Birth of a Bridge

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WATER

IT’S A CHILD, BARELY THREE YEARS OLD — LITTLE Billie — who finds Soren’s body five days later in a vacant lot behind the soccer field in Edgefront, where she’s wandering, teddy bear in hand, left to her own devices.

Billie likes this grassy wasteland a lot, lumpy, with dirty edges, begs to go there more and more often, and this morning while Katherine was getting her dressed, standing her up on the kitchen table before leaving for the site, while she was adjusting the elastic of her little canary-yellow skirt, the child took her face between her two soft hands and said, I want to go to the garden, so determined that Katherine suspended her gestures, admiring, looked at her and then hugged her close, whispering into her neck, I promise, my little chicken, you can go there today. Lifting the little one to the ground then, she rushed to the boys’ room, Liam had already left for junior high but Matt was still asleep — he had come home late again last night. The room stinks, an odour of livestock. Katherine sits on the edge of the bed and shakes Matt by the shoulder, wake up! He lets out a long groan and, since she’s still shaking him, pushes her away, eyes closed — she can feel that he’s almost as strong as she is now — then turns onto his side facing the wall, but Katherine persists, walks to the window and pulls open the curtain; streams of sun sweep through the room revealing heaps of crumpled, indistinct clothes, worn-out sneakers, dirty underwear, mistreated school books and binders, cookie wrappers, empty soda bottles, and crumbs over everything, and Katherine, discovering this mess, this filth, gags and asks herself how long it’s been since she came into this room; it comes back to her like a boomerang that Liam has been doing his homework at the kitchen table for a while now and only comes in here to sleep. Her own feeling of guilt, even more than the state of the room, is what throws her into a rage. She comes back to the bed, shakes Matt again, hard this time, channelling all her anger into this action, wake up, you little shit! Gets nothing but a loud snore. Unhinged, she charges to the kitchen and fills a pitcher with cold water and back in the room throws it in Matt’s face — he bolts upright yelling, Augh! Are you fucking out of your mind? Leaning back on his elbows, he drips, waxy circles under his eyes, mouth grey, skin bleary, stunned to see his mother standing straight and immense at the foot of his bed, pitcher in hand, and to hear her gunning him with these words: you have ten minutes to get up. Then you’re gonna clean up this room — your brother can’t even set foot in here anymore! When I get home tonight I want it to be spic and span, and this afternoon, instead of just skipping class, you’re gonna make yourself useful, take Billie to the garden after her nap, I want you to take care of her and talk to her, I want you to play with her, is that clear? The boy sits on the edge of the bed, head in his hands, and grumbles half-heartedly yeah, and if I don’t? Katherine hesitates, then, casting maternal reason and good role modelling to the wind, responds from between clenched teeth: Matt, if you don’t do it, I’ll break your face. She slams the door, looks at her watch, and goes to find Billie, who’s already watching TV on the pullout couch beside her sleeping father, passes a hand through her curly hair, I’m off, my little warbler, Matt will take you out later to play in the garden. The little girl, absorbed by the screen, doesn’t answer and mechanically holds out a cheek for her mother to kiss. As she passes through the front door, Katherine feels herself wobble, her eyes burning, her legs weak. She does a U-turn and swallows a big glass of water in the kitchen, breathes a long sigh with her arms stretched out on either side of the sink, then comes back to Matt’s room, pushes the door open gently, the boy is standing bare chested, getting dressed. His body’s changing, his shoulders are broadening and he has the torso of a young man now, he’s not a kid anymore. Matt, she begins, Matt, I’m sorry. The boy pulls a T-shirt on without looking at her. I got worked up. He turns his back to her, goes to open the window. I’m leaving you ten dollars for lunch, okay? She takes a step towards him, places a hand on his shoulder. His smell has changed too. He pulls away, Katherine’s hand falls. She begins again in a stronger voice, okay, take care of your sister. And in the doorway she hears the boy murmur I will, don’t worry. Later, in the bus full of tremors, Katherine bursts into tears without thinking of anything in particular, and to the woman beside her who looks at her questioningly — a very young woman full of solicitude — answers simply, I’m so tired.

WHEN MATT reaches the vacant lot there’s a girl there, sprawled in the grass, waiting for him with beers. What’s this? she asks, pointing to Billie in the stroller, little canary with pink heart-shaped sunglasses. This — this is my little sister! Matt releases Billie and she jumps from the stroller. The girl pouts, disappointed, I thought we were gonna be chill, I’m not crazy about kids, and Matt hastens to answer, don’t worry, she’s not a drag, you’ll see; already he’s kissing her with eyes closed squeezing her breasts, and Billie walks off quietly.

In the beginning, the little girl meanders along, picks up cigarette butts, drinks the last drops from discarded cans of beer, squats to pick dandelions. Hard to say what stories she’s telling herself, it looks like she’s talking, wandering in the sun, stepping over the carcasses of rusted bikes, gas cans busted by rifle shots. Soon she’s fondling a sole, unlacing a shoe, pulling at a sock, scratching the skin that’s revealed with a little wooden stick — she concentrates, her little pink tongue poking out between pursed lips — all the while shooing the flies hovering around, lots of them here, and noisy, then behind the leg she sees another leg, the same shoe and the same sock, and lifting her eyes discovers the rest of the body. She stands still for a long moment, above the head where half the face has disappeared beneath a black crust. Billie, surprised, leans over to ask, hey, are you sleeping? You asleep? When there’s no response, she begins to play with the hair, wiggling the head back and forth to unstick it from the ground and holding handfuls of hair at the back of the skull, but as soon as it comes unstuck, a swarm of flies, very dense, swells and surrounds her like the mesh of a net; the little girl hides her face, looks at her fingers covered in brown paste, doesn’t understand any of it, and at that exact moment a dishevelled Matt grabs her by the wrist exclaiming, oh shit! They back up. The horrified boy looks at the body, then looks at his sister, she’s disgusting, hands bloody, he calls out get over here to the girl who has stayed at the other end of the lot, and when she too is standing in front of the corpse, Matt yells at her, take the little one, take her, but the girl, seeing Billie’s hands, lets out a shriek and steps back, are you crazy, she’s covered in blood! So Matt sits Billie down roughly: hold up your hands, don’t move, stay like that, you understand? And Billie bursts into tears, then her face slowly deforms and she begins to scream as Matt leans over the body again, he too shooing the flies, it’s carnage, only the legs are intact — the head, the abdomen, and the entire back are lacerated, torn, ravaged.

THE BOMB hadn’t gone off. Unless, in the end, no one had pushed the button to detonate it. Short-circuit in the remote, bad electrical assembly, or a last-minute defection. The packs of dynamite remained stuck to the pier until they were discovered shortly after the men had arrived for the third shift. From the top of their building, standing neatly in a row before the picture window and looking at their watches, seeing nothing happen, the silent partners grew impatient, and finally the Frenchman yelled dammit, he fucked me over, and while Alex was admitting his failure, his fault for having chosen such a sucker, the Frenchman set the hunt in motion.

AFTER A brief moment of panic at the foot of the Edgefront tower, and once the explosives were neutralized, the guys called Diderot, who immediately whipped over to the site and then spent the rest of the night examining the apparatus, what is this mess? The quantity of dynamite was shocking but the ignition system was rudimentary. The work of an amateur, he concluded.

