribbles his way along the crowd to the buffet, lingers over the pot where the liquid churns like a priest’s robe scented with alcohol, pepper, and cinnamon, orange zest floating, refills his cup: he likes this wine that rasps his tongue, exactly as this city has rasped his skin from day one. Because in terms of promising the good life, Coca has done more than meet his expectations: it has reinvented him. He arrived in September as a model crane operator, a loving only son, an attentive fiancé, but since then he’s had the feeling that each day he’s slipping a little further out of his lovely smooth skin, his even skin: it has dried, flaked off, fallen in scraps, and he rids himself of it with a stiff joy, kicking in the shavings, in the slough. Everything happened as though the city, which acted on his skin like silver nitrate on photographic paper, was revealing the stigmata of desire and ambition, the taste for the game, the will to power, and now he enjoys the feeling that another skin is forming beneath the old one, another skin that he doesn’t yet know but that is the skin of real life, there is no doubt, and when he looks at his leopard body in the mirror, he feels handsome, yes, and tells himself that the moment has come to let what is inside him come to life.

DEEP INSIDE the multitude, Katherine Thoreau for the moment keeps her distance from Diderot, who verifies her presence with quick sidelong glances — they’re waiting for each other. Night falls, the crowd disperses, people throw their glasses into large trash cans and drift towards the locker rooms; the alcohol has warmed them, but it’s bonuses they’re talking about as they open their lockers, this Christmas bonus that no one has got yet, can’t let ourselves be lulled by cheap wine, we gotta sort this out. Trestles, portable stove, and cases of wine packed up, emptied, thrown out, and Mo Yun, astounded by these actions, begins to turn near the pot, there’s still enough to fill his flask and this is what he rushes to do, then sets about fishing out the orange peels one by one and stuffs them in a piece of newspaper, a cone he pockets, excited by this sweet deal, and then wanders away — and it’s at this precise moment that Diderot makes out Katherine’s hair as she moves towards the workers’ facilities, tells himself she’s leaving and he’s going to miss her, tosses his cup in the can, and with hands in his pockets launches himself in her direction — after all, I never really got to thank her, this is what he tells himself to get himself in gear — and intercepts her, almost solemn, hey Thoreau, one thing, I wanted to say thank you — and Katherine, who had seen him, a moving mass slaloming between the last groups still on-site and had instinctively slowed her step so they would meet — choreography of collision, it’s as old as the hills and still totally magic — she stops, opens her alcohol-clouded eyes wide, thank you? Thank you for what? She’s had too much to drink, Diderot sees it right away, her face is capsized, he gets right to the point: thank you for the other day, the fight, you know what I mean. She rests her naked eyes on him, transparent irises stinging behind the slight swell of her lids, oh, that’s all in the past, she pouts, that’s behind us; she wobbles on her feet, puts a hand to her temple — I have to eat something, I’ve had a few drinks, I have to eat, and Diderot seizes the opportunity — a miracle of a chance — to simply say, wait for me, let’s go.

LATER, THOREAU and Diderot are sitting in an ordinary snack bar, dazzled and stunned to be there and for it all to have happened so easily — even though they had to perform several circumventions in order to slip away quietly, and even though as soon as they’d been seated Katherine had to get up to go vomit in the toilet bowl, vile, in the bathroom — and, plunging her head into the hole, holding her hair back in a ponytail, she’d wanted to laugh again, I’m drunk, this is ridiculous — then she’d copiously splashed her clothes while rinsing her mouth under the faucet. The room is sparsely populated, only a few individuals lingering, two cops taking a break on their patrol, a man with a very long beard who soliloquizes. Quick, Katherine, have something to eat — this sudden first-name basis accelerates the cadence — Diderot calls the server over and Katherine checks her breath in her palm. You okay? He looks at her, smiling, and Katherine lifts her head, I’m great, and then, as though she couldn’t wait any longer, she shrugs off her ugly parka, and, taking off her sweater, crosses and uncrosses her arms from bottom to top, a large movement, her face disappearing fleetingly into the wool collar, then she opens the top buttons of her shirt beneath Diderot’s eyes that comb over her, imperturbable, and finally shakes her head lightly so her hair settles — a light moisture dews her top lip and her cheeks are red, and with this gesture she’s just made you think she was too hot, but no — and in a rush of unexpected directness she says, I’ll warn you, this is all I have to offer; Diderot, vaguely outdistanced, chews the inside of his cheeks and then states in turn, just as calm as she, and direct, that’s already a lot, and Katherine, in a trembling voice, says I think so too.

AT MIDNIGHT, AT THE WHIRR OF THE SIREN THAT signals the end of the second eight-hour time slot, the men stagger from the Pontoverde platform, skin tight, eyes burning under flickering lids. While most of them go back to their digs, a few others head for downtown Coca, zone of games and pleasures. The single ones value this rhythm even though it exhausts the organism and disturbs the nervous system (they get up around two in the afternoon, work from four until midnight, party till dawn), it lets them have the nightclubs when they’re bumping. They like night on the work site, night that encapsulates them, encloses them in pools of light — multitudes of bulbs light up the darkness like a celebration, vehicle headlights signal to one another in code, the drivers’ cabins are lit like alcoves — and emphasizes their community, their solidarity, and their strength: they are comrades, brothers in arms. So they don’t stagger too long, no, they get excited, a little dazed and impatient to go hit on the easy women, to drink and gamble, impatient to find, after the difficulty and the tension of the work, a little simple flow, a little sweet fluidity. Once they’re out, they walk through the fallen dusk in groups and keep up a good pace all the way to the shuttles that will take them there; they climb inside, already jostling one another, a pack of kids joking and jeering, a gang of electric schoolboys. Soren Cry, with his skirting-the-walls attitude, usually goes to sit at the back of the bus, solitary, and leans his head against the window, his gaze wandering out into the darkness; he likes these trips that are like decompression chambers, floating tunnels where he’s taken in, transported, where he can finally let his guard down. He doesn’t even see the guy who sits down beside him, who gives him a few taps on the shoulder so he’ll turn around and holds out a solid hand, Alex. Soren extends his hand reluctantly and then turns back to the window, but the guy hits his shoulder again, three quick hits whack whack whack, I know, I know who you are, I knew you in Anchorage. Soren starts — no one can see it but I know that his heart jolts inside his chest as though he was suffocating and then starts up again in a torrent — he replies slowly, naw, man, you must be mistaken, I’ve never been to Anchorage, I’m from Ashland, Kentucky; but the guy suddenly leans in close till his shoulder is touching Soren’s and lowers his voice, let’s not waste time, Soren Cry, don’t bother talking shit, you got it? Then, as Soren nearly pukes from terror, the guy spits out rapid fire in a falsely relaxed voice you had a little trouble in Anchorage, Soren, a story of a girl and a bear, not pretty — Soren’s catapulted upright on his feet as though on a spring, leave me alone, man, I’ve never been to Anchorage, I’m from Ashland, you must be getting me mixed up with someone else — but the other gets up just as fast to push him back down with a palm pressed hard against his shoulder, listen up — this is your last warning before I go to the cops, they’d be glad to get the guy who killed someone with a bear, believe me, everyone there was real shaken up — are you listening — hey, are you listening to me? Soren lowers his head, the back of his black hat covers his brow and his eyeballs vibrate in the darkness, strangely liquefied, yeah, the guy comes to press his cheek violently against Soren’s as though for a tango and breathes nicotine-gum-scented breath in his face, when we get downtown we’re gonna get off together, but you’re not gonna take off and play right away, we’re gonna talk first, got it — I’ve got a job for you, a thing you can’t say no to, or else, bang — he’s placed his first and middle fingers together in a pistol against Soren’s temple, blows on them like the professional after the clean execution of the contract — and Soren stiffens in place, cornered — and in fact, cornered is exactly what he is. When the guy finally steps away from him to joke around with the others in the front seats like nothing’s going on, Soren turns his head to the window again: microscopic islands of light and noise — neon signs, yellow-gold windows inundated with the warmth of kitchens, glowing embers in car ashtrays, blue halo of television sets, dogs yowling, solitary joggers who breathe and hit the pavement in cadence, bikes that zip through the night — perforate the urban darkness, residential neighbourhoods that stretch out, that hold embraces, hold dreams, all this is not for him who will never, it seems, find any rest, never, ever. Soren knows the way, just a few more minutes before they reach the big time bad luck of the sidewalks, deep in the orange belly of the city; he is emptied out, and while the suburbs slide past the window, his past unrolls like a great scroll, just as black and shadowy, and, in a few linear bursts of light, there he is, back in Anchorage.

FROM THE airport onward he had trembled, rigid with exhaustion from the trip and the spectacle of corpses on display on the concourse. A magnificent collection of stuffed specimens from Alaska, land and aquatic wildlife, animals he’d taken the time to gaze at, impressed by the reflective gleam of their pupils — they too had a gaze — and by the shine of their teeth moistened with varnish — they were hungry; among them, a moose with flat antlers and gentle eyes, a strange amphibious and vaguely prehistoric creature, solitary and independent, who crosses large rivers and grazes with its head underwater; a white bighorn sheep with large amber-coloured horns curving in hoops like the rolled coiffure of Madame Bovary; and finally a brown bear standing on its hind legs, colossal: ten feet tall and at least a thousand pounds. Soren is fascinated by the power and the violence — two nouns that, to him, are strangely synonymous, and he has blithely confused them since childhood — that subsist in this furry carcass staged in the airport terminal. A handsome welcoming committee. One that nightmares are made of — and nightmares would come, the animal would come to life on the flagstones.

First there was the boat to build, a hull a hundred feet long with a steel frame that Soren and three other guys had put together over a few months; the owner, a rich restaurateur from Anchorage, is starting up a hunting business and wants to transport hunters and fishers in groups of thirty to the lodges he owns in Kodiak, Seldovia, and Eagle River. It’s on this building site that Soren meets his first bear, a hungry young male who pulverizes the empty beer cans left behind after the break and flees at his approach. A few days later, when he sees it again, Soren decides from then on to prepare a bundle of berries, roots, and dried fish for the bear — he leaves it behind the shed, in the animal’s path (he does this in secret: taming a bear on the work site is strictly forbidden). Ten days later, when he goes out behind the shed to see, there’s nothing left of the bundle, and paw prints are clearly visible in the snow; Soren smiles, quivers with joy. A few days later he hears it growling again behind the fence, rushes to see it finish devouring the enormous bundle he’d brought so carefully onto the site; when it catches sight of him, the bear freezes, and they watch each other — Soren notices the red crescent mark above its eye — this lasts two or three seconds, no longer, and then the animal disappears behind a wall of containers.

