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THE PROSLOGIUM OF THE GREAT LAKES
There were so many bridges where she was born. When she was a girl chewing the sour black paint from her father's rosaries, Anselm used to stare at those old iron arms stretching tired and cranky over the rust-river and think that they grew like plants, unfurling girders and suspension cables like leaves, like flowers, setting down pylons into the water like growling stone roots, and stood waiting in the green and winding current, drinking sun and spitting out the occasional seed which would nestle in further downriver. She thought dinosaurs must have sniffed at the strange things which creaked up the morning with screeching, grinding bridge-songs. And surely, when people came, wearing deerskin and carrying dinosaur-slaying arrows in their fists, they must have lived on the bridges first, before they thought to try the land. There must have been schools and groceries and state liquor agencies and cornfields and knights with striped lances and cafes with blue umbrellas all along the bridge-walks, monasteries to count and name the drawings up of each bridge to allow the passage of ships and leviathans, houses all along the thoroughfare, wives sitting on the edges and eating fresh pies, kicking their long, tan legs over the river, and librarians hushing children with stone clubs. Under all those feet, the bridges must have known, for the first time, what they were for, and how to be happy.
Anselm guarded carefully her child's pre-history of the Cuyahoga. She felt that if she spoke of it to anyone, it would cease to be true, that her silence kept it alive, kept it real. It was a devotion she performed for its sake. Even with bridge schematics under her fingertips, she could never quite convince herself of the actuality of construction and iron smelting. She blamed this in part on her father, who was curiously silent on the subject of dinosaurs, having once been a Jesuit, before he met her mother, who was the particular cross on which he chose to pinion himself. She was the wound in his side, he said, and he would bleed for all his days. His guilt was pristine, mint-condition, polished to a high-gloss. They kept it in a glass case above the fireplace, and took it out only for Christmas. The priest took his eyes from his wife only once, when his daughter was born, in order to give her a name. He chose Anselm, for she, he always said, was the elegant proof of God which he might, in the end, be permitted to enter into the ledger beside his weakness. Her mother protested that this was not a girl's name, and he turned back to her, never to truly look at Anselm again. Thus she did not share with him her dreams of the early life of bridges, and thus they were never contradicted.
There is, of course, no bridge across Lake Erie. She had been told many times that it would be a ghastly undertaking to build one, but even as a grown woman who parted her brown hair neatly in the middle, she suspected that just as there are redwoods that graze the ceiling of the sky with their branches, there could too be a gargantuan grey seed beneath the waves that might one day erupt into the most delicate suspension bridge, brighter and more lovely than the Golden Gate, which would arch like the moon's edge all the way to Canada, glittering with countless lights puffing silvery bridge-pollen into the night. Sometimes, when she squints hard and it is raining, she can see it, spanning the islands, quiescent, waiting for feet.
All along the lakeside, steel mills spit their pale fire into a sky the color of a ship's hull. The fire-stalks ringed Anselm's bent head like St. Lucia's candles as she walked across the frozen beach, her footsteps cracking the veneer of ice which had hardened over the snow and sand. She had a few minutes left before she would have to return to work, put her green-rimmed glasses back on, and bend her nose to the liturgy of close scrutiny, which was what she called her copyediting of textbooks and technical manuals to keep from going mad. She told herself that she gazed over the gross matter of prose and punctuation with the eye of divinity, excising with plague and flood all that was not perfect. She had told her father this idea, and was rewarded with a small, pained laugh before the old Jesuit felt cold, felt the wound in his side pulse wetly, and bolted from his child to find his wife, his Church, his darling.
There was just enough time in the afternoon for her to come down to the lake, down the long, rocky stair, eat her roast chicken and green apple sandwich, and scan the waves for her infant bridge, though she would surely never admit, a woman nearing thirty, that she still did this. It was prettier than a cubicle, surely that was a presentable reason to amble down the rickety stones every day.
The sky was grey and recalcitrant as an old cat, and Anselm looked out over the bridgeless, frozen lake. It made her shiver, the endless whiteness, the ridged and icy waves, frozen at their crest, dropping crystal slabs of foam onto the thick, glassy ice to shatter and skitter like skipping stones. Water had exploded against the stony pebble-pier and simply stopped, becoming in a moment the spire of some splintered cathedral, jagged and sharp and whiter than virtue. In the far distance, the pale, hunched, crenellated ice looked like a distant mountain range, cutting off forever the Canadian wilds from the steel freighters and walleye fishermen. Deep under the surface, she could see the water, impossibly dark, impossibly blue, like the feathers of a great drowned crow. Even the beach had frozen, long fingers of ice inching up through the sand, as though a burning hand had turned it all to glass.
