The Rope Bridge

Early one morning, two weeks ago, we woke up to find a bridge above the river where one hadn’t been before. It was made of intricate knotted rope, like a macramé hammock. Who or whatever placed it there must have worked on it for years in secret and brought it out and fastened it (to what?) in the middle of the night.  The morning it appeared, parts of it glittered with dew like silver hair and other parts looked like the bony grey geometric skeleton of a building that miraculously stands after an explosion or a fire or like a film of ice melted in a lacy pattern by grains of salt.

Were we surprised by it? Of course we were, but the world had already pushed us off guard this year. What next? we were fond of saying. Well this is next, the universe had begun answering.

What was particularly odd about the bridge, however, was not just the fact that it appeared out of nowhere but also that it ran parallel to the river, above it, like a river made of string that went in either direction as far as the eye could see. When the river curved, the bridge went straight until it met the river again. Perhaps it was less a bridge than a hovering alternative to water.

There were a number of rope ladders hanging down from the bridge, and you could reach the ladders by swimming in the river, or by skiff. Once you climbed onto the bridge, you could walk either with or against the current. The rope bridge sagged slightly toward the water when anyone walked on it, and if more than one person was on it at once, it dipped in places and looked like a series of hammocks or a wave.

To confuse the metaphor even more, one or two of us thought it resembled a flag and others a musical staff. The church choir director hummed a tune that the bridge, he said, was notating in the air. He pointed out the pattern of knots along a series of five parallel ropes, and sure enough, we could see that too and those of us who could read music began to hum along and add harmony. It was a beautiful tune, actually, like a Philip Glass minimalist piano piece arranged for a small human choir and August’s humming locusts.

Very few of us chose to walk on the bridge after that first morning, once we realized we had absolutely no idea what was holding it up. We preferred to marvel at its intricacy. And we didn’t know whether to trust it—its strength, its reality, its virtue or kindness. We didn’t know whether it was a force for good or a force for evil, to be honest, or how it or its maker felt about us. We didn’t know if it meant anything. We didn’t even know where it began or where it ended.

And yes, of course the first thing we did was send scouts in both directions. The search party that walked to Lake Michigan said it seemed to continue over the water and bend toward the horizon. The search party that walked east said it did the same thing over Lake Huron. Both search parties came back a bit drunk, with coolers full of fresh trout.

We couldn’t see the bridge at night, though we sensed it from a kind of ionic disturbance in the air. The bridge appeared to appear each morning out of the sunrise and to disappear into the sunset.

What to do. What to do. Should we worship it? Report it to the authorities? Start a festival around it? Burn it down? Or should we simply ignore it.

Let’s go, all the children who lived along the river said, and before we could stop them they had abandoned the park’s playground, their yards, abandoned their balls and dolls and blocks and screens and crayons. They spent the weeks before school was to start swaying in the air above the river. We couldn’t stop them.

A child who saw a hammock rested in the bridge and watched cottonwood seeds float down from the sky. A child who saw a cocoon spent her days dreaming of wings. A child who saw music, plucked at it like a harp. A child who saw waves pretended to be a sailing ship or sometimes a dolphin. A child who saw the skeleton of a bombed-out building performed heroic rescues from the ashes of a tower. And so forth. They were so eager to get to the bridge every morning that many of them spent the day in their sweet, soft pajamas. They couldn’t take the time to change into daytime clothes, though they’d grab a swim suit on their way out the door.

The one thing about the bridge is that after the children had claimed it, if a parent got too close, or tried to call a child in before she was ready, there was a hissing sound like a wire about to go bad and the scent of ozone. This worried the adults, as we believed one plausible explanation for the bridge is that it had something to do with new changes to the power grid and that one day someone in Lansing would flip a switch and anything in contact with the bridge would be electrified. Someone someplace had to know what they were doing, and we still believed in somewhat logical explanations for things. Though why the bridge hadn’t become a story on the evening news, we also didn’t know.

So we tried to lure the children away from the bridge. We tried to keep them inside the houses. We told them they could eat tubs of buttercream icing. We bribed them with more screens for them to stare into. For instance, we offered tablets to the children who had spent their days watching television, longing for tablets, and we gave smartphones to the children who already had tablets, and we promised them their own YouTube channels where they would open presents every day and make children who watched their channels jealous, or we told them we would fill their rooms with inflatables (which were having a moment for some reason) and with animatronics and virtual reality playlands populated by ninjas or Disney princesses, all things we had formerly denied them. What else could we do? They were a united front. We couldn’t lock them in their rooms. They would find means of escape or they would report us to child protective services.