Soren, for his part, had bolted long ago, shivering in his heavy clothes, soaked with miry water and mud, terrified, not knowing if he had pressed the button on the remote or not, only that he’d thrown the case into the river and had run, looking for some shelter for the night, sure that if he went back to his place the Frenchman’s gang would find him there — he had run breathlessly towards the forest, the ultimate refuge for him, he would know how to survive there, a revelation, hit by the smell of the woods, racing along a dark road, faster and faster as the forest approached, with more and more joy to be coming back to the place where he belongs, but suddenly at the edge of the mountain range, headlights that flash on, beams that capture him, men who block his way. A wild growl. There’s a bear missing from the city zoo.

TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF JUNE THEY HAD TO speed things up even more. Diderot stroked his chin in front of calendars and work plans and the insides of his cheeks grew raw with wounds. The men from Pontoverde were harassing him now, daily phone calls, messages saying they’d already exceeded the projected budget and that the only way to not lose money now was to reduce the duration of the last work phase.

The towers were ready, solidly set in the riverbed, powerfully held in their protective concrete sheathing, but no matter how tall and red they were — acrylic paint developed to respect air-quality standards — they were stupid, didn’t signify anything besides the absence of the bridge to come — the main component was missing: the deck that would allow vehicles to cross from Coca to Edgefront.

GOTTA GET a move on now, gotta get to the other side of the water! This is what you’d hear if you left your ears lying around in the site offices, in the locker rooms, on the jogging paths stretched out along the banks — the runners took advantage to stop for a breather, hands on their hips, red-faced, some of them still bouncing as though possessed by St. Vitus’s dance, and talked about the progress of the work between two panted breaths. But in the end, more than urgency, more than deadlines to meet, it was the imminence of the last phase of the site, that of the forming and the placing of the deck, that excited the bridge men and women, the city’s population and the few columnists from the coast who cast a glance now and then at what was happening in Coca: everything would soon make sense, everything would finally become reality. For Diderot, on the other hand, this last phase was not a completion: it fit into the whole as a brand new experience, and once more it was a matter of plunging ahead, of running the risk, in a single sweep, and the cables incarnated this new situation perfectly.

We’re going to put a phenomenal tension system in place, a magic system of force transmission, we’re going to attain finesse itself! Diderot filters these comments through his teeth while drawing diagrams on the white board, tracing dynamic arrows (→ and ) over capital Fs, and soon these become slogans called out in a clear voice: the suspension bridge is cutting edge, the cream of the crop of human ingenuity, of problem solving, a matter of distribution of power and mass, the ingenuity of balance, without which there’s only wear and tear, degradation, tugs-of-war, collapses and ugliness. He overflows with ardour, the engineers love it — they recall their years of advanced calculus, the problems and the exams, the experiments on freezing lab benches, the water cold and dirty at the bottom of the sinks, the grey smocks; they see again the halo of their desk lamps on graph paper, this yellow circle cut out in the darkness of their rooms, their mothers’ worried heads around the half-open door, did you figure it out? Almost finished? Go to bed! and the celebration it is to solve the problem in the hollow of the night, the sudden perception of their own naked intelligence when they nab the curve of the suspension bridge, define the famous catenary, the hyperbolic cosine, rub their eyelids once they’ve figured out the formula — and all of them suddenly had the feeling of being in exactly the right place, all of them, including Sanche and Summer who sit in on these meetings side by side and throw each other complicit, mocking glances when Diderot plays the ham.

AND DIDEROT may well have celebrated the suppleness of a hammock and the lightness of a nest, but this is still about labour. A hell of a job. High technology revisiting the archaic motion of spinners at the distaff, because overall it is a matter of spinning cables exactly as you spin yarn on a spinning wheel, the specialized work of the cable layers who have already been working for several weeks. The plans had two main cables passing through the summit of the two towers like successive mountain crests and linking the structure to each riverbank. So two titanic ropes had to be built, each composed of 27,572 strands of galvanized steel, divided into groups of sixty-one bunches of strands and assembled by twisting them into a helix around a central longitudinal axis. The cablers gather, twist together, and then compress everything to make it round. Once it was built, the enormous strand would be nearly three feet round and one and a half miles long, a lasso that could capture Ursa Major; a journalist from the San Francisco Chronicle determines that, laid out end to end, these steel strands could circle the earth three times at the level of the equator, and it is this comparison, this scale of proportion, that will inspire the Boa’s municipal politics from now on. He is jubilant, the fishnet of the bridge is most definitely the net he has used to catch the city, an arachnidan webbing where each knot solidifies his influence and increases the intensity of his desires and ambition; he envisions great celebrations for the inauguration and begins to count down the days.

ONCE AGAIN the teams that swell with acrobats where the Natives take the lion’s share, once again the international agencies that windmill through their candidate files, driving a specific, calibrated workforce towards Coca, tightrope-walking workers, almighty men who are hard to pin down once they’re there — they run on challenges, confront death with the murky innocence of those for whom working at these heights is a feat as simple as drinking a glass of water or brushing their teeth — but once on-site, they work like gods, cable the bridge accurately — first the two long main cables, then the 250 pairs of vertical hangers, one every 70 feet, each one a hell of a clothespin, and over the weeks they devise an astonishing system of supported steel beams with a total mass of 25,000 tons, and capable of holding, while also stabilizing, a deck that will weigh 150,000 tons.

Reporters show up, cunning guys who want their chance at catching the spectacular image, the girl in a bra and hard hat suntanning on her break, beer in hand, sitting above the void, the guy who lifts his sandwich and looks at the camera, a laughing munchkin under the belled sky, an alignment of shoes in close-up with the river far away beneath, crackled like an oil painting or the glaze on pottery — but this wasn’t the time for monkey business, Diderot was shouting now, absolutely furious, the meters are running, still another few weeks to go, stay focused.

SOON A footbridge links the Coca bank to the Edgefront bank, a provisory suspension bridge whose line plays in the air like the fibre core of the cable, the interior thread around which the whole work will unfold. On the night it was finished, the workers advanced towards the centre from either side of the bridge, as was the custom, and broke bottles once the teams touched, they couldn’t believe it, the suspension bridge swayed, the wind rumbled under their hard hats, but dammit now you could cross, there were shouts, and finally, each one turned to go back to his side, most of them staggering.

