She stared back into the cavern mouth, trying to make sense of what she saw. Steam rising from the pots of soup vendors carts. Neon scavenged from the ruins of Oakland. How it ran together, blurred, melting in the fog. Surfaces of plywood, marble, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, Styrofoam, tropical hardwoods, mirror, etched Victorian glass, chrome gone dull in the sea air — all the mad richness of it, its randomness — a tunnel roofed by a precarious shack town mountainside climbing toward the first of the cable towers. She stood a long time, looking, then walked straight in, past a boy selling coverless yellowed paperbacks and a cafe where a blind parrot was chained on a metal perch, picking at a chicken's freshly severed foot.
Skinner surfaces from a dream of a bicycle covered with barnacles and sees that the girl is back. She's hung his leather jacket on its proper hook and squats now on her pallet of raw-edged black foam.
Bicycle. Barnacles.
Memory: A man called Fass snagged his tackle, hauled the bicycle up, trailing streamers of kelp. People laughed. Fass carried the bicycle away. Later he built a place to eat, a three-stool shanty leached far out over the void with Super Glue and shackles. Sold cold cooked mussels and Mexican beer, the bicycle slung above the little bar. The walls inside were shingled with picture postcards. Nights, he slept curled behind the bar. One morning the place was gone, Fass with it, just a broken shackle swinging in the wind and a few splinters of timber still adhering to the galvanized iron wall of a barber shop. People came, stood'at the edge, looked down at the water between the toes of their shoes.
The girl asks him if he's hungry. He says no. Asks him if he's eaten. He says no. She opens the tin foot chest and sorts through cans. He watches her pump the Coleman.
He says open the window a crack. The circular window pivots in its oak frame. Gotta eat, she says.
She'd like to tell him about going to the hotel but she doesn't have words for how it made her feel. She feeds him soup, a spoonful at a time. Helps him to the tankless old china toilet behind the faded roses of the chintz curtain. When he's done she draws water from the roof-tank line and pours it in. Gravity does the rest. Thousands of flexible transparent lines are looped and bundled, down through the structure, pouring raw sewage into the bay.
"Europe…" she tries to begin.
He looks up at her, mouth full of soup.
She guesses his hair must've been blond once. He swallows the soup. "Europe what?" Sometimes he'll snap right into focus like this, if she asks him a question, but now she's not sure what the question is.
"Paris," he says, and his eyes tell her he's lost again, "I went there. London, too. Great Portland Street." He nods, satisfied somehow. "Before the devaluation…" Wind sighs past the window. She thinks about climbing out on the roof. The rungs up to the hatch there are carved out of sections of two-by-four, painted the same white as the walls. He uses one for a towel rack. Undo the bolt. You raise the hatch with your head; Your eyes are level with gull shit. Nothing there, really. Flat tarpaper roof, a couple of two-by-four uprights: One flies a tattered Confederated flag, the other a faded orange windsock.
When he's asleep again, she closes the Coleman, scrubs out the pot, washes the spoon, pours the soupy water down the toilet, wipes pot and spoon, puts them away. Pulls on her hightop sneakers, laces them up. She puts on his jacket and checks that the knife's still clipped behind her belt.
She lifts the hatch in the floor and climbs through, finding the first rungs of the ladder with her feet. She lowers the hatch closed, careful not to wake him. She climbs down past the riveted face of the tower, to the waiting yellow basket of the elevator. Looking up, she sees the vast cable there, where it swoops out of the bottom of Skinner's room, vanishing through a taut and glowing wall of milky plastic film, a greenhouse; halogen bulbs throw spiky plant shadows on the plastic.
The elevator whines, creeping down the face of the tower, beside the ladder she doesn't use anymore, past a patchwork of plastic, plywood, sections of enameled steel stitched together from the skins of dead refrigerators. At the bottom of the fat-toothed track, she climbs out. She sees the man Skinner calls the African coming toward her along the catwalk, bearlike shoulders hunched in a ragged tweed overcoat. He carries a meter of some kind, a black box, dangling red and black wires tipped with alligator lips. The broken plastic frames of his glasses have been mended with silver duct tape. He smiles shyly as he eases past her, muttering something about brushes.
She rides another elevator, a bare steel cage, down to the first deck. She walks in the direction of Oakland, past racks of old clothes and blankets spread with the negotiable detritus of the city.
She finds Maria Paz in a coffee shop with windows on the bay's gray dawn. The room has the texture of an old ferry, dark dented varnish over plain heavy wood. As though someone's sawn it from a tired public vessel, lashing to the outermost edge of the structure. (Nearer Oakland, the wingless corpse of a 747 houses the kitchens of nine Thai restaurants.)
Maria Paz has eyes like slate and a tattoo of a blue swallow on the inside of her left ankle. Maria Paz smokes Kools, one after another, lighting them with a brushed chrome Zippo she takes from her purse. Each time she flicks it open, a sharp whiff of benzene cuts across the warm smells of coffee and scrambled eggs.
She sits with Maria Paz, drinks coffee, watches her smoke Kools. She tells Maria Paz about Skinner.
"How old is he?" she asks.
"Old… I don't know."
"And he lives over the cable saddle on the first tower?"
"Yes."
"The tops of the towers. you know about that?"
"No."
“From the days when the people came, out from the cities to live here.”
"Why did they?"
Maria Paz looks at her over the Zippo.
"Nowhere to live. Bridge closed to traffic three years…"
"Traffic?"
Maria Paz laughs. "Too many cars. Dug them tunnels under the bay. For cars, for maglevs. . bridge too old. Closed it before the devaluations. No money. One night the people came. No plan, no signal. Just came. Climbed the chain link. Chain link fell. Threw the concrete in the bay. Climbed the towers. Dawn came, they were here, on the bridge, singing, and the cities saw the world was watching. Japanese airlift, food and medical. National embarrassment. Forget the water cannons, sorry." Maria Paz smiles.
"Skinner? You think he came then?"
"Maybe, he's old as you think. How long you been on the bridge?"
"Three months?"
"I was born here," says Maria Paz.
The cities had their own pressing difficulties. Not an easy century, America quite clearly in decline and the very concept of nation-states called increasingly into question. The squatters were allowed to remain. Among their numbers were entrepreneurs, natural politicians, artists, men and women of untapped energy and talent. The world watched as they began to build. Shipments of advanced adhesives arrived from Japan. A Belgian manufacturer donated a boatload of carbon-fiber beams. Teams of scavengers rolled through the cities on broken flatbeds, returning to the bridge piled high with discarded building materials.
The bridge and its inhabitants became a tourist attraction.
She walks back in the early light that filters through windows, through sheets of wind-shivered plastic. The bridge never sleeps, but this is a quiet time. A man is arranging fish on a bed of shaved ice in a wooden cart. The pavement beneath her feet is covered with gum wrappers and the flattened filters of cigarettes. A drunk is singing somewhere overhead. Maria Paz left with a man, someone she'd been waiting for.
She thinks about the story and tries to imagine Skinner there, the night they took the bridge, young then, his leather jacket new and glossy.