Virtual Light

10. The modern dance

He’d made a note to consider this junction as an interface between the bridge’s program and the program of the city, but extracting Skinner’s story of the bridge was obviously more important. Convinced that Skinner somehow held the key to the bridge’s existential meaning, Yamazaki had abandoned his physical survey of secondary construction in order to spend as much time as possible in the old man’s company. Each night, in his borrowed apartment, he would send the day’s accumulation of material to Osaka University’s Department of Sociology.

Today, climbing to the lift that would carry him to Skinner’s room, he had met the girl on her way to work, descending, her shoulder through the frame of her bicycle. She was a courier in the city.

Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.

He found her attractive, Skinner’s girl, in an odd, foreign way, with her hard white legs and her militant, upthrust tail of dark hair.

“Dreamin’, Scooter?” Skinner set the basin aside, his hands trembling slightly, and settled his shoulders against musty-looking pillows. The white-painted plywood wall creaked faintly.

“No, Skinner-san. But you promised you would tell me about the first night, when you decided to take the bridge…” His tone was mild, his words deliberately chosen to irritate, to spur his subject to speech. He activated the notebook’s recording function.

“We didn’t decide anything. I told you that…”

“But somehow it happened.”

“Shit happens. Happened that night. No signals, no leader, no architects. You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over.”

“But you have said that the people were ‘ready.’ ”

“But not for anything. That’s what you can’t seem to get, can you? Like the bridge was here, but I’m not saying it was waiting. See the difference?”

“I think—”

“You think shit.” The notebook sometimes had trouble with Skinner’s idioms. In addition, he tended to slur. An expert system in Osaka had suggested he might have sustained a degree of neural damage, perhaps as the result of using street drugs, or of one or more minor strokes. But Yamazaki believed Skinner had simply been too long in proximity to whatever strange attractor had permitted the bridge to become what it had become. “Nobody” Skinner said, speaking slowly and deliberately at first, as if for emphasis, “was using this bridge for anything. After the Little Grande came through, understand?”

Yamazaki nodded, watching the characters of Skinner’s translated speech scroll down the notebook.

“Earthquake fucked it good, Scooter. The tunnel on Treasure caved in. Always been unstable there… First they were gonna rebuild, they said, bottom up, but they flat-out didn’t have the money. So they put chain link, razor-wire, concrete up at both ends. Then the Germans came in, maybe two years later, sold ’em on nanomech, how to build the new tunnel. Be cheap, carry cars and a mag-lev. And nobody believed how fast they could do it, once they got it legislated past the Greens. Sure, those Green biotech lobbies, they made ’em actually grow the sections out in Nevada. Like pumpkins, Scooter. Then they hauled ’em out here under bulk-lifters and sank ’em in the Bay. Hooked ’em up. Little tiny machines crawling around in there, hard as diamonds; tied it all together tight, and bam, there’s your tunnel. Bridge just sat there.”

Yamazaki held his breath, expecting Skinner to lose the thread, as he so often had before—often, Yamazaki suspected, deliberately.

“This one woman, she kept saying plant the whole thing with ivy, Virginia creeper… Somebody else, they said tear it down before another quake did it for ’em. But there it was. In the cities, lot of people, no place to go. Cardboard towns in the park, if you were lucky, and they’d brought those drip-pipes down from Portland, put ’em around the buildings. Leaks enough water on the ground, you don’t want to lay there. That’s a mean town, Portland. Invented that there…” He coughed. “But that one night, people just came. All kinds of stories, after, how it happened. Pissing down rain, too. No body’s idea of riot weather.”

Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.

“Maybe a thousand people, this end. Another thousand in Oakland. And we just started running. Cops falling back, and what were they protecting, anyway? Mainly the crowd—orders they had, keep people from getting together in the street. They had their choppers up in the rain, shining lights on us. Just made it easier. I had this pair of pointy boots on. Ran up to that ’link, it was maybe fifteen feet tall. Just kicked my toes in there and started climbing. Climb a fence like that easy, boots got a point. Up, man, I was up that thing like I was flying. Coils of razor at the top, but people behind me were pushing up anything; hunks of two-by-four, coats, sleeping-bags. To lay across the wire. And I felt like… weightless…”

Yamazaki felt that he was somehow close, very close, to the heart of the thing.

“I jumped. Don’t know who jumped first, but I just jumped. Out. Hit pavement. People yelling. They’d crashed the barriers on the Oakland side, by then. Those were lower. We could see their lights as they ran out on the cantilever. The police ’copters and these red highway flares some of the people had. They ran toward Treasure. Nobody out there since the Navy people left… We ran too. Met up somewhere in the middle and this cheer went up…” Skinner’s eyes were unfocused, distant. “After that, they were singing, hymns and shit. Just milling around, singing. Crazy. Me and some others, we were stoked. And we could see the cops, too, coming from both ends. Fuck that.”

Yamazaki swallowed. “And then?”

“We started climbing. The towers. Rungs they welded on those suckers, see, so painters could get up there. We were climbing. Television had their own ’copters out by then, Scooter. We were making it to world news and we didn’t know it. Guess you don’t. Wouldn’t’ve give a shit anyway. Just climbing. But that was going out live. Was gonna make it hard for the cops, later. And, man, people were falling off. The man in front of me had black tape wrapped ’round his shoes, kept the soles on. Tape all wet, coming loose, his feet kept slipping. Right in front of my face. His foot kept coming back off the rung and I’d get his heel in my eye, I didn’t watch it. Near to the top and both of ’em come off at once.” Skinner fell silent, as if listening to some distant sound. Yamazaki held his breath.

“How you learn to climb, up here” Skinner said, “the first thing is, you don’t look down. Second thing is, you keep one hand and one foot on the bridge all the time. This guy, he didn’t know that. And those shoes of his. He just went off, backward. Never made a sound. Sort of… graceful.”

Yamazaki shivered.

“But I kept climbing. Rain had quit, light was coming. Stayed.”

“How did you feel?” Yamazaki asked. Skinner blinked. “Feel?”

“What did you do then?”

“I saw the city.”

Yamazaki rode Skinner’s lift down to where stairs began, its yellow upright cup like a piece of picnicware discarded by a giant. All around him, now, the rattle of an evening’s commerce, and from a darkened doorway came the slap of cards, a woman’s laughter, voices raised in Spanish. Sunset pink as wine, through sheets of plastic that snapped like sails in a breeze scented with frying foods, woodsmoke, a sweet oily drift of cannabis. Boys in ragged leather crouched above a game whose counters were painted pebbles.

Yamazaki stopped. He stood very still, one hand on a wooden railing daubed with hyphens of aerosol silver. Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, through the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of sound from some secret bell, pitched too iow for the foreign, wishful ear.

We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the millennium’s turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.

Modernity was ending.

Here, on the bridge, it long since had.

He would walk toward Oakland now, feeling for the new thing’s strange heart.