The same night, happy, Georges phones Katherine: come on, let’s go cross it together. His voice gets lost in the silence, from which an answer flows back without conviction, okay. They agree to meet on the Edgefront side in the spot where they left each other last time. Diderot, at the wheel of the Impala, waits for Katherine who finally arrives, walking fast, head down, a nervousness about her that doesn’t seem like her, gets into the car, and without even looking at him orders, let’s go, let’s get out of here! They drive towards the river, and, crossing the old Golden Bridge that’s living out its last days, they reach Coca. You okay? Diderot asks, when Katherine, opening the window, removes herself into the outside. Ashes fly about inside the car, they race towards the site. What’s going on? he insists, showing his badge at the electronic gate and later, standing opposite each other over the hood, he finally discerns Katherine’s face: a dark crescent stretches from cheekbone to brow. He doesn’t say anything but places a hand on her waist and leads her towards the quay. The path seems endless, they walk beneath the bridge and delicately accost the Coca entrance to the footbridge by climbing the banks, high here, and coffered with concrete blocks between which a little rudimentary staircase has been built. Diderot unlocks the double wire-mesh door and here they are stepping forward onto the provisional catwalk. It’s night, their steps resonate on the detachable floor of metallic slats. So, it’s almost done? Katherine asks, and Diderot answers, yeah, it’ll go quickly now, we’ll be finished by mid-August. She doesn’t react, asks him about the placing of the deck concrete, the next step, and Diderot explains, getting technical, two methods were in competition, always the famous controversy of concrete versus steel, and finally the solution of an orthotropic deck made of flat steel with two inches of levelling concrete was chosen, the question of the weight of the deck being a crucial aspect. Katherine, falsely cheerful, nods, she’s elsewhere, Diderot gets frustrated: all right, can you tell me what’s going on? Beneath them, the last ferries slog from one bank to the other, chockablock with laborious silhouettes squeezed in tight. This thing between us is going nowhere. She looks at her feet. Diderot pauses, could have expected anything from this woman, anything except that it could deflate like this, he points to the end of the bridge, actually I had the feeling that we were headed somewhere. Katherine’s face that lights up — he can see it, even in the dark — it’s true, she says, we’re walking towards Edgefront, and that’s home for me. Diderot softens, and so? We can stay a little longer, we can do what we want, right? No, Katherine digs in her heels, I can’t do what I want, I don’t live like that. I know, Diderot shrugs, I know, but she closes herself off, hard, I don’t think you could possibly know. They stand, unmoving. Because of your husband, your kids? He’s aggressive, furious with her in this moment, furious for having uttered these words. She hasn’t moved, says simply, nothing to do with them, I’m free, believe it or not, and I like my life. She takes out a cigarette that Diderot lights for her with a curt gesture, a gust hits the bridge, he doesn’t look at her, leans against the guardrail — fine, so what next? — suddenly in a hurry to be done with her, wanting to avoid murkiness, endless conversations pierced with sticky silences, sad banality, all this while they’re on their bridge, together, dammit, not just anywhere, and suddenly after a long silence he says, taking a gamble, okay, come live with me. She laughs right away, a radiant laugh, bad idea, I’m a piece of work, he feels like he’s finding her again, takes her in his arms out of joy, pulls her to him, I am aware, brushes a thumb over her tumid temple — the day before, she wasn’t able to dodge the metal stapler Lewis had thrown at her face when she was taking Matt’s side, accused by his father of stealing cash, his habit of grabbing objects within his reach and whipping them at her face, but this time Liam had risen up and threatened his father with a knife, I’ll kill you, quickly held back by Matt, and they had shouted, gone ballistic; and after placing a cold cloth on her temple in the microscopic bathroom, Katherine had come back to say to them all, let’s start over, we are not victims; throwing a hard glance at Lewis she’d repeated, there is not a single victim in this room, and later, while she was smoking under the awning outside in a rocking chair about to bust, while Billie was dressing her Barbie for a ball, Lewis had said very calmly that she was free to go, and she had looked him in the eye and shrugged, I know.

Diderot and Thoreau have started walking again, you scared me, Diderot says quietly when they reach Edgefront, and Katherine answers I was scared too.

BETWEEN MARKET AND COLFAX THERE’S California Street, parallel track that’s narrower, high concentration at its midpoint — at the level of city hall — of pubs, bowling alleys, bars — all of them large rooms with giant screens placed high against fake mahogany panelling, always the same dimness with a cherry shine. Sanche heads into this area around one o’clock in the morning on the nights when he works. He pushes open the door of La Scala or Sugar Falls, finds the rung of a barstool he can stand on, periscoping his neck around the room, and then, spotting the table, joins Seamus and Mo, two or three others — sometimes even Summer. He’s waited all day for this moment.

BEER, WOMEN, a jukebox — paradise! It was in these terms that Seamus took possession of the table the first time they came in, only a few hours after the workers’ vote in favour of the bonus; that was almost three months ago already, and Sanche sidling in behind him had admired his virile nonchalance, the sexual authority that emanated from his body; people moved out of Seamus’s way, a barely perceptible step backwards that showed the effect of his aura, and in these overpopulated places, no one would think of picking a fight with him; many were they who, on the contrary (like Sanche), would have liked to share his table — baptized “the Irishman’s table” at the end of one night even though there was another always tagging along now, and that was Mo.

Sanche rushes to the table, zigzags through the full and humid room, among the streaming foreheads, mouths moistened with alcohol and crazy allegations, he comes the way you’d throw yourself headfirst into the pirate’s treasure chest to touch the gold, to make your skin glow with the gleam of precious stones and feel their sharp edges against the flesh of your thumbs, he has stomach cramps, a painful abdomen from impatience and apprehension, and he’s barely completed the rounds of greeting, heart lifted and pumping hard in his chest, before he pulls out a chair and sits down, already observing those around him, crazily exulted to be in their company, uprooted, plucked and placed among these heads that are totally unique in the world, to be beside their callused feet, Seamus, the fox character from children’s books, fuzzy cheeks, long thick yellow nails, hard skin, one of his grandparents having disembarked in New York around 1850 — the Irish famine, human corpses rotting in piles in the hollows of embankments, hamlets that empty out and are abandoned — no education, no talent, no money — migrates towards the north with a rudimentary compass in his stomach, looking for enough to live on, subsistence, that’s all, not a destiny or even a new beginning just something to eat and drink, something to take shelter under, and something to clothe himself in, to occupy the strength of his arms, and then the scattering of a lineage, genealogical absences, empty spaces in the forms, names noted wrongly sediment in their misprints; and at the end, this head, on the alert, this something hirsute and irreducible, and these feet that will soon be on the road again, well versed in the acceptance of loss, definitively eccentric: and glued to his side, clever Mo, who’s obsessed by the screen like a possible space of isolation in this plurality of places and paths, a sphere of relaxation where he can unwind a little, release his effort; a woman undulates there, hair swelled by an artificial breeze and skin rounded within the confines of a bikini, she’s very blonde, in perfect health, he stares at her, imperturbable, ready to duck out at any second, to veer elsewhere, on a new line segment, a new tangent, why not Africa; and sometimes, but more rarely, convinced by Sanche to rejoin the table at the cost of long minutes of telephone negotiations, there’s Summer, with her ponytail trapped in a triple elastic twist, Summer with her cold feet who gets drunk methodically — who comes there to get drunk, doesn’t quite know what to do with herself when she’s not working — flushes when teased and called “Miss Concrete,” ebbs back in her chair when Seamus brings his scarred face towards her and shows her the black interior of his mouth, stop it, she says without smiling but soon it’s she who sways forward seeking that same mouth that scares her, an oscillation that makes her dizzier than the alcohol and saws away at the invisible tether that joins her to her country of birth, this cord stretched to the limit that Sanche had cut brutally, with a gesture that was even more sudden than the process to accomplish it had been slow.

THE FIRST part was a regular exchange, although it had been agreed upon, that lasted all autumn, it was letters along with telephone calls, his mother — and his father behind her — invariably soliciting positive responses to questions he doesn’t care about — are you eating well? Are you well respected? Have you written to Augusta? Are you putting money aside? — questions, questions, always questions. As though their common language couldn’t break free from the regime of the interrogator, asking signified a reminder of his mother’s hard-earned right, her enduring right to be informed about his life, to possess him; and replying signified similarly the proof of his filial love. Soon, Sanche — who knows their conversation inside and out before even picking up the handset, and can’t stand being forced into this positivity — grows aggressive, he mocks them, he tells them off but always runs into this wall called his mother’s radical worry, this frenzied bias she has towards him. It comes to a head in December: despite his efforts to talk to his parents about the site and the people he’s meeting here — it was Christmas Day — here he is again irrevocably driven into the ever narrower and more pitiable groove of reassurance. His jaw locks, he hangs up, and never picks up again — too stirred up to compose the phrase that would express, without harshness, the tiniest bit of the violent pleasure he feels living here, far from her, far from them. He feels remorse, has a guilty conscience — reading their name in the messages on his cellphone; his chest is suddenly compressed upon finding a letter or a package in his mailbox, his saliva gets heavier, he sweats, horrified — but doesn’t regret a thing. Something has been broken. That’s life, he sometimes thinks, during the daily commute home.

