KHALID WARSAME

 The Salt Bridge

Commissioned in 2022 by the City of Melbourne

The Salt Bridge

We were completely beside ourselves, when we finally received permission to cross the salt bridge at Fishermans Bend. We were beginning to lose hope, all those months of waiting, but as the date grew closer, our joy turned to steadily mounting fear. What were we in for? We knew nothing, and didn’t know where to start. Rama suggested that we call on Joh, the former caretaker of the community home where we grew up, to ask him for advice and to retrieve a codex that she had left with him some years ago. He was living in a small flat in Albion, one of the older low-density retirement districts in our sector.

Albion was a poorly rendered suburb and I didn’t enjoy the feeling of discomfort that washed over me whenever I went there, the very air feeling lighter, less substantive. I always found an excuse to be doing something else whenever I saw that Rama was planning to visit Joh. It’s just as well that I usually didn’t join her because I suspected that he didn’t like me. I was an unruly child, and prone to outbursts. I never bonded with any of the adults who raised me, and the active role they played in my life were often corrective and involved long hours of Better Outcome sessions in low-res care centres.

‘I used to read texts about the other side,’ he told us. ‘Every year I’d have one or two of you up for a visit to see the bridge and the landing on the other side. Back then they were only just starting to have people crossing over, and new bridges were going up all the time.’

He got up and shuffled over to a shelf in the hallway between the kitchen and sitting room, returning with a thick volume. It had the ubiquitous brown and green colours of an old-world codex, though this one didn’t appear to be part of a set. He set the codex down and rested his arms on his stomach and sunk slightly into his chair.

There was no title on the cover or the spine. Instead, there was a moving image; a lush bend in a river, gum trees and sand dunes dominating the foreground on either side. On the distant riverbank some men were working on a task involving raising a lumber beam. The purpose of their labour was unfathomable to me, but the neatly stacked pyramids of logs on shore behind them indicated the scale of their purpose. Behind them a part of the thickly wooded horizon was bare, cleared of trees to make way for pasture. I recognised the period; it was near the time of the old city’s founding, before the seas rose and receded. The image changed, indicating the passage of time, showing the familiar sight of the old city of Melbourne. Next to me, Rama was absently stroking my hand and staring out the window, lost in thought.

I was brimming with curiosity as I picked up the codex. What it would be like to feel true ground beneath my feet? I wanted to see for myself the things I’d only ever heard about. The last time I had crossed the salt bridge at Fishermans Bend was so long ago. There were some things that I do remember: the journey to the salt bridge with John, and his words to me on that day.

‘I remember you told me to be kinder to the other children, that the world has only foul uses for unkind men,’ I said to Joh.

‘You were a good kid,’ he said. He looked at me oddly, as if trying to recall the moment. The memory was burned into my mind, and all the petty cruelties that used to obsess me as a child were set against John’s words to me at the foot of the salt bridge. Of the visit itself, I remember very little. I saw a dragonfly; that is all I can recall.

‘You were all good kids,’ he said, repeating himself as if to turn his words into truth. He’d raised over a hundred children until he’d retired ten years ago. Some of us, like Rama, were closer to him than others. I remembered him as a distant, if kind, figure, whereas to Rama he was a central presence in her life.

I opened the thick volume on the table and turned to the section on the salt bridge. The voice of the codex began to fill the air. I stared at the page; sometimes the words were different from the voice reading them, and I didn’t want to miss something important.

“… located in what was originally the precinct of Sandridge in the old inner-city of M------e.  Part of the Fishermans Bend Redevelopment project undertaken in the early 20s, it was named after the description of the area by a colonial surveyor, William Darke, in 1839, Fishermans Bend enjoyed a brief heyday as the centre of M-------e’s Neural-Imaging industry in the 40s and 50s, with several high-profile organisations maintaining campuses in the area, including LTE, COR Boeing, as well as the Pre-Restoration era Department of Defence and the University of—”

I felt a familiar feeling of smallness overcome me as I tried to make sense of the words. As always, anything involving the other side was initially incomprehensible to me. I flipped to a random page, landing on a passage on the reintroduction of various insect species in and around old city waterways by the current inhabitants. That was how it is with codices: they contained everything, just not in any particular order.

‘I used to read it for hours and hours,’ she said, running the tip of her finger down the dense script on the page. She paused at the entry Basalt.

‘The raw velocity of Earth, a renewal of form, a carrier for the wounds of creation,’ she read aloud.

‘When was this?’

‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘I bought it from a man.’

‘Where did he get it?’

Rama shrugged. ‘I never spoke to him again.’

In the weeks leading up to our crossing, we became frantic in our preparations. We only left the house once or twice, and ordered food delivered to our home, a somewhat novel experience for both of us. At first, we felt slightly guilty—after all, we had a kitchen, and our pantry was perfectly capable of restocking itself with fresh ingredients. It was Rama who initially planted the seed in our minds, when we were puzzling over an entry in the codex. We were reading a guide to old world foods, and became entranced by a quaint looking advertisement for a kind of pie that was once popular.

