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It had been many years since Blue crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. The last tine was with his father when he was a boy, and the memory of that day comes back to him now. He can see himself holding his father’s hand and walking at his side, and as he hears the traffic moving along the steel bridge-road below, he can remember telling his father that the noise sounded like the buzzing of an enormous swarm of bees. To his left is the Statue of Liberty; to his right is Manhattan, the buildings so tall in the morning sun they seem to be figments. His father was a great one for facts, and he told Blue the stories of all the monuments and skyscrapers, vast litanies of detail—the architects, the dates, the political intrigues—and how at one time the Brooklyn Bridge was the tallest was the tallest structure in America. The old man was born the same year the bridge was finished, and there was always the link in Blue’s mind, as though the bridge were somehow a monument to his father. He liked the story he was told that day as he and Blue Senior walked home over the same wooden planks he was walking on now, and for some reason he never forgot it. How John Roebling, the designer of the bridge, got his foot crushed between pilings and a ferry boat just days after finishing the plans and died from gangrene in less than three weeks. He didn’t have to die, Blue’s father said, but the only treatment he would accept was hydrotherapy, and that proved useless, and Blue was struck that a man who had spent his life building bridges over bodies of water so that people wouldn’t get wet should believe that the only true medicine consisted of immersing himself in water. After John Roebling’s death, his son Washington took over as chief engineer, and that was another curious story. Washington Roebling was just thirty-one at the time, with no building experience except for wooden bridges he designed during the Civil War, but he proved to be even more brilliant than his father. Not long after construction began on the Brooklyn Bridge, however, he was trapped for several hours during a fire in one of the underwater caissons and came out of it with a severe case of bends, an excruciating disease in which nitrogen bubbles gather in the blood stream. Nearly killed by the attack, he was thereafter an invalid, unable to leave the top floor room where he and his wife set up house in Brooklyn Heights. There Washington Roebling sat every day for many years, watching the progress of the bridge through a telescope, sending his wife down every morning with his instructions, drawing elaborate color pictures for the foreign workers who spoke no English so they could understand what they could do next, and the remarkable thing was that the whole bridge was literally in his head: every piece of it had been memorized, down to the tiniest bits of steel and stone, and though Washington Roebling never set foot on the bridge, it was totally present inside him, as though by the end of all those years it had somehow grown into his body.
First all that is true. That is part of the history of the Brooklyn Bridge, and if you ever get to see a documentary of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, watch it, it's fascinating. Now this is quite a digression but it's also the first moment that there is any depth to the characters in Ghosts. Until now t's been an abstract story, no real characters except named as colors andsome vague story of a detective following a character, similar to City of Glass but with hardly any details to give them flesh and blood. Here we see Blue's childhood and relationship with his father. All of a sudden it's as if the character has become real, but it's integraated into the true story of the building of the bridge. And there is a parallel that's created, the Roebling father and son and Blue and his father.
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Blue thinks of this now as he makes his way across the river, watching Black ahead of him and remembering his father and his boyhood out in Gravesend. The old man was a cop, later a detective at the 77th precinct, and life would have been good, Blue thinks, if it hadn’t been for the Russo case and the bullet that went through his father’s brain in 1927. Twenty years ago, he says to himself, suddenly appalled by the time that has passed, wondering if there is a heaven, and if so whether or not he will get to see his father again after he dies. He remembers a story from one of the endless magazines he has read this week, a new monthly called Stranger than Fiction, and it seems somehow to follow from all the other thoughts that have just come across to him. Somewhere in the French Alps, he recalls, a man was lost skiing twenty or twenty-five years ago, swallowed up by an avalanche, and his body was never recovered. His son, who was a little boy at the time, grew up and also became a skier. One day in the past year he went skiing, not far from the spot where his father was lost—although he did not know this. Through the minute and persistent displacements of the ice over the decades since his father’s death, the terrain was now completely different from what it had been. All alone there in the mountains, miles away from any other human being, the son chanced upon a body in the ice—a dead body, perfectly intact, as though preserved in suspended animation. Needless to say, the young man stopped to examine it, and as he bent down and looked at the face of the corpse, he had the distinct and terrifying impression that he was looking at himself. Trembling with fear, as the article put it, he inspected the body more closely, all sealed away as it was in the ice, like someone on the other side of a thick window, and saw that it was his father. The dead man was still young, even younger than the son was now, and there was something awesome about it, Blue felt, something so odd and terrible about being older than your own father, that he actually fight back tears as he read the article. Now, as he nears the end of the bridge, these same feelings came back to him, and he wishes to God that his father could be there, walking over the river and telling him stories. The, suddenly aware of what his mind was doing, he wonders why he has turned so sentimental, why after all these thoughts keep coming back to him, when for so many years they have never even occurred to him. It’s all part of it, he thinks, embarrassed at himself for being like this. That’s what happens when you have no one to talk to.
Auster continues building the relationship between Blue and his father, providing the detail of the father's death, and then Blue's thoughts turn to a story he's read in a magazine about another father and son with the son also discovering the death of his father. Now what does all this have to do with the story of Blue following Black? I don't think anything. I think it's just stray thoughts that are not relavant to the plot. Notice this shortly after walking across the bridge. Blue comes across a copy of Walden Pond and discovers it's copywrited by someone named Walter J. Black.
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Blue is momentarily jarred by this coincidence, thinking that perhaps there is some message in it for him, some glimpse of meaning that could make a difference. But then, recovering from the jolt, he begins to think not. It's a common enough name, he says to himself--and besides, he knows for a fact that Black's name is not Walter. Could be a relative, he adds, or maybe even his father.
Well, I haven't finished reading, so I can't be certain, but it's not. There is no connection between the publisher Black and the Black Blue is following. There is no connection between Walden Pond or the Skier story or the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. In a traditional detective story, there are signs and clues that connect events and motivations. What Auster is doing is setting up a disconnect between facts and relavance, a dislocation of signs to narrative events. This falls under the phiosophic study of semiotics. I bet we can apply this disconnect to City of Glass as well. All these allusions are just extraneous signs that are not connected to the narrative in any relavant fashion. Why does Aster do this? It's an aesthetic form to protray his understanding of the life and the universe. I hope that made sense.