One day in March, however, someone comes to get him in the locker room while Seamus is talking to him about a site where he’ll probably go after Coca, a uranium mine in Canada, and Sanche, vexed, follows the messenger back towards the administrative offices, who is it? The guy answers, I don’t know, it’s a woman, and Sanche logically assumes that it must be the owner of his studio apartment who has pursued him all the way to his workplace, some story about a water leak that has nothing to do with him, he scowls, the messenger says into the handset, here he is, and then Sanche holds the phone and recognizes, crystal clear, as though uttered from just a step away, the voice of his mother: Sanche, is that you? Sanche freezes, doesn’t answer. His mother is here. She came all the way here. The ground opens beneath his feet, chasm of claustrophobic Sundays and the viscosity of lace doilies on the television, the voice repeats, Sanche? Sanche, it’s me, it’s Mom, is that you? Once again he’ll have to answer yes — yes, Mom, yes it’s me — but Sanche doesn’t want any more questions, doesn’t want to say yes anymore, so he says without trembling, no, it’s not me, but the voice attacks again, at once stronger and more fragile, Sanche? Sanche is that you? and Sanche catching his breath one last time says very distinctly, bringing his mouth close to the receiver and almost in spite of himself modulating a definitive voice, no, no, ma’am, no, I don’t know you, cuts off the communication with his index finger, slowly hangs up the receiver, turns, and now goes charging down the hallway banging into others as he does, hurtles down the small stairway, crosses the work site, running till he’s breathless towards the locker rooms, running with all his might, nothing is more urgent in this precise instant than catching up with Seamus, and Mo, and the other guys from the site, and when he sees their silhouettes getting ready to leave the platform, he speeds up even more till he gets to the bus and mixes in with them, very agitated, his brain like a full tank on a boat that pitches and heaves, a tank of methane or gas, a highly flammable tank in any case, and from that moment on he’s full of a new intuition that something extraordinary is going to happen to him now, is going to transpire, here, in a few days or a few seconds: right now nothing is irrevocable because he has no link to anyone anymore — everything is within his reach.

WHAT HAPPENS to him, what comes into arm’s reach with the return of the good weather, could very well be Shakira, for example; she too is a night owl, she too has powerful feet and a befitting body, rushing through the city like a snowball, each day growing thicker and more friable than the day before. When she arrives one May night at La Scala or at Sugar Falls, she doesn’t need to climb onto the rung of a chair to see who’s there, all she needs to do is throw a quick glance around the room to untangle the aggregated silhouettes, and in the middle she recognizes Sanche, remembers the airport and the dip in the river — he’s not the one she’s looking for and who she’d like to kill at this moment, but his table offers a target to aim for so she heads there. Sanche nearly falls off his chair when he sees her coming towards him, like the lid of the treasure chest lifting slowly: here it is, the pirate’s gold.

SUMMER WALKS TOWARDS THE QUAY AT A GOOD clip, full dawn, brilliant skin, cool nape, optimistic girl overflowing with verve, this day is mine and I dance for it blah blah blah, she’s steady, goes without rushing, crosses intersections on the diagonal so as not to deviate from her initial idea: today I will cross to the other side of the water.

In less than twenty minutes she reaches the banks: the sky is suddenly wide, flared like a basin, the clamour breaks through, and the light whitens. Summer reaches the dock, there, a vending machine, she buys a bottle of water and empties it in one gulp, elbow raised to vertical, she’s sweating, takes her place in the short line of people waiting to buy a ticket for the journey, and once the price of the crossing is settled, goes down the steel gangway, jumps into the barge, and, following the wave of people boarding, finds herself in a large room, clammy and sonorous, the windows are dirty, the ceiling low, the odour heavy. Most of the people who boarded with her have spread out along the benches and settled themselves against the walls, chin to chest and arms folded into pillows, eyes soon closed, they worked the night shift in bars, hotels, casinos, gambling dens, and nightclubs in the city, and will soon collapse into unmade beds, shivering, shirts bunched up at the foot of the bed — dirty collars, ties knotted still, just loosened and pulled over their heads, cuff unbuttoned with weary hands.

THE SIREN bawls, the ferry jolts sideways from the dock, and Summer gets up, strolls along the benches, those who aren’t sleeping cast hostile glances towards her; she reaches the upper deck, looks for an observation post, finds one at the prow in front of a pickup full of worn-out tires, two guys — Natives, stocky, wide-brimmed black felt hats, turquoise jewellery — smoke cigarettes and parley in low voices, indifferent to the deafening motors, indifferent to the odour of rot — wood, fish, fruit — that clings to the hull. Summer wants to take advantage of the view for the less than twenty minutes it takes to cross from one bank to the other. At this hour, the river is mauve, languid, large and oily folds, no reflection. She looks at the city as it softly grows distant, revealing itself whole as it shrinks, leaning over the greyish eddies that coagulate and dissolve against the hull, while before her, in an opposite movement, the forest rises, rises, huge and black, devouring space. At the exact moment when she passes the median of the river, suddenly close to nothing, far from everything, her heart tightens, tears rise to her eyes in a handful of seconds; the smell of fuel, she thinks as she closes her eyes, it stinks, it’s going to give me a headache, and suddenly breathless, she nearly falls over backwards. An immense fear. She knows the one. It’s Sunday on the Porte Dorée lake, at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes. Late afternoon. She’s five years old. There are four of them in the boat. Her father, her mother, her brother, and her. It’s the end of winter and it’s a sunny cold. They’re rowing. They pass temples, grottos, mills, rotundas. The light on the water is magnificent. Her mother has reflections of gold on her face and she closes her eyes smiling above her shawl. It’s her father who’s in action. He leans forward, back, to the rhythm of his legs bending and unbending, the oars held firmly in the ring of the oarlocks. They move slowly. They glide over the lake. Little splashes fly into the air while the water creases here and there against the boat. Everything seems easy, beautiful. There is soft laughter in the air. The perfect postcard of a happy family. The boat is named Marianne, like her mother. They were glad to get this one, it’s a sign, honey, said her father as he held out his hand to his wife to step in. The Marianne is red edged with blue, slathered with thick paint that shows the trace of the brush and the drips solidified along the planking. Suddenly her father stands up, right in the middle of the lake. The boat rocks abruptly, her mother lets out a cry, her father bursts out laughing and grabs her little brother by the waist. He lifts him and holds him out over the lake. Her mother opens her eyes huge and stammers, what are you doing, stop. Her father laughs, he’s playing, don’t be so silly. The boat pitches in fits and starts. The little boy gesticulates, his thin ankles and his shoes with laces kick in the void, his father heaves him back and forth above the water as though he were going to throw him in. The little girl is petrified, clinging to her mother who’s screaming now, screaming at her father that he’s crazy, while he stands there, before them, immense, legs spread wide in the bottom of the boat. He laughs, opening his mouth wide. Then an oar slips from the oarlock and falls into the lake. Her father puts the little one down carelessly, swears, shit, then leans over the water and stretches out his arm but the oar is out of reach. The piece of wood floats for a moment on the surface, then disappears. Silently, they head back towards the wharf. The sun has set and it’s cold. Everything is sombre. On the banks, the naked trees bend frozen branches towards them. Her mother wraps the little boy in her arms and silently holds back her tears. Her father is out of breath trying to make the boat move with only one oar. He grows tired. The little girl is worried they’ll never get there. Once they’re back on land, her mother bursts into sobs and stammers incomprehensible words. Her father sighs, the evening is a disaster.

