And the air … I’d been distracted by my surroundings, but now I realized that I was panting as if I’d been running for miles. The air was thick and sluggish; it took effort to pull it into my lungs and then force it out again, like breathing water. I felt a flicker of panic nudging at the back of my mind: the panic of drowning. Mischke thumped his hand on my back. “It’s best not to think about the air,” he said. “Just breathe the stuff, and you’ll be okay.” Even Mischke’s voice, as big as he was, became weak and feminine in this place. I was about to make a joke to him about this, but the foreman was yelling at us—as well as he could in his enfeebled voice. It was time for us to work, he said.
The work was digging. Just as Mischke had described it with his soup bowl and vodka glass, we were to dig out the dirt from under our feet, and from underneath the walls of the massive structure we were inside. Shovelful by shovelful, we dug. We filled wheelbarrows with dirt and emptied them into a water-filled depression at the center of the caisson. A huge pipe ran from this pool up through the ceiling and on to the surface above, and inside this pipe was a clamshell device that lifted the dirt up to the outside world. Rocks too big to be lifted out in this way were broken up by men with picks. Boulders too big for men with picks were blasted apart with gunpowder. But for me and most of the men in the caisson, all we did was dig. Plunge your shovel into the sandy soil, lift it, dump out the soil. Then do it again, and again, and a thousand more times. It seemed absurd, what we were being asked to do—a few dozen men using the strength of their arms to create an inverse mountain, to lower this monster structure of wood and stone into the earth, like a farmer pounding a fence-post into the ground. But Mischke told me that the caisson was measured to sink a few inches every day, perhaps a foot in a week, a few feet in a month, and by these degrees the job would be done. The tower would have its foundation, the bridge would have its tower, and in time, the river would have its bridge.
So we shoveled.
At our lunch break Mischke went and sat on a bench that was against one of the outside walls of the caisson. Holding a gigantic slab of a sandwich in one hand, he banged on the wall behind us with the beer bottle in his other fist. It clanged metallically. “The inside is covered with sheet iron,” he said. “They didn’t know to do that with the Brooklyn caisson, so it was just wood. One day—it was when the digging in the caisson was almost done—a worker held a candle too close to the calking fiber between the timbers, up near the roof, and it started to burn. Nobody noticed the fire for a while, and by the time they did, it had eaten out a void inside the wood.” He leaned closer to me, looking into my eyes. “Things do not behave down here like they do up in the world. And fire … fire is one thing that behaves very differently.” He pointed up at the ceiling over our heads. “You know the walls and the roof of this caisson are thick, right? Layer on layer of the heaviest timbers, so the roof is fifteen feet thick. Well, that was a good thing, because the fire was burning through all of that. The place where the fire started was a small hole, no bigger than my hand. But inside the timbers of the ceiling, it was like a living thing, eating away more and more of the wood, hollowing out a big chamber. But that wasn’t the strangest thing, or the worst. Once that fire got started, it seemed that nothing would put it out. We used buckets of water at first, then they brought in a big hose and a pump, blasting water into the hole the fire had made. But always as soon as the water stopped, the fire would begin again. It seemed like it would soon eat away the whole top of the caisson, and all the stone of the tower above us and all the water of the East River would come down on our heads.” Mischke paused to chuckle, and I knew it was the sickly expression on my face that was making him laugh.
“So Colonel Roebling, the boss, the chief engineer,” Mischke continued, “he comes down. He has carpenters drill holes to see how far the fire has gone into the wood. They drill here, there, there … and they find live, burning coals two feet deep in the wood, three feet deep, four feet … ”
Mischke had finished his first sandwich, and he took the second out of his lunch pail and made a swooping gesture with it. He was eating a huge amount, even for a man of his size, and he’d emptied two of the four bottles of beer that were in his pail. “Finally Colonel Roebling decides to flood the caisson. He gets all of us out, and then he lets all the air out so that the river floods in, and the whole caisson is full of water. He didn’t want to do this, because he was afraid the water crashing in might wreck the caisson. But there was no choice; the fire would not die any other way. You understand? The fire would not die. Not down here. Not with this air.” Mischke waved his hand through the thick, heavy air between us.
“And it worked?” I asked. “Flooding the caisson put out the fire?”
“Of course! The colonel, he’s a smart man; he knows what he’s doing. They flooded it, and left it full of water for two days. That finally put the fire out. And the caisson wasn’t damaged by the water at all. Once they pumped the water out again, we went back in and had the Brooklyn caisson down to bedrock in two weeks.” He looked at me with a crooked grin of pride. “Forty-five feet below the bottom of the river we dug that thing.” The gong ending our allotted time for lunch sounded, and we stood up to go back to our shoveling. Mischke caught my arm. “You have to understand,” he said, putting his face close to mine again. “It’s different down here.” He stabbed a finger in the direction of his lunch pail. “You see how much I eat? We are all like that down here—you will be too in a day or so. The air does something to you, to your insides, so you burn through food like that fire burned through wood. Everything is different down here. Life is different, fire is different. Even the stones are different!”
I looked at him, not sure what he meant. “The stones?” I asked, but too late; he had turned to pick up his shovel and was walking away to his assigned digging station.
We shoveled. Our shift ended, and we went home and came back the next day and the next and the next. As Mischke predicted, my appetite while in the caisson became as outsized as his. And at the end of each day, as we “locked out” and climbed the spiral stairs to the outside world of afternoon sun and cold November air, a crushing weight of exhaustion descended on me, out of any proportion to the work I had done. I would have been ashamed at my feebleness as I staggered up those steps, but I saw that all the men around me were in the same condition. There was something about leaving the air of the caisson that made the energy drain out of you like water being poured from a jug.
Then one afternoon as we were waiting for the boat that would ferry us to shore, one of the men near me suddenly made a strange yelping sound, crouching in on himself and grabbing at his stomach. A moment later he dropped to his knees, his face screwed up in agony.