All they wanted seemed to be the bridge. For a while we sent the older children out each day with picnic baskets filled with vegetables and filtered water so the younger ones wouldn’t starve or dehydrate but at the same time weren’t having their disobedience reinforced with Pringles. After a while, though, they learned to catch both rainwater and their own fish and they became truly river children after years of having to be coaxed to leave the house on the finest of days.

Each night, the children came home before the lightning bugs came out and they climbed back up the ladders in the mornings.

Meanwhile, outside our town, this was year two of the years the world seemed to be ending. There was slaughter in the streets of the cities and the nations were run by madmen, and viruses seemed to be in ascendancy as the polar ice caps melted. There was no hope left for children. That’s what the children had been telling us for years, but we hadn’t listened. They were as heartbreakingly cute as children had ever been, and we loved them fiercely, but there had been a hollow sadness in their eyes, and when you saw them dressed for school each fall you wanted to sink down on your knees and weep for their beauty and their innocence. You wanted to beg their forgiveness for your complicity in the state of the world.

Cara, my neighbor, seemed oddly bored by the bridge, like it was something she’d seen already in a dream. Her unconscious wove the most elaborate dreams every night. Sometimes she would tell me about them, and I would tell her that I never dreamed, not really. It was a thing I’d left behind years earlier.

Cara was a painter and a good one, I think, though I’ve never known much about visual art. I don’t trust that I have any taste. The closer a painting is to the thing it’s portraying (as I see the thing) but with perhaps a surprising beautiful color or two in the shadows, the more I like it and am likely to buy a copy to hang above the couch. Her ability to paint, she said, was tied to her vivid dreams.

She moved into the house next door when we were both in our early thirties, and I went by after a few days with a welcome cake. She told me she and her husband had moved here by the river for inspiration, so they would have the space to devote to painting. Her house had good light and a small barn where her husband had his studio. He painted Cara often, like Wyeth painted Helga (I like those paintings) and she painted miniature pictures of something. She said it was the river, but they seemed like swirls of murky tea with flashes of movement, of something darting under the surface. They weren’t beautiful, but they were, I have to say, fascinating. Her husband’s paintings of her were sensual, again like the Helga paintings, and they sold well. She was an excellent model, with extraordinary skin.

And yes, as I think about it, hers was probably the old story of the muse’s tragedy, unspooling itself even while the world was in chaos. Why these stories repeat themselves, I don’t know.

I was married as well, and my husband and I were both teachers, so during the school year, when my children were young, Cara would sometimes watch them during the day. She said she welcomed the company of children, and she welcomed the money I and others paid her.

She had been married twice, and I knew both of her husbands. Both were painters, both taught at universities, and both showed their work at galleries in Chicago. She also had at least one lover, also a painter, that she would meet, occasionally, in the same Lake Michigan town where Nelson Algren and Simon de Beauvoir stayed in the forties. She was a bit needy, I supposed, and her need was to be worshipped.

I should say that Cara had been pregnant several times over the years but always tragically miscarried, and when she painted anything other than the river, it was quick watercolors of her golden angel limbo babies, as she called them, the sweet non-children.

Her house smelled of turpentine and herbs and yeast, of sun-warmed pine needles and lavender when I went there in the mornings with my coffee. I am a woman and my husband was a man, but if I had been a woman who loved women, I would have loved her. I understood the pull. We were the best of friends.

So in her living room that looks out upon the river, listening to the bubbling sound of the river, the rushing roar of it, during summer break we drank our coffee (or in her case, tea) in the mornings and sometimes all four of us (Cara and I and our husbands) would get together for a glass of wine at night. In between, she painted and I puttered. I have summer puttering down to a science. I water the flowers, make new sugar water for the hummingbird feeders, read novels, straighten and sort my possessions, make future lesson plans. I take walks along the river. During the hottest days I begin or end my walks in the dark, and that’s when Cara had begun to swim.

