ON AUGUST 15, 2007,THE NEW YORK TIMES announced in its business section the construction of a bridge in Coca, a three-line newsflash in twelve-point lower case that slid by without attracting anything more than a few raised eyebrows – people thought: finally there will be some jobs; or: here we go, they’re off again with a policy of major construction projects, nothing more. But the engineering firms that had taken a blow during the economic crisis began to ramp up: their teams set to work researching, securing contacts within the companies that had sealed the deal, planting moles within them, all so they might place themselves in the ranking, in a good position – to provide workers, machines, raw materials, services of all kinds. But it was already too late – the die had been cast and the agreements sealed. These agreements were the result of a complicated and delicate selection process that, although expedited, still took two years to materialize in the form of official signatures at the bottom of contracts at least a hundred and fifty pages long. A series of phases that resembled a hurdles race: September 2005, Coca’s city council launches an international call for applications; February 2006, five companies make the shortlist and the call for bids is sent out; December 20, 2006, the bids are submitted; April 15, 2007, two companies are chosen as finalists; June 1, 2007, the name of the winner is announced by the president of the CNCB (Commission for the New Coca Bridge): Pontoverde – a consortium of companies from France (Héraclès Group), the United States (Blackoak Inc.), and India (Green Shiva Co.) – is the lucky winner.

The competition had involved an infernal number of hours and had placed hundreds of people around the world under immense pressure. There was excitement and there was damage. The engineers worked fifteen hours a day and the rest of the time had their BlackBerries or iPhones glued to their ears, shoved under the pillow at night, sound turned up when they were in the shower or sweating it out at squash or tennis, vibrate setting on high when they went to the movies, though very few of them went to the movies ’cause they couldn’t think about anything but that fucking bridge, that fucking proposal, they grew obsessed, excepted themselves from daily life. The weeks slid past, the children grew distant, the houses got filthy, and soon they weren’t touching any other bodies besides their own. There was overtime, depression, there were miscarriages and divorces, sexual encounters in workplace cubicles, but it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t playful, just opportunity making the thief, and the inability to resist the promise of pleasure when your neck seizes and your eyes are scorched after twelve hours in front of Excel spreadsheets, sudden fever transmuted into quick coitus, a little haphazard, and finally, even though they were excruciatingly disappointed by the announcement of the winner, the ones who lost were somewhat relieved: they had aged, they were exhausted, broken down, dead tired, not a drop of juice left except the tears of fatigue they let spill once alone in the car on the way home from work, when the radio played a rock song, something saturated with youth and the desire to let loose, “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac or anything by the Beach Boys, and after nightfall when they were pulling into the garage, they didn’t get out right away but stayed instead in the darkness, headlights off, hands on the wheel, and suddenly imagined letting everything go, selling the house, paying off the credit cards hup, let’s go, everyone barefoot into the car, we’re heading to California.

THE OTHERS – the ones who worked for Pontoverde – went home victorious that night, re-energized, they had a bridge to build, their healthy bodies personified progress, their own hands would place a stone, they relished this coup shaped like fate, sure of themselves now as main characters in the world play. They too lingered in their vehicles, engines off, eyes riveted to a dried laurel leaf on the windshield and arms crossed over their chests, seat leaned back, and they too sat silently thinking about their coming expatriation; weighing their careers that were suddenly accelerated because they knew how to nod at an opportunity; counting the points they would rack up before going back to head office to occupy a superior position, which would include overseeing the reorganization of whatever department they would now be in charge of; and also reflecting on a potential move with the family, or imagining themselves relocated and single, commuting during school vacations – they too were suddenly ready to go, but this wasn’t a joyride, wasn’t dropping out, not really a vacation; now they had to gear themselves up to talk to their wives, to tell them the news; and some wives would puff up their chests with happiness and pride, they were good companions, their husbands were successful, had stature, and they would daydream themselves into a near future where they were spoiled by the company, served by local maids, a villa with a pool, yes, at the very least, two cars, a gardener, and a full-time nanny who was also a devoted cook, brilliant! Already they were laughing and going to wake up the kids, ready for the sweet leap up the social ladder; others, dismayed, would tidy the kitchen nervously in silence, and finally turn an anguished face towards their husbands because, dear, what are we going to do about school for the older ones, about my sick parents, about the little one’s speech therapist? These wives would need to be reassured, promised that they would have their say in all this, the whole thing had to be toned down, they had to be made to understand that their husbands were counting on them; while finally there was a handful of others, these ones the toughest by far, who would light up a smoke once the washing machine was on, and then, whoosh, they’d spin around to face their husband, butts pressed against the sink and faces lit strangely by the overhead light, unreal and yet marmoreal, like Marlene Dietrich, an ambiguous shading that made them enigmatic, abominably distant, and these ones would smile and conclude in a sardonic voice, I’m very happy for you, dear, but what’s my place in all this? These ones would hold tight to their jobs, they would need to be convinced, pressured, until finally one night their foot consents once again to creep beneath the sheets and caress the foot of the man stretched out next to them; their husbands would have to use cunning until they made this little gesture, this caress of the skin, a subtle sign of agreement that would grant their husbands the world – and these latter could then silently triumph, lying on their backs perfectly still. Then, once the family’s departure date was set, restlessness would set in. They would still need to cancel the lease, the phone, and the electricity, find storage – and then sort out this mess, the kids’ messes and their own, broken toys, outgrown clothes, piles of old magazines, chipped vases, faded photographs, everything in the dross; go to the doctor, say goodbye to friends and family, and finally pack their bags and head to Coca. And this is exactly what they did late August, early September.