‘It says here that Latin was spoken in Italy. That’s where pizza came from, even though it’s an American word,’ said Rama.

‘Tomatoes on bread. Did they add anything else?’

‘There’s a recreation restaurant nearby that makes pizza,’ said Rama, before passing along its information to me.

‘It doesn’t sound appetising at all, to be honest.’

‘It could be nice,’ she said.

When the pizza arrived, I had to meet a young man at the bottom of the building and open the front gate for him. He theatrically removed a thin box from within a bizarre fabric sleeve contraption along with, of all things, a paper bill.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and just as he was turning around to leave, I stopped him.

‘Is it any good?’ I asked, gesturing to the box in my hand. The young man tried to smile and grimace at the same time, which looked strange on him.

‘Usually only really old people order it,’ he said.

‘Do you ever want to go over there?’ I said. I was immediately embarrassed by what I’d said, but the young man made the connection between the pizza and my question, and responded gamely.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘Isn’t it weird though?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You all ruined it and then ran away and now that it’s starting to become better again, you want to go back. Just to do it all over again?’

His accusation caught me off guard. I didn’t know how to respond. ‘I’m not that old,’ I said, eventually. ‘I was born here.’

‘Look. I’m just saying. You asked,’ he said.

‘I did. Thank you,’ I said, even though I didn’t feel as if I should be thanking him. After an awkward moment between us, the silence knife-like and working against me, the young man turned around and left, swinging the fabric sleeve against his side.

The bill was outrageous, the delivery costing three times more than the pizza. The pizza itself was unappetising and strange; it was slathered in a kind of thick, stretchy substance that Rama said was called ‘cheese,’ and came out of creatures called cows. I puzzled over it for ages, trying to link the quickly cooling substance to images I had seen of large mammalian creatures and their white coloured discharge.

Not for the first time, I wondered how they ever got anything done in the old world, where material things weren’t collapsible into digital form and you had to physically move stuff from one place to another. I told Rama about my interaction with the young man who delivered our pizza.

‘I mean, maybe he has a point,’ I said.

‘Do you think we shouldn’t go there?’ said Rama. She had gone very still, and was looking at me intently.

‘No, but we did leave at one point. Almost every codex mentions the fact that we came there and then left and came here, and … well, they’ve been there for a long time.’

‘I can’t find a codex that goes that far back. There’s a lot that we don’t know,’ she said. Most of the codex was about things we had no reference for, like different kinds of insects and rocks and patterns of rivers. We spent most of the next day reading the codex on old Melbourne. We felt like we were beginning to understand some of it, though there were large gaps in our knowledge. Unlike others of its kind I had seen before, Rama’s codex dedicated only a small section to how people lived.

One of the interactive passages in the codex detailed efforts by an old sim-travel company to digitally reconstruct and recreate a city waterfront which had, at the time, been swallowed by the sea. Another showed the same area at the height of it’s glory, following a redevelopment project spearheaded by the government of the day. Satellite images showed time-lapses of the project in incredible detail, capturing residents enjoying walks and strolls by the river, some riding crude looking wheeled contraptions called ‘bicycles.’

My favourite section was one on sand dunes, which contained many names that each sounded more strange and interesting than the other. I read it out loud to Rama one evening. We often studied this way: one of us would read a random passage from a codex, while the other would look up the meanings of strange words.

“The ridge of sand dunes along the beach which the precinct is named for has long since been obliterated in the course of the old city’s original development, and were originally formed of deposits of fluvial gravel and sands, part of the Yarra Delta at the confluence of Moonee Ponds Creek and the Maribyrnong and Yarra Rivers. Recent work by the owners and custodians of the land have restored much of the region’s biodiversity, which has been accurately scanned with ADEOS 1, adding to the detailed virtual mapping work originally undertaken by the City of Melbourne as part of their Your City 2060! project.”

Rama held up a lexicon. ‘It says ADEOS stands for Advanced Earth Observing Satellite. The rest are names for places.’

Later that night, I was replaying the young man’s words in my head, thinking of what I could have said in response. It was a futile task: as always the words weren’t there.

~

Soon it was the day of our crossing. We both found it difficult to sleep the night before, and Rama reported having a dream where she was walking towards a bright white light, but the longer she went, the further away the light became. I didn’t share my feelings with her: that I found her dream disquieting, an ill omen.

In the morning, Rama and I took a trip out to New Federation Square, where the salt bridge was housed. To get there we had to take an upstream transit line, one which required a hefty fee to temporarily upgrade our resolution. Rama had her codex open the whole ride over, which made us look like pilgrims. I could see others in our carriage carrying similar, though heftier, tomes and codices. One man had an open codex on his lap and a parrot on his shoulder which was whispering the words on the page to him in his ear. I noticed, uncomfortably, that we were closer in age to the pilgrims than the other people in the carriage—normal people.

