The night was moist and warm like a litter of kittens.
Inez had ignored the handrail hundreds of times. It was a thick metal line propped on countless balusters--a long handleless rake--distorted by the impossible perspective of a bridge. Standing on the overpass’ approach, she took in the scene with new eyes, discovering shapes and textures. The guardrail was no different from countless others peppered all over the American geography, but now it had new personality and bonhomie, like tame shoes. In an instant, the spurned handrail metamorphosed from useless prop into welcoming friend: it would ease her journey.
She edged closer, stopped to appraise the banister from afar and breathed the damp night’s air. Perhaps it was her imagination, but besides engine oil and stale beer the air smelled of disenfranchised souls and broken dreams. Why haven’t I noticed the banister before?
For a flitting moment, Inez marveled at the selective nature of every day perceptions. She glimpsed into a human brain’s survival routine and the mechanism of looking past the inconsequential, as one would a beggar’s hand.
Inez had walked the bridge twice a day for countless years, her eyes always intent on shiny flecks, like angel dust, that bestrewed the pavement. Years? Countless? Mornings, evenings, days, weeks, months or years were devices to measure the passage of sorrow. One foot after the other.
As the poet had once measured life in coffee spoons, she’d added up her misery in steps. Four hundred and sixty-seven from beginning of the bridge to end. Four, six and seven: seventeen. One and seven: eight—infinity turned on its head.
She studied the orphan lanes and her new handrail framed by night’s darkness, punctuated by countless streetlights like oversized glowworms with a bent for drill. After all, the ethos of any existence is a continual walking of bridges.
Inez leaned against a lamppost, her cheek grateful for the cast iron’s cold touch.
People walk over bridges.
The discovery was unexpected and intriguing. She hugged the streetlamp, her mind alert to the possibilities. Bridges, doors, stairs: means of passage, always used for transit and seldom for transition.
Why didn’t I see it before?
"We are invited to enter doors but our feet do the walking." A fine proverb, a snippet of old wisdom, false as Judas’ kiss because freedom is a chimera. We are pushed through doors, she decided, and forced across bridges by mermaid’s songs issuing from blackboards, screens and lecterns: the hidden persuaders; the machine’s bellhops.
Another spasm, stronger this time, shot across her stomach. Inez was hungry. Echoes of buttered fettuccini, zabaglione-dipped ladyfingers and seashell chocolates, nibbled at her consciousness’ edge, glorious treats for the blessed but forbidden poisons for her body.
A cockroach, brown and glossy, darted from a narrow clump of weeds growing on the pavement’s edge, to stop inches from her feet. She peered closer, her eyes focusing. Not a roach but a southern mole cricket. Its feelers trembled in the moist air. Then it chirped, timidly at first, gaining strength and rhythm as Inez watched mesmerized. Crickets only chirp for a couple of hours after sunset and the sun would soon chase the night away. She frowned. What are you doing here, little one?
After a few heartbeats, the insect paused and with slow determination returned to its unlikely burrow in the asphalt’s crack. It had been a welcome, a bridge’s welcome.
Drivers seldom gave the flyover a second thought, she decided, their minds clogged by the staccato of tires cruising over regularly spaced bumps. Drivers, people with their own hills to climb, steep or not, as a function of chancy elements such as skin color or sensibility: knolls, mesas, pikes, or sheer mountains in which to play their Sisyphus curse day in and day out.
She had a bridge to walk and the thought was comforting.
Her common shoes dragged over the glittering sidewalk—the same false diamonds that once beguiled Ellis Island’s dreamers—and neared the rail with anticipation and reverence, as a penitent before the lash.
For an instant, she feared that, like Tantalus’ fruit and water, it would recede from her grasp.
It did not.
Under the bridge cars flashed by, meteors streaking over the asphalt leaving dusty wakes of sparkling red light.
She tested the handrail, to feel a rugged surface of rusty flakes buried under coats of paint and pearls of condensation turn to water under her palms.
Hands. Inez forgot the dampness. She stared at soft and clammy flesh with short, plump fingers, her own grubby appendages, squirming as grotesque larvae: her hand attached to a flabby arm of jigging adipose pleats.
Swallowing nausea in her forever-empty stomach and a swell of thick bile burning her gut, she drew one hand to her bust. The moisture wet her blouse. She did not care. Her hand addressed her breast, deformed, swollen as a flabby bag of greasy gelatin appended to her body; the shapeless masses of tissue she carted before the mirrors. Sickness returned with vapid memories of masked feasts and grim flashes of eager fingers triggering deliverance from a bruised throat.
A billboard caught her eye. It came about slowly through waving mist, as if seen through reverberating air over hot asphalt. Lingerie. ‘Triumph’. What a strange trademark for underwear. Inez rolled her tongue around the word; “Triumph,” verb or noun mattered little: rejoice or exult at a victory or success; the hymn to Bacchus, the general’s ride into ancient Rome after a conquest.
Victory. Success. Conquest. Over what?
She winced when her brassiere straps dug deeper into fleshy shoulders.
Inez squinted at the picture in the hoarding, full of impossibly sinuous curves. Her watery eyes appraised delicate cups, filled but not congested, and chiffony black rosaline edges against smooth skin.
She wept, and lights became mischievous stars curving around the surface of hot tears. Inez yearned for the comfort of the thumb and the soft cotton childhood pillow. She sobbed, and her tears pushed hazy memories of uncharted skins, of mendacious daisies and stubborn telephones. Echoes of wet flesh and dry linen.
Her feet ached.
As if a cool frothy wave had broken over her tormented brain, its soothing waters flowing like a mother’s touch, she calmed. "A tower of nine stories begins with a heap of earth. The journey of a thousand li starts with a single step."
Tonight she would not walk her bridge. She would cross it.
Inez gripped the handrail with both hands, her fingers surrounding the steel with voluptuous anticipation as if testing a lover’s readiness. She lifted an obese leg over the rail and pushed hard off the banister with a rush of impending freedom.
Instants later, Inez’s emaciated body impacted on the highway’s concrete one hundred feet below.
