San Francisco Noir

THE NEUTRAL ZONE BY KATE BRAVERMAN

Fisherman’s Wharf

Zoë and Clarissa meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone. The landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood. The carousel spins in predictable orbits and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. These hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel does not require calculus, rehab, or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.

“I’m here,” Zoë says from her cell phone.

“At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.

“Little anemic waves at my feet. Corn dogs that give you cancer. Old men catching perch with so much mercury they explode as they reel them in,” Zoë reports.

“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks.

“Last-ditch leukemia IV drip blue,” Zoë decides.

“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”

Zoë has no interest in who Clarissa will abandon or strand at a conference table, restaurant, or health club. No callbacks, a medical emergency, cancel everything, Clarissa will inform her staff. It’s a day for experimental time travel.

They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments and behaviors, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses never seen, husbands dead or divorced, known only by anecdote or photograph. Entire strata of their lives are less than footnotes. Years passed when they did not know one another’s addresses or current last names. Decades when they could have been driftwood to one another, vessels lost at sea. A drowned stranger, perhaps, why bother?

“This litany of blame is becoming tedious,” Zoë once recognized.

“Human perimeters are collective background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded. “It’s residual static from a Baptist radio broadcast in Mississippi. It’s irrelevant and obsolete.”

“We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” Zoë offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”

“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields,” Clarissa was enthusiastic. “We’ll crawl our Ho Chi Minh trail, hand-in-hand, trusting each other with our lives.”

“But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” Zoë prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”

“Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”

“We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” Zoë said.

It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, bay studded with cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. Zoë had lived two years without electricity in a shack on a nameless river of red orchids in the jungle near Hana. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably didn’t know there were sea-sons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening, and the mosquitoes went in temporary remission.

“I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”

“Should we reject linearity entirely?” Zoë asked. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”

“Discreet and unpredictable meetings with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa replied. “We’ll wear asbestos jackets.”

A process of accommodation and evolution was plausible, they agreed. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret do not apply to them. They would have a pact, an armistice, like aggressive radical improvisational surgery. Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. The possibility of malignant complications was an acceptable risk. Then they had shaken hands.

Now Zoë sees Clarissa. She is exiting a black Lincoln town car, wearing her standard business outfit-aerobics pants and jacket, Gucci sunglasses and Giants baseball cap. It’s the camouflaged movie star look designed to create the impression that you’re attempting to be incognito. Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, which would be appropriate and predictable, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and gold braid handles. It’s the uniform the narcissistic personality disorder dictates.

They kiss on each cheek. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins. She dismisses the car and driver with a hand gesture.

“I didn’t sign on as a soccer mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank-you cards. I don’t answer the phone. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” Zoë reminds her.

“Don’t you go to bed before Thanksgiving and not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa’s voice is light.

“That was my mother,” Zoë says. “I simply leave the country at appropriate junctures.”

Actually, Zoë is fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia. Ornately decorated pine trees in the air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet. Bamboo balconies draped in green velvets, antique brocades, and holly wreaths. More fetishes. And Christmas carols rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation they’re almost tolerable. Rivers smell of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires, and hunger. Air is layers of decaying prayers that remind her of a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it is 103 degrees.

“Let’s just be here now,” Clarissa says. “We know the rules. It’s play time.” Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen Zoë doesn’t want to consider.

The wharf is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week, in an undifferentiated season. It’s another windswept early November. They walk hand-in-hand down the pier past occasional immigrant men fishing and stray teenagers who appear eager for corruption. Zoë and Clarissa know where they live. They, too, grew up in tenements designed for transience, already shabby decades ago, festering like sun sores. They were an integral part of the blueprint for the millennial slums in the sun. They were the penciled-in stick figures on the diagrams.

“Don’t look,” Clarissa cautions. “They’re contagious. We’ll get a contact psychotic flashback.”

The Last Edge Saloon perches on the furthest border of the pier. Their reunions begin here. They choose a booth facing the bay on three sides. They might drink coffee, perhaps with Dexedrine. Or get drunk on something festive, like White Russians or champagne. Since Zoë is technically in AA, she decides to let Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it’s the obvious choice.

