A warm day in early October 2022. I am thirty-seven years old, in Connecticut. I bought my house a year and a half ago in a small farming village about an hour west of the town where I was raised, with a bunch of money I made selling paintings of well-known people I’ve never met who appear to me constantly on screens everywhere. The rural home purchase supports my desire to find a more ideal version of the geographical, topographical landscape familiar to me from my youth, as well as to effect distance between myself and the ever-more-ineluctable “digital media landscape” I associate with the metropolis two hours to the south. 

I’ve just opened and closed a solo exhibition in Paris titled Misery. I populated the show with portraits of movie stars accepting Academy Awards, plus three random paintings of Holstein Friesian dairy cattle. I have been downloading Hollywood stock photography to use as source material for years. Stock photos of livestock don’t seem like much of a leap, but the collectors are confused. I don’t care; I am an artist in the gallery’s stable of talent—another sort of livestock. Most of my new neighbors in Connecticut are cows, of whom I am fond. I had the gallery install red carpeting throughout the space because the show was Oscars-themed, but also because red complemented the green grazing pastures upon which these bovines feature. It was incongruent, glamorous. 

Today’s the first decent weather following a week of rain, the tail end of a hurricane that drifted up here after blowing most of Florida to smithereens. I’ve thought about Fisher every day since I looked him up eight months ago. With Paris finished, I have nothing to work on and I hate wasting time, so I’ve decided to go to Massachusetts, where the grief might break and dissolve into something else. Janet Malcolm: “It is a commonplace of visits to places where something bad happened that no trace of it remains; the visitor is struck by the absence of what he has come to ‘see.’ ” That very well may be. Assuming it is, wouldn’t that be the point? 

The yellow, orange, red, and green foliage asserts itself as soon as I exit the interstate and enter the Pioneer Valley. Pumpkin patches and cornfields, decrepit houses, horse barns, men in work shirts, stone walls, and cemeteries. I stop at a roadside convenience to buy a bottle of water, and the old woman behind the counter makes a comment about “Indian summer.” When our transaction is finished, she calls out to her back-room associate and says, “Well, I’ll be dipped” instead of “Well, I’ll be damned,” which is exactly what my grandmother used to say, in deference to God’s wrath. I realize I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek too hard and have drawn blood. This is how I know I am anxious. 

I pull off Route 2 into a parking area near an unimpressive stretch of lazy stream. The French King Bridge stretches 782 feet across the Connecticut River, connecting two nearby towns, Millers Falls and Gill. I had entered the bridge as my destination in the app on my iPhone but the phone led me here, to a parking lot and a sign, large, that reads, WELCOME TO ERVING on one side and, on the other, GREAT PLACE TO LIVE. I study the map on my phone and realize that I haven’t gone far enough. 

I’ve googled the bridge already, just like I googled my dead friend when I thought he was living. I found it was beautiful, like my friend used to be. When they designed it, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works’s plan was to reroute a treacherous section of the old Mohawk Trail highway. Those in charge surveyed and weighed in on other sites, including much lower crossings up- or downriver. But maybe we needed something tall to aspire to. The bedrock at Gill was firm, the better to support a hundred-and-forty-foot-tall, three-span cantilever arch bridge within spitting distance of the French King Rock, a monumental stone sticking up out of the water, so named for the glory of Louis XIV by scouting officers ahead of the French and Indian Wars of 1688–1763. Construction began in September 1931 and was completed a year later, near the height of the Great Depression. The American Institute of Steel Construction awarded it the prize for the country’s most beautiful steel bridge in its class. 

My big idea is to park my car halfway across the bridge, which is illegal, although at fifty feet wide, the two-lane roadway should allow for it. My research indicates that there are cameras positioned to take notice when drivers pull over in order to do what I am about to pretend to do. Like never before, I want to beckon cops hither. I want to know what it sounds like when police try to prevent someone from ending his life. They do not have an excellent track record. But there is nowhere to pull over, because of a construction crew that is erecting wrought-iron barriers along the footpath. Crossing via car is hardly delayed, in fact, so I get to enjoy Fisher’s last, breathtaking view of Earth for less than one minute. The landscape is ancient and furious, the river is mighty, the sky is clear after all that rain. 

There are signs bolted to the original railing, which is only three and a half feet high. Jesus Christ, so easy. The signs say, DESPERATE? CALL US. WE LISTEN. SAMARITANS and then a phone number. The view from the bridge will be diminished by the barriers, which look like prison bars, an unsubtle reminder of the need to escape. I think of the immiseration of the various communities scattered around the valley. Nice people tasked with caring for the disabled and depressed, who include veterans of ludicrous foreign wars with minds hastened toward self-destruction, their need for relief made ridiculous by the insufficiencies afforded them, such as the flippant condescension of a euphemism barely visible at night.