I had a dream where the world ended.
My dream was about a rich man. He traveled the world with his girlfriend; Paris, Athens, Monaco, and they had many adventures together. He had a dog - a kind of snow white Scottish Deerhound, long and sleek and utterly human in its intelligence and its friendliness.
One day, this man and his girlfriend became estranged. Perhaps, because he did not marry her. And so, dispirited, he and his dog went back home to New York, to stay at his father's estate on the river, overlooking the city.
He was unhappy, and not able to distract himself with the diversions of his life before. He spent much time thinking. Inevitably, he wondered what he had ever accomplished. Staring out over the East River at the Brooklyn Bridge, he had a wonderful idea.
"What if we could eliminate the trip from JFK, or LaGuardia, or Newark, for the millions of people who wanted to come here?"
"What if I could make an airport on the Brooklyn Bridge?"
And the next moments are a blur of activity, architects, planners, and politicians. The Bridge would be a new monument. He discovered it was within only a few years of being permanently closed due to disrepair, and that the city would have to raise a huge bond to rebuild it. He could seriously reduce automobile traffic, revamp the subway line that ran over it, create a new public space - a mall - three malls, really - of scale and splendor to make the world envy. Restaurants and theme parks and shops and parks and beautiful brass and gold faux revival gilt and brilliant, shimmering lamplight. The Roebling bridge was beautiful, but cold, and dead. He would make it live, a giant skybridge, and glowing promenade, a bridge to the world.
His architects showed him a model like a giant upturned trapezoid, dwarfing the original bridge, enclosing it in a new, enormous shape. Planes could fly in and park, passengers could be on the banks of the Seine at noon and be shopping downtown by four. The Atlantic would become a comma, not a period. It could revitalize the economy, he told the mayor.
Carefully, meticulously prepared, he took his scale model and his blueprints and his thick sheaves of paper and letters of endorsement to his father's office. "Dad, let me build it. I can do it. Let me make my mark."
"The greatest thing built in New York since the Rockerfellers," the financier said, as the father listened, reclining in an office chair.
He had deftly prepared an answer to every objection his father raised. The old man, who had long ago given up on his son, and blamed himself for hobbling him with a life of ease, had never expected him to devote himself to any act of greatness. He scowled at the sheer madness of it, while inside he was happier than he had ever been, because his son somehow seemed to be thinking like a real man. And he was good at it.
The financier, seeing the old man would be unable to refuse his son... that perhaps, this... lunacy... was so absurd as to actually prevent refusal, began to see a picture in his head. He saw in the man's eyes that he could demand anything, the crown jewels of his empire, as collateral on the loans. And, god forbid, he chastised himself for being even for an instant drawn into believing this insanity, should he find himself collecting interest from the empire the bridge could become?
He shook himself out of his reverie when he realized the two men were looking at him expectantly. They couldn't do it alone. They would need him to build the coalition. Finance the deal.
"The dog," he said.
Perhaps it was out of bitterness that he spoke. To punish the childishness out of which all such ideas come. "We will work out the rest, but I demand the dog, before anything, as a guarantee."
The silence lasted for many seconds. But perhaps because he understood, or perhaps because he did not need to, the young man nodded solemnly.
In the model train room, under the glass ceiling, he stroked the dog's head and spoke to him softly, as the financier produced a leash.
"It'll be OK, boy. I'll build it. They'll see. We'll be the kings of the world. Just don't forget me. Hold on," he said, as the man led him down from the empty coal car and out the door.
Then the bridge was built anew.
Passengers driving to Manhattan that day would find the experience more like passing through the gargantuan tunnels of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. And at 2:42pm, they would feel the roadway jump and buckle, just a little, as the first plane touched down on the pad above them. The first passengers, who had flown from Berlin, disembarked and were shuttled in great moving arms to the upper concourse. The 6 train ran bumper to bumper, but few of the travelers rode it; the bridge was what they were here to see; the sunset through the epic walls of glass overlooking the harbor, the shops, which were the envy of Paris and London and Los Angeles and even Fifth Avenue; they would stay at the hotel and eat at the restaurants and watch the onlookers in Brooklyn Heights on their old fashioned promenade, decked with lights and balloons, a mere decoration for their view, staring up at them, and walk around the plazas and indoor parks lush with carefully cultivated greenery and attend the parties, which would range all over the bridge and on both ends, all throughout the night.
