[video]
Solo
[video]
Damian Lewis on the Band of Brothers set.
(via stayforthecredits)
He felt dull moans in the cable, and a salt breeze from the ocean passed over his back. The swarm changed again. It was close this time, right in front of him, big and shapeless, in flux but also barely there, like a memory of a storm cloud. It came closer and moved with such speed that Tom did not have a chance to sit up. As the swarm passed over him and froze him to the cable with its chill, he squeezed his eyes shut. The vermilion he saw behind his eyes faded. It became a pale white, dim and flickering. He pushed his fingers down to hold on and they gave into the cable as if it were liquid. He tried to stir it, tracing letters, making words as the cold made him completely numb. He wanted to call out, but the swarm would not let him.
—
Two days went by before someone notified the supervisor that Tom was missing. The day after that, the supervisor sent Domingo and Frank up onto the Eastern cable to look for something—perhaps a snapped harness, anything that would clue them in as to what had happened. They scoured the cable from end to end but found no harnesses, no equipment. Domingo only found a message, scratched into the steel of the North tower, just above where the Eastern cable passed through it. It was scrawled deep into the vermillion, and the cuts into the metal already showed signs of corrosion. It read:
the mighty task is never done
He stopped painting. He put his brush away and a few hours later the bristles were hard with drying orange. He turned himself around on the cable and waited to see the swarm again. He made sure not to move. It had to be a work cloud, someone on the cable ruining the paint, creating a ruckus. Tom tried to breathe slowly, and soon he leaned forward until he was laying against the cable, his arms and legs wrapped around it. He wanted to hide, seem invisible, so that he could catch the culprit at the right moment. Identify the person that was erasing what he’d done. As he lay there he could feel periodic vibrations in the steel. Someone was on the cable. It could be kids from the city. The bridge should be better policed he thought, and then he saw the swarm again. It was closer this time, a haze of bluish gray, like sprays of dust that refused to dissipate. It buzzed around the cable until it seemed to turn inward on itself. Tom’s vision filled with dots, flecks of dim nothing that seemed to pull his eyes far beyond the horizon. He grew lightheaded, and felt weightless. He lost a sense of the swarm’s deepness and he wanted to vomit. It stung him with sharp vertigo and suddenly it was if he was looking into the hollow bottom of a cone.
On the fortieth day, near the top of the second suspension tower, he saw something—a haze, a translucent kind of swarm, moving like smoke around the cable. It was far, far away from him, and he saw it only for a fleeting moment. He had to strain his eyes and almost will himself to see it. But it was there.
A month in, his work took him to the middle of the bridge, and by then the corrosion he came across was also accompanied by deep scratches into the metal. “Nothing on Earth can do this,” he muttered to himself amidst the cloak of the fog. “Someone is ruining this. Someone is sabotaging me.” His suspicion transformed into paranoia. Someone was playing a joke on him. Maybe one of the other men. Maybe someone he didn’t know. Someone was following behind him in the distance, and wrecking his path of careful vermilion. Some of the scratches were deep, like cuts. The saboteur had tools and was deliberate. Tom continued to paint, but now his days were mostly filled with looking behind him, keeping still, and trying to see movement. He stared over his shoulder into the vanishing point of the Eastern cable. Sometimes he would stare for hours. Sometimes he would do it longer.
By the sixtieth day, he went into the supervisor’s office and made a demand.
“I want to paint the Eastern cable again.”
“What?”
“For the next 60 days. Put me on the Eastern cable again.”
The supervisor was on the phone, only half-listening. “We rotate the crew for a reason. You’re gonna be on a different part of the bridge.”
“I want the Eastern cable.” The supervisor watched him. He finished up his phone call, hung up the receiver, and stopped looking at Tom.
“What do you want to see up there?”
“I want to see that paint I laid down two months ago.”
“There’s nothing up there.”
“I want the Eastern cable.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Please.” Tom said the word quiet, looking away from the supervisor and to the dust of the floor.
“Okay. Fine. It’s yours.”
Tom started the next day back on the San Francisco side. He climbed up until he reached the base of the Eastern suspension cable. He had a good feeling. He would see his careful work in near mint condition. Instead, he found the corrosion to be rampant and toxic. It was worse than before. Tom felt tears and anxiety behind his eyes, and as he painted that day, his brush passed vermilion over the metal softly. His wrist felt very weak.
In the next week, Tom found more of the bridge in horrible condition. All along the Eastern cable the corrosion was rampant, like a skin disease eating into the iron bone. It infuriated him. “Couldn’t happen in a hundred years!” he found himself yelling to no one, into the sky. “Not in a hundred years…” The rust patches stretched for yards at a time. Tom would have to drag himself across the powdery orange and brown of the oxidation as he straddled the cable and worked. The inner thighs of his jumpsuit became permanently tainted with the color of rust.
He grew restless, and one morning during the fifth week he walked into his supervisor’s office, and demanded an explanation.
“What’s going on with the bridge?” Tom asked, pacing in the narrow office just down the hall from the men’s lockers. “Is there something you’re not telling us?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the supervisor without looking at him. The man was bigger now that he wasn’t up on the bridge every day. He’d graduated from the Golden Gate to this room, with a window that looked out onto the bridge he used to scale in his youth. Tom doubted he’d ever be able to get up onto it again.
“Where we getting our iron from? It’s getting eaten up out there. Two months and the paint looks like hell.” Tom was running through the possible explanations he’d spent time thinking of on the bridge.
“Iron’s fine. Reports show nothing different,” said the supervisor.
“Who worked the Eastern cable in the last cycle, the last one before me?”
“What’s it matter to you?”
“They might’ve skipped over a lot, I mean you should see it, it really looks like hell up there.” The supervisor stared at him for a moment, a long while. He flipped through some papers in a folder nearby.
“Domingo.”
“Domingo. Okay. Yeah, I think Domingo might’ve been slackin‘ it, I don’t know.”
“Just paint the bridge, Tom.”
“I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’,” Tom said as he walked out of the office. He stopped by a group of guys near the lockers, and saw Domingo. “Domingo, how’d the Eastern cable treat you last cycle?” Tom asked. The lanky Latino turned and looked with unchallenged black eyes. Domingo was older than Tom, and had worked the bridge longer. He always said the least of any of the men.
“Cable was okay… Why you ask?” he uttered in his accent.
“I just… I just don’t know if you did worth a shit on it, it’s all corroded to hell up there.” Domingo’s face grew taut and he took a step closer to Tom. “What you say, sonny?” The other men began to grumble and get in between them. Tom didn’t want to fight, he just wanted everyone to do a good job.
“You gotta paint more carefully,” Tom said, shaking his head.
“I gotta do what, you say?” Domingo came at him, voice growing louder. The men stopped him from getting closer, and a few seconds later, Tom was already gone from the room.