Observer at Fixed Distance

The bitumen beneath each footfall is super-smooth, super-flat, a diorama of place collapsed in two dimensions; process flattened, materials without reference to source; heavier than anything he can imagine, this bridge weighs more than the Earth and all its contents. Whether it is a bridge or not is a consideration that applies pressure to his private language for a few steps – is it not a curving overpass instead, as it leans upwards from the ground on an uncoiling of pylons; or, if it is bridge-like at the point it reaches across the pastoral fields, it should not yet be described as such given its intentions are incomplete: the structure is only partially finished.

This is why Leif stopped at all, on the Hexham roadside, today especially, the first of the year – construction is halted for the public holiday, so how could he pass up the opportunity to walk up this liminal expanse, so incongruous on a landscape he drove past for more than a decade; low-lying grazing fields, cows would gather in late afternoon in an unbroken constellation of black and white dots, like pinpricks in a map poked through from underneath, out to the endless horizon; when it rained too much the grass turned oceanic and the livestock moved to the harbourside, thin risen boardwalks of mounted soil that gave passage to and from the schedule of their days; and now this, two point two four billion dollars set aside to pull a roadway through the clouds, another lane, just one more lane, subject to viable reductions: wait, viaduct, that’s the word, this is a viaduct that Leif is treading up, along the middle dotted line of both lanes, one foot on the left and one on the southbound.

It is late afternoon and Leif is due in Newcastle for a family dinner by six, six thirty, and the sun feels warmer and lower than it should for this time of day, even given the time of day; perhaps with each metre inclined, as Leif makes his way closer to the sky, the perspective skews; it is an easy walk, one foot after another, the construction workers have left no tools behind, no concrete dust or debris anywhere, swept clean before the holidays, no bird droppings, no footprints, no cow hooves pressed into the fine grain perfection that is the onramp; it reminds Leif of roadways he saw from moving cars that took him across Dubai, across Singapore, places where everything is new because there is no was, it is all tomorrow.

When moved to think about such things, it seems to Leif as though there exists within him, in the atlas of his interior cartography, three types of place: there are places he can routinely go whenever he desires, there are places he has been but will likely never return to, and there are places that do not exist but which he nonetheless thinks about often. For example, he thinks about the streets and public parks through which he walks his dog of a morning and afternoon, or the cafés he frequents for lunch, that are all within easy, daily reach; then, there are those places he spent a week on international work ventures, The Bund in Shanghai with the nests of telegraph wires hung on the corners of sandstone buildings, when he was completely lost and making his way from one side of the river to the other, somehow, through parks and laneways he will never again visit even if he tried, or the Springs village theatre in Gauteng, no longer standing now since an expressway connecting Johannesburg came about, or the volcanic crater that he swam in, there are photos on an SD card somewhere, somewhere near the crest of the Great Dividing Range, never since identified on any chart or satellite map.

Then, and he thinks about this as his calves start to feel the tingle of having now exerted enough counterforce to the hours spent languid in the car to really get the blood moving again, there are the places that do not exist and yet occupy such an abundant regional span inside his head that they take equal measure against the rest: when he travels on a train and his carriage pauses at the Hawkesbury River Station, he thinks about meeting Katita there, she caught an earlier train and has been waiting beside the platform beneath a weeping willow reading a mathematics pamphlet, a light treatise about points on an elliptic curve and the relationship between falling autumn leaves and cryptography; they make their way to a double-storey white-painted weatherboard hotel with warm bedside lamps inside that make good on the promise made by the small windows and heavy blinds, because they are not here to sleep, they are here to kneel on the floor and be deeply silent together: this place does not exist, nor does the pebble courtyard out the back, with its orange tree and fallen fruit, and yet he thinks about them.

He thinks about walking back to the station together the next day, again she will depart first, the timetable being what it is, but now he will be left beneath the shade of the willow to wait an hour, just one more hour, for the train he’s never left; this station, like all the others between here and there, all of which carry their own narrative in which he and Katita meet up for a while, the way he looks at her arms hanging to the sides of her thrift shop dress, the little flowers up the front, the pressed fabric embrace in the impossible places of his interiority. As he reaches the top of the viaduct, not far from home, the sun at head-height, Leif hopes they’ll never finish the construction here, never connecting this span to whatever lies ahead. Let it stand instead as a monument to this ascension alone, standing here on the first of a brand-new year.