THEY WEREN’T the only ones to leave. All kinds of people set out in the violet night and converged in the city whose soda pop name jangled like thousands of corrosive little pins in their dry mouths. The want ads that popped up on the web called for cable riggers, ironworkers, welders, concrete form setters, asphalt paving crews, crane operators, scaffolding builders, heavy-lifting contractors, excavators – these skilled workers packed their bags in a single movement, synchronized, a tight manoeuvre, and set off by any means they could. A first wave stuffed themselves into cargo planes chartered by subcontractors who specialized in recruiting skilled labourers – these companies worked fast and with clichéd racism: preferring the strong Turk, the industrious Korean, the aesthetic Tunisian, the Finnish carpenter, the Austrian cabinet maker, and the Kenyan geometrician; avoiding the dancing Greek and the stormy Spaniard, the Japanese hypocrite and the impulsive Slav. The chosen ones, poor terrified guys dealing with their baptism by air, barfed up their guts at the back of the cabin. Others jumped on the backs of freight trains where they were immediately jounced about, asses bouncing on the floor as though on a tatami, and propped themselves up against their bags that knocked together, soon dizzy with noise and dust, heads between their knees because their eyes were tearing. And there were others still who boarded the buses that fill the night highway, those public dangers handled by drivers with bugged-out eyes – lack of sleep, coke – transport for the poor who don’t have three hundred dollars to put down on a used car and so are picked up like stragglers by the street sweeper, that’s why it stinks in here, the velour of the seats soaked with fatigue and cold sweat, a smell of tired feet – we all know that’s the real smell of humanity; these ones wait in miserable little parking lots at the city limits and lift a gloomy arm so the driver will stop, the news of the site had spread like wildfire, and the city already shimmered in a corner of their brains; finally, there were some who arrived on foot, and it seemed that nothing could make them deviate from their path – they headed straight there, like dogs, as though they had followed the scent of a magic rag rubbed against their noses, while still others were simply vagrants, people for whom here or there was the same thing, who had a certain idea of their life and proudly believed that they had a right to adventure.

A thin-legged Chinese fellow with a profile like a cliff is among these last – his name is Mo Yun. Nine months earlier, a miner among millions of others – miner because his father and mother are miners, miner because he’s nothing else and ’cause to descend to the bottom of the hole is simply to follow the greater movement – he suddenly turns his back on Datong, world capital of slag heaps, violent proletarian hot pot – a real survival instinct, since scampering off from the rut of childhood meant giving his youth a chance; after that, even if it was miserable, wandering has the taste of the potato chosen from among all the rest for its shape and colour, and the smallest radish smells like freedom. Mo crosses Mongolia huddled in the back of a four-by-four with a couple of Russian botanists, and once they’re in the suburbs of Ulan Bator, hops to his feet and turns off to the right, heads straight to the sea, three months of travelling, who knows with what money and especially where he finds the strength, then boards a Dutch container ship and does Vladivostok–Vancouver in fifteen days, fifteen days of darkness at the end of which Mo emerges from his waterproof bulkhead compartment one icy night. The city looks deserted. He heads south at the back of a Greyhound bus, and once he reaches San Francisco, Chinatown, knocks on the door of a scuzzy joint on Grant Avenue, a greasy but profitable dive where one of his uncles exploits him sixteen to eighteen hours a day for four months. It’s there, in the back kitchen, that he first hears talk of the bridge, and he calmly puts down teapots and rice boxes, unties his apron, passes through the restaurant by the central aisle, and pushes open the front door – the customers’ door, the main door – he chooses this one and not another one, the inaugural door, see ya! His brown feet, at present, are thickened with corns, callused, and etched with the wrinkled trace of the world map, he’s seventeen years old and he can see the lights of Coca.

Among those who come to the site are Duane Fisher and Buddy Loo, nineteen and twenty years old, red skin, black skin, mixed blood. For the moment they’re squatting against the wall drinking cans of beer in the parking lot of the Coca bus station. They’re out of breath, dazzled, just emerged from the opposite bank, rolled out of the forest after three months bushwhacking in a clandestine gold-panning station that was held up too often by police and ordinary crooks, three months sifting rivulets of a gold-bearing alluvium, necks devoured by parasites, nothing to eat but boiled beans and yucca in all its forms. They split from there and followed the ravines, feet bare inside their sneakers, mud up to their ankles, and sticky clay full of worms squelching between their toes slurp slurp, mosquitoes caught inside their jeans, ticks beneath their waistbands, but they have gold, yeah, a few ounces, a pinch, enough to buy themselves some tequila and a pork chop to cook over twigs snatched from the sickly weeds growing along the sidewalk on Colfax Avenue outside the city limits. In front of them, sitting on the hood of a Mercedes four-by-four, two men in steel-grey suits talk in low voices, put their heads together, then move towards them. They have recruitment forms in hand: a year of work, boys, a salary, health insurance, a pension, and the pride of participating in the creation of a historic landmark, a golden opportunity, the chance of a lifetime. The two boys hold the paper, don’t read it ’cause they can’t even read anymore, exchange a look, sign at the bottom, and receive a summons to appear on September 1st, and there it is, it’s done – they’re in, bridge men.

