From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Monday, May 07, 2001 1:37 PM Fifteenth post Metamorpheus: Four (part 3 of 3) After sex, Orr brushes Arol's hair, then she takes off, claiming that her family will be expecting her. She'd stay if she could she says, but really, why can't she? It seems more likely that she just stopped in for a quickie and now doesn't want to hang around. Orr reassures her that it's OK that she's leaving, but he would like to say more and can't. He has that fear of being crushed, being trapped, still -- i.e., the fear that if he comes out and tells her that he wants her to stay, he'll be admitting his vulnerability, putting himself in her power. Once she leaves, Orr sees a TV in the next room, an old library with shelves bare. It's turned on, but blank. Something dark closes over the view, then withdraws, it's a hand. He sees the man on the bed again; a woman moves away from the camera and goes to brush her hair, staring at "what must be a mirror on the wall." A chair has been shifted and the bed is not quite as neat. The woman looks down at the man, then kisses him on the forehead, smoothes some hair away from his brow, and leaves. Orr doesn't get a good look at her face. He turns off the TV, picks up the phone, and the beeps are not quite regular and a bit faster. It's clear that the woman is Andrea, visiting the narrator in the hospital. The guy in the hospital bed, Sleeping Beauty, has finally gotten his kiss. There is an equivalency between Orr brushing Arrol's hair in the dream and Andrea brushing her hair in reality; was the narrator's fantisized sex with Arrol sparked by Andrea's presence? I'm still not quite sure of how the hospital room is supposed to be set up. Now at least it's confirmed that there is a mirror in it. But I don't really understand how the view works out. So what's the next thing that happens after Sleeping Beauty is kissed? Orr walks outside, the bridge shudders, there's another disaster. His legs and chest hurt, he tries to think of Abberlaine to make himself feel better, but it doesn't work. "It was in a haunted apartment; the ghosts of that mindless noise and that nearly unchanging picture were there all the time, a hand's motion away, a switch-turning away, probably even when I first kissed her, even while her four limbs gripped me and I cried out in terror." Note the quick return to all the recently introduced images: the static and unchanging picture of the TV, Andrea's hand, switching off the TV -- all make it obvious that the experience with Abberlaine was indeed false. Orr is dissatisfied with this new "distraction", as well he should be. Orr tries to remember how the room looks, but sees it in black and white, from up in one corner -- is he seeing the room through on of those corner-placed mirrors that let nurses see around corners as they pass by? Thinking this, Orr approaches a train wreck. He gets drafted to haul a stretcher. He helps to bring a seriously wounded man to an express train, and has to stay there, gripping a torn piece of skin in the man's neck to compress the wound. The man is "unconcious but still suffering", "reduced to something pathetic and animal in his agony." The doctors bandage the man, and Orr is left on the express train as it leaves. He also sees an injured woman giving birth. Orr realizes that he can just stay on the train and, perhaps, escape The Bridge. Should he get off the train? He thinks that Joyce, Brooke, and Arrol would want him to. But he feels that all he's doing is playing games. He refers to the "echoing horror" that happened during sex with Arrol ... He thinks "Here I am in a thing become place..." (the train). He thinks of the train explicitly as a phallic symbol, poised between the limbs of the bridge. He's tempted just to stay on the train and therefore go, "to voyage out bravely leaving the woman at home." "Is a woman a place and a man just a thing?" he wonders. He feels there's something to this idea because he's offended by it. "So what do I represent then, sitting here, inside the train, within the symbol? Good question, I tell myself. Good question." Well, there is only one thing that's symbolically inside a phallic symbol, and that's sperm. Orr is moving towards a new conception and a second birth, a rebirth, like the injured woman who is the last victim of the disaster that he sees. Otherwise, note that Orr's symbolism is not quite symmetrical. Women are "a place" and men are "*just* a thing". Is being objectified as a place supposed to be better than being objectified as a thing? This sounds a bit defensive to me; after all, things get to move, to do things, while places just sit there. Places get conquered -- a bit of an expression from _Inversions_, by the way. Orr's symbolism, seemingly denigrating both sexes equally, conceals a lot of wished-for male dominance within it. Orr rides off. He takes off his hospital identity bracelet, "a little circle of plastic with his name on it", which identifies him as someone who isn't supposed to leave his neighborhood on the bridge. Symbolically, he is leaving his identity as Orr, the man defined by the circular injury on his chest. He feels naked without it. This is the last part of the novel set on The Bridge. It marks a sea change; the rest may still be set within a dream world, but the surroundings are different. It's worth while to think about the characters on the bridge, who we're never going to see again. What was their point, now that we've seen as much of them as we're ever going to? We've gone over Joyce's and Brooke's purposes; Joyce has seemingly won, since Orr has completed Joyce's rejection of his high status with a rejection of the bridge entirely. Arrol did her best to give Orr a reason to stay, but failed, for the reasons discussed above. The only other named character that I can remember Orr exchanging words with is Lynch. Apparently the narrator really needed a complete lower-class stereotype who is never anything else.