“You still look like a hippy,” Clarissa observes. She regards her with a smile that is speciously conciliatory, perhaps even condescending. Zoë interprets this as disturbing. Anxiety is inseparable from the air. It’s in the oxygen molecules and how their biochemistry fails to correctly process them. It’s a perpetual uneasy truce.

“It’s my signature classic bohemian style,” Zoë replies. “And I want to formalize our alliance.”

“Do you want to get married?” Clarissa asks.

“I want a document with terms, precise specifications,” Zoë realizes. “And I want a weapons check.”

“Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re a wish list for Santa.” She’s a lawyer, after all. She knows.

“We could become cousins,” Zoë suggests. This appeals to her.

Survivors of cataclysmic childhoods defined by poverty and isolation compulsively seek validation. They know they lack proper emotional documentation. Cousins evokes a blood connection that would both substantiate and obviate certain complexities, the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. Such a device would highlight and justify their erratic and pathologically intense con-junction. In regions of bamboo and sun-rotted petals, wind propels sand like tiny bullets, and there are always too few artifacts. Cousins is an inspiration.

“I could draw up the papers,” Clarissa is expansive. “But adoption is superior.”

Zoë came to San Francisco when she was seven. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. She used to think heaven was a foster home. If Marvin would just finally die, perhaps she could even get adopted.

“I’ve missed you like a first love,” Zoë says.

“I was your first love,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you mine.”

They lean across the faux-wood table etched with knife-gouged gang insignias and logos of metal bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. Zoë and Clarissa share numerous personality disorders. They are both bipolar 2 with borderline features. Substance abuse is a persistent irritant. Recently, they have both been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Today, sun turns San Francisco Bay the purple of noon irises in country gardens in July. To articulate such facets, to know and chart them, is a spasm of thunder inside, a tiny birth the size of a violet’s mouth. If she extracted this entity from her body, she could give it to Clarissa like an infant.

Zoë examines her almost cousin’s eyes. Even through dark sunglasses, they are inordinately bright. Zoë senses that she, too, is also glowing. Yes, her eyes are brass corridors reflecting fluorescent light. They are both candles today, unusually in sync, radiant with clarity and energy. Clarissa wears a silk scarf, a vivid purple implying motion. It might contain vertical waves.

“Do you like it?” Clarissa asks. “Hérmes. Take it. I just stole it on Maiden Lane.”

“You still shoplift?” Zoë holds the scarf. It feels moist and sanctified, an embrace around her neck.

“It’s an attitude like guerrilla warfare,” Clarissa explains. They’ve finished their second round of drinks. “A thrill kill requires mental discipline. Put it on and keep walking. I know, I’ve had it for years. I bought it on the Champs-Élysées. It was raining. I was at the George V. I remember the details absolutely. No one could dare question me. And no one does. Let’s ride the carousel.”

They carry their drinks across the stained wooden planks of the pier. The carousel is closed. Clarissa makes a cell phone call and a man appears. She produces three hundred-dollar bills. They wait for the right seats, choosing recently painted twin horses, white and intricately decorated like certain porcelain, and ride for half an hour. Clarissa vomits twice.

Zoë searches her theoretical arsenal. Is it time for a hand grenade? Should she call for a chopper with medics? Then she remembers her mission. “Are you okay?” she manages.

“I understand how children discover bulimia,” Clarissa reports, excited. “It’s an accidental miracle.”

“Maybe you’ll get retroactive psychiatric insight points,” Zoë says.

Despite the gym-suit camouflage, it’s obvious Clarissa has gained weight. But even they have taboos. Eating disorders are a forbidden topic. They meet on neutral ground, but there are still no-fly zones, areas of fragmentation bombs and landmines. Shrapnel is a constant.

Clarissa borrows the purple scarf to wipe her mouth. She has contaminated the silk, but Zoë still wants it back. She thinks, suddenly, of flower bouquets and their inadequacy. The floral arrangements of her life have been too much and not enough. The petals stained. They were debris.

“If a contract is insufficient, what can we do?” Zoë wonders.

They are standing on the pier where the carousel is no longer operating. Gone are the circles they inscribed in the loitering too-thin aqua air. Her body carved the afternoon as they whirled and spun, engraving trails of midnight-blue ink like marks made by fins. Somewhere these etchings floated into a river winding down to a bay, more invisible origami.

