Barbarossa Bridge

By Michael O'Neill

Mariana never set foot again on Barbarossa Bridge.

East moving west, or west into east, didn’t matter, she’d stay put before setting out across Barbarossa Bridge.

You thought, fool, that you could survive on misery, on catching the looks of terror, confusion, of the drunk and the fucked up. Pathetic effort at catching and holding like light in a bottle, the poor bastards more fucked up than yourself.

When things just turned to shit, Mariana would pull the small iron heavy monitor across the room, push a video cartridge into position and watch the faces and contortions and mutilations all those other poor wretches provided her with.

Until Barbarossa Bridge took away the veil behind which she could hide, protected from the miserable creature she had been and remained.

Institutionalized until she deserted the therapy, camera and mythology of jumpers and doom sustaining her as she stole her way into the city, living from room to room, in deserted building stairwells, anywhere so long as the next night there’d be no trace of her.

Barbarossa Bridge leads in a long march to the short leap, the end of the beginning.

The beginning of the end started long before anyone set foot on Barbarossa Bridge.

Barbarossa bridge, reaching from here to beyond there, the safe there, reaching from the safety we assume exists, yearn to have exist and to know otherwise, the safety of where you came from to a place you’ll never reach.

Barbarossa Bridge, sacred? Possibly. Enigmatic, dangerous. A portal, so some came to call it with the same reverence they once bestowed upon the Prince Edward Viaduct, further south spanning the same terrain.

Terrifying are these places of no control, or where the only control was and remains held by the one soul that day, that moment, with their finger on a hair trigger.

And…

Bang!

Gone!

Christ!

Just like that!

Shuffle, climb, poised, glance without seeing and…

Barbarossa Bridge.

Time was before Mariana hated Barbarossa Bridge that she’d appear, just appear and wait, not up there on Barbarossa Bridge, but beneath in hiding, crouched among the bruise and brambles and shreds of torn clothes.

And wait.

Until he reciprocated; waiting up there on top. One time, two, once he caught a glimpse of her looking back through musty lens. He didn’t move off. He did return.

Did she hope?

Didn’t matter.

It could happen, probably would happen, not much to hold you down on that precarious perch over six lanes of traffic.

Mariana was more than a spectator. She was to be his self appointed chronicler, feigning indifference with her an antiquated video camera.

No one would do what she did.

“I’m a retail videographer.” Mariana said by of justification to the man she stood next to on the south side of the bridge, a foot or two from the railing. It was after three in the morning and the only thing she wanted was to get free, get down in the brush, on her back camera aimed high, and wait for the sun to crest enough light to catch…. If this was the time.

She knew she should never have gone out on the bridge, even though she had never seen him arrive before five. But this time, the only time he suddenly appeared as if out of the sidewalk rather than from over it.

She knew she needed to assure him that she had not intention of “helping him.”

As she began to denigrate those with compassion for lives they knew nothing about a car moved from downtown over the bridge moving slow eastward.

Cops?

Can’t be, those bastards would be all over them.

In a sudden cold sweat, Mariana hoisted her camera to her shoulder turning toward the decelerating vehicle.

Camera’s are the witness that can’t be intimidated or bought.

The driver takes note of this intrusion as the gunmen in the back seat duck to check their shoes.

The man on the bridge never flinched, never turned, never moved, didn’t care because those cowards with Glock 9’s were pallid imitations of threat, compared to what he was capable of.

The vehicle of marauders moved off, disappointed; the men making their getaway watch her lower the camera as they cruise into a combat zone of their choosing.

“Most of the time,” she told the man next to her measuring her tone, struggling with the chill, “I shoot drunks. You know convention drunks blowing into town for the big time.

She pauses. The man shifts.

Mariana relaxes.

“And whores,” She slaps the railing of the bridge with an open hand. “Whores are the most fun, just to be with, when they’re not working it. Then its just business.”

The man on the bridge in the dark raincoat, grey pants and battered running shoes waited for her to continue. For some reason her story seemed important enough to wait for. The fedora he’ wear was always worn with the brim tilted to obscure her view of his face. Age she would only speculate upon, over thirty under fifty. She knew she’d never ask. It was his hands that gave her the only reason to speculate further, hands which appeared frail, sinewy, crafted from a life which was without its essential ingredient, the art of it.

In need of affirmation, Mariana continued her story, caring only to hear it for herself, aloud.

