Guthridge: The Bridge
Jul. 11th, 2011 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteAndromeda is the child of a White teacher and an Ingalikmiut woman who has long since left them to live in Anchorage; her father was originally attracted to her because of her abiding sorrow and the fond but misguided notion he could bring her enough happiness to pull her out of it. Years later, her ex and children still live on Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia. In the wake of greenhouse warming, this part of the ocean has been ice-free throughout the year for long enough that the U.S. and Russia built a bridge connecting the two countries. (The 80-km bridge would be quite the engineering feat, but feasible enough that it’s been seriously proposed in the past; the water depth would be no more than a couple hundred feet, even accounting for the predicted sea level rise.) At one point, heavy trucks used to bring goods back and forth between the two countries, leading to a measure of economic prosperity for the islanders, but troubles in both nations have caused the traffic to vanish. Now, the islanders survive mostly on the government royalties from oil sales that all Alaskans receive.
The story begins with a present-tense narration, with the unnamed narrator watching a teenager, 17 and already pregnant with her second child, her father and brother “gone”. She’s filling out an unspecified checklist that seems like make-work, and resenting it, and possibly considering throwing herself off the bridge to end it all. The split between this omniscient third-person POV and subsequent first-person accounts is jarring and confusing and may throw you out of the story if you’re not willing to persist, but persist and you’ll be rewarded—just not in anything resembling a pleasant way. [If you have a sensitive nature at all, stop reading this review now and don’t read the rest of the story. The story’s wrenching, even stripped of nuance and detail as it must be in a review.]
[Spoilers] Two of the locals, Preston Robert and Mukta, have found a way to supplement the village’s income—by selling their emotions and sensations over the Web to people who are curious about how the Ingalikmiut perceive their world. They do it using the computers in the middle of Andromeda’s father’s classroom, entering and leaving with no concern for whether this might disrupt classes; like many natives, they resent the White man in their midst, have no desire to show him any respect, and constantly rub his nose in the fact that he doesn’t belong here, despite his self-avowed mission to rescue the children through education and give them hope of something better. Though he’d like to keep them out of his class, he’s been warned that they are “untouchable” because of the income they bring in. But their occupation is hazardous, and when Mukta’s work triggers a seizure, Andromeda’s father tears him away from the computer and keeps him alive until the village medic can take over. Enraged by this close call, Andromeda’s father locks the doors to the classroom and denies access to the computers to anyone but the students, enraging Preston—who gains his revenge in short order by killing the teacher and making it look like he fell into the ocean and drowned.
But it gets worse. Preston gains his first revenge on the teacher by raping Andromeda—repeatedly, initially with a condom but later getting her pregnant. She is unable to bring herself to turn him in because he threatens to harm her family if she does, and when Preston kills her father, this leaves her with an enormous burden of guilt. We soon infer that the woman the narrator was watching in the opening passages is Andromeda herself, though we don’t yet learn how she’s able to watch herself: Is she reliving memories from a safe distance, or distancing herself from events the way many trauma survivors do? Andromeda’s situation grows ever worse. Their father did not change his life insurance policy after his wife left him, so Andromeda’s delinquent mother receives all the money and will not share it with her children. They have no way to survive, as the community support net that once existed has long since been destroyed by the endless grinding hopelessness resulting from the destruction of the traditional native way of life. Gwimaq, her twin brother, must turn to selling his emotions over the Web, though it may be killing him and though most of the money goes to Preston’s gang. One day, when Preston reveals his plans for Andromeda and Gwimaq can endure no more, he sets out to kill Preston and his cronies. He fails, and flees across the bridge to Russia, abandoning his sister to their tender mercies. When Preston rapes her again, this time for all the world to see (and pay for) over the Web, Andromeda commits suicide by chaining herself naked outdoors so the cold will kill her. She hopes that when the police investigate, they’ll find her pregnant, figure out who the father is, and bring Preston to justice—but she’s forgotten the ever-hungry birds, who soon strip her corpse and leave no evidence behind but the bones. Andromeda has moved on, becoming part of the northern aurora, watching from above, but it’s not a hopeful transcendence: what sustains her is anger and a desire to watch vengeance slowly unfold as her village slowly sinks beneath the sea.
