Biblical (2 page)

Marie heard high-pitched screaming from the fire and thought for a moment it was the desperate sounds of the girl’s agony, but there was a chorus of other screeches and percussive snaps and pops, and she realized they were the sounds of combustion: the fire now a single, writhing, surging entity consuming everything in the execution pyre. But then Marie heard other screaming, and realized it was her own voice as she sank to her knees, the heat of the blaze almost unbearable even at this distance.

A Burgundian soldier stepped forward and Marie saw something dark writhing furiously in his gauntleted fist. He swung it with full force and she saw the black cat follow a twisting arc through the air and into the flames.

“She is not a witch!” Marie screamed, pleadingly, at the soldier who did not even turn in her direction. “She is NOT a witch!”

Marie sobbed. Great, wracking sobs as she gazed up at the burning girl. Marie, whose faith had always been deep and pure and complete, could not believe she was witnessing the death of her heroine. How had she come to be here, Rouen, on the thirtieth day of May, 1431, to witness this horror unfold? How could anyone ever believe she had seen this great evil with her own eyes? She needed proof. Positive proof.

Still sobbing, she reached into her pocket for something and held it at shaking arm’s length, pointing it at the girl who now burned like a torch atop the pyre.

*

Marie used her thumb to select the camera function of the cellphone she had taken from her jeans and pressed the button, in an attempt to capture the image that seared into her brain, the image that filled her universe.

The image of Jeanne d’Arc as she passed from one world to the next.

The thing about the remarkable and the extraordinary is that, if they are part of your everyday life, they become by definition unremarkable and ordinary. That which awakens awe and wonder in others ceases to be noticed. For Walter Ramirez, the extraordinary that had become ordinary, the remarkable made unremarkable by daily exposure, was the Bridge.

The Bridge was known by millions. All around the world people could call the Bridge to mind, even if they had only ever seen its image. The Bridge was an icon, it was a symbol, it was a means of transit. For many, it was a destination.

But sometimes, when you have become accustomed to the uncustomary, there still comes the moment in which you see it as others see it. Ramirez experienced two such moments that Wednesday.

The first was when he drove his marked Explorer out of the Waldo Tunnel. Ramirez was on the early shift and the sun was just about to come up as he drove his prowler out into the infant day. Despite having seen it so many times, the scene that opened out at the tunnel mouth was one to send a small electric current running across the skin and raise the hairs on the nape of Ramirez’s neck. There were still lights on in the city, a cluster of bright white and yellow pinpricks in the purple velvet of the immediately pre-dawn sky, shimmering in reflection on the Bay; to his left was
the
Bay Bridge. But ahead was
the
Bridge. Ramirez’s beat.

The Golden Gate.

Walt Ramirez had been an officer of the California Highway Patrol for fifteen years, all with the San Francisco Bay Area Command, ten of which had been in the Golden Gate Division, seven of those working out of Marin County station on San Clemente, twelve minutes from the Bridge. The chevrons on his sleeve had been there for three years.

Walt Ramirez looked like a thug in a uniform: a big, broad-shouldered and hard-faced man of forty with huge hands that appeared out of proportion with even his massive build. It was a physical presence that had served him well. In fifteen years as a CHP officer and outside of the Patrol’s firing range, Ramirez had unholstered his firearm twelve times in total and had fired it only once, and that had been a warning shot. Generally, when Sergeant Walter Ramirez told someone to do something in his disconcertingly quiet, calm way, they tended to do it.

Although Walt Ramirez might have looked like a thug in uniform, he was anything but. Popular with everyone who got to know the modest, friendly man behind the intimidating presence, Ramirez’s senior, brother and junior officers all liked and respected him. He was one of those cops who were in the job for all the right reasons: he cared about people – perhaps even a little too much given the suffering he had had to encounter over the years – and he had become a policeman to help others, not through some need to exert authority over them. With the public he was consistently courteous and respectful, but firm whenever the need arose. His fellow officers knew that he was someone they could rely on in a tight spot, someone who would always have your back. In fact, Walt Ramirez was exactly the guy you wanted to have your back.

