So she’s taken an escalator, one she doesn’t remember, to the upper level, and is making her way, without really thinking about it, to the foot of their tower, the wet light having turned to a thin and gusting rain, blowing through the bridge’s tattered secondhand superstructure. People are hauling their laundry in, where they’ve hung it, draped on lines, and there’s a general pre-storm bustle that she knows will fade if the weather changes.
And so far, she thinks, she’s not seen a single face she knows from before, and no one has greeted her, and she finds herself imagining the bridge’s entire population replaced in her absence. No, there went the bookstall woman, the one with the ivory chopsticks thrust into her dyed black bun, and she recognizes the Korean boy with the bad leg, rumbling his father’s soup wagon along as though it should have brakes.
The tower she’d ascended each day to Skinner’s plywood shack is bundled in subsidiary construction, its iron buried at the core of an organic complex of spaces appropriated for specific activities. Behind taut, wind-shivered sheets of milky plastic, the unearthly light of a hydroponics operation casts outsize leaf shadows. She hears the snarl o~ an electric saw from the tiny workshop of a furniture-maker, whose assistant sits patiently, rubbing wax into a small bench collaged from paint-flecked oak scavenged from the shells of older houses. Someone else is making jam, the big copper kettle heated by a propane ring.
Perfect for Tessa, she thinks: the bridge people maintaining their interstices. Doing their little things. But Chevette has seen them drunk. Has seen the drugged and the mad dive to their deaths in the gray and unforgiving chop. Has seen men fight to the death with knives. Has seen a mother, dumbstruck, walking with a strangled child in her arms, at dawn. The bridge is no tourist’s fantasy. The bridge is real, and to live here exacts its own price.
It is a world within the world, and, if there be such places between 80 the things of the world, places built in the gaps, then surely there are things there, and places between them, and things in those places too.
And Tessa doesn’t know this, and it is not Chevette’s place to tell her.
She ducks past a loose flap of plastic, into moist warmth and the spectrum of grow lamps. A reek of chemicals. Black water pumped amid pale roots. These are medicinal plants, she supposes, but probably not
– – drugs in the street sense. Those are grown nearer Oakland, in a sector
somehow allotted for that, and on warm days there the fug of resin hangs
– – narcotic in the air, bringing an almost perceptible buzz, faint alteration of perception and the will.
“Hey. Anybody here?”
Gurgle of liquid through transparent tubing. A silt-slimed pair of
– – battered yellow waders dangle nearby, but no sign of who hung them there. She moves quickly, her feet remembering, to where corroded aluminum rungs protrude from fist-sized blobs of super-epoxy.
The ball-chain zip pulls on Skinner’s old jacket jingle as she climbs. These rungs are a back way, an emergency exit if needed.
Climbing past the sickly greenish sun of a grow lamp, housed in a corroded industrial fixture, she pulls herself up the last aluminum rung and through a narrow triangular opening.
It is dark here, shaded by walls of rain-swolkin composite.
• Shadowed where she remembers light, and she sees that the bulb,
– above, in this enclosed space, is missing. This is the lower end of
– Skinner’s “funicular,” the little junkyard elevator trolley, built for him by a black man named Fontaine, and it was here that she’d lock her bike in her messengering days, after shouldering it up another, less covert ladder.
She studies the cog-toothed track of the funicular, where the grease shows dull with accumulated dust. The gondola, a yellow municipal
recycling bin, deep enough to stand in and grasp the rim, waits where it should. But if it is here, it likely means that the current resident of the cable tower is not. Unless the car has been sent in expectation of a visitor, which Chevette doubts. It is better to be up there with the car up. She knows that feeling.