The Long Bridge

Roger opened his eyes gradually, blinking in the soft light and rubbing the sleep out of them. Nothing but the quiet lapping of sea on ancient timbers and easy sway of swirling breezes could be heard. Overhead, blurry glowing edges of soft golden clouds intertwined with crisp outlines of swollen storms in the way that only the fading light of evening will do. Slowly, he sat up and rubbed his head. No gull nor sea creature disturbed the peace, and above the gentle rocking in the boat, a few brave evening stars peeked out of the pale eastern sky. A quick panic arose in Roger’s chest as he realized he was on water. He had hated deep water since childhood when recurring nightmares of drowning would send his mother into fits of laughter. “We don’t live within two hundred miles of the big lakes,” she’d remind him. “Drowning is the least of your worries.” Then they would sit on the screened in porch together and listen to the wind rush over freshly harvested corn stalks. He would fall asleep in a wide chair, curled up under his grandfather’s wool blanket with his mother’s humming of some old hymn and the plains wind in his ears. 

Despite the sudden tightening is his throat, Roger could see a wide stretch of land under the scattered stars in the distance. The shore rose steeply into green hills beyond, and extended as far as he could see to the left and right, seemingly curving as if he had entered the mouth of some large bay. As he traced the horizon with his eyes, the breeze tickled the back of his ears and the boat glided onward toward the shore. Roger watched the land for a while, wondering how long it might take to reach it, or, he thought with a shudder, if a sudden shift in the wind might send him back out to open sea. But the breeze held steady, and although slowly, the land grew closer. He wondered at the lack of darkness; behind him, the fading light had sunk no further. ‘Perhaps it is rising,’ he pondered for a moment before putting it out of his mind. Something else was troubling him. Turning around, Roger eased into the bow. He lay down in the hull and stared up at the milky sky above him, trying to piece together how exactly he had come to this moment. 

“Surely, it must be Tuesday,” he reasoned aloud to himself (although morning or evening remained a puzzle). “Why, yesterday was Monday, clear as day.” He nodded, feeling more assured. “I got home from work late, and even had cake before I went to sleep,” he added. His brow furrowed. “Tuesday was supposed to snow. Or is supposed to snow, maybe. Because it hasn’t happened yet, right? I would have remembered the first snows of the season. And none of that even remotely explains the boat. I must be dreaming,” he determined with finality. For a moment he remembered, or simply imagined, donning his winter cap as he stepped into the fresh snow about his driveway. A sudden voice evaporated the vision in an instant.

“Not a dream at all!”

Roger shot up. His eyes met the voice. A man was standing, with hand extended toward Roger, in the water next to the boat. Roger’s shock melted quickly as he remembered he was dreaming. He gave a quick smile and reached out to meet the stranger’s grasp. Tall and polite looking with a close-cropped beard and messy brown hair, the man met Roger’s rough midwestern grip with a sturdy hand. Still recovering from the jolt of the unexpected meeting, Roger hadn’t had the time to wonder that his dinghy was already beached. He stepped over the gunwale into the melodic lapping of waves about his ankles and took in the sight of the stranger as he dragged the boat up past the water line beyond the sand. Where his long grey robes should have been sandy and dripping, they swished back and forth with each step, dry and light as a breeze. Wedging a hewn log under the downhill side of the boat, the man turned and placed his hands on his hips, staring at Roger. The man raised his eyebrows as if expecting the large, suddenly silent man before him to break the silence. Roger stared, dumbly. The man pushed his round glasses up his long, thin nose, then turned and began walking. Roger, at a loss, hurried forward to followed.

“You aren’t dreaming, you know,” the man said without looking backwards, as if reading Roger’s thought. “No, unfortunately not a dream at all.” The man stopped for a moment, looked side to side, then continued straight on ahead. “More real than anything you’ve ever experienced, probably.” They walked on in silence for some time, the low sparse grasses of the beach lands lifting into foothills.

“So… what should I call you?” 

“I am known by many things. Some good, some less good. You may call me Pyotr.”

“Well, I’m – ”

“Roger.  Yes, I know.”