An express train sped across one of the several freestanding mini-bridges just next to the bridge proper, on the new subway track which flew over the river, just a thin ribbon of beige almost floating in the air, a few meters to the north, unassisted by any visible supports, inspiring vertigo even from those viewing it from far away.
On the Manhattan side, City Hall had been relocated to Ellis Island, and the old monuments had become offices. Along the park and down Park Row, and all the way towards the water, the newly minted waterside bustled with revelry. Men in crisp white chef's uniforms served haute cuisine from gold-trimmed trays on the sidewalk to anyone who walked by, men on stilts and in clown suits lumbered along, old metal railings had been trimmed with golden holographic ribbon. Children ran and crowded in the gigantic park, and slid on the Swiss-designed twenty foot slide, in the shadow of the newly built five-thousand student school, annexed to the Manhattan Anchorage, all built by the Bridge Project, in deals brokered with a myriad of planning committees. Bright and beautiful people crowded into the landside subway stations, lavish as five star hotel lobbies, with grand, circular spiraling walkways and soft earth tone surfaces, lit by golden sconces with incandescent lights.
In the blocks north of the old city hall, other denizens of the city, long alien to such a spectacle, created their own revelry, perhaps out of competition, or perhaps because they simply did every day. A bridge partygoer who stumbled in the wrong direction even a few hundred yards would be struck by one of the many famous contrasts of New York City - as well as the reason for City Hall's move - the devastated ghetto that was the lasting remnant of the Chinatown Riots, and the boarded hulk of One Police Plaza. The shards of broken glass glittered in the windows of the tall, ancient stone buildings; the false windows and abandoned storefronts, and the local denizens, roaming the streets, lawless, without help in sight.
Back by the water, the U.C.G. Chrysanthemum had been christened earlier in the day, and a small crowd of the well-to-do and their children were assembled on its foredeck, being lectured by a celebrity and well-known sailing enthusiast. She was a replica - a triple-masted clipper ship, sparkling, whitewashed with beautiful, clean canvas sails, and so part of the many spectacles engineered for the opening day festivities. The small group was told briefly about the life and duties of a sailor in the many previous centuries, as a much larger crowd watched from ashore, and the ship's crew themselves watched idly while preparing the ship for its launch.
The man taught them to wrap lines on winches, to haul and release them safely. The children piled on the ropes and pulled as one, and then cried out, ecstatic at the miracle of leverage. Ready now, with a brief nod to the chief of the crew, the man readied the group once more, this time to hoist one of the many square sails, as the crew made ready to do all the rest in unison, and with remarkably lucky ease, the ship had let loose from the moorings along the boardwalk and was off - in a sudden gust of terrific wind, her sails billowed, and the crowd in the bay was awestruck, as she listed slightly, taking the wind, the captain cutting her hard to port, and she began a long graceful arc across the bridge's north side, to tack back into the southerly wind, and up the east river. The evening sun gleamed over the hills of Brooklyn, igniting the glassy countryside.
"This city has a few good years left in it," the man thought softly, leaning against the rail, staring over the bowsprit, feeling the wind in his hair and watching the racing water.
Across the river, motoring north with almost silent speed, was the sleek white Dutch-made cruiser that was the yacht of the young man who owned the bridge. He squinted at them, preparing to wave a friendly nautical greeting. He could not see the man on deck, or any other part of the family, though there were staff moving here and there. He saw a young woman leaning over the port side, facing him but looking up, north, away from the bridge and ignoring the spectacle, as the boat sped off.
"Perhaps not everyone agrees," he thought more darkly.
The boat sailed on, the wind slacking momentarily. In the sudden quiet, he heard a scream.
Then others echoed it from ashore. The sound of a car crash. More silence, which dragged on for what seemed like minutes, as he attempted to collect himself. Then, without warning, the top of the great tumbling sphere, one of the rides in the new Brooklyn-side amusement park, five stories high and carrying hundreds of passengers, could be seen to veer, towards and then into a support. There was an ear splitting crunch that could be heard across the river, and then, the top sank out of sight, behind the riverside skyline. Now the human wailing rose like a single sound, a haunting, evil tide. He glanced around, and everything appeared normal on the shores, people milling, but perhaps it was the wrong kind of milling.
Softly, he picked up his phone and called the Coast Guard. The phone rang, and rang. After some time, watching the river, and becoming nervous at how close the captain was shaving the east shore, he realized that no one was answering, and put the phone down again. Above the general keening, he heard one hysterical woman in the brief lulls of the wind, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god..." shouting it over and over again, even over the music of the restaurants and celebrations on the river. It chilled his blood.