Once the hull is finished, Soren finds another job in a factory where he freezes his ass off all day long standing in front of trays of fish to be gutted before packaging. Yet he continues to bring provisions, once or twice a month, until the night when he finds the bundle intact — the bear’s not coming anymore. This desertion hits him hard: Soren lies around, gets drunk on weekends, feels himself foundering. When he hears word of a position as a bus driver that’s opening, he snaps it up, and, displaying some ultimate confidence, he begins to venture into nature, which is where he meets the woman who will drive him completely insane.

Though he doesn’t entirely believe in this thing between them — she’s in university, she’s travelled, and she speaks French — he lets himself be taken in because they share a similar metabolism, both are solitary, independent early risers, two mute and graceless individuals fascinated by wildness. In the beginning, Soren’s not very physically attracted to her — she’s stocky and short limbed, with a closed face and dull hair, but he likes her arrogance and her big breasts beneath the aqua down jacket, breasts she lets him enjoy at will, breasts he kneads, licks, sucks; besides, he’s aware that she’s not clingy, doesn’t ask questions, and that his appetite for sex suits her. When she arrives at his place because of some story about a broken heater in her studio, he opens the door politely, specifies with a smile that this is only temporary, right, but he’s so transfigured that a girl is knocking at his door, it’s as though he’s asking her to stay forever. So she makes her entrance, royal and desired, and soon there he is waiting for her to come home each evening, organizing night trips into nature, now he’s driving her around, guiding her, and making casseroles for her. The end of the study she’s been conducting on wolves (communication within the pack: decoding the cries and the howls) — signifies the end of their honeymoon. The girl returns to university and is suddenly smug about it, doesn’t bother answering the questions he asks, is openly bored; soon she brings guys over to his place in the afternoon, students who are a little boorish but flush, who down his beers and drain his hot-water tank. Strangely, Soren takes it, says nothing, holding out — but the girl humiliates him more and more often, refuses to sleep with him anymore, refuses to let him touch her breasts, snickering at his handwriting — are you dyslexic or something? You should get that checked out, buddy, I won’t be here forever — or at his job, going out each night under the black netting of new stockings, breasts out in the open, and comes home at dawn drunk to toss used condoms in the garbage. He finally asks her to leave — he’s scared now that he might hit her, he knows himself, she’s gotta get out of here. But the girl digs in her heels, says she’s waiting for a money order from her father; Soren, crazy with rage, answers coldly I don’t give a shit tonight you are outta here — but that night, ridiculous, they end up sleeping together again, and it’s so intense for Soren that he doesn’t know what he wants anymore. This time again the girl screamed her pleasure loudly; gleaming with sweat, strands of her hair stuck to her temples, she looks at him for a long moment with brilliantly shining eyes — her mouth is cruel and disdainful. Soren, it’s time I told you clearly: I am not a big dog, not a mare or a goat: I’m a woman, a human being, can you get that straight? Then she turned towards the wall with a sigh, stifled a dirty little laugh, and, with her back arched, presented her ass to him again, and he took it. It was that same night that the bear from the site reappeared, foraging in the shrubby bushes behind his building. Soren is completely disoriented, the girl is asleep on her stomach. Not knowing how to find an outlet for the sexual violence that torments him, and feeling himself losing ground, he gets dressed and takes the garbage out, keys in hand. The animal is there in the small courtyard, resplendent, walnut brown and lustrous beneath an enormous moon; he lifts his head and looks at Soren with his little eyes, they recognize each other, the bear has the same sliver of red above his eye, it’s him — Soren is dazzled, spellbound, calls the animal softly and he comes, moving slowly on four paws, swaying with his whole enormous body, and warm, it’s magic, Soren climbs the stairs backwards, step by step, holding out the garbage bag to the bear who comes slowly, with no other noise than that of his fur against the walls at the turns, then once Soren’s on the landing he opens the door quickly and puts the bag inside, a few feet from the doorway; he leaves the door open and slips out to climb a little higher on the staircase, and as soon as the bear goes inside the apartment, he turns the key in the lock with a fevered hand, closing the door on the bear and the girl.

THE MEN have just got off the bus. Alex immediately places himself behind Soren — who moves ahead reluctantly, desperate — and pushes him forward with a series of jabs to his shoulder. They plunge into a gleaming, oily neighbourhood, following narrow alleyways and finally enter an ordinary bar where a Frenchman is waiting for them. Have a seat. Beneath the grenadine bulbs that light the place, Soren learns their faces — Alex’s intrigues him, he recognizes him vaguely. As though this conversation was just a pleasantry, an interlude of sociability in good company, the Frenchman points at both of them with a whirling index finger, what are you going to have? The minutes that follow are exactly like a hand squeezing the throat. The Frenchman, silver fox with prominent Adam’s apple, says you’ll receive a package at the midnight change of shift — Alex will bring it to you, but he won’t come onto the site — you’ll have to pick it up outside and then stash it in your locker. You’ll still have time to catch the bus and have a drink with the guys. Soren looks at his hands trembling on the table: and then? Then you wait for instructions. Soren doesn’t blink, he lowers his head again, his eye is reflected in the bronze of his beer, he exhales: what’s in the package? At this point Alex plants himself against his shoulder again and practically licks his ear whispering, shut up, while the Frenchman lifts Soren’s chin with the signet ring on his fist, listen up — you don’t ask any questions, you just wait for instructions and everything will work out fine. But Soren insists, tears in his eyes like glue, and if I say no? If you say no? If you say no we may just find ourselves a bear and lock you up with it.

RALPH WALDO WILL BE STOPPING OVER IN COCA for twenty-four hours — this is what he tells Diderot in mid-January over the phone in a mild and international voice. Since the Boa is off in Dubai, Diderot and he will meet alone. Rendezvous in the Four Seasons bar, the last luxury hotel to open in Coca, a popular spot, built in the old prison like the one in Istanbul: the cells of the defiant Natives and the area’s worst crooks have been redone as deluxe suites that go for two thou a night, after the walls have been scraped of all the rebellious graffiti, racist insults and threats directed at the judges — when I get out I’ll stuff your balls down your throat — after sanding off the caricatures relegating the heads of these same judges to the darkness, cheeks colonized by scrubby sideburns, fur of corruption or intransigence; the visiting rooms are converted into meeting rooms for all kinds of conference calls, the workshops into business centres, the refectory into a jazzy lounge bar, and the slammer courtyard into a tropical garden with a mosaicked pool and beds of eternal, undying roses.

DIDEROT IS late by an hour at least, but Waldo smiles at him, fifty years old, tall and slim, without a paunch, splendid hands — slender wrists, but a singular width of the palm and thumb, fuselage of muscled fingers — placed on his hips, elbows thrown back spreading the tails of his jacket, billiard-ball head haloed with a glory still sharp: they say he won the Coca bridge contest by drawing the bridge right in front of the jury, pencil in hand, a double-edged ruler in his pocket, this is all I need he said right off the bat, presenting his meagre supplies one after the other like the magician who shows the audience the inside of his hat before pulling out a flock of turtledoves, all I need is an idea and a strong philosophy. Then the oral part of the presentation, the dreaded challenge, had mutated into a master class, Ralph Waldo beginning his talk with murmurs whispered into the auditorium as though he was pondering aloud: how is a bridge conceived? How does its shape appear? Is it determined by the context, or does it define itself according to the stated needs? From there he had launched into a virtuoso demonstration led by his hands that suddenly inhabit all the space and by his voice that explains each detail on the board, nevertheless allowing himself a few fumbles, a couple of hesitations while he tears white sheets from the large board, pantomime of the violent and inhabited genius, and even though it is false — even grossly hypocritical — this work in progress becomes something daring, sassy, that captivates the judges: they will award the prize to this choreography, as well oiled as a number by the Bluebell Girls.

WHISKY LIGHT and fluffy carpet, willowy women swaying between tables, golden dimness, the men start drinking. They get to the bridge immediately: how is the site going, Georges? The man scrutinizes Diderot from behind his fine, round, polycarbonate glasses; he’s dressed in black — polo shirt, Italian suit, and leather running shoes with rubber soles, the latest trend. Diderot takes off his jacket, mumbles, it’s going fine, we’ve dredged three-quarters of a million cubic yards of silt and sediment, a whole shit heap that we dumped back into the ocean, not a pretty picture, I’m not sure we’re totally within the lines, have to watch that the eco gang doesn’t crack down on us; then we had to dynamite a channel and level the shoals — we’ve prepared the bed for the beast, the anchorage phase is almost done, we’re raising up the towers, everything’s on schedule.

Ralph Waldo smiles. His question was intended to evoke a general impression, an emotion, some interiority — not a technical report. A dialogue of the deaf ensues: while Ralph Waldo extrapolates on the question of the bridge, touching upon the aesthetics, the intimate experience of crossing over, and that of nature — he’s the man who returns from a great theoretical distance, the one who invents the form — Diderot delimits it, handles it technically, numbers it, sizes it, and finally gives his progressive rectilinear view of the crossing; this goddamn bridge, like all kinds of works, is nothing more than the calibration of a form we all know inside and out, and to talk about it means simply isolating a problem and breaking it down, breaking it down, always breaking it down, one more time, and then once more, and it’s in this methodical way that any appropriate response will arise — this is his method, his way of thinking.

RALPH WALDO versus Georges Diderot. Two men face to face, deep in their armchairs, the alcohol going to their heads; the bar is closing, last call, they have one last stiff shot and then go, hugging themselves in the rain, Ralph Waldo teetering with his glasses in hand, my aim is always to intervene the least amount possible he shouts with his arm extended in what he believes to be the direction of the bridge, one must always find the lightest, purest, most modern form, an interpretation of the landscape — his glasses fall to the sidewalk as he stumbles in the gutter — an interpretation of the landscape, that’s what I deliver, he streams water and belts it out, happy in this moment, and Diderot inwardly visualizes the giant mechanism of the site, the deployment of forces, the physical expenditure of the men, haggard and dirty by day’s end, the deafening noise of the machines, the bundles of bills counted and recounted one by one in filthy hands before being folded into small squares at the bottom of leather wallets, the accidents that threaten and those that happen, the closed faces of the Natives and the violent movements of the men from Detroit, suddenly making out Summer concentrating on her concrete and Sanche, minuscule at the foot of his crane, holding all this with Katherine right in the middle at the controls of her excavator, he lets himself be overcome with emotion — an interpretation of the landscape! — a silent laugh shakes him as the architect takes great strides towards the river, chest slanting to the ground as though he is charging into a strong adverse wind, Diderot clings now to Waldo’s voice that cuts through the wind and declaims: a third landscape — not the welding together of two areas, Georges, but a new landscape! Waldo has put an arm through Diderot’s, and, hooked together like this, they make their way towards the river, drunk, spirited, magnetized by the banks, the tree-lined path, the little benches, the bushes, and soon hypnotized by the roar of the waters, the curvilinear signs traced on the surface, the bubbling filaments — illegible chalk messages on a blackboard — that disintegrate in a space of seconds.