“Oh. How’d you – ”

“Shhh. Not yet, but after you have Seen, we may talk.” Pyotr motioned for Roger to come up alongside him. They walked together, the land now tilted and rolling, swelling up from the coastal plain below. The grass underfoot was thick and pillowy, and the stars that Roger had seen earlier were now hidden behind the hillside.

Startled, Roger thought he heard laughter but couldn’t quite make it out after straining his ears. Then it came again suddenly behind them and passed them by on the right. A young girl appeared from nowhere. She was dressed as if for a picnic, and skipped among the wildflowers, singing to herself. She apparently took no notice of them, but she would occasionally stoop to examine some treasure she had found or pluck a flower from among the grasses to put in her hair. Roger hadn’t even noticed the scattered flowers. She continued skipping along up the hill until she was out of sight.  Roger was pained at first by some faint recognition of her at the edge of his consciousness but the feeling passed and she seemed no more than a mere figment of his imagination. A piece of the dream that made just about as much sense as everything else. Neither of them had spoken as she passed by. Pyotr looked back at Roger with a smile. A miserable groan off to the left brought Roger back from his thoughts. From a cliff face below them, a man was making his way down a steep section of rock. He was downcast, sliding along as he could, making his way down the hill in the opposite direction the girl had been going. Never raising his head, he seemed to be dragging down the slope through the roughest path he could have taken. A curving of their trail took the miserable man out of sight. Pyotr did not look back and smile this time.  

Suddenly the ground flattened and the hillside opened up. They started down a slight rise and turned right, keeping the hilltops on their left. At last, the ground gave way to a great open rift in the side of the hill.  The bank they stood on dropped away steeply and to the left, a great stream of water fell from the heights down into the chasm below. They stood on a cliff above a long wide lake, its waters gathering at one end in the churn of the lone waterfall with no obvious source of drainage. Pyotr motioned for Roger to look out to the center of the water. At first, he saw nothing. Turning he began to speak but Pyotr raised his eyebrows again and looked out over the long lake. Roger looked and the surface of the lake began to change. His eyes became transfixed on the suddenly tumultuous lake as the calm from moments before was transformed into a rippling, silvery sheen like the water had become mercury. Stillness returned as quickly as it had gone. No longer reflecting a pale sky, snowflakes began to fall in the image upon the great lake. Roger’s breath froze in his chest as he realized the little house in the image, with snow piled around the eves, was his very own.  Tucked away at the end of a quiet little cul-de-sac, morning dawned beautifully over Roger’s first wakeful minutes on an average but not easily forgotten Tuesday.

Like most mornings, Roger awoke early, and with steaming coffee in hand, nestled in his favorite armchair to watch sunrise slip over his neighbor’s hickory tree. He dressed quickly, eager to hit the road before school traffic rather than having to wait or go on foot the entire way. Roger loved the snow, especially first snows, but delivering mail wasn’t exactly his ideal way of spending the first day of winter. He grabbed his keys and traded out his pickup for the DJ he would drive for the day. They still hadn’t switched out all the old Dispatchers for the new Grummans yet, and Roger preferred his trusty Jeep anyhow. After grabbing his bag from the mail room and loading the truck with parcels, Roger motored four blocks over and parked on the street behind Sunview Elementary. 

Years later, having both lived through and rewatched the day’s events, Roger would remember the way the sun shone more than anything that day. The air was crisp, and wood smoke curled up from among the rows of houses. Familiar faces smiled, cars honked with a wave, and dogs reminded Roger of their eternal archrivalry. Light came gently slanting down through large naked oaks, their slender boughs hanging loosely with snow tracing the tops. House after house, mailbox after mailbox, it was all routine, and Roger felt more at east than he had in months. With the creak of snow underfoot and bite of frost on his nose, Roger felt at home, comforted by the dampened quiet and the fresh wool blanket hugging the earth. Winter was really the only season he felt himself. Spring would come, and remind him of life, beginnings, and bitter memories of youth. Summer was no better with joyful sounds of children laughing and pop bottles opening, and Fall served as little more than a reminder of aging. Winter was comfort because Winter was bitter. Roger would look in the mirror and see himself in the winter of his life, struggling on, but filled with a purpose in days of pain and loneliness. Years and years without Holly and Ana had worn him down, but in struggle and in strife, he found his rut that he was happily stuck in. 