THE OTHER bank disconcerts Summer. The large public square that meets the dock is still in shade, and it’s much colder and wetter here than on the other side at the end of May. A little crowd of poor folk — mostly Natives — come and go between shabby stalls, banged-up vegetables, frilly underwear, used tools, kitchen knives and machetes riddled with rust spread out on little braided rugs, bottles of fake spring water, everything drowned in a smell of boiled cabbage, fatty fish, and soap. Here and there, people toss offal into large cast-iron pots heated on makeshift stoves, cook them over low fires in a spicy sauce, then stuff them into a sheath of big bread sprinkled with lemon, disgusting thinks Summer, nauseated, crossing the square, goes into the first greasy spoon — a mosaic of compressed Coca-Cola cans wallpapers the facade — orders a coffee, the guy behind the counter looks her up and down without a word of greeting and mechanically pours bitter liquid into a plastic cup, turns his back, and picks up his paper again. Summer glances at her watch, almost seven o’clock. She takes a quick look over her shoulder and, through the half-open door, sees the ferry, already at the dock and ready for boarding. The excitement of this trip “to the other side of the water,” as everyone says here, dies away all at once, she’s cold, what an idea to come here, alone, without a plan, without anything to do. Indecisive, she sips her coffee, soon lukewarm, and while she’s counting her change, head down over her open palm, the guy at the bar calls, you looking for something? No, nothing, I’m fine, I’m gonna catch the boat back, she pushes her strap farther up her shoulder, turns towards the door, and behind her the guy continues, so there’s nothing for you here, you don’t like it? Mocking smile — translucent enamel at the edge of teeth that are very yellow and very straight — in contrast with a cold glance, transparent as a cat’s eye marble, Summer, uncomfortable, heads for the door, reconsiders and says simply, I’m looking for Sugar Falls. The guy joins her in the doorway of the greasy spoon, you go to the edge of the square on the left, the path that goes up from there, it’s straight till the pavement ends, then you’re at the viewpoint, keep to the left on the forest path, take it a little farther and then you’re there. His voice mixes in with the noises of the square that have bulked up now, just like the crowd that’s growing, the market is opening. Summer asks, it is far? An hour and a half walking, double that if it’s been raining. Oh. Summer looks at her watch. You’re in a hurry, eh, miss? He considers her, sarcastic, spiteful. You’re from the bridge, right? She nods her head. He takes a pack of hardened tobacco out of his pocket, rolls it quickly between thumb and index, lights up a skinny little smoke, props it in his mouth and tosses out, you should get off that site, take the time to go see it up there, it’s gonna shake up your identity, Miss Cannibal Bridge.

SHE BUYS oranges, Coke, and bread, climbs the slope of the road, the river at her back, the forest before her. The little lopsided apartments and stone buildings that border the market square have disappeared, she’s now walking along beside wooden houses tangled in with one another, some of them in complex and ambitious shapes — Chinese pagodas, Swiss chalets, thatched cottages from the Auge region of France — most of them like western movie falsefronts, walls askew but with an abundance of decorative details. At this hour, children are slamming doors and running into the street, schoolbags dangling from their shoulders, women in worn old slippers lift a crocheted curtain to watch them, and, suspicious, stare at Summer who peels her first orange, we can hear dogs barking behind the hedges, the air smells of detergent and babies.

Soon the sun is beating down, the pavement heats up beneath running shoes, the houses line up poorer and poorer, bricked-up windows or broken panes, garbage and scrap metal heaped up here and there in unkempt yards. Soon unmovable trailers with dusty windows alternate with crude wood cabins, done up with tires or tarps coated with tar, and (always ingenious) outdoor showers through a gleaming slotted spoon, a roof of nailed-on planks, one or two deboned mopeds in the grass, red, yellow, and blue plastic kids’ toys, an atmosphere of shacks on the verge of becoming junkyards, a smell of boiling iron, surprised insects bouncing off old axles, grilled instantly, no more children, no more shouts. This is the last section of the road now. Apparently uninhabited, not a soul in sight, but the forest like a bellows, the roots of young trees smashing the pavement open, grass infiltrating every corner and waist-high ferns on the sides of the road, the last huts, a tire-marked porn magazine forgotten on a stony berm, the last bits of trash, more cans, a bunched-up T-shirt, worn-out sneakers, finally a sign that indicates the viewpoint and Summer reaches a little bench graffitied with dicks and sexual insults, a phone number or two. She sits down, heart beating, out of breath, and suddenly discovers Coca silver-plating itself in the juvenile sun, on the other side of the river, the metallic brassiness of the financial district, the shattering whiteness of city hall and the bridge work site; she struggles to assemble the landscape, a light suffocation seizes her, a faintness she recognizes and she forces herself to breathe slowly, images pass — the Tiger who’s fallen off the face of the earth and whose eyes are disappearing, the Blondes who laugh on Skype with large movements of their hair, her father — she breathes deeper and deeper, thinking I’ve got to get a hold of myself, without being able to, submerged by her internal cacophony, displaced, unable to attune herself to what’s around her, she sways forwards, spits on the ground, finally closes her eyes. Then lifting her head again looks at Coca, looks at the edge. And suddenly enters the forest.

FIRST THE undergrowth, penetrated by a multitude of wells of light, the coolness that falls into indistinct space, then darkness.

It’s night in here, a green and humid night, the clamour of a fairground. Summer is surprised that the path is so wide and the earth so well packed, traces of tires, of paws, of soles, soon she passes two children following each other on skateboards, is this the freeway or what? She feels good now, back on her feet after the weak-kneed episode at the viewpoint. Around her, sequoias like gigantic stakes, ferns in compact masses, fluorescent mosses that cushion the roots, long sharp sedges, and all over the embankment are black holes — Summer shudders, imagining putting a hand in there and the prehistoric beast that would bite it, a cross between a wild boar and a red-eyed otter, some kind of duck-billed platypus that she would be waking. Little by little the forest grows more dense, the light doesn’t pass through the canopy anymore, you’d think you were at the bottom of an aquarium, and actually Summer does hear the sounds of water, turn in the path, a stone shaped like a rocket that reminds her of the ones in the Bois de Vincennes, and immediately the acrid smell of a fire from a berm on the river, she goes closer, two guys, both standing with a stick in hand, are watching a patch of earth perforated with holes that let out smoke, the smell is heavy, bloody flesh is visible here and there under the screed of earth: Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo are smoking game, and chewing tobacco from their own harvest.

