A man named Benjamin Russell stood in the middle of a walkway across a bridge: a beautiful bridge it was, and he was alone. It was just before midnight. The sky was cloudless but the air was thick, the light arriving in woozy clumps. The bridge hummed and the water moved. New York, he thought to himself, surrounded by rivers and kills: how fast this current flows, and how long it’s been flowing. Long before New York was named New York, before the Dutch or the Delaware Indians had settled, long before any mistakes were made, here was the river, trying to drag this island back into the sea.
He was a cautious man and his perch made him dizzy, his senses distressed, eyes uncertain in their sockets; or perhaps it was because the previous month had been full of difficult nights, not so much sleepless as filled with waking—being drawn back to consciousness every hour or two, like a small boat on this very river, carried unhappily southwards to the ever-shores surrounding the Land of Aware. The night before, he’d woken again and again and again, each time finding himself sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands waving in the air, in a gesture that even he didn’t quite understand—fending off an attacker, or describing an urgent point of argument, or bidding goodbye. That very evening he’d slept for no more than an hour, and rather than lying in bed thinking his thoughts for the rest of the night, he’d risen and dressed and found himself, just a few minutes later, standing on the sidewalk outside his apartment on Rivington Street. He started walking.
The way was all pockets and corners, stairs leading down from the street into dark dens, creatures hiding in the gutters, beasts in waiting beneath the subway gratings; he couldn’t control his responses, the little jerks of fright, electric shocks left over from dreams that he hadn’t finished. He had walked down Bowery and passed through Chatham Square, anonymous amid the anonymous buildings, a panel van passing, a police car parked outside a Chinese bank, now and then a solitary man flickering past him. Then he’d cut west on Worth and started down Centre Street, and there was no one around at all. The streets were clean, the walls unmarked with posters or graffiti, no shops or shoppers. How sturdy it all looked, how elegant, reasonable and fair: the soul of adjudication, unsullied by the mess of real men and women. He’d looked back at the courthouse, which sat there on its granite flanks, uncomprehending. How many lives had been changed by this old man of a building? A mad old man, a dotard, stubborn and formidable, whom no one defied although no one knew why.
He’d continued down to the corner and started up the pedestrian walkway that led onto the bridge. A young man and a young woman on bicycles raced passed him, going in the other direction, but neither so much as glanced at him. Perhaps all they saw was each other; perhaps all they saw was the road. There was no one else along the way, and midway across the river he stopped. It would be a simple matter from there to swing his legs over the side, climb onto a beam, and make his way out to the edge. — Actually, it would be quite impossible. The beam was wide enough, and if it had been painted on a sidewalk he could have strolled across it easily, but knowing that he could fall made it almost certain that he would. Perhaps he could crawl. He had never been particularly athletic, but he’d played all the games little boys played, and he’d once been a fine Latin dancer: good enough to draw a little attention even at the clubs uptown. All those places were gone. Women in red dresses and men in white silk scarves. Gone. They’d stepped into their black limousines and disappeared.
Somehow he made it to the other side of the beam, though he had no idea how. He might have walked, the Devil might have carried him, he may very well have flown. He did feel like some kind of bird, now, folded up in the night. He could hear cars passing on the level below, another rhythm that made no sense; and all around him there were streamers of light. The rivets pressed into the bottoms of his feet, the thick fibers of the cable in his hand; and there was a faint wind blowing up from the south, smelling distinctly of murky water and slippery fish—a nineteenth-century odor, the salt of poets, still lingering. Another car passed below, and he wondered how many times he himself might have crossed this bridge, oblivious to a man standing where he was now, above it all. A machine: that’s what the bridge was. John A. Roebling, inventor of a device for the abbreviation of lonely hearts.
He stood on his iron plinth and thought like a monster. Love was one of those diseases that strike only once in life, strengthening your immunity if you were lucky enough to get it young, becoming more and more destructive with the age of the victim, likely killing you if you were old. He’d missed it in his early years, and he’d grown stoic in his decision not to pursue it. Well, that was all right, there was a thinness to his experience, he understood; he had other things to occupy him. But the lack of a woman had made him fussy and distant, which in turn made a woman less likely. He’d known this, but he couldn’t fix it. He had always been too careful: Was that the problem? No, other men were careful. Meek, was that a better word? A handsome little boy, he had been: fair-skinned and bright, but by seventeen he had lost all confidence. Too sensitive, too conscious. He hadn’t been to college, that was one thing; he had gone to an Episcopal high school, and at one time he’d even thought of becoming a minister, but the summer after graduating he’d decided the whole thing was grotesque—this life, this world, these people, and the God they thought was watching them. In time, he recovered some measure of sympathy, though never his faith; in any case, by then he was in his mid-twenties, he had been working in the men’s department of Macy’s, and it was too late for him to try to pursue a degree. But he went to museums on the weekends, and one afternoon in the Met he’d stumbled upon a room filled with Africana, and in it a small vitrine containing a statue of a man, carved out of wood, elongated, enchanting, an altar figure from the Ivory Coast. That had set him off on thirty-five years of buying and selling, occupying a small storefront on Lexington, then a tony little office on East 90th, and at last a showroom of his very own on Elizabeth Street.