The unfinished bridge is massive in the night, a monstrous presence, very dark — Waldo stares at it in a low voice, the lighting at night shouldn’t be too bright, too spectacular, Georges, I don’t want flame sabres, beams that slice, bulbs that carve, all that grandiloquence junk — the towers won’t be lit right up to the top, that way you’ll be able to imagine them extending into the night, the deck will be a simple stroke like a vanishing line, and we’ll regulate the balance between shadows, between different qualities of shadows, we’ll let the materials, the river, the city, and the forest touch, and, for the bridge, all I want is for people to sense the strength of the cables. Diderot listens to the architect’s voice flowing through the murmur of Coca and that of the forest, and holds Waldo back as he leans dangerously far out over the waters, seeing nothing; he turns him around gently so they can go back together, and whispers in his ear, about the lighting, no problem, I’ve got a plan for that too.

SANCHE HAS A COUPLE OF MINUTES LEFT BEFORE the day starts up, before he has to decode the workers’ hand signals as they prepare and balance the loads to be lifted — standard gestures outlined on professional charts, official crane operator language learned by heart and hard-hatted silhouettes drawn on white paper on the day of the exam — and then hoist each load of reinforcing steel that must be placed within a half-inch degree of precision. A few minutes left to enjoy his position. Sanche turns towards Coca, his gaze grazes over the city, stops at an intersection where silhouettes rush along, says to himself how much he’d like to turn his boom towards that tower on the river’s edge, thirty storeys high in aquamarine blue, and maybe he would be able to touch, with the end of his extendible arm, the window of that girl who welcomed him in Coca, that twisted, splendid caller at the square dance of life.

FIRST FORMIDABLE hours of his arrival in Coca, the girl who’s all legs who lifts his name up on a placard, the car that rushes towards the city, the radio turned up blasting international pop. This impression of crazy speed and light that spatters, this incredible feeling that life is racing ahead. Shakira croons, sings loud on the choruses, shakes her head, her hair coming loose, taps her hands against the wheel, pressing the accelerator at the same time so that they move in rhythm with the stereo, smokes red Dunhills, slants a look at a text, and once they’re alone in the middle of the plain says to Sanche in a husky, ironic voice, don’t worry, sugar, I love to drive in heels, and he grimaces a smile, a smile of panic and enthusiasm, that will need to be elucidated; his mouth is dry, now, the reverberation of the sun exhausts his eyes so thoroughly that he finally lowers the visor, tells himself he has to buy a hat right away, a black one, a stetson with a leather band, promises himself he won’t go cheap; and then the highway that cuts through a desert zone with powdery ground, white as a lake of salt, occupied here and there by little groups of shacks, by thirsty coyotes — Sanche imagines them lingering around the oil wells — and by cacti with arms outstretched like Christs in glory. Suddenly space gaping open before him, a lateral scope, the faraway hills at both ends of the plain, shadowy forms floating on the haze of the heat, blue, drowsy like dinosaurs, while here, right beside him, the girl is another mountain who adjusts the A/C and pays attention to the vibrations of her cellphone; Sanche, stunned by their communal presence in this mercurial racing car, shivers, rubs his hands together, smiles again that same smile people like about him, head held high and facing the windshield; he says to himself in this second, here I am in the latest Mercedes beside a Russian girl with legs to die for, I’m twenty-seven years old, I’m a crane operator who just flew fifteen hours to come to this site, my first bridge, and I know like everyone else that anyone who wants to build a bridge must first make a pact with the devil, and before him, the highway is like a fatal funnel he dives into headfirst with her beside him.

LATER THEY reach the end of the high plain, the highway ending bluntly at the edge of a precipice beyond which, crouched in the valley, the city of Coca shimmers — a camo moth, thinks Sanche, leaning closer to the windshield, it must show up best at night. In the middle of the day, the sky reflects its serene grammar in the facades of the towers, and the entire landscape is absorbed into them while the cranes, cranes by the hundreds, planted close together, augur the city’s power to come. They merge onto a street that’s fairly wide but fissured, pavement eroded by couch grass; it winds along the side of the plateau in sweeping bends grossly hollowed out from the limestone plateau, and once it reaches the valley, blends with the interchanges and other fast streets, the way a white strand sneaks into an otherwise vigorous head of hair. Later, when they reach the heart of the city, Shakira Ourga’s large hand makes excited deferential gestures as she points out Coca’s riches, her face tense with a restless rictus. She makes a point of slowing down in front of the giant aquariums inside which he can see the gleam of luxury racing cars, check it out! Ferrari, Mercedes, Porsche — they’re all there, Sanche nods his head solemnly, leans forward to see, whistles, and in so doing gives Shakira great pleasure; soon she tosses the keys of the Mercedes to a Filipino valet, dark as a spectre in front of the door of a restaurant on the first floor of a mirrored tower — for seven years he’s been standing here, in his narrow redingote and tasselled cap pushed back on his head; seven years since he immigrated to Coca, seven years, you have to stop and imagine such a sequence, counting on your fingers, the faces of the wife and kids fading inside the pages of his passport, a monthly money transfer sent to the village and the crumbs of his paycheque gone to pay for a room without windows in a basement somewhere, very rarely a woman with him, and candied tangerines that he sucks in front of the television, he says only thirty words a day, but the same ones a hundred times over.

They eat lunch quickly once Shakira has put down her phone and taken the waiter to task for serving the table beside them first — she speaks to him in a hard tone, face closed, the nail of her index finger tapping the gold-plated face of her Swiss watch. Face-on, close-up, the relief of her face is brought into focus, and Sanche follows its line, rising and falling, a route that unfurls its black coil behind the table where the girl devours her meal, citizen of Coca, new and jewelled in an irreproachable body, cared for like a precision tool, behind this avenue where she works for the city, behind this tower where she sleeps with the director of the powerful chamber of commerce (who happens to be the owner of the Mercedes), a route that unlaces dirty bus stations and the fear of being killed, the back of covered trucks where she knocked against others like her, baggage holds, trunks of cars, train toilets, robberies, the joy of coming upon a half-full can or a sweater at the bottom of the garbage, freezing your ass off and filthy. And behind her curving back that’s already been through so much, things are fidgeting, stirring, shouting — behind her is Russia, the war, and Youri, her little brother the soldier, the one who was posted to Chechnya, the one she didn’t wait for. The one who left as a young man without knowing, not a war lover, no, more like a lazy sun-basking snake or a clever monkey, who left in January 2000 without knowing, in just the same way you’d get up from the couch to stretch your legs — and who is now charging into suspicious buildings in a suburb of Grozny, breaking down doors with great kicks, submachine gun held firmly against his hip and pointed inside at hypothetical enemy bodies vanishing into dark corners, staked out in the rubble, or covered in mud, and who freezes in front of the apartments, waits, listens, keeps watch, and at the least noise sprays a heavy shower, sprays a ton, sweeping the space with the gun rat a tat tat tat tat, sprays like a madman, and after a while he doesn’t even go to the trouble of listening first, nor of casting a look inside — he breaks down the door and machine-guns straight away without waiting — he’s that scared, he’s seen that many of his buddies in agony after being ambushed by surprise gunfire, and then have their throats cut post-mortem — he’s that terrorized, broken, out of his head, and that’s how crazed, deceitful, and fanatical the other side is, that’s how much they want his scalp, and through all this there’s the waste, there are drops, it leaks even, dammit it drips, blood and guts, there are cries and screams and old women and children, through all this he leaves a hell of a trail of carnage, that Youri, he spends his time machine-gunning, he’s the kamikaze of the squadron, he doesn’t know how to do anything but this anymore, and when he stops, it’s to drink his face off with other guys who, like him, left without knowing, or it’s to go to the brothel — but he can’t even get it up anymore, there are too many little noises in the room, too many suspicious breaths — or to write to Shakira, his beautiful sis. Shaki, wait for me, wait for me to get back to Moscow, we’ll get out of there together, I’ll have the cash. But Shaki left without him. And behind her, Youri breathes down her neck with his fraternal breath, a nauseating stench of gunpowder and hot blood.

AFTER THE meal, Shakira steps away to compose a message on her phone and then suddenly does an about-face, decides to take a trip to the beach stretched out along the length of the river north of the city, and Sanche lets himself be carried along even though just the idea of a beach seems bizarre to him right now — a beach! — it hadn’t even crossed his mind — all he’s seen so far of Coca is an assembly of towers arranged in a geometric cadaster.

On the way, they pass other sedans that are as powerful and drive past other buildings that are as dazzling although still unfinished. Shakira sums it up: here, the rules are simple — if you have money, come on in, and if not, well then, bye-bye! — her hands leave the wheel to illustrate the words — inward/outward flaps — and Sanche, gobsmacked, contracts his buttocks on the seat as the car plunges full speed ahead in the fast lane that hugs the river’s edge.

Water-level parking lot, new cafés, patios, umbrellas with logos, cheery soundtrack, and always pop, synth versions of old standards. At this hour, a high-rolling sun varnishes the surface of the water and the sand of the beach sparkles like sugar. They walk to the shore. This is the only place where I feel happy, Shakira breathes deeply, sends her thongs clattering with a kick, walks towards the water, hikes her jeans up to mid-thigh, and enters the river, calling out to Sanche, come on! come on! and Sanche has the feeling that things are becoming clear. They’re becoming clear in a strange way, because his gaze abandons the girl to move farther off, towards Edgefront and the opposite bank: greens of all sorts mix their shades into a sonorous and profuse border of vegetation, tall as a man, a few roofs of sheet metal emerging here and there, shacks, motor boats anchored beneath the branches, rowboats, and pontoons floating on tires, and farther still, in the depth of the field, the rise of a forested mountain devours the sky loudly. Then, Shakira’s voice again, come on! come! She smiles at him from the riverside and he smiles back, shaking his head no, hands in his pockets and feet scraping the minuscule stones; and he’s sweating beneath his shirt, he’s thirsty, wipes the corners of his lips. So the Russian stepped from the water and walked straight towards Sanche with long strides, thighs streaming, hair floating like feather dusters, stopped right in front of him and commanded: take off your clothes. Weighed up like this, Sanche rubbed his chest with an indecisive hand: he hated to disappoint. Right now he’s wondering if he’ll have to carry out the lubricious actions appropriate to the situation — in other words, contained as they are within a limited perimeter and subject to high temperatures, he, a Russian girl, and green water bathing the length of a city given over, mouth open, to a future bridge; asks himself if the time had come to, if he was being watched, if this tall chick straight out of the taiga was a test, a lure; he unbuttons his collar, loosens his tie, suddenly catches sight of a guy combing the sand with a metal detector, warns the girl, careful, he’s going to get you — Shakira lets out a stunned whinny of a laugh and picks up her sandals, Sanche mops his forehead, and they leave the beach.