After the bridge appeared, she started night swimming, so of course I think she knows more about the bridge than she’s saying. She emerges from the river as the sun rises and the bridge is at its most silver. She emerges a second time as the sun completely sets.

One morning when she walked from the water and the bridge came into focus for the day, I noticed that there seemed to be something new about the bridge. Translucent globes had begun appearing. What are those things? I asked her, and she looked over her shoulder at where I was pointing. She turned back around to look at me, and she shrugged. Her mind was someplace else, and her eyes that morning, which were a changeable hazel, were particularly green.

The orbs on the bridge were small and seemed stuck to the rope. Some by themselves and some in clusters. Some of them glistened like pearls, some looked like small grapes, and some like balls made of straw and mud. I was sure they were a kind of egg, the glistening ones made from a body’s glue and the dull ones formed by a body from river goo and dried sticks. They gave me the creeps for some reason, like when you pick up a leaf and the back is covered with bumps and you know that whatever is inside the bumps will destroy the leaf.

The children didn’t seem to be afraid of them, of course. Nor was Cara. But from the moment I saw the first one, I was terrified.

I had only one child left at home that summer, my youngest, the boy named Gabe. He was our entire life, the last of our joys, my husband and me. We had spent our lives teaching children and had raised three. Two were now adults. We had watched Gabe climb onto the bridge each morning with all the other children. What could we have done? He was a strong boy, like a gymnast, and he flipped and spun on the ropes in the sunlight. Beautiful boy, he was. But when I saw the orbs appear I knew I had to keep him grounded. My husband and I looked for a way to keep him home. Take him fishing, I said, take him out in the lake. Take him out for days. Whatever you do, go north or south, not parallel to the bridge. The orbs are growing, I said, every day a bit riper. My husband thought I was imagining it, but I knew I wasn’t. He agreed to the trip. Something, I said, is going to burst from those orbs, and it’s not going to be pretty. It will be sticky and evil, I said. Like poison berries.

I asked Cara if she would help me protect the children from the bridge, but she didn’t seem frightened by it either. What’s happening to this world? I asked her. Don’t ask me to tell you what I’ve seen, she said. What do you do at night when you swim? I asked her, and she said she was trying to find the beginning of the bridge, and the end of it. The alpha and the omega, and things along the way. She thought it might circle the world, she said, and begin and perhaps end in someplace like Slovakia. She had told me of course about a man who, years ago, had said she was beautiful. Like women from eastern Europe, some war-torn region. She thinks he had cursed her in some way, that he was the first of the men who gave her the bad luck. The babies that wouldn’t stay inside of her long enough to become living children, the paintings that no one would buy. Why do you think the bridge is about you? I asked her. Because I dreamed it, she said, and then one morning it was there. If it’s a circle, I told her, it doesn’t begin or end anyplace, I said. You know that, don’t you? I think my angel babies are someplace on that bridge, she finally said to me. And I will find them.

When the world itself goes mad, I thought, the mad find the answers they’ve been looking for.

It was a Wednesday when we had that conversation, and my husband had planned on taking Gabe and leaving Friday. On Thursday morning, of course, the day was fair. Late August. A cool breeze. My husband packed the car with fishing gear. I made sandwiches and cut fruit for them to take with them. It was just a week left before school was due to start. It was a usual August. There were hurricanes heading toward the coast of Florida and wildfires in California, but in northern Michigan the weather was as fine as spun sugar. The contrast between light and shadow was sharp as a knife, the colors saturated.

All the children, including my precious Gabe, were up in the air that morning, spinning.

It was around mid-morning when we heard a crackling sound, like some large animal walking through dried leaves. That’s what it sounded like. I went outside and stood by my husband. He pointed toward the rope bridge, where the orbs were splitting. Fragile threads, like spider legs, crawled out from the abandoned shells. The threads were attached to red globular bodies. Like spiders, yes, but unlike them too. We all started running toward the river, toward the children. Cara ran toward us and told us to look more closely. The spiders were spinning down from the bridge, toward the river. The children were better where they were, up in the air. The spiders skimmed the river on their hair-like legs towards the shore. They headed toward us, the adults. All will be well now, Cara said. It’s like I’d dreamed, she said. The children will all be well, she whispered to me as the bridge cradled them up high above the rope bridge, snug in their sticky safe cocoons.