Hey now. There was a boat on the water, some kind of barge, coming north, lights glowing on the grey deck as it glided through the waves. It was surprisingly swift against the current, and as it approached the bridge the captain blew the horn, letting loose a huge, stunning sound, a brass parabola that radiated outwards, its lip expanding, nearly knocking him to his knees, and then rippling and resounding off the buildings on either side with such force that it shook the bridge, the great cables humming in sympathy. When the noise passed it seemed to take the earth with it, leaving the bridge to hang there like an arc etched in space, and he felt the whole system turn over and over again in the emptiness.
The money had all melted away, and with it had gone his little life: the apartment, the shop. There had never been much of it, but now there was none, instead there was this burden, the monstrous weight of owing absolutely everyone. Each day the amount had grown; each day he had been driven down a little deeper. He looked across to Manhattan; Malebolge-on-the-Hudson, and there was so much money there, millions per cubic yard, but there was none to spare for him. Months earlier he’d tried to calculate how long it would take him to become solvent again if he sold everything he had, worked very hard, spent the favors owed and nothing else. It would have taken him not quite forever, he would have been a very old man, but there had been some hope: if he lived to be eighty, he might not die in outrageous debt. Then the letter had come from the IRS, notifying him that he owed them some enormous sum, and interest on top of that, and penalties on top of that. A staggering number, when all he had was a handful of grimy coins. Since then, the lawyer he’d hired had become more difficult to reach, no doubt because he realized that there was no money left to pay him. No one even bothered to tell him what was going on anymore. One morning, the marshals had come at dawn to put a lock on the door of his shop. Then what did they have all those meetings for? He had no more assets so they made him give all of his time, and when he had no more time they took his dignity, and when his dignity was gone they began shaving away at his very existence, one sliver at a time.
He’d only been by the shop once since they’d shuttered it; he’d stood on the sidewalk and peered through the front window, while people who had once been his neighbors and friends passed behind him, staring like the figures in an Ensor painting. The inside was almost empty, except for a few small things—beautiful but worthless, and still he wasn’t allowed to take them home. He was coming undone.
He felt a wind come whipping up from the Atlantic, funneling past Staten Island and quickening on the river. It blew him backwards, almost pushing him off the beam and onto the road below, and he jerked forward to counter it. What a way to go, he thought. Another botch, done in by pavement rather than midnight water, by some delivery van or bus. Overhead, the slow floating wing lights of a private plane; in another direction, there was a helicopter flying slightly sideways, its searchlight sipping at the darkness, and he could hear its blades shearing through the atmosphere again and again, a rhythm like the sound of film running through a projector. Yes? That was the beat behind the chords of the bridge and the voice of the ship’s horn, which was still sounding. Still. Such confidence the river had in its own music, never to pause for a breath, its melody continually unspooling.
In the wake of the wind came the pale tendrils of a beloved ghostess—Jillian’s perfume, a murmuring, rose-heavy bouquet, still lingering on his coat from the last time she’d hugged him, three months previously. If he’d known it was going to be the last time, he would have driven his hands into her flesh to hold her, bolted his wrists behind her and refused to let go. Instead she had walked away, leaving behind a scent as distinct and constant as the sound of her breathing. It had tortured him for months, but what could he do? Buy a new coat? What would that cost? And besides, the smell of her skin was the only part of her that he had left. When that was all gone it would mean she was all gone, and then he would have nothing.
Such a waste, that’s what he was. A man should leave more behind than he took from the world. This bridge, for example, with its massive lace and its great tense peaks, the very pitch and image of success—the men who built it could look at it for the rest of their lives and say, I did that to their wives and children. And he with his little bankrupt store, Jillian gone, all his days summoning zero, and all those remaining hours to fill, without work to occupy him, without a kiss to look forward to at night, all the same slow spending on an empty draft.
He wavered back and forth on his feet, blown by the wind, though he hardly noticed. What was wind but more of nothing moving from one place to another? Then another car passed below, this one thumping with the beat of its sound system, the sound so low it rattled his sternum: lub lub lub lub lub, young men rolling and laughing. Then a truck: all this traffic, and he wondered if that’s what the world comes to. Is it? This busyness, this movement, and why? Somewhere boxes of things were making their way from one building to another, airplanes landing, another train on another bridge. Where was he supposed to find stillness in all this? The taking and trading, the passing tumult of days battering by. There should have been more to it, but he didn’t know what or how to get it.