Read Online Rose's Garden by Carrie Brown - Free Book Online Page B

over the Mad River, its surface strangely flat and colorless between eroding concrete banks. Once he had seen a great blue heron down here. It had been a strange sight, like a man from the past who wanders through some complicated fold of time to arrive in the present, incongruously dressed, vulnerable, ugly of feature. Conrad, who usually had his binoculars with him when he went for a walk, had pulled them out and put them to his eyes, the world rearing up into close focus inside a tiny circle. Looking through his field glasses, he always felt that he had left his place on the ground, was balanced aloft like a bird, his eyes trained on the bulging and convex dimensions of the world. He had fixed on the heron, alighted on an old truck tire half-submerged near the bank. After a minute it had unfolded its wings and flapped away slowly upriver, as though saddened by the changed reality of what it had found.
    Staring out over the river now, Conrad suffered a moment of terrible disorientation. Leaning over, he put out his hand toward the water, but no reflection met his palm, no answering shape rose to meet his flesh. One of his eyes, his left, had begun troubling him; his vision would fade in and out. Was it this that accounted for the fact that he seemed so insubstantial now, too insubstantial to have a reflection? Trembling, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a handful of coins, leaned over the water again, and let them trickle from his palm. The surface of the water scattered reassuringly as though under a quick shower of rain.
    But the moment when he felt himself to have disappeared, and the unalterable descent of the coins, recalled to him another moment when he had hung above the world, terrified and uncertain.
    IT WAS THE largest, most ambitious gilding job Conrad had ever undertaken. Earlier that year he had gilded a set of enormous gates woven with prancing horses and wild sea froth and wheeling planets at a Du Pont estate in Pennsylvania; it was the first job on which he had tested his new technology: a carbon-core brush used to electronically deposit plating solutions—water-soluble mixtures of zinc, nickel, cadmium, lead, tin, and, of course, gold—on virtually any surface. His employer had been so pleased with Conrad’s meticulous results that he had recommended him for the bank job in Connecticut. After consulting with various engineers, Conrad had decided that the work was best done safely at ground level on thin shells, which could then be hoisted by helicopter and adhered to the original dome. And it would only take about thirty-eight ounces of gold.
    The day the shells were to be fitted in place, Conrad joined the contracting crew as they ascended through the building and swung in harnesses to the lip of the dome itself, where the menwere to catch and steady the new pieces as they hovered above. Conrad himself was just along for the ride, as he put it.
    â€œI just want to see it all fall into place,” he explained as they attached the belt to him.
    But as Conrad and another man stepped to the trapeze and attached themselves to the safety cables, the harness at one end of the trapeze snapped, a noise like the report of a starter’s gun, hollow and pointless. Conrad clung to the cable, the breath itself shocked from him; his partner, suspended in his safety belt, dropped away and caught with a jerk, hanging against the edge of the building like a man pretending flight in a theater performance, strung up awkwardly on guylines.
    It was very quiet. Even the drone of the helicopters seemed to fade away in that moment. The sun, tilting toward noon, roared white and soundless above them. The city lay spread out below, its streets crawling with traffic. Conrad noticed, though he could not have said why, a woman in a lilac coat walking slowly around an empty fountain in the park, with an insect’s creeping pace.
    The dangling man hung perhaps twenty feet from Conrad. When the sound of the