Before starting the car again, Shakira had carefully wiped the sand off her feet with tissues slipped between her toes and then curtly crumpled and tossed out the window one by one, the whole box soon squandered. Sanche’s eyes had followed the white Kleenexes that floated in the air, fluttered softly, deformed by the slightest breeze, and finally settled on the ground, little by little smudging the entire landscape.

THE SIREN sounds, Sanche gets into position. On the ground, carpenters, welders, and rock bolters press together, having stepped off the river shuttles. They wear hard hats, they’re getting ready, heavy-footed. They pace without getting anywhere. At the second sounding of the siren they remain aggregated, their shoulders move in an abnormal wave, and suddenly one guy steps away from the group — the others encircle him — he speaks for a long while, brandishes his fist, shakes his head no, and it seems like the others are with him. Sanche calls an engineer on the platform, the walkie-talkie crackles, there’s a lot of noise down there, shouts, stirrings of anger, what’s going on? A circumspect tone responds, things are heating up, the guys won’t go to work, there’s a communication breakdown. Sanche presses against the window to see better — an abnormal restlessness prevails below, the guys who try to head towards the crates are prevented by others who grab them, hurl abuses at them — features change in an instant: mouths that open wide, circumflex eyebrows, red blotches. The crowd has become a body shaken by spasms, Sanche thinks to himself someone’s gonna end up in the river, thinks the water’s freezing, doesn’t understand anything, and decides to climb down. Once he’s on the ground, what strikes him is the raging commotion, the tumult. The guy who set himself apart tries to keep the crowd calm, a white guy, torso narrow as a playing card, shoulders like a coat hanger, pointed, a kind of gypsy; he lifts two knotty arms to silence the crowd, hey, hey, two black sideburns lie like Arabic daggers along clean-shaven cheeks, and when his thin lips — a dark stroke — finally open, they spit out words one by one: no one goes to their station, no one — we want a daily raise, and until we get it, we don’t go back to work. His voice furls in the brief silence that follows, then spurts out again, playful for the first time, we didn’t get a Christmas bonus — well, we’re gonna get something better than that.

Men are now forming a barricade across the platform, linking together, arms like basket handles threaded through one another, they align themselves solemnly. Sanche walks among the workers, curious, a little marmoset come down from his branch fishing for information, irresistible and a pain in the ass, smiling brightly, he doesn’t pass by unnoticed. After some time steering through the crowd, he finally comes upon the man who was speaking and asks him, what’s happening? The other scans him with a suspicious eye, what’s happening is that we want to be paid starting when we set foot on the work site, and not only from the time we fasten the first bolt, get it? Sanche nods his head yes and the other continues, speaking as though he was spitting with anger, they deduct the time it takes for us to get here, but the thing is it takes thirty, sometimes forty minutes between punching in on the platform and arriving here — so multiply that by two, coming and going, and that’s at least an hour extra per day — at least. We will not be exploited. The man is cold, rubs his hands together, looks at his ancestor’s watch on his wrist tattooed with barbed wire, we’d better not take too long or they’re gonna lose their temper in the back. At that moment a group of workers approaches, worried, we don’t want any trouble, we can’t afford to lose our jobs; and the man with sideburns slashes them with his eyes one by one, coldly, his mandibles pulse beneath their fur, baa, baa, so we’re sheep then? baa, baa — he scowls, terrifying in his anger — Sanche follows the exchange with fevered attention, wonders how this is all going to play out, already wants to be a part of it, when suddenly the guy with sideburns shouts at him with a jerk of his chin, you management? Sanche assents without blinking, and specifies as though apologizing, I’m not under local contract; the other looks at him contemptuously, well you’ve done well for yourself then, and turns back towards the men all packed together, stamping the ground, some of them smoking with hands cupped around their mouths as though to warm them. Sanche stands frozen in place, terribly alone.

The workers are trying to organize themselves now, talking about defending their interests, tongues are loosened: untenable pace, sketchy safety measures, shitty salary. The story of the twenty-five box girders per worker per workday — this means three assembled per hour in the deafening noise, discomfort, and glacial cold — is brought up again: the guys shout that the box girders have been badly assembled in the prefab workshops, that all too often they have to weld in order to make sure the steel pieces fit, to standardize them, to make them watertight, and that this slows the rhythm — and not all of them are trained welders, a certified skill, a craftsman’s job. The man with sideburns walks among them, introduces himself — he’s a carpenter, from Ontario, and Seamus O’Shaughnessy is his name. From time to time he casts a glance at his watch and eventually comes back towards Sanche, you — you’re management, so call the bosses and tell them to step on it, we’re cold out here. Sanche nods okay, steps away from the group — happy to be the messenger — calls Diderot, who picks up, listens, asks him to specify the number of guys and the causes of the walkout — you can just see him twisting his mouth and stroking his chin — says okay, I’m coming.

DIDEROT’S ARRIVAL on the Edgefront site causes an awestruck silence, a mixture of reticence and curiosity. They all know his form by heart and step aside to let him pass. Who’s the spokesperson? At these words the silence grows thicker, and then Seamus O’Shaughnessy steps forward from the ranks, his lips pressed so tightly together that they are no more than a notch on his disturbing face: I am. The two men size each other up. Seamus restates the demand — always this same clipped phrasing, lips that pull back to reveal his gums: a raise of one hour per workday. Diderot looks at the guys, says we can’t do it: an hour a day is six per week, twenty-four per month, etc., multiplied by the number of salaries, I don’t have to spell it out for you, it’s pie in the sky. Oh yeah, what do you mean pie in the sky? Seamus grows tense, body like a tight fist pushed deep in a pocket, and Diderot says drily, you’ll never get it. Seamus turns towards the others, okay, so we’ll put the strike to a vote: if we don’t get a raise, we stop working. The guys start to get riled up, swell slowly in a great collective movement — it’s quite beautiful to behold — and now some of them address Diderot directly without any more protocol, some of them call him by name — Diderot doesn’t have superpowers, he’s just a man with two arms and two legs and a hard hat on his head, and he too is in deep at the moment — they repeat, we wanna be paid for the travel time, or we walk out; their voices overlap and comfort one another, one guy takes it further, yeah, and we’ll occupy the site. The hot flame of anger is reawakened in their eyes all around, the feeling of power, yeah, we’ll stay, we are the bridge. Sanche has stepped up onto a crate, we’re in a power struggle now, he trembles, excited, and watches Diderot evaluate the situation, weighing the seriousness of the crisis, knowing he has to work something out quickly, has to find a solution. Diderot states slowly, almost solemnly: I agree with the principle. Some of the guys shout, applaud, someone lifts a woman up by the waist, everyone starts pushing against each other; Seamus throws them a wrathful look, what are they thinking? We’re not here to celebrate Santa’s generosity, we’re here to put pressure on the boss. Diderot quells the crowd again immediately by announcing, with a lift of his hand, hang on, now we’ll have to do the calculations. Gust of silence and ebb of enthusiasm among those facing him, you won’t get rid of us with a few extra crumbs, we won’t let ourselves be walked all over, says the woman who was just lifted up in triumph.

DIDEROT PICKS up the pace now, points to Sanche, you, come with me; and turning to Seamus O’Shaughnessy, asks him to also choose a witness — he picks Mo Yun, petrified in the front lines and whose excessively large hard hat half-closes his agitated eyelids. Diderot elucidates his method: synchronize your watches, we’re going to take the trip together, the weather conditions are normal, we’ll time the exact length of the trip from the locker rooms to the site, and when that’s done, and only then, we’ll negotiate.

The quartet sets out in the shuttle back towards the Pontoverde platform, moving farther away, leaving the workers a little lost — some raise their hands and wave as though they were heading off on a long voyage. After a few minutes, Seamus points out to Diderot that in fact this is a speedboat and not the slower river shuttle that transports the workers from one end of the site to the other — he specifies, tensely, I’m telling you because we need to be meticulous. Diderot nods, that’s true, and asks the driver to adjust his speed to that of the workers’ boat.

The bow streams along the corridor in the frozen river, conquered that very morning by other ships, the layer of ice hasn’t closed over again, and they can hear the water splashing against the hull, no one speaks on-board as though they were all thinking only about the time that passes, that materializes in this spray, thick and white, exploding in heavy pendants and then slowly dissipating into greyish strands. Diderot thinks: this is not the first time he’s been confronted with a crisis, nor threatened with a strike — but the previous times, the guys were organized, represented by unions, negotiations followed an official protocol, discussions moved along a clear track, bolted step by step according to a pre-established timeline, each emissary with a few cards up his sleeve. But in Coca — which is, after all, a remote nowhere — the teams mix several different nationalities, the projects require the workers to split up on sites that are far from one another, and, moreover, everything was thought through so as to prevent their coagulating forces: at least half of those hired are under short-term contracts, weekly gigs that, even though they are automatically renewed from one week to the next, thus creating identical linear presences, still instill a sense of profound difference in status among workers on the site, maintain a feeling of precariousness in some — that of a vacation that could end at any moment — and in others, some of whom were lucky enough to have a year-long contract, a feeling of privilege, of a security that should be protected at all costs, the naive sense that they are sitting on a sack of gold, and that there should be no false moves, easy, Tiger, no point in trashing this incredible luck for nothing. And so the conflict had immediately taken on a primitive aspect — a gust of wind whipping, a fire spilling over, a fist in the stomach — it is sudden, confused, unpredictable, gathered up into a single violent desire for justice that shines a torchlight on all the faces; and it is exactly this that shakes Diderot.

Fifteen minutes have already passed in the trip. With his face turned towards the prow, delighting in the frontality smacking him in the face, Sanche prepares himself for his first conflict — so happy in this moment to be in the heart of the action, recollecting as best he can the greatest moments in the labour movement as told by the man from Nouakchott over the long nights when they had sweated together — while Mo Yun, not used to being singled out from a group, is standing circumspect. Once they arrive at the Pontoverde platform, they walk towards the workers’ facilities, crossing the esplanade at such an absurdly normal pace that Sanche stumbles, he’s trying so hard to control his ankles. At the door of the building each one of them reads his watch face aloud, elbow lifted to horizontal, and Diderot concludes: the trip took twenty-six minutes, are we all agreed? The others nod. All right. We can begin negotiations.

