THE PONTIFEX

More about THE PONTIFEX

Nobody knew exactly when the Pontifex began building bridges.

Some said he was born on a Tuesday in Oregon, during a rainstorm that had been going on for three hundred years. Others insisted he had once been a perfectly ordinary man who missed the last bus and decided to walk across eternity instead.

He wore a black overcoat and carried a small wooden box containing nine pieces of fog.

Each piece had a different colour.

He had collected them from places that no longer existed, including a railway station in Russia, a forest where the moon had fallen asleep, and a little town that had been demolished to make room for a larger little town.

The Pontifex was employed by the Department of Unnecessary Crossings.

His job was to build bridges between things that had absolutely no business being connected.

He built a bridge between a widow’s forgotten dream and a bowl of soup.

He built another between the first kiss of a sixteen-year-old girl and the last cigarette smoked by a man dying in a hospital in Spokane.

Nobody used these bridges very much.

That didn’t bother him.

“Bridges are like poems,” he said. “They don’t have to go anywhere. They just have to be there when somebody needs them.”

One morning he found a pearl floating in a puddle beside an abandoned bus stop.

Inside the pearl was a tiny ocean.

On that ocean a man was rowing a boat toward a city that had not yet been invented.

The Pontifex put the pearl in his pocket.

That afternoon he crossed a stone bridge suspended between two banks of clouds. The clouds were enormous, like sleeping cattle that had forgotten the invention of gravity.

Below him were eighty-one little worlds arranged in a square.

Each world contained a bridge, a lonely pedestrian, and a destination obscured by fog.

He noticed that the pedestrians were all himself.

Some were young. Some were old. One had died forty years ago but continued walking out of habit.

The Pontifex waved.

None of them waved back.

This was disappointing but understandable.

At the far end of the bridge stood a woman selling tickets to yesterday.

“How much?” he asked.

“One memory,” she answered.

He thought about this for a long time.

Then he took the pearl from his pocket and handed it to her.

She listened to the little ocean inside.

“There’s somebody rowing,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Where is he going?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled and gave him a ticket.

It was blank.

He crossed into yesterday and discovered that yesterday was exactly like tomorrow, except that all the clocks were filled with seawater and the birds flew backward through their own songs.

He sat down on a bench.

For the first time in his life, he had nowhere to build a bridge.

This was a terrible relief.

Far away, someone was waiting for a bus that would never arrive.

The Pontifex took off his shoes.

He put his feet into the fog.

It was warm.

He wondered whether the universe was nothing more than a vast collection of missed connections, lovingly maintained by an incompetent municipal employee.

Then a small cloud drifted past and settled on his knees.

It looked like a sleeping cat.

He stroked it until evening.

Somewhere beneath him, the man in the little boat reached the shore.

There was nobody there to meet him.

But there was a bridge.

And that was enough.