Virtual Light

He found her attractive, Ski

“Dreamin’, Scooter?” Ski

“No, Ski

“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 Ski

Yamazaki nodded, watching the characters of Ski

“Earthquake fucked it good, Scooter. The tu

Yamazaki held his breath, expecting Ski

“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 Ski

“Maybe a thousand people, this end. Another thousand in Oakland. And we just started ru

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…” Ski

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 go

“How you learn to climb, up here” Ski

Yamazaki shivered.

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

“How did you feel?” Yamazaki asked. Ski

“What did you do then?”

“I saw the city.”

Yamazaki rode Ski

Yamazaki stopped. He stood very still, one hand on a wooden railing daubed with hyphens of aerosol silver. Ski

We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the mille

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.