ONCE AGAIN the overheated room, once again the schoolroom table and chairs, once again the tension partitioning the room into two camps — the bosses (Diderot, Sanche) — before the workers (O’Shaughnessy, Yun). And they’re off. Seamus, diving right in, restates the demand for a raise: fifty-two minutes of supplementary wages calculated in proportion to an hour of salaried work and multiplied by the number of days worked. Sanche, who volunteered to be secretary of the meeting, scrupulously notes the demand, and after a few minutes Diderot presses the speaker button on the telephone and begins to read this paper to the board members who, practically ulcerated, pass the words along — you have to handle the troops, Georges, the CEO scolds him thoroughly — a raise of this much is impossible, and I’ll remind you that the work just got extended by at least three weeks because of these bloody stupid sparrows — and suddenly there’s nothing more idiotic on earth than these voices, these little authoritarian gullets that, through the intermittence of the satellite connection, become vulnerable, quavering even, mixing in with the static and the inopportune echoes, the satellite delays — it becomes completely staggering to think that these nebulous packets of vocal waves could have a part in this story, that they’d be granted room to manoeuvre, and even crazier to think that they’d be obeyed — it was all such a farce — and Diderot tried to hold back the hysterical laughter that rose up in him. And when he summarized the conflict for them, he kept to the essentials: the workforce is paid for eight hours of work even though they’re here for nine hours, so either you stretch out the dough or we tighten up the shifts — in any case you’ve gotta move fast or the guys won’t go back to work, the strike will be put to a vote at noon, and then we will have lost the whole day.

SIX O’CLOCK strikes now at head office in Bécon-les-Bruyères, a crisis committee meets chop chop, and already the financial directors are in violent opposition, those who are for a raise arguing that a reduction in work time will lead to paying much higher lateness compensation to the municipality of Coca, and those who are for a reduction in work time panicking at the thought that the bridge’s budget will explode if they pay this additional hour. Calculators heat up between impeccably manicured hands. Some of them, zealous, frenetic, compare the cost of laying off the troublemakers to that of importing dependable workers, and others imagine the worst — what if this spreads like wildfire and contaminates the whole site? They’re so worked up they don’t even notice night falling like a slipcover over the Héraclès tower, while thousands of miles away, in another latitude, closer to the equator, a winter sun forces its way behind the clouds, bleaching their dirty whites, and they sweat it out in the meeting room, it’s almost twelve o’clock.

SEATED AT his desk, Diderot scrolls through the reverse schedule for the umpteenth time. Lifting his head to the three others, he suddenly says: okay, we’ll work it out between us. Seamus starts, immediately mistrusting this “us” that stinks of trouble, mafia collusions, secret deals, familial scheming, everything that disgusts him — and he has reason to be mistrustful: Diderot is not on the workers’ side, doesn’t know a thing about a guilty conscience, and if he speaks about an egalitarian “between us,” it’s out of pragmatism, to find the solution that will put everyone back to work the fastest. Seamus resists, demands a proper agreement, an official, signed document, a guarantee: there’s no “us” here, Mr. Diderot, we just want our extra hour. For his part, Mo Yun nods his head and tries to remain invisible, worried that this confrontation might be hiding certain stakes that his rudimentary English could miss, worried it will go to court — and then, he’s certain he’ll be the accused who’s forced into a public confession before ending up in a hole somewhere with a bullet in the back of his head; he thinks back to Datong and all those he saw marching in the People’s Square, dunce caps on their heads and signs on their backs, and although he thinks long and hard he can’t figure out how he could have been noticed, he who always keeps his head down, stammers and trembles — now he looks for a pretext to be able to leave the room while in front of him Sanche holds his breath — his first social conflict can’t just pass by right under his nose, he’s got to really feel the thing. This is when Diderot gets up, massive, swings forward with all his weight to slap his hands down flat on the table — they’re enormous, stretched out like that, fingers spread out from one another, like great paws — and leaning forward, he looks Seamus in the eye, brows raised so high they’re lost in the creases of his forehead. He speaks in a confident tone, without yelling: the balance of power is not in my favour, the site is already behind schedule, we absolutely can’t allow a strike — I deliver on time, I’ve always delivered on time, it’s a question of principle. Sorry, but that’s not my problem, O’Shaughnessy shakes his head and he too leans forward over the table, my problem is a fair wage. He shoots Diderot an inflexible look and remains tense when he answers, the directors will never budge, you’re wasting your time: I propose the following agreement, you can take it or leave it: compensation for the transport time, per worker — twenty-six minutes multiplied by two and multiplied by a hundred — now it’s up to you if you want to enter into a conflict with Pontoverde. Why a hundred? Seamus asks, suspicious, because in a hundred days we will have finished raising these goddamn towers. Diderot gets up to open the window. And what if the work drags on? Seamus’s voice behind him. Diderot whips around: you’ll get nothing more on the salaries, they can wait for weeks, but you guys can’t and neither can I. I’ll talk to the guys, they can decide — Seamus is already getting up from the table and leaves the room holding the written proposal that Sanche, deeply moved, has just handed him.

TWO HOURS later, while Diderot was calling the board to tell them about the agreement and the amount of the bonus — a done deal that illustrates how his is a regime of exceptions within the consortium and betrays his power — not a single executive bats an eye, you want the work to keep going, right? — the guys on the tower carry Seamus O’Shaughnessy and Mo Yun in victory and snap away at them with their cellphones — Mo Yun in an absolute panic now, agoraphobic and desperate to escape these arms carrying them, these hands touching them — and Sanche applauding what he calls the workers’ victory — swift conflict and baptism by fire in which, in his mind, countless future promises can be seen.

AT THE BEGINNING OF MARCH, A PONTOVERDE delegation arrives on-site for an official visit commentated by Ralph Waldo himself, a squadron of senior executives with great potential, to which the Boa adds his own contingent of loyalists, as well as some councillors from the opposition who he hopes to neutralize, placing himself at the head of the group — twenty men and three women — and once they all have their hard hats on, this tribe strolls from one end of the site to the other after Diderot has greeted each of them with a handshake and an offer of coffee and cookies in the meeting room of the main building — some are surprised at the destitution of the place, at the insipidity of the coffee, but they approve of the heating system which they study as though they were potential buyers when in truth they’re just dawdling, because outside Coca’s continental climate continues to assert its brutality, a biting cold darned with blizzards stings the cheeks, assaults shoe leather, penetrates gloves: when they leave, they’ll step out backwards.

FOR DIDEROT, these visits are nothing but a big pain in the ass — people will scrutinize his way of doing things, will ask questions, will wait to catch him out: this business of the transit bonus is still fresh in their minds, a fait accompli that he has not yet been forgiven for; Héraclès had had to convince the other parties that make up Pontoverde (Blackoak Inc. and Green Shiva Co.) to pull out their pocketbooks, which prejudiced people against him; and the South Asians, among others, had taken malicious pleasure in mocking these screw-ups, threatening to send in inspectors.

The delegation is invited to come quickly to the site because now there’s something to see — the towers — and they get moving. The Natives, warm inside appropriate clothing — thick canvas, fur mitts, fur-lined waterproof boots — stand out from the rest, relaxed, movements loose and smiles on their lips. The executive directors of the consortium, on the other hand, collate their active lightweight shells, bottle-green or sea-blue jackets with corduroy collars, waterproof but not very warm, which they wear on family sailing regattas in the summer offshore from Trinité-sur-Mer in France; they blow on their hands, stamp the ground with their trekking shoes, letting fall a fine clay powder stuck to their soles since Easter hikes on the Pyrenean slopes, when they went valiantly from shelter to shelter with a walking stick in hand, pulling a recalcitrant horde of kids behind them who beg for a Coke each time they stop, never lifting their eyes to admire the sublime peaks, the mountain sheep, and the unparalleled beauty of the wildflowers. These ones had just boarded the rapid shuttles splitting through the squall and already their extremities were red, especially their noses; their lips turned practically the colour of eggplants, the circles under their eyes deepened, retracting them into the back of their sockets — but not one of them dares to speak about the glacial temperature — virility will not allow it, and after all, the guys on the bridge work outside all the time.

WHEN THE large river shuttle comes into view of the bridge towers, a few men whistle, suggesting that the site is much further along than they would have thought, and, reassured, grimace their contentment. It’s all taking shape, one of the Héraclès legal counsel concludes. The towers are indeed impressive already, slender and vigorous, flagpoles without any fanfare besides their scarlet verticality. Since their elevation progresses at a constant rhythm, the joke is that they are building themselves, as though their form, their shape is only the consequence of a congenital movement — as though they are actually developing from the inside. But behind the steel walls, it’s an insane mechanics that proliferates upward, a labyrinth of box girders where workers could get lost looking for the one they were working on the day before; it’s the din of welders echoed, multiplied, boring into eardrums amid the smell of hot metal, it’s the explosive atmosphere of a blast-off.

But for Coca’s inhabitants, the most striking thing has less to do with the towers’ construction than with their sudden presence in the city. An event that affects time as much as it does space. A split. We can never go back. From now on, never and always would come up in office conversation, in hallways and lobbies, and the higher the towers grew, the more thoroughly something was erased, relegated to the past — and all the more swallowed up, all the more lost since this past was so close and intimate, that much more irretrievable since this past was just yesterday, it was the city “before the towers” that would soon be the city “before the bridge.” Something had died, and so what did it matter, the idea of progress attached to the work, what did modernity matter and the need to get with the times, thinking about it dealt a wicked blow.

Getting used to these red metal towers wasn’t easy — nothing in their shape or their material helped them to blend into the landscape, to infiltrate it gently. They tripped up the gaze, these superstructures, while at the same time — a paradox that provoked hours of discussion — they stood with a disconcerting simplicity, nearly enigmatic, like elements of a decor that had been waiting in the wings and whose hour had finally come to appear onstage, rising up in exactly the spot where two crosses on the ground had marked their places, sure, incontestable. They rose from the water and the inhabitants oscillated, lost souls without any points of reference anymore, and many were those who urgently set about recounting anecdotes that traced the story of their lives against that of the area, scanning backwards across the urban temporality to unearth lost pathways; tongues came unknotted and spoke of meeting places that don’t exist anymore, travel times that have been shortened, walks that have become dangerous, ferry routes that have disappeared, and the subject of horses came up often; then they would blink in the direction of the bridge, and in a grand gesture of appetence they would suddenly argue that really, it was as though these towers had always been there, or at least as though we’d always been waiting for them, and that they had only come to occupy a designated space already carved out for them, and wasn’t it all so strange.

AMONG THESE folks, a group of resisters speaks up more and more often, inhabitants from old stock who argue that they’ve been in Coca long enough to have extra legitimacy; these are individuals who know the area by heart and remind everyone in the preamble to each public speech — in the municipal council, in press conferences, in assemblies of their associations — that, as children, they ran free in fields as vast as the ocean, parting the tall grasses that scratched their pale foreheads; that they swam in every fissure of the river (they can cite the name of each rock and of every smallest pasture before it was converted into a building plot), and that their ancestors mixed the dust of their bodies with this very earth. These ones, who include landowners, families of the first merchants, and ferryboat operators — such as the Frenchman — form the majority of the municipal opposition; they’re affected by these towers that make them visible to the world, adding Coca to the list of potential terrorism targets, as though since the attack on the World Trade Center, their imagination has become contaminated by the threat and as though from now on, seeing vertical lines become firmer in their skies, they can’t help but envision these masses collapsing, tumbling down in a morbid cloud, a vague paranoia whose corollary, in architecture, boils down to one simple line: we don’t want any trouble.

