He came from an era when nothing was impossible and humanity strived towards the sky. He was used to scaling great heights and looking down on sprawling cities. But now he was looking down on the train crash at the mouth of the underground station. A small group of strangers had formed a habit of looking at the spectacle every morning, gathering on the bridge crossing the tracks. They greeted each other with a “Good morning” when the weather was pleasant, a nod when it wasn’t, and sometimes just a sigh. They were all older men, except one short, grumpy looking man who was ancient. To pass the time, the others shared anecdotes from the past; he had no such memories. No recollections of family or friends. For him it was a blessing to live only in the here and now. Too many had died in his line of work; he was grateful to have forgotten their names, if only he had also forgotten their faces.
They had similarities dressed in coats that had seen too many winters, caps to protect their bald heads, and nothing better to do. After the first weeks, excitement had quickly turned into boring repetition. Rain or sunshine, they came to look at the workers straining like ants carrying pine needles. The men looked down with grave faces, shaking their heads or airing the occasional comment to break the silence. “That won’t work”, “the shackle will break” or a similar prediction. It was acknowledged by a nod or a grunt from the others. And they were not wrong, he noted, not once.
“It’s like an invisible force working against them,” a man said.
“It’s called gravity,” another replied.
The group chuckled, but not the ancient man. Gravity was an old friend and an old enemy of his, a force that had dominated his life. Nothing to joke about. He felt what the other man felt. There was something cursing this work. As a practical engineer, whose life had depended on understanding basic physics, he wasn’t superstitious. But when he closed his eyes it pushed against him. The accident had been just that, whatever was at play in the cleanup project now was something different.
“They will do the lift soon,” a man said.
“Won’t work. The cable will tear through the train roof. They need to spread the load better, and anchor cables to the steel frame,” a man in hornbeam glasses stated.
The ancient man could hear the certainty in his voice, it wasn’t a prediction based on experience. It was a fact. He closed his eyes and felt the force, tangible as a weight on his chest. True enough, when the crane started reeling in the cable, the roof tore like a sheet of paper. They saw workers waiving their hands at the crane operator and heard the yells. A worker threw his fluorescent yellow hard hat to the ground, cursing.
“Enough excitement for one day,” a man said, and limped away slowly from the group towards the senior housing block.
One by one they dispersed. There were no farewells, no promises to return the next day. These men could tell with certainty what would happen at the crash site, but they were not deluded enough to believe that they could tell if they would be alive tomorrow. The ancient man lingered. The pressure gradually left his chest and he straightened slightly. He turned around, facing north towards the city. Apartment blocks in all directions. Hidden behind them an area with old stand-alone houses and, rising to the sky behind them, the chimney of the power station. It was from the sixties, at the age of fifteen he had scaled the chimney for the first time.
Eventually, lunch time arrived, and he walked over to his bike and swung his leg over the rear wheel. Pedaling lightly he followed the path towards the gas station. The front fender jiggled and rattled, one of the screws holding it in place was missing. He knew how to fix it, but the repairman had suggested buying a new bike, “it won’t last much longer anyway”. Over my dead body, he had thought. The bike was older than the repairman and what did he know about lasting. Arriving at the old gas station, he leaned the bike on one of the giant poplars. A blackbird rustled among the leaves, his favorite bird. One few memories he had left was that of blackbirds singing in the morning as he climbed the chimney. The gas station was a restaurant now, all cars were electric these days. He didn’t mind the fresh air, though not everything had been better back in the day. He had crawled through the inside of chimneys, he knew the taste and smell of soot, but he was done with that. They still had real sausages, rolling on heated pins. Probably lying there since yesterday, just the way he liked them. Better than the new artificial stuff that youngsters ate and drank.
Five minutes later he was on the bike path again. The chimney beckoned to him and he took a slight detour to pass by the power station to take in its glory. Rising one hundred and thirty metres tall, it was a landmark in the city. For a moment he thought he saw a crack in the concrete, impossible! When he looked closer it was gone. I must be imagining things, he thought. It was no longer operational, all maintenance work had ceased. But the work he had done on it would have it last for the rest of his life. He had been offered a fortune to knock it down, piece by piece from the top. Over my dead body, he had thought, and without responding, he had closed the door in the face of the begging city official. Surrounded by a bath house and residential houses, there was no other way to take it down. He was the last one capable of the task.
He took one last glance over his shoulder at the chimney as he crossed the street. The screeching of tires startled him. When the car struck him, he realized what was happening. He felt surprised at first, this wasn’t the way he had imagined it would happen. A sense of betrayal came over him. He had always assumed that work would be his death. It was said that a steeplejack only falls once. But it was never the fall that killed them, it was the ground. He saw the car grinding to a halt as he spun and it was at that last moment he found peace.
The ground rumbled and the air filled with the cracking and crumbling of concrete. The chimney crashed down upon him.
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