The Last Bridge

All of a sudden, I saw her. She was coming up the other side of the street, just passing a seedy old antique shop. The speed of her stride sent her long auburn hair sweeping back over her shoulders. Head up, shoulders straight, arms swinging... her usual enthusiastic pace. Before my brain could kick in and stop me, my mouth had already opened.

"Ramona!" I yelled. "Over here!"

She turned at once, her radiant smile lighting up her face. "Hi, ol’ buddy!" came the clear, ringing answer. Easing gracefully between two parked cars, she started across to me – just as the big CTA bus turned the corner and zoomed down the block at full speed, its diesel emitting a low, threatening drone.

"Look out!" I screamed... too late. The monstrous vehicle hit her with a sickening THUD!, sending her body flying back into one of the parked cars. She collided with its windshield, shattering it... bounced rag-doll fashion over its roof... and landed heavily on the sidewalk she’d just left.

I screamed again, an inarticulate cry of horror, and launched myself into the street as the bus roared on. I was so terror-stricken I didn’t even think about being hit myself -- or how strange it was that the bus never slowed down. Pelting across the street, I squeezed between the cars, steeling myself against the sight of my young wife’s broken body.

But -- it wasn’t there. The dirty sidewalk was empty, except for a few newspaper pages and broken bottles. I looked frantically around. Then I noticed... the car’s windshield where she’d struck was NOT broken. I straightened up, slowly beginning to realize the truth. Sure enough, there was no sign of the bus... and no lingering odor of diesel fumes.

"Damn!"

Once again... it was all just a waking, lying... dream. A hallucination. Different from the last one and the one before that, and the one before THAT... but also the same. Nothing had taken place at all, except in my fevered brain and in my pounding, once-again broken heart.

No, of course the event wasn’t real. Ramona’s been gone for twelve years, you dummy – and her death wasn’t an accident. God’s mistake, maybe. But the cutting pain just beneath my breastbone was as real as the sweat running down my face.

I looked around in desperation for someplace to hide while I tried to recover some semblance of normality. Across the street, just beyond the spot I’d reached when the hallucination hit me, was a church. A decrepit, somewhat derelict-looking church, true; but even from across the street I could see, beside its big front doors, a bulletin board announcing the times of services. Would the building be open, though, on a midweek afternoon? It was worth a chance, I decided; I HAD to get inside somewhere -- anywhere.

Recrossing the street, I climbed the half-dozen uneven cement steps to a small landing in front of the ten-foot-high double doors. Even in my distraught mental state, those doors impressed themselves on me. Weathered almost black; heavy wrought-iron hinges with long pointed flanges; knobs too big to fit in my hand, above a keyhole at least two inches high. Those doors belonged on a castle somewhere in the Black Forest, not a grimy little brick church lost in the beehive neighborhoods of Chicago's northwest quarter. I was certain they'd be locked – they LOOKED locked.

But although the bulky knob on the left-side door was stubborn -- I had to use both hands, like a small child -- it turned. That door was solid, heavy, a good four inches thick; but it swung open without even one creak, releasing a draft of cooler air heavy with that musty smell peculiar to old churches. A memory flickered, like an old black-and-white movie: July, thirty years ago, Sunday School, coming in out of the warm grassy-smelling Connecticut morning to that same characteristic odor. "Time to stop playing and quiet down -- we're in God's house!" Long ago and far away, I thought... but thank goodness it’s open, anyway. I stepped across the threshold.

The entryway fitted the outside of the building: dark, gloomy, run-down. I tugged the door shut behind me, click-BOOM. All at once the hazy brightness of the afternoon was blocked out. Only a varicolored twilight filtered softly through small stained-glass windows on both side walls. The entry was about ten feet on a side, with coarse stuccoed walls of indeterminate color which on some long-ago day must have been bright and fresh. A doorway in the left corner revealed narrow stairs winding upwards; choir loft? bell tower? Against the right side wall leaned a table piled with brochures and small books. Directly opposite the tall outer doors were two more, smaller, covered with what appeared to be dark green vinyl fastened around the edges with rows of tacks, like upholstered furniture.

I stood just inside the door for several minutes, while my breathing gradually returned to near-normal; and as my brain recovered from the shock of the delusion I’d just passed through, a sound began to intrude gradually upon my consciousness. When the outer door closed, it had shut out not only the afternoon light but also the noises of the street, and the interior was hushed, still. I became aware the sound I was hearing was a voice, rising and falling upon the quiet. It was human speech, but it wasn't ordinary speaking -- the cadences and intonations were not right, somehow. I couldn't quite make out the words, but the voice was coming from beyond the second set of doors. Walking slowly across the entryway, I discovered the inner doors were barroom-type, double-hinged and free-swinging (Barroom? Swinging? In a church? Never on Sunday; the clown in my mind had recovered, at least). I pushed my way through.