IN THE SHUTTLE, the discovery that the towers are already so tall provokes several questions — some technical (bolting or welding?), some financial (cost of river transport = fuel + crew + cost of wear and tear on the boats), and finally some aesthetic (the red was decidedly unpopular). When they are almost at the Edgefront tower, a member of the municipal opposition — a short man with grey hair in a brush cut, cozy inside his sheepskin coat with fur collar, seizes upon an interstice of silence to criticize this arrogant project, this provocation that will surely invite the vengeance and deadly schemes of terrorists. An embarrassed silence falls over the boat as it slows, approaching the structures. Ralph Waldo sticks his head out from under the awning to better see the vertebrae of the bridge and then concedes that indeed — he places a hand flat against his chest — like most bridges, this one will incarnate not only technological excellence but also a certain idea of democracy; producing a territory that is wider, richer, and more open; integrating dissimilar areas that up until now have been poorly connected; augmenting the volume and the speed of traffic: it will create a new communal space, a strong space, where victim tendencies and apocalyptic predictions — he’s become an orator now, defending his oeuvre, eyes sinking back in their sockets and rolling with intensity — have no place. Then, setting aside his formal composure, and vitrifying the stunned assembly with one look, he says: what you have before your eyes is a unit of raw energy, part of a creative impetus whose completion eradicates the dark ideas that will henceforth sully the work of architects. It will emblazon the city with an avenging optimism, a new affirmation — one hell of a number, the Boa laps it up, totally impressed, and Diderot lights a Lusitania. And then the Pontoverde execs lean their heads out to visualize the progression of the work, blinking their eyes momentarily against the wet snow that has begun falling from the sky, and the boat docks at the foot of the Edgefront tower.

THE DELEGATION is brought inside the tower, and rises between the box girders to observe the work of arc welding and to congratulate themselves on the excellent productivity of this technique — one of the directors asks a worker about the thickness of the filler metal, trying to impress, and Diderot answers him curtly, cutting short the puzzlement of the man who puts his mask back on to continue his work; they examine the security, hard hats and harnesses, safety cables — a woman from the delegation stipulates in a loud voice that any disregard for safety guidelines will result in immediate layoffs for serious misconduct, it’s simply a question of insurance, and all the heads nod in agreement with the intransigence of such a procedure — they shake hands at random, many of which they have to wait for — Seamus O’Shaughnessy refuses to interrupt his work and keeps his own hand gloved, we’re not animals in a zoo, dammit — and anyway it’s freezing, the mouths of the officials sink into their collars beneath their scarves and they decide to make a U-turn and head back to the platform. On the way, the adversary of the project stops Diderot, says, I’d like to know your feelings about the bridge — you are the builder — tell me something concrete — he has a determined face, very white and perfectly aligned teeth, and the air of a retired GI colonel. Diderot looks at him and articulates very distinctly, I don’t think about hypothetical threats and fantasies, I don’t have the time, my concern is for the execution of the work and the safety of the workers, which is threatened by insane deadlines, impossible specs, this shitty climate, and the fucking cost-effectiveness of this whole mess.

IN TRUTH, DIDEROT IS CONCERNED ABOUT Katherine, who he hasn’t seen since the night when they sat face to face in that banal snack bar at the corner of Colfax and Arapahoe, centred on short fake-leather banquettes the colour of oxblood, between which — frank, square, and welcoming to elbows and palms, as though created expressly for dialogue — stood the table, champagne surface with rounded corners just the length of an extended arm — an arm that, indeed, had to be extended, unfolded to horizontal, so that the bodies waiting behind could begin to move forward, conjoined at the shoulder, and so they could come along softly, gaining territory, their slow approach; and this carnal arm that would seal the alliance, and which was at present the very measure of what separated them: something still has to be crossed, and that is the table, which is also a river, and Diderot calls the waitress over, Katherine needs to eat soon so she can sober up.

And in this bar, with its flat obviousness and crackling jukebox, on this ochre linoleum shaded with dark rings, between these dirty windows muddled with paint, beneath these globes of white light laid out on the ceiling like the dots on a domino, not far from the counter where fluorescent cupcakes and three-day-old doughnuts sit drying under glass, where fake-leather stools veined like ground beef stand waiting, the Formica table is their greatest ally. With its quotidian power in action, it becomes the great equalizer — of sex, age, social status — an egalitarian playing field neutralizing hierarchies and presences — and if they had thought of this, they would have thanked it, this table, they would have kissed its flat surface with its residue of grease and ammonia, upon which they had unfolded the present. They speak to one another on level ground, as though they had just suddenly turned up face to face smack in the middle of a clearing, or in the way we throw ourselves at one another’s heads — like elk that clash antlers, all decorum aside — short-circuiting introductions; Katherine takes off her sweater directly, and watching her, Georges encloses them together in the heart of the matter: the only backwards glance they’ll allow themselves is to speak of the path that led them to Coca. She bites into a slice of bread, announces, lucid, I live with my husband and my kids in Edgefront, I have two boys and a little girl, Georges nods, smiling, I know, I met the whole troop the other day, she lifts her eyes to his, right, that’s them, she’s spreading mustard on her bread now, and you? Georges tilts his face towards the south, I live in Cherry Creek Valley near the river on the Coca side, by myself, no kids, and Katherine smiles, oh it’s pretty out there, you’re right near the water, and he nods, yes, for the duration of the bridge — he too is lucid, calling it what it is. The waitress puts the drinks down on the table at this exact instant — a beer for Georges, a coffee for Katherine — thus diverting the impact of these last words, and also giving them the gift of a few movements to make — he picks up his glass, she plunges into the mug — then Georges begins again, still calm, three kids, that’s a lot of work, eh, but Katherine’s gaze slides to the guy in a white hat and long dirty apron who’s walking towards them now, pancakes and home fries, kids, that’s my thing, she passes a hand in front of her face as though to close the subject, and Diderot moves his belly back from the table: the food has arrived. And afterwards, do you know where you’ll go? Katherine asks while considering the contents of her plate, afterwards? he answers, afterwards I leave again, we’ll see. There aren’t many people left in the place at this hour, the waitress is wiping tables, the old guy with the beard mutters, the duo of cops have gone back to cruising, Katherine splashes maple syrup over the pancakes, and tells him — obstinate in this moment, forehead rounded and very white in the light of the bulb: Lewis, my husband, had an accident last year, a fall, twenty feet; he was redoing a roof for some people south of San Francisco. The insurance didn’t work — she swallows her coffee in one gulp — why? Georges interrupts, and Katherine, forehead leaning over her plate of syrupy potatoes that she mops up till the last drop, says in an expressionless voice, he’d had a few beers with lunch, they said he was drunk. She hadn’t worked since Matt was born, it didn’t make sense with how much daycare cost, and she’d had to find something real quick and so, for her too, the site, a godsend, she liked it, yes, really. And afterwards? Georges asks. Katherine lifts her palms towards the ceiling and leans her head towards her shoulder, repeats, afterwards? Afterwards we’ll see, we move all the time. So we’re the same, then? Georges murmurs while they both eye the beer, yes, the same, Katherine smiles.

NOW THEY’RE alone in the restaurant, two towers of light facing each other, and outside night has fallen. A systolic joy clangs in their chests, painful, and traces in a single movement the thing that rises between them and that which sinks quickly, the upsurging of the present and the erasure of their lives before, they’re restless and vaguely sad — love is what tears at them. Feeling better now? Georges, serious as the pope, points to the plate that sparkles and she laughs with mock shame, lines folding into suns at the corners of her lids, swollen with fatigue, and at that moment the waitress reappears stiffly, filthy rag in hand, and says, excuse me, we’re closing in five minutes. Then Katherine leans towards Georges, forehead pale beneath her mass of tobacco hair, her irises dark now and shining, nearly black, and suddenly she reaches out her arm, advancing one hand towards him and placing it flat against his cheek — a strange gesture, thinks Diderot, touched — and says, we have to go, time is running out, but he takes her hand, folds it like a fist into his own, turns it over, hup, a kiss: we have our whole lives ahead of us.

Outside, the cutting cold sent them reeling at first — actually, finding themselves suddenly without a table, they were thrown off-kilter, clattering about like spinning tops — and then it stiffened them as they stood face to face, statues of flesh. Is someone waiting for you at home? Georges turns up the collar of his coat and Katherine zips up her parka, without answering, cheeks on fire and shivering already, you trying to say I should go, is that it? Serious now, and on the defensive, she begins to walk away along the sidewalk — you think I haven’t sacrificed enough? — vaguely aggressive while simultaneously weary, on the edge of dropping it completely, but Georges interrupts her, firm, I don’t think anything at all, it’s you that knows. Let’s go.

THREE BLOCKS away, the Niagara Motel on Colfax, and a coarse room where they won’t turn on the lights. They arrive out of breath: they ran here. A little hundred yard dash, Georges suddenly pointing out the finish line to Katherine — see the door with the red neon sign over there? — and the two of them got into position side by side, one knee on the ground between their gloved hands placed flat on the pavement, don’t you dare cheat, Katherine murmured, and then Georges shouted, go! without warning and they set off like sprinters — clatter of their soles against the nocturnal asphalt, their forms (no longer quite so young) bundled inside heavy coats, the beanpole and Ms. Messy Hair, breathless with the effort — he’s in front, she catches up with him at the second block, and then they run heads down, exaggerating their strides, arms pumping like Olympic champions, and she passes him, touches the reception door first, and Diderot, touching it three seconds after, shakes his head, hands on his ribs, and spits I don’t get it, they call me Carl Lewis, and Katherine, calm, her hand held out over the counter for the key, it’s simply a question of mindset, darling; still breathing hard they stroll through the shadows between buildings till they find theirs, then skirt the doors till they reach their number, a room that is one among many, absolutely like all the others, exactly the way they are a man and woman among thousands of others, and once they’re inside there’s the sensation of a rebellion, a chanted uprising; they undress in silence, seated one on either side of the bed but they keep glancing at one another over their shoulders — it takes a long time to remove all these clothes, these thicknesses of T-shirts, these laces to undo, each movement liberating epidermal odours, above which floats the scent of the site, like a shared fluid; they’re naked now and their skin, merged by darkness, takes on the same temperature and the same carbon nuance. Each one stretches out a hand above the bed till they touch the other, till they move closer, one against the other, and then it’s the great trial and error, the tactile opera, and their bodies in multiple fragmentation that know perfectly well how to find their way in the dark.

THEY HAVEN’T seen each other since then, not the next day, not in the weeks that followed. He knows that she works on the levelling sites for the freeway approaches, far from the platform, while he is required to be on the tower sites. And if he’s concerned, seated in the powerful superintendent’s speedboat among the Pontoverde bigwigs, it’s less about seeing her again, touching her, pushing her hair back again from her forehead — they don’t miss each other and they have faith — and more about knowing how she’s managing to hold these lives — these territories — together.