And Ramirez’s beat was a small but iconic one. Ramirez’s beat was the Bridge.

As well as being the shift supervisor on all patrols that covered the Bridge and its approaches on both sides, Ramirez
provided liaison with the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Administration District, which had its own security force, Marin County Sheriff’s Department, the SFPD and the US Coast Guard station at Fort Baker, Sausalito, one thousand feet from the Bridge’s north tower.

The west side walkway was permanently closed to pedestrians and Ramirez made the Bridge just after 5.30 a.m., when the automatic barrier on the east sidewalk opened. He noticed a group of about thirty people had just cleared the gates, and he guessed they had been waiting for them to open. Slowing down, he examined them across the safety barrier. They were all young people, no one much over thirty, and they were chatting to each other in a relaxed manner. That was something Ramirez, like all the cops who worked the Bridge, had learned a long time ago: to read body language. And to do the mental math of despair: where there were many, as now, there was no risk; where there was the individual, the solitary soul wrapped up in his or her own thoughts, you watched them. The Bridge authority watched them too, on CCTV. And counted lamp poles.

Ramirez called in on his radio and asked Vallejo to patch him through to Bridge security.

“What’s the deal with the early birds?” he asked.

“They’ve been waiting for about fifteen minutes for the gates to open,” the Bridge dispatcher explained. “Guess they’re just out for an early morning run.”

“They don’t look like joggers,” said Ramirez. “I’ll wheel round and take another look.”

Ramirez drove the length of the Golden Gate and then back, watching the group from across the carriageway. With the exception of a couple of semi-trailers up ahead, he had the Bridge to himself, so looped a U to come back alongside the group. By this time they were already past the first tower. They were walking together, not running nor stepping out with a particular sense of purpose, and again he noticed that they
were all in good spirits, as if enjoying each other’s company as the sun came up over the Bay. But something still jarred. He pulled up, switching on his roof bar to alert other drivers. Some of the walkers spotted him and stopped, waiting for him to come over to the barrier.

“Morning …” Ramirez said cheerily and the walkers returned his smile.

“Morning officer,” an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, dark hair gathered up on her head, answered. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

“It is that, ma’am. You all together? A group?”

“Yes … yes we are.” She frowned insincere concern. “Are we in breach of a city ordinance?”

“No, you’re fine. Are you some kind of club?”

“We all work together. I’m the CEO … we decided yesterday to take this walk together and watch the sun come up. Is that okay?”

“Sure … I didn’t mean to disturb you.” Ramirez examined her more closely: as a company CEO, the woman looked too young, too wrong. Wrong clothes, wrong type. “What is it your company does?” he asked, still smiling, still keeping his tone conversational.

“Gaming.”

“Gaming?”

“Computer games. We design them. These guys are my best teams.”

“Shoot-em-up games, that kind of thing?” Ramirez asked. The phrase sat clumsily in his mouth; it was something he’d heard his eldest say.

The woman laughed and shook her head. “No, nothing like that. Alternate reality games, mostly … We do stuff like this to remind ourselves that there’s a real world out there.”

“Like teambuilding, that kind of thing?” he asked.

“Something like. I didn’t think we needed to ask permission.”
The young woman looked right to Ramirez now. Dot-com-social-network-type right. A world he didn’t have much time for and which had sneaked a generation gap in between him and his kids.

“You don’t,” he said. “Well, you enjoy sunup. Have a good day, ma’am.”

“And you, officer.” She smiled at him again.

Climbing back into the Explorer, Ramirez watched the group walk on. They all had a careless glow about them – of youth or of the sunrise or both – and he felt a pang of envy. Yet he counted lamp poles. Counting lamp poles was something you learned to do if you were a cop attached to the Bridge, but these were not the type you needed to count lamp poles for.

Shaking the thought from his head, Ramirez switched off the bar lights and started up the engine. As he drove past, the young woman who probably made in a month what he made in a year waved at him.

What was it? What was wrong?