WOMEN ARE there too who had to elbow their way in to get a job on the site. There are only a few, but they are there, polish corroded on black nails, mascara swaddling their lashes, the elastic of their panties worn out around blurry waists. They’ve done the calculations and come: the pay is good, especially if you include in advance overtime and compensation of all kinds. Most of these women cleared out of their homes overnight, telling their colleagues at the very last moment, with enough time to offload a plant or a cat into their affable hands, then a quick hug and whoosh, steering clear of beers between gals on the last night, steering clear of promises. Once in Coca, they lobbied Pontoverde’s local hiring office till they were hired, volunteered themselves for the hardest jobs, under-qualification requires it, and signed up for the shittiest hours – weekends, nights. Then they rented a room in one of the motels that abound on Colfax, their rival signs uncoiling thick fluorescent pink or golden-yellow ribbons into the night between the Kmarts, the Safeways, the Trader Joe’s, the Walgreens, the parking lots full of used cars, outlet stores, and all the discount clothing warehouses in the world.

In one of these motels, the Black Rose, in one of these rooms with succinct furnishings and minimum comfort, one of these women, Katherine Thoreau, uncaps a Coors and smiles. She still has her parka on and a contract swells her breast pocket. None of the people watching TV – a man, two teenagers – looked up when she came in; we might even wonder if they heard her – well, I can confirm it: they heard her plain as day when she pushed open the door and then took a bottle from the fridge. She leans a shoulder against the wall, takes a mouthful straight from the bottle, and then, still smiling, says: I got it! The two boys leap up, yes! The younger one runs over to her, presses his cheek against her belly, and puts his arms around her waist. Katherine buries a hand in his mane, strokes him softly, thoughtful, then lifts her head – don’t you think the TV’s a bit loud? She meets the eyes, serious eyes, of the older one, and repeats, I got it, we’re gonna get through this; the teen nods his head and turns back to the screen. You can’t hear anything besides Larry King’s swinging and brutal, professional voice, and Sarah Jessica Parker’s laugh that displays her big teeth and pointed chin between golden curls, laughter and applause, the program’s credits. Katherine says again, turn it down a little, it’s too loud, it’s gonna give you a headache. She slowly finishes the bottle, then lifts the younger one’s head, still pressed against her, smooths her hand across his forehead and whispers, did you guys put Billie to bed? He gives a solemn nod. The man, disabled, immobile in his wheelchair, hasn’t lifted his gaze from the set, hasn’t once looked at his wife.

ANOTHER WORKER joins the group without being noticed – not a single one among us would have cast an eye on his angular, shifty form, tattooed with a safety pin, a mistreated cat that would take a beating and dream of giving one in return. Soren Cry arrived after six days hitching from Kentucky and the Eastern Coalfields – a ghostly rural zone, scrappy, dismal little hamlets scattered over an area hammered with misery; drugs and alcohol to eradicate the threatening spectres of Cheyenne warriors hidden in the Appalachians; youth who bury their noses in rags soaked with white-spirit or turpentine, hunt squirrels with rifles, organize car rodeos in the mud, empty out cartridges into bottles of beer downed one after the other, light fires in the carcasses of rusty pickups, all this just to get their rocks off a little once night falls; they listen to heavy metal loud enough to burst their eardrums, music like decibels spewed, like death rattles. A quagmire. Kicked out of the army six months earlier for acts of violence against a superior – the colonel was a thirty-three-year-old woman, a technocrat hayseed who had humiliated him in public, treated him like a hillbilly, and spluttered in his face, no doubt because she’d seen too many movies, and something in him had given way. He broke her teeth. Since then he’s been living with his mother, taking one-off jobs, seasonal work, and the rest of the time, nothing, time off fiddling around, playing GameBoy in front of the TV in the condo he shares with this pious, poor, and depressive woman – who he has imagined stabbing to death or strangling countless times, but who he kisses tenderly each night on the temple – and probably he left so he wouldn’t have to kill her.

SO IT’S a multitude that moves towards Coca, while another multitude escorts it, a thick and sonorous stream mixing chicken roasters, dentists, psychologists, hairdressers, pizzaiolos, pawnbrokers, prostitutes, laminators of official documents, television and multimedia device repairmen, public letter writers, T-shirt vendors, makers of laurel lotion to treat calluses and cream to kill lice, priests, and cellphone agents – all of these infiltrate the place, siphoned from the flood that such a site causes, betting on the economic spinoff of the thing and getting ready to collect this collateral manna like the first rain after a dry season, in stainless steel bowls.