“Sometimes I get stiffed, sure, that happens. Sometimes I’ve even taken a punch or two…”

The bruised cheek bone under her left eye suddenly flared, as if to punctuate the revelation with a nostalgic revelation of a beating she deserved.

“Nobody really gives a shit.” She wanted the words to sound indifferent, they didn’t.

Without having seen him so much as move she found his hand extended, a pack of cigarettes, match book tucked into the cellophane proffered. He snapped one half out of the pack. She accepted, slipping it with an expertise she recognized from having idle time to fill between sessions between her lips and inhaling the flame.

Cigarettes forever conjured images of a time when possibilities were ahead of her, when there was still more ahead than behind.

With two rapid lung strained coughs, she was back on the bridge, camera in one hand cigarette in the other and a life lived in between.

“Sometimes I tell ‘em,” she wheezed, “those I film, that I’m working on a documentary, and you know the shit they’ll tell the camera, man it’s pretty fucking scary.”

The cigarette is more a seductive medium than Mariana recalled and she was starting to feel relaxed in monologue.

“Like I asked a guy, just some guy who was walking on the sidewalk, Bay Street heading south from Yorkville, where he was from. We were standing I think in front of a pharmacy, it was late and the light from inside was harsh and irritating. He had just been walking toward me and suddenly stopped right in the glare, like a deer in the headlights.”

The cigarette was down to ember meeting flesh. She burned her index finger, noticed the smell before registering any sensation, which was only mimicked.

None of the burns, the gashes, none of the damaged inflicted or self-inflicted had ever seemed to intrude upon her conscience, the damage always only to flesh, never beyond.

Once she might have thought that after all the therapy, all the meds, all the tests and all the effort, she’d have felt, something.

Nothing.

She shrugged and tossed the butt over the side into the traffic scurrying beneath them.

Over to the east the first flush of an anemic dawn. Here palms were sweaty as she itched to get down below and wait, watch, wait, shoot if the time, his time was right.

Get off the fucking bridge!

“I asked the guy,” Mariana continued passionlessly, “ where he was from; you know kind of ice breaker shit, and you know what I got back, weeping. The fucking guy standing there in a ten thousand dollar suit, shoes so black and shiny I could pick chicken from between my teeth in them, a guy who looked like he owned me, just fucking bawled like a wounded child. He collapsed onto the sidewalk amidst the greasy stains and curled himself as tight as could be done and howled, all curled up weeping, not crying weeping. I circled him with the camera, kept moving left foot over right, left over right, faster and faster, never taking focus off his face, his miserable twisted face. He just kept blubbering in words that never ended, a litany of expressions that were meaningless. When I replayed him, I heard what he’d been saying; everybody was gone. Everybody vanished.”

Mariana gave her tale some thought.

“And I knew he killed them. Every fucking one of who ever they were. And you know, they fucking deserved it.”

Mariana wanted to say thanks and adios to the man on the bridge. Instead she waited until she started again.

“One night I ran into a woman. I stopped her at a bus stop. I thought she was waiting. She’d been drinking and had a bad cut on her forehead. I didn’t want to film her at first but she gave me a hundred bucks and a business card.

Film me until I pass out she said and send the film to that address. I did.”

Time was slipping away.

The dead air of the city, acrid with the exhaust of ten million ovens awaiting their victims, made her edgy.

“I don’t have a story.” He spoke as if in answer to her unasked question.

“The why and the wherefores, they are meaningless in the face of implacable resolve. You know what that is, implacable resolve?”

“Sure. Ain’t no turning back.”

Mariana hoisted the camera to her shoulder, stepped back and focused in on the man beneath the brim of his tipped fedora.

“I’ve watched you down there,” He steps toward the railing, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, buttoned to the neck, his gaze falling over the side into the shrubs and brush below. “Watched you just barely holding on, way down there among the roots of trees and brambles.”

He paused for a moment and she waited.

“At times,” he continued still by the railing, still looking over the side below, “I’d see you crouching near the supports watching me through your camera. You were always down there, waiting. Why?”

“Because you kept coming back.”

“You’ve been hoping I’d jump.”

“I don’t have any hopes.” Mariana stepped to the railing and stood close enough to the man in the raincoat that she expected to feel something, a presence, body heat, something.

There was nothing to sense. I was as if he were an apparition, already gone.

“Waiting is seductive for me.” Mariana holds the camera out over the railing of the bridge, the lens toward her, filming herself, “I masturbate in front of the camera and play it back. Watching me leaves me cold, so I start again, and wait. I wait, I masturbate and I wait. When I wait down there wait for you or for… I sometimes prop the camera on the ground, the bridge railing high above and masturbate. Sometimes I’ve caught a face looking down when I play the video back on my monitor. With you I just wait.”