That night, she was singularly calm and serene when she whispered to him, I want to go home now. He was stretched out on his back, could make her out searching for her clothes in the darkness, had said I’ll take you — it was late, the buses would be few and far between, he would drop her off in Edgefront. They got dressed, joking at the thought of getting their clothes mixed up, then once again the space of the motel, Colfax, the frozen car, and the heart of Coca, abuzz like it was every night around 2:00 a.m. They crossed the frozen river, venous and unstable, and once they reached the other side she said, stop the car, I’ll get out here. Georges parked without a word and, abbreviating the separation, Katherine got out quickly, then bent down in the doorway, we’ll be in touch, and he nodded, take care of yourself. He didn’t start the car right away, instead he watched her walk up the avenue, very slim now, not so tall, a silhouette that was out of proportion with her mane of hair. He followed her with his eyes until she turned the corner of the block and until even her shadow had disappeared in the deserted and luminous street, certain that he could still hear her, walking now in another territory, a space that closed itself behind her with every step, a space that belonged to her, that was her home, and he admired for a moment this ability to go home, to go on to the next thing; while she — accelerating now towards her prefab shack with its whitewash mildewing at the corners, getting ready to open the flimsy door to her front hall, sure that the kids are sleeping, breathing cozy beneath gaudy quilts, but that Lewis will be waiting for her in front of the television, eyeballs staring, umpteenth can of beer in hand — she sped up, swelled with a strange desire, and she may even have been smiling softly with her head tucked down into the collar of her coat that hissed like fire with each of her movements, because everything was happening as though she was already recreating herself.

THE ACCIDENT HAPPENS A FEW DAYS AFTER THE debacle — time is running out and the men on the towers accelerate their cadence. Some of them attach themselves only once they’ve reached their posts to save time during the ascent, which is slower if they’re wearing safety cables. But the ascent and the descent are delicate manoeuvres, each a sort of rush hour that demands order and vigilance — the descent is especially worrisome: they tumble onto the deck sections, down the ladders, they hurry so as not to miss the first shuttle back to the Pontoverde platform, they’re in such a rush to be finished with the workday.

This particular day, the mild spell had delighted the troop of workers who went bare-armed, in overalls or T-shirts. Already in the river shuttle some of them had babbled excitedly about the return of girls in short skirts, whistled at the joggers running along the banks, and the few women on the teams had piped up, cheeky, calling out to the guys who cut through the air in satiny shorts that they were waiting for them, whenever you want it, honey. This new gaiety congests their movements, all of them stammering the most ordinary gestures, getting excited as they imagine a boat trip in the bay or a fishing session in the branches of the river upstream from the city, as they plan carpooling from one box girder to the next, yelling over the noise of the welders, and at lunchtime there are a lot of them squashed onto the deck to eat their sandwiches, and each one has a story to tell, the transparency of the air sets winter tongues stirring; just as, far below, hundreds of feet down, the river thickens its slow and unctuous course, the last sheets of ice stuck in the branches on the banks have long dissolved into the very green torrent, and here and there, enigmatic whorls curve the surface of the waters, the seals of some pearly white gastropods, genies of the river who shake themselves off in the eddies — it is once again the time of great liquid mobility.

So now the light too has returned. It splashes off the bend of a crossbeam, a crate, ricochets off rivets, and when a ray of sun passes through the frame and hits their faces, it’s blinding, it makes bodies vacillate. The fatal accident happened in just this sort of glimmering: it was a little after noon when, moving forward onto the deck after eating and drinking, his safety cable detached while he mimed the bowling session that led him to a strike — three quick steps followed by a slide, the arm carrying the ball lifted to shoulder height — a guy in his fifties, blinded by the sun, slipped and fell to the side, his right knee hitting the steel deck while the other slid into the void; the big boot at the end of his leg acted as a weight, there was nothing for his hands to grab — and plus the left hand, the one supposed to be holding the invisible ball, was hanging on the wrong side from the rest — and there was no net, no cord there that could save him, he fell to the side, body in a tailspin like a big bag — and if you saw the scene, you might have thought of those stories of pirates, of the guys who were thrown overboard, trussed up in a blanket or a sheet, their bodies nearly parallel to the ship’s planking at the moment of the fall: a shout like gauze tearing, the sky half-opens, the sound of the water being pierced, the splash stifled by distance — only a few workers could hear it, too much ruckus, too much banter.

THE ACCIDENT happened at lightning speed, a reflection in the eye, a flutter of lids, a sputter of Morse code, and several conversations continued after the splash, the guys teasing one another with their noses in their lunch boxes and then mechanically lifting their heads, blinking their eyes, themselves blinded or too stunned to believe it — so much so that a few seconds passed before the workers reacted, and suddenly those who had been laughing a moment earlier at the replay of the bowling move stand frozen, pillars of salt; then, having double-checked their harnesses, they approach the edge, slowly, holding on to one another. One of them threw up his meal, deathly pale, he had to be carried back to the ground; others were hot, dizzy, scared to go down — finally the siren was activated. The dead man was found mid-afternoon downstream from Coca, his body stuck beneath the roots and brambles festooning the bank on the Edgefront side. Disentangling him was a delicate procedure.

SINCE IT was a workplace accident, there would be an investigation. This began the next day, and the question of the safety cable left undone during lunch hour would be dissected first. It seemed to be common practice, a lack of rigour or excess of confidence dominant among the workers on the Edgefront tower, those in charge not doing their job well enough, their books showing no fines, no reprimands, it was said without irony that the men held the reins, that sanctions were necessary, a diagnosis that infuriated the workers — Seamus O’Shaughnessy modulated the daggers of black hair on his gaunt face once more and promised to bring up the subject of the infernal pace again if a single worker — a single one — got any shit during the investigation — they would plead an isolated incident, while Diderot would pull out the climatic argument before the investigators, the warm spell, the light, and finally, in order to keep up appearances, and by way of making a compromise, he coldly decreed that alcohol was forbidden on all work sites, and warned them one last time that whoever was seen without a hard hat and a harness would be fired immediately.

Diderot didn’t know the man who fell, didn’t play the grieving role, just did what had to be done — sent a funeral wreath to the family, people in Missouri to whom the reassembled body was sent in the hold of a plane with the Pontoverde insignia on the side — but the fall affected him, gathering as it did in its fatal trajectory all the confusion of the site. This entanglement of bodies and materials that struggled together on an unstable front, this mixture of slackenings and tension, this parcelled-out calendar, these composite procedures — this fragmentation, finally, that was at the heart of his work and the handling of which was his method — all this suddenly seemed just barely enough, precarious, infinitely friable in the face of the bridge that each day rose higher and more solid than the day before, but each day more monstrous, and in the nights that followed the accident, he thought he could hear again Jacob’s shout, bastard, bastard! and when he got up to open the window, trying to find something to breathe out there, all he saw in the blackness was a turbulent landscape, exorbitant waters constantly swollen with alluvium, and their endless ringing flow.

IT’S 3:50 P.M. ON MAY 13TH AND THE COCA TOWER is now seven hundred feet high. Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo have their hard hats on and are properly harnessed but nothing can contain their desire to mess around. Only ten minutes to go before the siren; they’ve got eight hours of work behind them and are suffocating inside the box girders, sweating under their visors.

They learned to weld in three days, some backup was needed up above, they were hiring young guys, strong ones with skills, and the notion came up again that Natives don’t get vertigo, that they possess a unique gene that exempts them from the fear of working at insane heights, funambulists with iron muscles walking fast along steel girders — the legend of the Mohawks always comes out, they who were discovered to be acrobats in the sky as early as 1886 by the foremen of a road bridge over the St. Lawrence, astounded to see them gambolling into the heights, agile and with grace, and from then on they were the chosen ironworkers, imported in groups from their reservations in the northeastern United States or from Canada to flesh out the contingent of workers on skyscrapers (including the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York); and it was said that after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, Mohawks — descendants of those who built them — were the ones who came back to the devastated site to dismantle everything, and it’s certain that it was all the more satisfying to distinguish them in this way — precisely because they had previously been debased to the lowest extent. Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo didn’t know about this election, not being Mohawk themselves — they are Ohlone — and yet they too are psyched to be sent way up there.

THE FIRST time they found themselves at the top of the Coca tower, they were stunned at the vastitude of the sky, got a violent smack; the air was iridescent, rapid, billions of microscopic droplets diffracted light and movement, euphorizing space that suddenly dilated to the full extent, and they laughed, intoxicated. It didn’t take them long to learn how to provoke danger as you might provoke a dog — they quickly figured out how to pierce the gangue of the prohibited, within which they performed a select repertoire of actions. The void with the river beneath, the red bay that divided the landscape, the others who looked on in amazement, all this made for a kind of theatre, articulated a field of action where their desire for thrills exploded — and so they began the leaps. The first time, Duane had checked his harness a little before four o’clock and turned his face towards Buddy, ivory white teeth and anise pupils, had said flat out — hey, wanna bet I won’t jump? — and Buddy, a hand shading his eyes had cast a quick glance down, evaluating the height, yeah, I’ll go after you, we’ll be like paratroopers, yes, we’re fighters, we’re Indian warriors, and he let out a whoop that Duane echoed before adding, we’ll show the new boys on the block how we party — and for sure they got off on it. It was break time now and the guys were coming out of the locker rooms, Duane waited till they were assembled and then placed himself in starting position like a parachutist about to exit, one leg bent in front, the other stretched out behind, then he let out a cry — the classic Tarzan cry — and threw himself into the void, the cable unrolling behind him at a mad speed, like a lasso, like a crack in the wall of time; the harness squealed in his ears while his yell lost itself, naked, no echo anymore, and suddenly the landscape rushed into him, tearing at his chest, cutting off his breath, and then he crashed into the sky without bouncing back — the cable wasn’t very elastic — but his body swung back violently towards the column and he had to bend his legs, knees to his abdomen and feet vertical to soften the shock of crashing into the structure; he pushed himself off the steel surface like a tumbling alpinist pushes the mountain away, once, twice, three times, until it diminished to a gentle swinging; he remained suspended in the air, stunned, tipped his head back to look up at the top of the tower where the workers on the team were pressed together, heads leaning over, backlit, a necklace of black beads — he couldn’t see their faces but could hear their applause, and then Buddy jumps, he too with the shock and the cry of the warrior, he too the assimilation into the sky.

These stunts became an attraction — the rumour of them spread throughout the tower — and it’s certain that Diderot heard about them, and possibly even right from the first jump; word spread quickly on the site and certain residents on the Coca side would have been able to tell him, those who were positioned all day long at the window and saw plain as day all that happened on the tower, who enjoyed making reports to the site foremen, informing themselves about pollution statistics and the construction schedule, and formulating complaints about the dirtiness, the noise, the pickpocketing that was steadily increasing and which they blamed on the workers; and they began to report all this at the end of the day when the bosses were coming back to their makeshift offices at the foot of the tower, they’re messing around, they say, winning themselves a few rounds and songs on the jukebox, since the site was in a paradoxical time: the heaviness after the man’s death on the Edgefront tower was now rolled up into a new tension — the preparation of the cables, the placing of the bridge deck.