The thought nagged him to another halt and he watched them in his side mirror. The clump of walkers had become a string that stretched along the sidewalk. They stopped. And lamp pole sixty-nine was at the middle. She was in the middle. She was standing at lamp pole sixty-nine. Sixty-nine.

The pole you counted most.

The Golden Gate Bridge was an icon. People from across the country, from around the world, were drawn to its strange beauty; and most of all they were drawn to the view from pole sixty-nine.

He got out of the Explorer and started back.

“Excuse me, ma’am …” he called and waved to the young woman. She waved back as, in unison, she and her colleagues climbed over the safety railing and down onto the three-feet-wide girder that Ramirez knew was just over the barrier, about two feet below walkway level.

Jesus … Ramirez broke into a sprint. Jesus Christ … there must be thirty of them. As he ran he could see the flashing lights of other vehicles, alerted by the Bridge authority, racing towards them. Too far. Too late.

Pole sixty-nine.

The Golden Gate Bridge demanded a special kind of cop, because the Golden Gate Bridge was the world’s number one location for suicide. Every year, scores of people came to the bridge to cross over something more than San Francisco Bay. They came from all over the country, some from abroad, to walk out onto the Bridge’s span where death was always just a four-and-a-half-feet climb over the sidewalk safety barrier and a four-second, seventy-five-mile-an-hour drop. At that speed, impact on water felt like impact on concrete. Hardly anyone drowned: ninety per cent plus died of massive internal injuries, their bones and organs smashed. On average, the Bridge had one known jumper every week-and-a-half with more than thirty known deaths a year; and, of course, there were those who managed to jump without being spotted, their dust-covered cars found abandoned in the car parks.

Of the Bridge’s one hundred and twenty-eight lamp poles, it was pole sixty-nine that had felt the last touches of most.

He vaulted over the traffic barrier and onto the walkway. Trained in a whole range of strategies for talking to potential suicides, Ramirez also knew a dozen practiced maneuvers for grabbing and securing an indecisive jumper. But there were too many of them.

“Don’t!” he shouted. “For God’s sake don’t!”

He was near the railing, close to where the young woman stood looking down at the water. He could see them now, all standing on the girder, holding hands.

The young woman turned her head to look at him over her shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she said, smiling again, this time sincerely,
kindly. “It’s not your fault, there was nothing you could do. It’s all right … we are becoming.”

As if by a wordless command, without hesitation, they all stepped off in unison.

Ramirez made it to the barrier just in time to see them hit the water. Everything seemed unreal, as if what he had just witnessed could not possibly have happened and he must have imagined the young people on the Bridge just seconds before. He heard his own voice as if it belonged to someone else as he radioed it in, calling for the Fort Baker Coastguard rescue boat. The Bridge security vehicle and the SFPD cruiser pulled up beside him, and the urgent, questioning voices of the other officers came to Ramirez like radio messages from a distant planet.

He turned away from the safety railing and looked at the Bridge, at the graceful sweep and arch of its back, at the red of its soaring towers made redder by the rising sun. For the second time that day he saw the Bridge for what it was, what it symbolized, saw all of its beauty.

And he hated it.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Hebrews 11:3

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.

René Descartes

Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.

Niels Bohr

It all began with the staring.
But there were many other things before the staring, before it began. Strange accounts from distant places:

A man in New York died of malnutrition in a luxurious Central Park apartment empty of food but filled with vitamin pills. There was an inexplicable epidemic of suicides: twenty-seven young people jumping in unison from the Golden Gate Bridge; fifty Japanese students camping out deep in the huge Aokigahara forest – the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji – sharing food and singing songs around campfires before wandering separately into the dark of the forest to open their arteries; four notable suicides in Berlin on the same day – three scientists and a writer. A Russian physicist turned neo-pagan mystic purported to be the Son of God. A French teenager claimed to have had a vision of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. A middle-aged woman calmly sat down in the middle of the road at the entrance of the CERN complex in Switzerland, then just as calmly doused her clothing in kerosene and set fire to herself. A Hollywood effects studio was firebombed. A fundamentalist Christian sect kidnapped and murdered a geneticist.