Near the gate there was a huddle of people. I recognised more than a few carrying the same passes and invitation letters we’d also received. We approached them and realised that the group was split into two. One of the groups was huddled around a man who was speaking in a low voice, such that you had to lean in close to hear him. He had an open codex in one hand, and was speaking urgently to his listeners, occasionally turning to his codex whenever he stumbled over a word. The other group was more spread out; some of them were standing quietly in ones and twos, while others were hovering on the outskirts of the first group.

‘I want to listen to what that man is saying. Meet you back here?’ said Rama. She squeezed my arm and walked off into the crowd. I considered the tightly packed group, and while casting my eye about I spotted the man from the carriage, who had the parrot on his shoulder. Luckily, he turned up from his codex just as I was approaching him.

‘Are you passing today, my friend?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m just poking around.’

‘Ah, my wife and I are hoping to cross over soon,’ I said. ‘Have you passed through before?’

‘Oh no,’ said the man. ‘I’m just a curious observer. I’ve been studying the bridge for some time. Did you know it gets hot and then cold over there?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In some places during the day it’s very cold, and in other places its hot for months! It’s called summer.’

I’d read about the seasons, of course, and knew what hot was, and cold was a concept that I understood to be a lack of energy, but for the whole world itself to be hot? I couldn’t imagine it.

‘Do you know why they don’t let anyone through?’ asked the man.

‘There’s limited space. A border of some kind, right?’

The man smiled, and his parrot began to laugh. It wasn’t a cruel sound; but filled with mirth at my expense nonetheless. ‘No, nothing like that. I’m not surprised that you don’t know. Very few codices mention it. In truth, it’s different for every bridge but for most of them, crossing involves nothing more than a simple ceremony, some kind of welcome ritual.’

‘That doesn’t sound so bad?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘It’s just that … well, it’s hard to explain. It’s to do with the nature of the salt bridge itself—it ensures balance between here and over there. Something they did on the other side. You’ll understand when you cross over yourself. Tell me, have you ever looked up the name of the places in the codices, the actual names the people who live there know them by?’

‘I have not,’ I replied, astonished.

‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I suspect that very little of the knowledge collected in codices and lexicons is relevant on the other side. Have you noticed that the only parts that seem to update are on plants and insects and rocks?’

I was about to ask him for details when Rama appeared by my side. The man with the parrot chose that moment to bid me goodbye, saying that he was due to meet a friend, and then turned to Rama and said goodbye to her as well. He also gave us his name, Mr. Upupa.

‘What was that man saying to the crowd?’ I asked her.

‘He was trying to convince people not to cross the salt bridge,’ she said. ‘He was saying all sorts of things.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rama. ‘He said there’s nothing for us there anymore. He says the material world is hostile to us, and that crossing over changes you.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘Of course not,’ she said.

I looked over at the crowd, which was definitely smaller than before. Most, like Rama, must have drifted off once they’d realised the nonsense he was speaking. It wasn’t that his ideas were new, but that they were old; boring, in other words. We had heard it all before, most recently from the young man who delivered our pizza. If they were right, then how could we explain the wonders inside codices? The autonomous transcriptions of dying satellites, captured texts from a forgotten time? Surely, they wanted us to cross over? Surely, we were only returning to reclaim that which we’d left behind?

A loud bell rang out across the square, and a hush fell over the crowds as dozens of conversations instantly died out. The sound repeated three times, a signal that the salt bridge would soon  open. We went over to the shortest queue we could find, and waited our turn. Rama had her codex clutched to her chest.

‘It should be our turn soon,’ said Rama. I passed our tickets to her and tucked the codex under my arm. The air was buzzing; this close to the salt bridge, the barrier between us and the material world was thinner, and we could feel ourselves being poked and prodded by charged particles radiating from the bridge. The line got smaller and we soon were within sight of the crossing.  Ahead of me was the bridge, which spanned a wet expanse of water—a marsh. In the distance, it disappeared into darkness.

We got to the front of the line and handed over our passes and crossed the gate. The bridge was ahead of me. I paused, waiting for Rama to catch up, but when I looked behind me, the gate was gone, and so was the attendant’s booth, the line of people, and the world beyond—all disappeared into nothing.

Behind me was a sign which was written in a language I didn’t understand. Ahead was the low bridge over the marsh, which disappeared into the distance. To either side of me were strange plants jutting out of the water and insects flitting about. To my right, a dragonfly appeared, hovering in place, as if regarding me. It was large and bright green, and moved with tremendous speed. The moment I focused my vision on it, the dragonfly was gone, like an apparition, and I was once again alone.