“We could get a tattoo,” Clarissa proposes. “Our names together in a heart.”

“A tattoo?” Zoë repeats, delighted. “Won’t it be painful and dangerous? The possibility of AIDS and infection?”

“But you love needles.” Clarissa is annoyed. “You’re a professional junky.”

“I’m in remission,” Zoë replies quickly, unexpectedly defensive.

In truth, during one particularly virulent carousel rotation, she began to think about a drug dealer she knew in North Beach. It’s walking distance, over a steep sequence of stone steps and hills, through a sudden unexpected gate. There is a combination lock. Within, a creek is dammed and trapped, the water a stalled green with slime and duck excrement. She knows this Victorian house, the grain in every wooden floorboard and the way sunset displays itself through each glass pane in every room. There is geometry to how sun impales and dissects the Golden Gate Bridge. If you comprehend this mathematics, you can construct spaceships and time machines with common household appliances. You listen to the radio and talk to any god. This is encrypted information she will be buried with.

“You always relapse,” Clarissa observes, as if stating an historical date or chemical formula. “And don’t you already have AIDS?”

Zoë is shocked. She stares at Clarissa. Even with Gucci sunglasses, there’s a distinct softening around the chin, a loss of definition in her cheeks. “No, dear potential cousin. I have hepatitis C. And you need to get your face done.”

“What part?” Clarissa is concerned.

They are walking from the pier toward a tattoo parlor on Columbus Avenue. Shops offer stacks of cheap plaster statues, saints and children, dwarves and frogs. Someone will purchase and paint these objects, display them, give them as gifts. And plastic replicas of Alcatraz and T-shirts that say Prisoner and Psycho Ward.

“What part?” Zoë repeats. “It isn’t a fucking contract. It’s a composition. Just give the guy a blank check. And don’t use a Pacific Heights or Marin surgeon. You’ll end up looking like everybody else. I found an Italian in Pittsburgh.”

“I noticed you finally got your father off your face,” Clarissa slowly admits.

“Well, the police wouldn’t do it,” Zoë says. “And Mommy was so busy.”

Slow swells are below the wharf now. The bay is a liquid representation of fall. It’s in continual transition. It’s a form of treachery. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal. That’s what leaves changing mean, the reds and ochre, the yellows like lanterns. It’s about packing and disappearing. It’s a season for divestiture. That’s the fundamental imperative winds hint at. Time of the severing. That’s the obvious subtext. And it occurs to Zoë that her elation could dissipate. Emotions have their own seasons, inexplicable currents and random lightning storms.

Zoë follows Clarissa into the tattoo parlor. “Let’s rock,” Clarissa says. “Lock and load.”

The Eagles are playing. It’s “Hotel California,” of course. A tanned man with a blond ponytail who looks like a yoga instructor opens a book of designs. Dragons. Butterflies. Demons. Flowers. Guitars. Spiders. Zoë vaguely remembers negotiations including the procurement of a fifth of vodka, tomato juice, and a complicated argument about the aesthetic implications of script choices. Eventually they selected a gothic font. Then she may have passed out.

Zoë realizes they are in an arcade on Pier 39. It’s three hours and six Bloody Marys later. They have gauze and adhesive tape on their shoulders where their names are carved into their left upper arms in identical navy-blue. They decided to leave the encircling heart in red ink for their next reunion. Banks of garish video games surround them; hip-hop music blasts from speakers in the ceilings and floors. Boys who all look part Asian or Mexican are armed with laser levers and plastic machine guns. They keep the real Glocks in their pockets.

“This is not the global village I envisioned,” Zoë says.

“That’s politically incorrect enough to get me disbarred,” Clarissa whispers. She places two fingers against her red lacquered lips in a gesture of mock fright.

The automatic photographic booth is on the far side of the arcade. Four shots. They have been taking pictures here since they rode buses and walked from Daly City in seventh grade. Zoë remembers when it cost a quarter. Now it takes dollars. This photographic session is a ritual element in each of their meetings. It’s their sacrament. When they leave the booth, they cut the strip in half. Zoë saves her photographs in a shoebox where she keeps her passport and birth certifi-cate. She assumes Clarissa saves hers in her jewelry vault. Or perhaps she just throws them away.

