Andromeda, a novel by Joe Nobel, Part 52 -- The Chain Bridge

Anna Singer, Andromeda, stood frozen on the bridge with all her options exhausted. She was just short of its crest. Exposed. A gust of wind blew across her face. She felt the chill through her less-than-adequate clothing. She looked up, not a star in the sky. Another drop of rain hit her face.

“When is it going to finally start raining,” she thought, her outlook was as dejected as the starless sky.

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Anna looked at the massive suspension cables one more time, then at the struts running down from them, through steel plates on the bridge floor to supporting girders underneath. Half ran straight down, the rest crisscrossed each other and went under at forty-five degree angles. She looked for anything in the design that might help her, hide her. She focused on the steel plates covering the bridge under the cables. Some plates were massive, three by four feet, but they alternated with plates a third that size. Most were bolted down. But some had a bolt or two missing. She looked desperately for one of the smaller plates to see if there were any with all their bolts missing. She was not disappointed; she soon found one that was just lying there, without anything holding it in place.

Anna put her fingers around that square of iron. It was heavier than she anticipated. She slid it forward, trying to keep the plate silent as it grated on top of the adjacent plate. She pulled herself down the hole head first. As soon as she was through, she wished she would have gone feet first. But, it was already too late, for that by the time she slid down the forty-five degree strut.

Anna clung to the iron work in a most awkward fashion. She’d slid all the way down until her shoulder became jammed against an intersecting strut. She held on with arms embracing the cold steel, lying on that forty-five degree beam, feet dangling above her.

She dared not move even one muscle until she heard the footsteps of the police walk past her and fade into the night.

Anna tried to right herself. She pulled in her legs to kneel on the girder and started to pull herself upright. But, she slipped and tumbling over. It was only by chance that she caught the edge of the girder. She found herself clinging to the truss with only her fingers.

Fatigue hit her, as if all her energy drained to her feet and pulled her downward. Anna clung on but her arms refused to pull her up. She looked down. Although invisible from the dark of the night, she heard the Danube rushing below her. The river made its own unique sounds, a sound which under other circumstances might have been soothing but now filled her with dread at the thought of falling to her death.

“Odin, if I ever needed you, it’s now!” Anna whimpered.

This is it, she thought. She took a deep breath and prepared to let go and plunge to the Danube’s brown waters below.

She heard the footsteps of the couple the police checked ahead of her. They stopped right above her. They were speaking quietly to each other. “Oh great, I'm going to die while a couple above me is making out,” she moaned.

“Help!” she tried to yell, but produced only an inaudible squeak. She was dizzy. She looked down once more at the Danube as despair filled her and fatigue weighed her down. Anna felt her fingers slowly lose their grip, one at a time, until she could no longer hold on.

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Hervé Scott Flament (1959, French)
The River Dream

Mankind, with its senses of sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell, and limited reasoning power, can detect but a meager slice of the universe. He is imprisoned by time, ever moving forward. In it, he is forced to follow time’s stream as it meanders forever into the future. He is blind to all other dimensions of space. Nor, does he hold open the possibility that there may be multiple dimensions of time as well.

Anna had a glimpse of that which exists outside her philosophy. Odin, once summoned from his far-off dimension, had his games with her, then returned the favor in kind by giving her the strength to free herself. Even so close and intimate with him, Anna had not begun to suspect the extent of his power. Besides having the energy of a billion suns coursing through his little finger, he travels through all those multiple dimensions of time the way we mortals walk to the corner store for bread.

And what of life itself? What is it? How can humanity begin to explain the complex depths of the immortal human soul if we cannot even fathom the physical universe around us?

How can the human brain deal with the impossible? What would it do when confronted with something that cannot happen? To survive, would the mind banish this new knowledge in order to remain whole? Are there impossibilities so impossible that even Anna, with her power to see what others force out of their minds, cannot reconcile?

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Anna remembered something about hanging from the girders underneath the chain bridge. And she remembered her fingers loosened their grip. She then found herself running again. Yes, there was a discontinuous moment, a lingering doubt, a hiccup in her brain, as she wondered how she got here.

Her bare feet were blistered, stockings having long worn through. Her lungs were burning. She was exhausted. She ran off the Chain Bridge, past the empty police car, across Clark Square, and up the steep Buda Castle Hill. She ran up the King’s way, a set of pedestrian steps, canopied by oaks, that paralleled the serpentine cobblestone street.

A car drove by on the road far below on her right. Both the street and the steps would ultimately lead to Disz Square on top of the hill. But the driver didn’t see her and that’s what was important. It wasn’t a police car, but it could have been filled with Uri’s plain-clothes Soviet agents. Then again, it could have been nothing more than a functionary heading home to his apartment up in the posh Castle District.

“Keep moving Anna,” she told herself. Yet, her lungs were burning. She couldn’t stop now. She was steps away from the safe house.

Anna didn’t know how she got to where she was. The events of the night began to take their toll on her sanity. First she was running, then seeking a place to hide, then she was clinging for life. Then what? She didn’t remember how she got up from under the bridge; she only remembered that she was running again, as if running was the entirety of her existence.

She was on a steep climb up to the top of Buda Castle Hill. Halfway up, those stairs mercifully turned into an ever-rising, meandering walkway. The road was below her on the right, snaking its own way up. The walls of the castle were above her on the left.

Anna was almost at the top when she saw another flight of stairs beside the castle wall. She ran those three flights of twelve steps each without slowing. Her heart was pounding by the time she reached the top. But she was there, on top of Buda Castle Hill.

“Stupid place to put a safe house,” she gasped, as she felt a few more drops of rain.

Anna entered the vast cobblestone plaza on top of the hill; this was Disz Square. It appeared empty. The car that had sped by her was long gone. There were two cars parked at the periphery of the square. Both were empty. She surveyed the buildings along the plaza paying particular attention to the shadowy doorways. She recited her directions: cross the plaza then take the first side street. The safe house is the second building on the left. Simple.

Walking slowly, she was soon out of the cover of darkness in the middle of the cobblestone square. Misty silence of the night filled her ears. She could hear the blood pulsing in her head. It was louder than the largest train engine.

“Andromeda, my dear,” the voice came from behind. “I’m sorry I missed you at my flat.”

… to be continued …

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