“The Bridge” is unrelentingly depressing, immersing us ever deeper into the grinding hopelessness of Andromeda and hinting that the other villagers may fare no better. There are scant moments of grace that give Andromeda strength to carry on. She and her father seem to have had a loving, heartwarming relationship, playing at games together such as walking together into the snow, then backtracking carefully in their footprints so it seems like they vanished at the end of the trail. She’s obsessed with or perhaps possessed by numbers, making her seem “slow” to outsiders, when in fact she’s able to perceive the auras and emotions people have and the endless stream of numbers that makes up the world, and it’s a source of beauty of a kind; this explains her passivity to some extent, since the description sounds very much like a form of autism. She wears three watches on each arm so she can track elapsed times from key events, such as the date of her first rape and the arrival of the telescope. They’re probably gifts from her father since she would have had little money of her own. Her father was fascinated with astronomy, and shared that love with her when the two pool their scant resources and purchased each other a telescope as a mutual gift. When she tells us of how she finds her father drowned, with his “glow” gone, she compares his corpse with the dark heart of the Andromeda galaxy that is her namesake, and she thinks of it as the place “where numbers go to die” (a clever, if chilling, description of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy).
Guthridge’s descriptions of the aurora and northern climes reminded me profoundly of their cold beauty, though in my case I’ve only seen it from northern Ontario rather than the Arctic. It’s spectacular enough from that distance that it must be mind-boggling farther north. The descriptions of traditional aboveground burials because the ground is frozen too hard to excavate (though by the story’s time, it would no longer be frozen that hard during the summer) and of covering the coffin with stones to protect against bears (which are long gone, dead or migrated) are poignant reminders of traditions that have persisted through the ages long after their original reasons are gone.
But these are rare grace notes in the progressively deepening horror of Andromeda’s life. The biographical note tells us that Guthridge has lived the life of the teacher he describes in this story, so he knows what he’s describing when he tells us of the life of the villagers; the hopelessness and endless tragedies of life in remote settlements that I’ve read about almost defy comprehension to a privileged child of the middle class like me. (His descriptions of the people rang very true, both the good and the bad, based on the aboriginal Canadians I’ve known over the years.) What he’s accomplished in this story, if you’re willing to let yourself feel it, is to make you feel in unflinching and inescapable detail what it feels like to be a native in such a community—and there’s no small irony in how this echoes the way the Ingalikmiut sell their own stories over the Web to survive. (To be clear: that’s not a criticism. Understanding and a desire to help begins with empathy, and Guthridge establishes that empathy.) It’s masterfully done, but it’s not a journey for the faint of heart to undertake. As the only story in this book that deals with the plight of the disenfranchised aboriginal people who will reap what we have sown, it’s a brutal reminder that bad as our situation may become, many others will have it far worse.
The story begins with a present-tense narration, with the unnamed narrator watching a teenager, 17 and already pregnant with her second child, her father and brother “gone”. She’s filling out an unspecified checklist that seems like make-work, and resenting it, and possibly considering throwing herself off the bridge to end it all. The split between this omniscient third-person POV and subsequent first-person accounts is jarring and confusing and may throw you out of the story if you’re not willing to persist, but persist and you’ll be rewarded—just not in anything resembling a pleasant way. [If you have a sensitive nature at all, stop reading this review now and don’t read the rest of the story. The story’s wrenching, even stripped of nuance and detail as it must be in a review.]
[Spoilers] Two of the locals, Preston Robert and Mukta, have found a way to supplement the village’s income—by selling their emotions and sensations over the Web to people who are curious about how the Ingalikmiut perceive their world. They do it using the computers in the middle of Andromeda’s father’s classroom, entering and leaving with no concern for whether this might disrupt classes; like many natives, they resent the White man in their midst, have no desire to show him any respect, and constantly rub his nose in the fact that he doesn’t belong here, despite his self-avowed mission to rescue the children through education and give them hope of something better. Though he’d like to keep them out of his class, he’s been warned that they are “untouchable” because of the income they bring in. But their occupation is hazardous, and when Mukta’s work triggers a seizure, Andromeda’s father tears him away from the computer and keeps him alive until the village medic can take over. Enraged by this close call, Andromeda’s father locks the doors to the classroom and denies access to the computers to anyone but the students, enraging Preston—who gains his revenge in short order by killing the teacher and making it look like he fell into the ocean and drowned.