THEY’RE UP top, the siren’s gonna go in ten minutes and with a quick glance at each other, Duane and Buddy have decided on a leap. They stroll up to the deck, exaggeratedly relaxed, roll their necks, rotate their torsos as though spinning hula hoops, chewing gum buzzes in their show-offy mouths, they haven’t heard the engine of the shuttle that let Diderot out, haven’t seen him ascending the levels of box girders using small archaic elevators; and once the workers are gathered for the show, they throw themselves into the air to the sound of shouts, cheers, sputters that Diderot hears too, speeding up, and once he’s on the last deck section, stupefied, moves to the edge of the structure, making his way between the hard hats stuck together, and his head is now an extra bead on the necklace that adorns the tower. No one sees him arrive — the workers have their backs to him — but they all jump and turn as one when they hear him exclaim, dammit to hell! They clear the way immediately, then back off, leaving Diderot alone with the two boys who sway in the air, about to light up a smoke since they’re off-site now, since they’re swinging, since they’re braves. Diderot whips around to the workers grouped together at the back, and what happens next? You haul them up, is that it? Yeah, that’s it. Diderot leans over again, the two boys have tipped back their radiant faces, surprised their audience has disappeared, all except for this one head, a head they don’t recognize, they call up, hey guys, start hauling! Straightening up again, Diderot orders the other workers to leave, get out of here, I don’t want anyone else here. A slow movement can be seen, a shuffle of workboots towards the stairs, one woman is worried, turns an anxious face over her shoulder, you’re not gonna leave them there, are you? Diderot doesn’t answer. He’s livid with rage. Once the deck is empty, he leans out again over Duane and Buddy, who grow worried as they hear the sounds of footsteps in the tower’s staircases, as they see their friends descending and calling out to them once they’re at their level, Diderot’s up top, the boss is here. The two boys think oh shit, then hear Diderot’s voice shouting at them, you have five minutes to get back up here before the siren, move your asses.

They look at each other, then up at the length of the cable with alarm — more than a thousand feet, at least. And then, without exchanging a single word, they start swinging. Using what sway is left to regain momentum, to increase their oscillation so they can touch the structure again and use it to climb up — they manage, and once their feet are solidly against the metal plate, dark still at this hour, crimson almost black, they tense the muscles of their arms, hard as they can, and haul themselves, inch by inch, up the entire side of the tower; it’s long and exhausting, they’re liquefied by the effort, clenching their faces and hardening their stomachs, they climb, using little jumps to gain a little more height on the cord, and once they’ve hoisted themselves onto their bellies at the level of the deck, hair plastered with sweat to their muddy foreheads, hands bleeding, they grab the first bar at the base of the guardrail and pant hard for a few seconds, cheeks resting against the steel deck, still warm, and then Diderot’s shadow falls over them and cools them off. He holds out his hand and with a powerful motion lifts them one last time, one after the other; they stay collapsed for a few moments, exhausted, shipwrecked sailors washed up on a beach, survivors, eyelids closed, catching their breath, while Diderot tells them curtly that they’re fired, tells them to collect their things from their lockers and then go to the administrative offices for an envelope with their final payment.

TOO LATE. SOREN SEES ALEX WAITING FOR HIM IN front of the doors, recognizes him in the shadows, tries to back away towards the work site, casting quick lateral glances to find somewhere he can fold himself away into the dark, but it’s too late — Alex has seen him and comes forward, thrusts the bag into his arms whispering don’t tell me you forgot about our little deal, it’s on for tomorrow, the instructions are inside. Soren staggers under the weight of the bag and lets out a cry, makes a half-turn towards the locker rooms but in the same moment a hand grabs him by the neck: a word of advice — no funny business. Soren shrugs him off with a movement of his shoulder and hurries towards the workers’ facilities, those he passes headed in the opposite direction barely nod, no one questions him. Once he’s inside, he rushes to his locker, unlocks it, puts the bag in, at the last moment unzips it, plunges a hand in, feels a piece of paper folded into quarters, stuffs it in his pocket, closes everything up again, and rushes to the bus that’s waiting outside. Later, sitting alone at the back, head against the window, he catches his breath — how could he have believed they had decided against the sabotage — he uses the small overhead light to read the paper, typed, and turns pale — the bag contains four dynamite cartridges equipped with suction cups — no seepage of nitroglycerine, the explosives are stabilized, reliable — the cartridges are to be stuck to the four sides of the upstream pier of the Edgefront tower, at the point where the base narrows, so that the whole tower, suddenly one legged, will topple; and their explosion will be set off by activating a programmed detonator from the opposite shore — not a sequential ignition system, and not a delay system — through a remote, which will allow him to act at the last minute.

Of course, he thinks of running — nothing could be more simple, he could go back to his digs, pack his bag, pick up his cheque, and disappear on a night bus headed south, any old bus and no one would be the wiser — but he abandons this idea, sure they would find him, these guys always find their man and when they find him they kill him, he’s been warned. This is why, tonight — a beautiful night too, odours of mud and detritic ground are a reminder that Coca was built on an alluvial plain, a breeding tank teeming with worms and coypu — he doesn’t stray from his routine, stops in for a game of pool at a bar in Edgefront, and then goes home.

HARD TO describe the day that follows when each movement, each word, each intention is obliterated by the sabotage to come, by the conviction of such precariousness that nothing else really matters, as though the future was only a hazy aureole, the cigarette hole in the film, disintegrating time. Soren floats, cottony. He gets to the Pontoverde platform half an hour before the first siren sounds so he can be alone in the locker room. When he opens his locker, the bag jumps in his face like a fierce animal: it’s a small black knapsack that weighs as much as an eight-year-old child. He stuffs in a sandwich and a sweater, and goes to the river-shuttle dock, forcing his form not to fold under the weight, making sure that this bumpy mass on his back doesn’t alter his walk, and keeps his expression steady.

IT’S NEARLY midnight on the Edgefront site and Soren is waiting for the lights of the last shuttle headed back to the esplanade to disappear. He didn’t have to pretend he had forgotten something inside a crate, didn’t have to tell the others not to wait for him, he’d go back and then take the next boat, no, he didn’t have to say a word, because no one here asks him anything — and you could even bet that Diderot himself, who professes to know every person on the bridge, wouldn’t be able to hail him by name or even recognize him if he passed him off-site — similarly, no one noticed the bag from which he ostensibly pulled a sandwich and a bottle of water at break, exposing a pile of dark clothing inside. At the moment, Soren is cold. He shivers under the pier, a few steps back from the water’s edge, and nature rumbles, the torrent is large, each sound amplified by the presence of the steel column standing behind him. Once he’s alone, while the site foremen go back to their portables (Algecos with kettles) giving themselves a break before the next batch of workers, Soren, dressed all in black now, quickly places the dynamite cartridges all around the upstream pier that’s sheathed in concrete at this height, making sure to stay hugging the sides, in the shadow of the tower — the rest of the site is lit up like a fairground, a village dance, garlands of tiny lights, he has never performed these movements but he’s studied the diagrams on the folded paper, and as it turns out, it’s dead simple. In less than three minutes the cartridges are suctioned onto the pier, Soren breathes hard under his hood, picks up the bag, throws it over his shoulder and, camouflaged silhouette already fleeing, he veers towards the brownish, lumpy-looking bank: he has a hundred and fifty feet to cross in the river. A break in the levelling of the pier, a gash three feet wide, Soren squats and slips into the water silently, terrified at the thought that the noise of his specific splashes — the body of a man penetrating a liquid — multiplied here, could alert the site foremen who, in a few minutes, will put their hard hats with headlamps back on and go out to meet the new contingent of workers, while on the other side of the river, on the twenty-seventh floor of a waterfront building, the Frenchman and his posse are opening bottles of champagne, filling crystal glasses, and moving to the picture window, ready for the fireworks.

SOREN IS in the river up to his waist, water so cold that a painful cramp crushes his shins, penetrates his bones, he’s sure it reaches all the way to the marrow, corroding his strength, he’s suffocating, can’t move anymore — stands for a long minute without being able to let go, without being able to launch himself. It’s the sputtering of voices behind him that pushes him forward into the fuliginous waves, he falls in, stifling a yell with a tremendous effort, keeps his head above water without really having any coordination, like a panicked dog fallen overboard, then manages to calm down, getting used to the temperature, regaining control, and, synchronizing his breathing with the movements of his body, he begins to swim silently towards the bank, immersing himself completely at regular intervals in the current that carries him downstream. This is when excitement and fear, the fact of being swallowed but conscious, make him believe that a bulky animal is swimming along beside him — he can make out its mass and its phenomenal strength, there are new underwater currents that accompany him, he lifts his head out of the water without seeing anything but the licorice river that grips him and far off the lights of the river shuttle coming back with the night teams — inside they’re probably joking around, having a last smoke, daydreaming — he dives under once more but again the animal is there, escorting him, brushing against him with its thick, dense fur, a colossal beast that could well be a bear, the bear from Anchorage, it’s wild, it’s hungry, hunting whatever it can to feed itself, he’s delirious, he speeds up without being able to turn around or cast a glance to his side — terror has so paralyzed him — he hears a growl at his neck and nearly sinks like a stone — there’s no fear more terrible than an open jaw behind your back — the bank comes nearer now and the lights of Edgefront press large gold squares of light onto the water while the reflection of the vegetal gangue on the bank lengthens: tall tough plants, bristling black and sharpened lances, they form a barricade, holding Soren back inexorably from all human life. He speeds up till he touches ground, grabs a root, pulls himself out of the river and collapses in a crevice of mud. The bear has disappeared. He breathes, spits, half-dead, and now he still has to take the remote out of its watertight case and press the button that will make everything blow up, he’s out of breath, rummages in his bag, drooling bile, can’t see anything, droplets form stalactites from the arch of his brow, obstruct his nostrils, block his ears, he hurries, body shaken by opposing pieces of information — he’s alive, he’s dead — numb fingers suddenly touching the little hard-plastic case, shivering violently — shakes that tear him apart — he adjusts his gaze to the pier where there is no movement yet. The boatload of workers has passed the river bend, it’s heading for shore now, begins to slow. On the Edgefront tower site, still very brightly lit, almost festive, three men stroll out nonchalantly, walk to the edge of the quay, cross their arms over their chests, and stand there, posed, waiting, like actors caught up in the pursuit of theatre. Soren has never heard the sound of their voices but he can see the pink of their cheeks, the steam that clouds as it leaves their mouths, three little fellas just doing their job who stand at the edge of the river, the boat is still two hundred feet away, he has to press the button, he has to press it now.