They recognize Summer who doesn’t recognize them but quickly spots, against their dark skin, the sparkling yellow bracelets they wear on their wrist, a plastic strip with a barcode, stamped with the company logo, beeped each morning at the entrance of the site, an open sesame. The two guys throw each other a look that says, what’s Miss Concrete doing coming over here? Can’t stay where she belongs, “on the other side of the water”? She’s got to turn up out of the blue, naively play the tourist? What is she deluding herself with? They all sit down cross-legged around the fire and munch on a nice piece of the meat, telling one another jokes, as though they weren’t one girl and two guys, one white and two others, a black guy and a Native, one senior exec on the bridge and two workers who aren’t even skilled, who were immediately assigned to cleaning out the canal; in other words, one engineer and two garbage collectors, so what does she want, coming to see them up close? Since when do white folks come and barbecue with blacks in this country? Buddy Loo is cautious. He’s had problems before — in January 2006, a Friday night, fifteen degrees below zero, a girl is passed out drunk in the parking lot of a bowling alley on Colfax, Woody’s, Buddy picks her up, she had thrown up on her cream-coloured down coat, her eyes are rolled back, he hoists her into his car, leans the seat back, thinks it over, gotta go to the hospital, no desire to keep this girl in a full-on alcoholic coma in my ride; later, at the hospital, he signs the forms and hits the road, but the next day the cops turn up at his place while he’s at school, search his room, twenty-seven dollars are missing from the girl’s wallet, when he gets home Buddy is nabbed, sent to the hole, held in custody, they verify that the girl hasn’t been raped, no, nothing, Buddy makes bail, a month in reform school and community service for stealing, he’s sixteen, swears he’ll find that girl again and roll her for real, once he’s out he starts hanging around the bowling alley again, one night that same bitch staggers out accompanied by a giant with a bull’s neck, empty eyes, they’ve been drinking, Buddy holds himself back from head-butting the girl right away — she can’t recognize him, of course — he springs up from the darkness between two big cars, pulls out a gun, threatens the two of them, the girl laughs and then cries when he orders them to get undressed, but for Christ’s sake keep your panties on, I don’t wanna see your little white asses, your snitchy asses, empty your pockets, oh-ho, forty-three dollaaars; makes a pile with the clothes and puts the two pairs of shoes on top, sprays it all with mineral spirits, strikes a match, and leaves them naked and poor, feet in the snow, he took off and never went back to the bowling alley on Colfax, they say there’s a price on his head, set by empty-eyed bullneck. So he tells himself he should limit his contacts. Summer intercepts their stare, clears her throat, asks where Sugar Falls is — to have something to ask ’cause she doesn’t know what to say, there’s nothing to say — she sputters, the smoke stings her eyes, Buddy Loo gestures limply towards the heart of the jungle without even looking at her, while Duane Fisher turns his back and throws stones harshly into the water. She’s not welcome here, no, not at all. Buddy Loo doesn’t make another move, silently uses a giant rhubarb leaf to ventilate the coals. Summer nods her head once more, bye, takes a step or two backwards and then turns and picks up the path once again, keeps moving forward because she can’t turn back now, the falls are there, she can hear them.

DISSOCIATE THE light from the noise of the water. The clearing is vast, bathed in an electric whiteness, so brilliant that it takes Summer a few seconds to filter through the jumble of her perceptions, to distinguish the waterfall that bubbles, the high grass of an intense green colour — a soccer field lit up at night; to discern the bare-chested children armed with little yellow plastic water guns, the women, fewer men, all Native. She walks towards the falls, the little ones come running, their eyes shine, they laugh, call to one another in a language Summer doesn’t understand, they make a cortege around her all the way to the stone pool; she casts a glance at the adults who stare at her, greets them with a nod of her head. Then she crouches to drink, plunging her hands several times into the water, splashing her neck, her forehead, her forearms. Suddenly not a peep is heard in the clearing, the hubbub has gone silent. Noticing a large wooden signboard headlined Sugar Falls, she gets up to go read it, but a voice behind her stops her — don’t waste your time, it’s just propaganda, she turns around, the guy is white, the only white guy here. They look at each other. Sugar Falls! What a joke! the man says with irony, then says to her, you shouldn’t have drunk the water from these springs, it’s special here. Summer responds simply, I was thirsty. Looks around at the space that grows sharper now, perfectly spherical, but can’t pick out the beginning of the path she took to come here. Where are we?

THE WATER in the falls isn’t sweet, not even a little. The young Franciscan monk who founded the first Spanish mission had not changed it into syrup by some miracle, contrary to what was written in a few tourist guides or other books given to children. But for the Natives, these headwaters are a blessing, a place populated by spirits, they like to meet here on the solstice, the most well-off among them leave their four-by-fours gleaming at the entrance to the uplands, at the level of the viewpoint, and come the rest of the way on foot. All of them know about it, the path. The guy has thus logically chosen this clearing to teach them archaeology, botany, their pharmacopeia, and their language. He counts on the women, the most regular ones, some of them coming all the way from the other side of Coca to listen to him. He has his theory: teach the Natives to be their own archaeologists so that they can claim ownership of their burial grounds — thousands of them scattered along the shores of the bay at the far reaches of the high plains, beneath supermarket parking lots, along freeways, in the foundations of buildings — and rename their territory, learn how to use the technologies that kept them isolated in order to reverse the situation. He was both full of passion and worn out, operated in a sawtooth rhythm alternating between surging forward and sinking back in depression; his violent fervour cut into the quiet of the clearing, the peaceful atmosphere of this Native picnic. During the lessons, they listen attentively to the man, some women get up to give evidence, unfold signs, pass documents around. Several times someone comes up to Summer, brings a black coffee, a cheddar-cheese sandwich, offers her cookies and cigarettes. Children come to flop down beside her at naptime, and one of them even puts his head on her knees, she looks closely at the inside corners of his eyes, flat and smooth like the interior of a shell, asked herself again how her eyelids work, drunk with sensations, and calm, inside an absolutely porous solitude at present, she simply sits there, listening to this man whose voice carries louder than the falls, dozing when he refers to the idiots at the university who had decreed the forest tribes extinct — Ohlone, Muwekma — their language, their ceremonies, and reviving when he concludes his talk: we want to take back the burial grounds to compare the DNA of the dead and the living — he points to the children who chase and squirt one another — and it will quickly become clear that these tribes are still alive and well! Suddenly his face grows tense and Summer recognizes the guy she passed on the site, the one who attacked Diderot.

She decides to head back before dark and there are children to accompany her, they are heading back to Edgefront themselves, the parents will follow later. All the way down, they whirl around her, fiercely playful, constantly changing speed, stopping for long moments only to catch up to her again, passing between the rays of golden light that sabre the woods, whistling in the zebra stripes that hide them and reveal them all at once. She can spot a head, an arm, sometimes a whole body, she points them out calling found you! When they get farther away, she can still hear their exclamations, without really knowing if they are joking or fighting, but soon she can understand their language again: their Native language gradually disappears the closer they came to the city and Summer admires this way they have of matching the world.

IT’S NOW WEEK FORTY-TWO, LAPPING WAVES ON the river, the sky slumps, it’s evening. Coca lights up slowly, Sanche watches from the top of his crane, never gets tired of watching it, a hundred and fifty feet — a height that truly suits him. Dashboard at rest, indicator lights on green, and joysticks raised, a mickey of Jack Daniel’s, cookies, a CD player, Sanche is at the footbridge and he’s waiting for Shakira.

He called her before starting his shift at four o’clock this afternoon — more precisely, he sent her a text, prefers to communicate by SMS, lapidary signals or a quick joke without preamble, distance conserved, risk management — are you afraid of heights? No, she answered after twenty seconds. Meet at midnight? Okay. Sanche immediately put the phone down and rubbed his hands together because he had to do something, he was trembling with excitement, then three running steps knees to chest, one full spin, oh baby it’s yes, tonight’s the night and a little later, knees to chest still, he went to buy the whisky in a little joint beside the supermarket in front of the entrance to the site, and, on his way back, met Diderot who was at the wheel of the Chevrolet, about to leave, told him through the lowered window that he would be staying late tonight, two or three things to go over.

AND NOW he’s perched in the night, and the stars and the electric lights get all mixed up. But Sanche holds himself back from any nervousness that would cloud his attention and keeps his eyes fixed on the river that snakes towards him, a path punctuated with light, powdery halos, upon which long shining leaves move, a magical view from so high up, this river that, in less than four hours, will carry Shakira to the foot of the crane — she’ll arrive on time, 10:55 in front of the main entrance to the Pontoverde platform, welcomed at the door by a contact who’s been paid to bring her across the diagonal of the esplanade to the quay, where another accomplice will take care of her; they’ll board the management shuttle and head for the Edgefront tower at full speed, where Sanche (who will be keeping watch) will phone her cellphone to guide her along the pier to the elevator door, and while the shuttle does a U-turn to go back on the double without passing the large shuttle of the night team, Shakira will rise to him along the length of the lit-up crane, a golden-yellow projection, and as soon as she steps into the cabin, Sanche will be amazed: this tall body enlarges the cubicle, it makes room.