But it gets worse. Preston gains his first revenge on the teacher by raping Andromeda—repeatedly, initially with a condom but later getting her pregnant. She is unable to bring herself to turn him in because he threatens to harm her family if she does, and when Preston kills her father, this leaves her with an enormous burden of guilt. We soon infer that the woman the narrator was watching in the opening passages is Andromeda herself, though we don’t yet learn how she’s able to watch herself: Is she reliving memories from a safe distance, or distancing herself from events the way many trauma survivors do? Andromeda’s situation grows ever worse. Their father did not change his life insurance policy after his wife left him, so Andromeda’s delinquent mother receives all the money and will not share it with her children. They have no way to survive, as the community support net that once existed has long since been destroyed by the endless grinding hopelessness resulting from the destruction of the traditional native way of life. Gwimaq, her twin brother, must turn to selling his emotions over the Web, though it may be killing him and though most of the money goes to Preston’s gang. One day, when Preston reveals his plans for Andromeda and Gwimaq can endure no more, he sets out to kill Preston and his cronies. He fails, and flees across the bridge to Russia, abandoning his sister to their tender mercies. When Preston rapes her again, this time for all the world to see (and pay for) over the Web, Andromeda commits suicide by chaining herself naked outdoors so the cold will kill her. She hopes that when the police investigate, they’ll find her pregnant, figure out who the father is, and bring Preston to justice—but she’s forgotten the ever-hungry birds, who soon strip her corpse and leave no evidence behind but the bones. Andromeda has moved on, becoming part of the northern aurora, watching from above, but it’s not a hopeful transcendence: what sustains her is anger and a desire to watch vengeance slowly unfold as her village slowly sinks beneath the sea.
“The Bridge” is unrelentingly depressing, immersing us ever deeper into the grinding hopelessness of Andromeda and hinting that the other villagers may fare no better. There are scant moments of grace that give Andromeda strength to carry on. She and her father seem to have had a loving, heartwarming relationship, playing at games together such as walking together into the snow, then backtracking carefully in their footprints so it seems like they vanished at the end of the trail. She’s obsessed with or perhaps possessed by numbers, making her seem “slow” to outsiders, when in fact she’s able to perceive the auras and emotions people have and the endless stream of numbers that makes up the world, and it’s a source of beauty of a kind; this explains her passivity to some extent, since the description sounds very much like a form of autism. She wears three watches on each arm so she can track elapsed times from key events, such as the date of her first rape and the arrival of the telescope. They’re probably gifts from her father since she would have had little money of her own. Her father was fascinated with astronomy, and shared that love with her when the two pool their scant resources and purchased each other a telescope as a mutual gift. When she tells us of how she finds her father drowned, with his “glow” gone, she compares his corpse with the dark heart of the Andromeda galaxy that is her namesake, and she thinks of it as the place “where numbers go to die” (a clever, if chilling, description of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy).
Guthridge’s descriptions of the aurora and northern climes reminded me profoundly of their cold beauty, though in my case I’ve only seen it from northern Ontario rather than the Arctic. It’s spectacular enough from that distance that it must be mind-boggling farther north. The descriptions of traditional aboveground burials because the ground is frozen too hard to excavate (though by the story’s time, it would no longer be frozen that hard during the summer) and of covering the coffin with stones to protect against bears (which are long gone, dead or migrated) are poignant reminders of traditions that have persisted through the ages long after their original reasons are gone.
But these are rare grace notes in the progressively deepening horror of Andromeda’s life. The biographical note tells us that Guthridge has lived the life of the teacher he describes in this story, so he knows what he’s describing when he tells us of the life of the villagers; the hopelessness and endless tragedies of life in remote settlements that I’ve read about almost defy comprehension to a privileged child of the middle class like me. (His descriptions of the people rang very true, both the good and the bad, based on the aboriginal Canadians I’ve known over the years.) What he’s accomplished in this story, if you’re willing to let yourself feel it, is to make you feel in unflinching and inescapable detail what it feels like to be a native in such a community—and there’s no small irony in how this echoes the way the Ingalikmiut sell their own stories over the Web to survive. (To be clear: that’s not a criticism. Understanding and a desire to help begins with empathy, and Guthridge establishes that empathy.) It’s masterfully done, but it’s not a journey for the faint of heart to undertake. As the only story in this book that deals with the plight of the disenfranchised aboriginal people who will reap what we have sown, it’s a brutal reminder that bad as our situation may become, many others will have it far worse.