Biblical Read Free

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.

part one

IN THE BEGINNING

     
    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

1

THE BEGINNING
    It all began with the staring.
But there were many other things before the staring,