The machinery of the elevator has been set in motion, mechanical buzzing of cables and promises, and when the doors finally slide open, Shakira is there — stepping over the doorstep, superhuman-beauty spike heels dangling by their straps from her hand, and once she’s there she turns in a circle, amazed by the immensity that’s so close, I’m taking the grand tour, curious, takes the time to look at everything, the indicators, the buttons, the joysticks, the stickers, the knick-knacks, the CDs, and each movement of her body increases the space in the cabin, it’s beautiful here, she concludes, is it dangerous? Sanche devours her with his eyes, he yammers away, the problem with cranes is the wind. The wind in sudden gusts, the wind in blasts. I hate the change of seasons, there are violent breezes that come off the ocean, squalls that form on the plains, swell, and then come hurtling over the river, explode against the woods, then the birds flee and the water starts to turn like in the circus, he mimes the actions: stretches out his arms to say the birds, draws circles with his index finger to say the circus. Since she’s listening to him, he goes on, exaggerating: the crane towers sway on their barges, the cabs get the shakes, the loads swing like a pendulum at the end of a long chain, and each lifting operation becomes a risk that shouldn’t be taken, when the load is a hundred and fifty tons and the counterweight is twelve, that’s why I’m here, to avoid that risk; he points to the anemometer: every morning I monitor the wind speed, if it goes above forty-five miles per hour all operations are forbidden; and above all I watch, I see everything! He’s finished talking. The silence thickens.

Shakira takes off her coat — it falls to the floor, reveals her in a black velvet bustier dress, a shape and a material that show her champagne-glass figure, the outline from her enormous breasts — did they grow again or something? — to her ultraslim waist, the chemical platinum of her hair, and the calm pressure of her very white skin, she is nearly naked and better than naked, a goddess and a little bit like a whore, goes to the window, watches the outdoors intensely, narrows her eyes as though she’s looking for geodesic landmarks, multiplied now in the panes, precise reflections of faces against the unstable night, spins suddenly towards Sanche, you see, I’m not scared of heights, I feel fine here, she sees the bottle of whisky, and I’d love a drink. They drink. Sanche comes to stand beside her, now he also appears on the glass walls, crowded in here, eh? He smiles, feels handsome beside her, he likes that this woman overcomes him like the outside overcomes the capsule, gobbles it up, reconfigures their presence, and unbridles both their movements and the free flow of their fantasies; he likes the relationship of their two bodies that grow and shrink like in a fairy tale as they touch, as they set in motion all the usual gestures of a first time and he likes that the glass cabin becomes the scene, ceaselessly renewed, of love affairs. He slips a hand sideways beneath her hair and pulls her to him while his other hand slides up under her dress, along the surface of her very real skin — it was phenomenal to touch her, like being the first witness to her existence, and perhaps even more to his own existence, as though it was the touch that created the body; she leans down to kiss him, taking him by the throat, then they undress each other without once bumping heads, no, on the contrary the cabin is exactly the right size for them, its walls provide support, offer them something to brace against or lever themselves with: she raises herself from the dashboard just enough that she can slip her panties over her ankles, lifts her arms just enough that he can slide her dress over her head — she touches the ceiling — he backs up just enough that she can unbutton his jeans and bend down to roll his boxers to the ground, then pulls his shoulders just far enough back that she can push the sleeves of his shirt off his arms, an obstacle course that accelerates the rhythm of their breath, increases their sweat, and soon the windows of the cabin are covered with steam, the carbon dioxide they exhale and the Joule effect of their naked bodies encloses them in the vapour of a sauna, a cloud of condensation that removes them from the gaze of the owls, bats, and moths, from that of the aviators and of teenagers who mess around at night on the rooftops of buildings, a halo that holds them together, sheltered in the heart of the shadows, when in fact the cabin is dilating, swaying, pliable, a limitless erogenous zone; they’re standing now, face to face — she had to lower herself a little — and when the moment arrives to enter her it again gets just complicated enough (she does, after all, have to be able to separate her very long legs, and in order to do so must press her back against the window without tumbling over backwards, and then lift her pelvis; he must after all place himself at the right height and be able to slip his hands behind her back, place them on her hips, and find enough amplitude to pull her towards him) that they are required to pirate some new solutions.

EVERY TIME DIDEROT SHOWERS, HE COMES UPON the scar from Jacob’s knife, a diagonal line along his side, two inches long. It’s been almost ten months that he’s been living with this crimson segment that screams bastard every time his eyes fall on it, and that marks the day when Katherine Thoreau crossed his path. Sometimes he tells himself that without this knife wound, he would never have met this woman, and with the tips of his fingers he traces the imprint. But he can’t let go of the insult of the thing. He promises himself he won’t leave Coca without having found that man again, the one he rolled with in the dust of the road.

For the moment, though, the site is pushing him hard. They still need to find some solutions for placing the flat deck of the bridge. They have to provide for thermal effects on the steel plates that make up the deck — in Coca, the variations in temperature are extreme, it’s a continental climate. Under the effect of a heat wave, swelling the steel, the length of the deck could increase by twenty-seven inches in a span six thousand feet long, and then retract again. So they need expansion joints every hundred and fifty feet — after some discussion they choose a system of modular expansion joints that will allow for movements of any amplitude, in three directions, and rotations on three axes. Deciding on the interval between them keeps the builders occupied for a few days. Diderot loves these crystal-clear technical demands; he orders tests, evaluates, compares, and decides. It’s the very movement of the bridge itself, its supple and living nature that’s at play in the pure reality of the steel, and he pores over this question with the zeal you put into finishing a project. The teams of ironworkers set out horizontally and assemble the span, plate by plate, six thousand feet long by a hundred across, it’s a mechanical job, weld, bolt, bolt, weld. Seamus and Mo are part of the team and work without talking to each other, they’ve synchronized all their movements with precision, it’s a choreography. They work fast in the lead and have quickly covered their strip — and then the river is crossed. They too feel like they’re almost at the finish line. A slackening that worries Diderot, it’s always in the last days that people mess up the most, careful, he warns them, all the more since in the last few days the heat has been torrid, the guys’ heads boil under their hard hats, and there’s hardly any shade to take a break in; the steel burns like the concrete that covers the whole span now, the site has become an inferno and it’s during the trips along the river that the men become reanimated, they’re already imagining themselves in the future, sharing a few leads. Seamus will skip the inauguration of the bridge and leave at the end of August for the northwest of Canada, Cigar Lake, the future’s in nuclear, he laughs, compares the wage he’s been offered with that of the workers on other sites, while the bridge guys grimace, I’d never do uranium, never, got no desire to become radioactive. Mo watches the banks parade past, he’s hesitant to leave with Seamus, who assures him that it’s a good contract, but he has a link in Zimbabwe, in a platinum mine where one of his cousins, who he found on the internet, is already working, there are hundreds of us here, he wrote. Mo doesn’t know yet what he’ll do, he’s always gotten by but one thing is certain, he wants to see the opening of the bridge, the lights, the jubilation. Three more weeks to go.

