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over the Fremont Bridge instead of the bridge he was biking over, the Broadway Bridge, which was a more workmanlike affair, maroon and million-riveted; a bascule bridge with chunky block piers like galoshes. The Fremont Bridge was so beautiful, massive and graceful at once, a marvel of engineering. A brisk wind in the seagullosphere snapped the flags at the apex of its arc. The river below was a deep, churning green.
    One morning six months back, Leo had found his car skewed and curb-jumped before his house. So it was no dream, he’d thought, filled with shame and dread and panic. It was easier to quit driving than drinking, so Leo had transformed himself into a committed cyclist. But now, the fact that there was no pedestrian or bike path on the Fremont Bridge was an affront to him. Leo knew well that driving over the top deck of that bridge, especially at speed, was a real zooter. A state-subsidized roller coaster for the auto-addicted, he thought to himself as he looked at the Fremont’s graceful trajectory, which lay along a much shorter path between his home and workplace—another affront, to be denied not only the most glamorous but also the most direct route to his destination. Why should so much of the might of the state go to flinging out these ribbons of concrete so that citizens can zoom around in their private metal zoom-arounders?
    He was getting indignant. Leo was good at indignant. Also burdened; he could do a good burdened. But indignant was one of the few aggressive postures he could strike convincingly—something having to do with the mix of blue-blood Yankee yeoman farmer and Mayflower screwball and tough prairie Protestant in his pedigree. A crackpot uncle of his, in Maine, had twice handcuffed himself to heavy equipment to obstruct the construction of cell phone towers. There was a gene Leo wouldn’t mind expressing.
    Yes, he thought as he passed too close to a shuffle-jogging man upholstered in a damp terry tracksuit, pedaling over the Fremont Bridge in the morning would be an excellent start to the day . Maybe he should lead a political campaign to get a pedestrian and bicycle right-of-way added to the bridge. Maybe by his efforts the bridge would become a century-defining nonmotorized boulevard and, upon his death, from kiteboarding or something, would be named after him. A man who looked like a teddy bear was cursing at him. Why?
    Now a gust came up off the water and flung the tassel-terminated strings of his woolen hat behind his head. He biked faster. The gust brought him news—yeast and pine gum and benzene and bleach and fir and mud and pulp and slurry. Atop the Fremont Bridge, you could probably smell for miles, thought Leo as he coasted across the humbler bridge, filling his lungs with air and his eyes with light.
    Then a cloud scudded before the sun and the bridge quit humming beneath him and the wind ceased to carry meaning and in countless other ways the grandeur fled, like shining back into shook foil. The strange brew of neurotransmitters that had encouraged the bike-activist fantasy sloshed up against some limiting mechanism and began to recede; the recipe was tweaked, and chemicals brushed past one another, exchanging glances, methyl groups. Leo started the process, which would increase in period and intensity throughout the day, of telling himself that he was a loser and a failure.
    Where to begin? People who get bike lanes added to bridges are committed people, five-year-plan people. Tireless campaigners who probably cared more about ideas than they did about themselves. How do you care about something more than yourself? Leo wondered. Daydreaming about bridges bearing his name? Please. He hadn’t voted in years, he wasn’t wearing a helmet, he had only one brake, he was late for work, and he worked at a preschool.
    “Fuck. I hate myself,” he whispered, spit drying on his chin.
    Leo waited at the traffic light at the end of the bridge. He marveled at the vast post office—was