Anselm took off her glasses and carefully folded them into her brown corduroy blazer. She slitted her eyes against the wind-sting, and let it whip her irises to tears. The clock pulled at her clothes insistently, plucked at her cuffs, tugged at her hair, but she ignored it. She was not looking for the bridge, she told herself, she was just looking at the lake, for stranded ships or fish frozen in mid-leap.
She remembered her mother, once, had gutted and cleaned three fish in the kitchen sink. She had put her knife down and turned to her daughter, dark eyes tired, and said that sometimes, you find in the center of the world a thing you want above all other things, like a huge, black-finned fish wriggling in the sea, and it doesn't matter so much what the thing thinks of you-want is want, and things bend to want, when the want is big enough, and deep enough, things and people and fish. They can't help it. But better, she told her daughter, to want than to be wanted.
Anselm had been a good child, and dutiful, and she tried to want things as hard as she could. She wanted the bridge, and the lake, and the librarians wielding gnarled old clubs, and the knights with visors hammered together from steel girders. She wanted them every day, and built her want carefully and secretly. It became a habit, though by this, the Jesuit's daughter did not mean that it became a custom, but that it became a garment, a brown, homespun thing she wore on her shoulders every day, though it scratched and worried against her age, a white rope she tied around her waist and said her prayers by, a tonsure she had cut into her scalp: the world of Ohio she had once invented because she could not imagine another reasonable means of genesis. Her eyes watered in the chill, and she squirmed under the weight of all the secret things she had lost the ability to disbelieve.
The Jesuit's daughter knew her namesake well. As far as she had been able to tell, the last time she could stand to read hagiography, Anselm had simply wanted God with such a pure fire that he could not breathe, and while choking on light wrote the Proslogium, which contained some very silly ideas on the necessity of God's existence, because, she thought, he was not quite brave enough to admit that he just wanted it to be true, and that was enough. And so it was that Anselm the younger had no faith in anything but her bridge and her mother's knife scissoring through fish scales, and would balance no ledger.
She had allowed herself, when she was six, exactly one hour to imagine St. Anselm on the bridge, bundled up in his cowl with his hair on fire, scribbling marginalia into a book so large that it spanned easily one small bend of the river, and he straddled the spine, allowing no one else onto his bridge, the only one on the river without roots. But she could not, try as she might, create St. Anselm with his own face, and each time he looked up from drawings of despair and dolphins and woeful lions passant, he looked at her with her father's eyes. She shut her eyes very tightly and sent a librarian after him.
By the shore she considered all these things, lingering, refusing, as she did every time, to look for the great Erie bridge. You are too old for this, she thought, as she always did, you must get back to work, or you will be reprimanded.
So intently did she not look for her bridge that her feet found their way to the creased and wrinkled ice-edge before she knew she had begun to walk. She balanced on the thin line of slippery stones that wandered out into the water and stood at its tip, staring down into the still and silent waves. There was a tiny fish encased in ice below her, its tail caught in a little silver thrash.
With a brown leather boot she tested the ice. It was thick as a bed, it did not even groan in protest against her slight weight. Far off, she could hear great slabs of lake moving against each other like tectonic plates, sounds like foghorns, low and rough. Anselm stood on the ice. It was loyal; it held her up like a blue palm. She smiled slowly, her pale face, her text-tired eyes, wind-wrenched tears frozen to her cheeks.
There was, there was a bridge across Erie, and it was cold, and glittering, and vast. How the knights would tilt there, as if at a winter court, with lances of hard, jagged ice, and visors of rusted freight-hull! How the grocers would call out their harvests of ice-grapes and frozen milk, how the cafes would serve their glassy teas in china cups with a black-headed match on the dish, to light and thaw the chamomile! How the librarians would hunt the children, how the monks would dance in the winch-houses, how the long-flanked leviathans with eyes of lump coal would wave at the throng as they passed beneath the great, wide bridge! Anselm could see it, could see the lights flickering on the horizon, could feel her want bending back the lake like a sapphire bow.
She walked out onto the ice, and did not stop.
Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan's Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is the winner of the 2006 Tiptree Award. She currently lives in Ohio with her two dogs.
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