AND THEN one morning Summer knocks on Diderot’s office door, and in a stroke of luck he’s there, lifts his head from his computer screen: everything okay, Diamantis? Summer will be the last to work hard, he knows it — the levelling of the freeway approaches, including six lanes that must be connected at various points from the bridge to the road system, requires an increased production of concrete. On the Coca side, the bridge freeway flows perfectly into the system, converging towards an interchange which, past the toll booth, will redistribute the lanes in all directions, two of them bypassing the city to head straight for the plateau; but on the Edgefront side, past the toll booth, the six lanes remain connected, and then the hundred-foot-wide channel narrows to look like a simple road that stretches along the river downstream. Summer has to prepare the ground for future construction: the mountain range road, once it’s open, will wreak havoc on the neighbourhood of Edgefront, dividing it into two equal parts before reaching the forest. This forest highway is bullshit, Summer blurts as soon as she sits down in the chair facing his desk, hard hat in her lap. She’d hesitated for a long time before knocking on Diderot’s door: she’d been working alongside him for nearly a year, and while she respects and admires the way he has of fulfilling himself in human action, connected to a materiality that exists outside of him, she’s also cautious of this man for whom living amounts to flowing with the flux of the world, with all its movement. Diderot leans back in his chair: what’s going on, Diamantis? This freeway, she repeats, this freeway they want to build, it’s gonna wreck everything. Diderot, curt: that’s not our job, Diamantis. But Summer shakes her head, but my job is also the freeway approaches and the grid connection. Silence, then Diderot nods softly, that’s true, but there isn’t a grid yet in Edgefront, we’re connecting to the road along the shore, we’re easing up the traffic in the centre, that’s all. Then, since they’re suffocating in the little room, Summer opens the window, turns around, I found the man who attacked you in November. Diderot shudders, his scar burns under his shirt, oh yeah? Yeah. Two minutes later, they’re on the way.

THEY STREAKED along in the Impala, silent, zigzagging between vehicles, taking as many risks as fugitives with the cops on their tail, and once they reached the Edgefront side they climbed the road up to the viewpoint, a path that Diderot is seeing for the first time, Summer’s driving. Once they’re out of the car, he doesn’t take the time to contemplate Coca, marvellous, buildings piercing the heat haze, no, they go straightaway into the forest and the undergrowth does impress Diderot, disorients him, fragmentary, the day occupying the same proportion of space as the darkness, he walks for a long time without knowing whether he’s inside or outside, incorporated as he is into the frenzy of vegetation, with Summer silent at his side; and later, with the shade increasing its share, the light dissipates into slivers and a silhouette can be seen at the end of the path, ghostly but becoming steadily more incarnate as it draws nearer, Jacob is walking to meet them.

He stops a few yards from them — they too stop, and then the silence swells, swarms, a breeding ground. All three of them are covered with the same patches of light, clothes and skin transfigured. This is the meeting, Summer says simply, staying back while Diderot moves forward. The two men are now face to face, inches apart. They know each other by heart. There is so much noise that Jacob has to raise his voice, I knew you’d come, and Diderot answers slowly, dragging his syllables, I wanted to break your face — and also, I wanted to say thank you. Their timbres are expressionless, they size each other up, without affect, Jacob says, skip right to the thank-you, arms crossed over his chest. Critters of all kinds populate the luminous pastilles, pink flies, poppy-red butterflies, bronze beetles; then everything grows quiet and Diderot’s voice vibrates, all right, thank you for the knife wound. Jacob uncrosses his arms, dumbstruck, puts his hands on his hips, and kicks at a leaf; Diderot hesitates, thinks about dealing him a quick fist to the face, Jacob wouldn’t have the time to protect himself, he’d hit him in the nose, make him snort blood, the forest swirls around him, it accelerates, he smiles.

Summer paces behind them. A butterfly flutters about her, electric and delicate, she follows it with her eyes for a long moment, then crouches to look closer as it creeps into the corolla of an unknown flower, she concentrates. It’s a mission blue butterfly. A super-protected species. On the banks of the river they had to plant entire areas with flowerbeds so these butterflies would have something to live on and decreed that the boat speed and that of the cars on the freeway approaches would be limited to five miles an hour from March until June. The forest is saved. She exults, eyes closed. Then, lifting her head, pulls the elastic out of her ponytail, it’s the very first time — suddenly her whole look and face change, she calls to the two men, so is the war over now? I have to get back to work.

THE DAY BEFORE THE OPENING CEREMONY, PEOPLE are still hard at work on the bridge. The electrification of the structure requires the installation of one hundred and fifty-two lamps along the deck, and sixteen more powerful ones on the towers that will each be crowned with a red beacon, they’re still unrolling miles of cables. The freeway approaches are just barely finished, the poured concrete is still wet on the bridge’s access ramps. They’re scrubbing the metal, keeping a close eye on the birds; swing stages sway along the piers to clean up the least stain. Here and there along the structure, hanger cables are sprinkled with flags that smack in the wind, and in front of the Coca gate, a giant stage is put up, circled by bleachers and crowned with a meringue circus tent — tomorrow an orchestra is supposed to set up here and launch the fanfare when the Boa comes to cut the magic ribbon, when he places the tip of his shoe on the splendid roadway and walks across to Edgefront, alone at the head of the people, relaxed, triumphant, offered up to their gazes, arms at his sides and chin parallel to the ground, perhaps even a rose in hand, followed twenty minutes later by two thousand guests who will also cross on foot, hand-picked close friends — among them, Shakira, and we hope that Mo will also have managed to infiltrate the little privileged crowd, he will have put on a white shirt and a pair of grey linen pants that will narrow his hips, he’ll feel a wild pleasure in crossing this bridge that belongs to him, without a hard hat, full sun on his face. On the other side of the water the welcome will be triumphant: release of doves, cheerleaders, jugglers, Native traditional dances, a parade of municipal police, and free distribution of T-shirts emblazoned with a magic formula: c = 0 %, m = 69 %, y = 100 %, k = 6 %, the definition of the structure’s vermilion. Draconian security measures have been taken: Jacob and the Natives — among them Buddy Loo and Duane Fisher — are under surveillance in a motel on Colfax with a giant screen; the younger generation is excluded from the celebrations, Matt plans to watch the ceremony from the viewpoint, Liam will come too, they’ll bring Billie, their father has said he doesn’t want to see any of it, and anyways he’s got the TV.

IT’S THE END of the afternoon and Katherine’s going to park her vehicle for the last time in the parking lot for the levelling machines, she taps the base of her seat — how many hours will she have spent in here? — picks up the photo of her kids tucked into the windshield, the bottle of water, the pair of gloves, and then, passing by the facilities, gathers her things from her locker — soap, towel, change of T-shirt — and goes to hand in her hard hat, her badge, and her padlock in the administrative building. Don’t dwell on it, make your gestures quick.

Diderot is waiting for her past the work site, wedged into the Impala that’s soon heading upstream, towards the river bend, where there are no more villages, just a few cabins and coves. It’s not the last time they’ll see each other, there isn’t a last time, no one is dead yet in this car, and their only idea right now is to find a place for themselves, it’s still hot, they choose the wild reeds and the sandy grass, take off their shoes, prick their toes. They have beautiful feet, Katherine with slender ankles and wide heels, gently flared at the edges, Diderot with slim slightly curving toes. They walk along the bank lifting their knees high; their skin is erased in the brown, inhabited water. Far off, the bridge, and before them, very unsettled, the river, worked by strong currents that create a froth on the surface, there’s only one landscape left around them, shall we? They get undressed quickly, toss their splashed clothes onto the bank, and with long strides run into the water yelling, pushing away the branches floating in their path, a carton of Campbell’s soup, a pink sandal, then catch the current and drift off in a sidestroke.