The next few moments were difficult to understand as he experienced them, and watching them from above, Roger had trouble believing what he was seeing. As he turned onto a street that butted up to the southwest corner of Sunview, Roger saw two things that sent a chill through his blood. The first was a figure that stepped out from behind a tree across the street, pulled something out of his waistband, and slipped through a gate at the edge of the soccer field. The man from the rock. The second was a bell proceeded by a class of second graders that spilled out of the classroom onto the playground. The girl from the meadow. In a flash, Roger was across the street, barely conscious of what he was doing. He was following a gut feeling for fear of something he couldn’t even put a name to because of his disbelief. Leaping through the open gate, Roger’s head spun.  Everything was quiet and his mind was working in slow motion. Or rather it was his legs that were working in slow motion, his mind was spinning a million miles a minute, blank except for the singular thought: Where’d he go? Where’d he go? Where’d he go? Colors and shapes flashed before his eyes, as if he were moving without realizing it.  Unaware even of what his limbs were doing, his ears registered a sharp crack crack crack and his body slammed something very hard. Roger was on top of the man, his deranged eyes unable to find a place to focus. They were wrestling, Roger with his forearm on the man’s neck and their hands locked on each other’s wrists. Another crack. Somebody yelled. The sound of feet running, something smashing over Roger’s head, a scream, crack crack. A dull pain somewhere in his side. Blackness closing in. Silence. Dark. 

The lake shuddered, waves breaking the image on the surface. Roger sprang backwards, pointing at the water below. “I died! I’m… I’m… DEAD!” His lips quivered and his body suddenly felt so cold. 

Pyotr touched his shoulder, and his body felt a surge of warmth down to his toes. “No, you are not dead either. Look.” Roger sensed a great sadness in Pyotr but could not draw his eyes off the lake.

The lake was still again. A group of doctors and nurses huddled around a body. Soft voices conferred; heads were shaking. They left the room. Suddenly the surface of the lake began changing rapidly. A dirt covered mound, then another. Tears, anger, confusion. People yelling at each other, pointing fingers. The images made no sense to Roger as they flicked between scenes of people he had never seen standing arm in arm. The lake became still again. 

Trembling, Roger lifted his eyes again to Pyotr, but they were no longer standing on the grassy bank above the water, but rather in the middle of a long bridge over a deep chasm. 

“What are you showing me? Why am I here?” Roger asked with wet cheeks.

“Roger,” Pyotr said tenderly. “Roger, my friend. Today was a day you will not soon forget. You looked evil in the eyes, and you met it with fierce resistance, and nearly lost your life doing so I might add. But today, the course of two souls have been set. Two that you could not save. Their time is up where you walk, for better or for worse.”  His face was serious. “But others have been saved, by your hand. And you too, have been saved by yet another. Soon you will have to go back. Your steps are numbered, but that number is great still. In just a few minutes, the doctors will bring you back to life, miraculously.” He winked. “But you must choose, the path you will take. You will not return the same man you woke up as this morning. How will you spend your final years? What will you prioritize? The way is for you to decide.” Pyotr motioned to one side of the bridge, then the other.

Roger was overwhelmed.  He sat down, put his head in his hands, and wept.  “I think would like to just sit here for a while, if that’s alright.”

Pyotr smiled with compassion and shook his head. “The bridge is not neutral ground.”

There was a flash of light, and a rumble. Then all was dark and quiet.  Roger gradually opened his eyes. A slow, but steady beep from the monitor beside his head interrupted the songbirds chorus outside his window. Tubes and wires kept Roger from moving more than just eyes, and his breathing fell in labored breaths. His side ached, his head throbbed. The nurses stood tensely as he woke. One of them said to the other, “He’s stable, can you go grab the officers? They want a word with him.” Voices and footsteps in the hall faded to a dull echo. Roger turned and watched the sun coming down in slanting rays through the thin curtains. One of the nurses noticed him watching the window and went to throw back the curtains. Roger shut his eyes tight and breathed deeply. His cheeks were getting the pillow wet. It was a new day.