Mariana lets the camera, held out at arms length over the valley below roll on. She seems no longer able to pull it back.

Mariana hasn’t been able to let go of anything and the camera is no exception.

“But there is something else?” The man won’t release her and she can sense of no route by which to escape this cloistered presence.

For the first time he actually glanced in her direction as she pulls the camera close to her pressing it protectively, stupidly to her chest.

“You are too late for the Viaduct.” She begins a story she never intended.

“I wasn’t. Heard about it from a guy I spent time with and he told me how he’d in time dance the Viaduct. A few months later he did. And now I’m talking to you.”

Mariana seems entranced looking into the camera lens again, her reflection in outline.

“Two days after I got here, I was hitching a ride downtown when everything stopped for her, standing out on the Viaduct railing. I started shooting faces waiting, faces that had nothing better to do but if they realized their worth, they’d be first over the side and then I turned the camera west out over the railing out at her, without really intending to at first.

She and I were wearing the same clothes, jeans, t-shirt, black and white running shoes, our hair tied back the same way. On her t-shirt was the peace symbol, in yellow, same as mine. I didn’t even notice any of that until I ran the tape through the monitor that night. She was facing north.”

Mariana turned in the opposite direction, pulling the camera around with her, with the lens still focused on herself.

“Everything just, stopped for her. Everything, birds settled under leaves of old trees and in the high eves, facing in every which direction except the one that counted. Traffic snarled itself in every direction, asphyxiating itself into a rumble of pointless effort.

Everything going north, struggling south, didn’t fucking matter. This girl maybe a hundred and ten pounds of twenty something all raggedy assed, she held all before her. Man even the wind herself genuflected before her and sun turned coward and shuffled behind any cloud it could pray up from the depths.

Me, I leaned against the railing near the fence where it dropped off into the valley and kept shooting. For some reason I took my eye from the finder and looked directly out at her and she was looking back. I’d never seen a face more wreathed in beauty, I felt an ache, like I’d been knifed. I staggered, suddenly exhausted. I yawned and she did the same, together. She held up her hands as she too were filming as I filmed, taking my picture, smiled she did and stepped off, never taking her eyes off me, nor me her, all the way down.”

Mariana lowers the camera turning it off.

The man next to her shifts and for an instant she catches sight of an acne ravaged cheek, full lips on a face once angular, now cadaverous.

“Leave now”. He said looking directly at her for the first time and Mariana was felt loose as if her nerve had collapsed, spineless. His eyes were circled in ages long past, he was like something that was ancient, forgotten, out of time and place, attempting from the flitting eyes, to find and maybe had found the way home or on.

His was a look so intense, so intimately part of where he was that Mariana found herself crying.

It was as if he’d pulled her apart, exposed the one moment in all the moments, good, bad that still meant something and she wept for the girl who stepped out falling in love as she fell and fell and fell and fell.

He reached out and took from her the camera.

“I…” Mariana was immobilized, stammered, staggered before him.

“You are done here.” He leaned into her, his raincoat a death cold shroud floating about her, enrapturing her consciousness until it faded and she weakened.

“I’ll keep the camera safe.”

Mariana said nothing, feeling a wave of nausea well up. She staggered, nearly fell into the railing and vomited.

Slowly she felt propelled along the sidewalk, wiping the dribbling vomit from her chin she moved toward the west, toward the inner core of the city she forever felt safest, if such could be said of anyplace she arrived at.

And she could here her voice, her voice was praying aloud as she moved west toward the core of the city.

…in the name of the father, the son the holy spirit…

…in the name of….the son, the son, the…

And she didn’t look back, she didn’t look up from her black and white running shoes stained with bloody vomit.

Behind her was an empty bridge.

Barbarossa Bridge.

Sacred to some?

Place of no control, or place where the only control was held by the one soul with their finger on the hair trigger.

And…

Then…

Bang!

Gone!

Christ! Just like fucking that!

Shuffle, climb, poised, glance without seeing and then snap open the lens, stare inside and…

Barbarossa Bridge.

Contact Michael O'Neill

Michael O'Neill has published several works of short fiction in Megeara, Gangway, The Danforth Review, Minimag, Moth Magazine, and Word Riot. Earlier short stories appeared in Raw Fiction and New Maritimes.