Skinner's Room Page 2

  "Adjusting the brushes," he says.

  "I'll climb." She goes up the ladder. Always keep one hand and one foot on the ladder, Skinner told her, don't think about where you are and don't look down, it's a long climb, up toward the smooth sweep of cable. Skinner must've done it thousands of times, uncounted, unthinking. She reaches the top of this ladder, makes a careful transfer to the second, the short one, that leads to his room.

  He's there, of course, asleep, when she scrambles up through the hatch. She tries to move as quietly as she can, but the jingle of the jacket's chrome hardware disturbs him, or reaches him in his dream, because he calls something out, voice thick with sleep. It might be a woman's name, she thinks. It certainly isn't hers.

  In Skinner's dream now they all run forward, and the police are hesitating, failing back. Overhead the steady drum of the network helicopters with their lights and cameras. Thin rain falls as Skinner locks his cold fingers in the chain link and starts to climb. Behind him a roar goes up, drowning the bullhorns of the police and the National Guard, and Skinner's climbing, kicking the narrow toes of his boots into chain link as though he's gone suddenly weightless—floating up, really, rising on the crowd's roar, the ragged cheer torn from all their lungs. He's there, at the top, for one interminable instant. He jumps. He's the first. He's on the bridge, running, running toward Oakland, as the chain link crashes behind him, his cheeks wet with rain.

  And somewhere off in the night, on the Oakland side, another fence falls, and they meet, these two lost armies, and flow together as one, and huddle there, at the bridge's center, their arms around one another, singing ragged wordless hymns.

  At dawn, the first climbers begin to scale the towers.

  Skinner is with them.

  She's brewing coffee on the Coleman when she sees him open his eyes. "I thought you'd gone," he says. "I took a walk. I'm not going anywhere. There's coffee." He smiled, eyes sliding out of focus. "I was dreaming…"

  "Dreaming what?"

  "I don't remember… we were singing. In the rain…"

  She brings him coffee in the heavy china cup he likes, holds it, helps him drink. "Skinner, were you here when they came from the cities? When they took the bridge?"

  He looks up at her with a strange expression. His eyes widen. He coughs on the coffee, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Yes," he says, "yes. In the rain. We were singing. I remember that."

  "Did you build this place, Skinner? This room? Do you remember?"

  "No," he says, "no… sometimes I don't remember… we climbed. Up. We climbed up past the helicopters. We waved at them… some people fell… at the top. We got to the top…"

  "What happened then?"

  He smiles. "The sun came out. We saw the city."