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The Bridge

Rebecca Lee

    Just keep your eyes down and hope for the best. It’s the refrain I’ve been telling myself for the past year. Ever since NPR was taken over by the president, I haven’t been able to trust the news. Diane Rehm is gone. Terry Gross has been replaced. Even the New York Times isn’t what it used to be.
    Two days after the president was elected, all of the newspapers reported the same story:
    “Today The Golden President has promised a new life for those who demonstrate absolute patriotism. Today marks a new path for immigrants. A bridge to a new destiny for those who do not belong in the United States will be built in four years time.”

    Just keep your eyes down and hope for the best. The jobs shortened six months ago. Mandatory ID checks were enforced at every grocery store, restaurant, bank, and local place of business all over the country. Being an undocumented immigrant, I knew the ID crackdown would lead to lower and lower paying jobs. No longer could I support my family through restaurant work. No longer could I sell things on Ebay. No longer could I go anywhere without a proper American ID.
    Just keep your eyes down and hope for the best. My career came soon after the crackdown. It was the last of the paying jobs a man like me could get. I reasoned it wouldn’t be so bad. I reasoned the mandatory long hours were for the best. More money for my family. More responsibility for my whereabouts.
    My job was to help build the bridge to the Middle East. I suspected that the bridge would be the inevitable transport for all the illegal ‘aliens’. I suspected eventually they would send us down the bridge, never to be seen again, deported to another land where we did not belong.
    Just keep your eyes down and hope for the best. I work on the bridge day and night. When it is hot, I take my shirt off and bathe in the hot afternoon sun. When it is cold out, I work faster, harder, longer, in hopes of building up a comfortable sweat. We all must work long hours to get the bridge built before the end of The Golden Presidency. Without the bridge, his promise is a public failure.
    Our president’s blond hair and squinty blue eyes belong to the face of a pure American. The term was coined, himself. The Golden President promises good fortune, more jobs, and a rich lifestyle to those who deserve it. He promises the aliens will be gone before he is done.
    I look at my skin and expect to see green. I touch my head and I expect an antenna. Still, it is just me. Two eyes a nose and one closed mouth.
    Just keep your eyes down and hope for the best. It has been seven months since I started working on the bridge. This is the first day I’ve heard sirens. The supervisors with their loudspeakers are yelling. We must congregate at the end of the bridge.
    Crowded together we are a sea of color. There are the Mexicans. There are the Africans. There are the Arabs and the Russians and the Albanians. There are no green men.
    I watch as the hired supervisors stand in a line next to the end of the bridge. The bridge stretches out far into the ocean until at last, it doesn’t. Its un-built edge is hard and jagged and juts straight out. Looking down I can see another color. The ice blue ocean beneath us.
    “You have come to the end of the line,” one supervisor is yelling into his loudspeaker. “You must jump. All of you. One by one into the ocean.”
    He pushes a boy no older than 18 off the bridge. The boy’s eyes, terrified and pleading, stare up into the sky, begging for refuge.
    Just keep your eyes down and hope for the best. I promise myself I will never look up. I will never dare to hope for something out of reach.

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