The photographs are a necessary component of their liturgy. Zoë knows they can only see one another by laminated representations. It would be too disturbing and intrusive if they could actually perceive one another without artificial mediation. They communicate by email, fax, and newspaper clippings. The telephone is unbearable. They only use it to arrange an imminent unplanned meeting.

“Marvin’s jowls are definitely gone.” Clarissa studies the thin strip of four facial shots. “You have cheekbones. Are those implants? Jesus. You’re gorgeous. You never looked this good, not at sixteen, even. Cosmetic surgery already.”

“We’re breathing on forty,” Zoë says, bewildered. Certainly Clarissa comprehends the necessity of proactive facial procedures. This is San Francisco and Clarissa is an entertainment business attorney with a penthouse office above a Chinese bank. Is Clarissa in denial? Are her medications interfering with her functioning on so obvious and rudimentary a level?

“I thought you had to wait as long as possible.” Clarissa’s words are slurred.

“After you psychologically remove the slap across the face, and its more damaging verbal resonances-” Zoë begins.

“And that takes decades and costs what? A quarter of a million?” Clarissa is still staring at the strip of photographs.

“Then the next step is actual surgical removal. It’s a natural progression. It’s how to treat emotional cancer. Keep them,” Zoë says. “Get some reference points.”

They sit on a bench on the south side of the pier, sun tamed and restrained. The water is becoming agitated. White caps like mouths opening, baring teeth. The bay reminds Zoe of women in autumn in a medical imaging office. First the locker, the paper bathrobe, the chatty blonde with the clipboard who walks you into the room containing the mammogram machines. Then the stasis before the X-rays are read. Yes, the bay is waiting for its results. Poppies encrusted with resins or blood float like prayer offerings in the dangerous toxic waters.

“We used to walk here. What were we? Eleven, twelve?” Clarissa asks. Her mood is also shifting. They’re both still drunk.

Zoë and Clarissa, gauze and bandages on their shoulders, hold hands. Zoë’s childhood is sequences of yellows composed of trailer park kitchen cabinets and the invisible poisons leaking from the pores of fathers undergoing chemotherapy. Take a breath of rancid lemon. You’ve seen the Pacific, reached the end of the trail and don’t linger at the edges of death too long. They had a final punctuation for that. It was called the iron lung.

“They hadn’t invented a vocabulary for us yet,” Clarissa says to the waves. “Dysfunctional families. Latchkey children. Remember when I lost my key? What my father did? Jerry tied me up in the carport in pajamas for a week.”

“I brought you a canteen with orange juice. A bottle of vitamins,” Zoë recalls. “And a few joints. I cut up a cantaloupe in tiny pieces. You were handcuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”

“How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa asks.

“I took it from the hospital outpatient closet,” Zoë says. Her head is throbbing.

She stares at sea swells that are the process by which autumn becomes water. If you understand the bay, it smells of slow-burning cedar. Midnight currents are actually leaves brushing the ocean with russet and amber. Only adepts recognize this. Waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time, have the cuff links and invitations ready.

“Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.

Zoë nods. Yes, only I was at ground zero when it happened. This is why we tattooed ourselves. Who else could comprehend adolescence in the margins of a hardscrabble town in the conceptual latitudes? The late ’50s and their village was subdivided wood frame houses and stucco bungalows nailed in rows like the fruit trees above gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.

“We sat next to each other in homeroom,” Zoë says.

It was seventh grade and they were learning about cities. Their names were Sherry and Judy then but they do not ever mention this.

“We rode buses, trying to find the city,” Clarissa remembers. “We had library cards.”

True, Zoë thinks, but they could not find their geography or circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters experienced angst rather than hunger and rage. Such children did not sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles redeemable for two cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, you could trap enough coins for lunch.

“Remember digging for bottles for food money?” Zoë asks.

“I remember what you said,” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”

Zoë laughs. “Remember our black berets? We were trying to meet Ginsberg and Kerouac. We wore those berets every day. We got lice.”

Clarissa shrugs. “We looked for beatniks right here, on this pier. Boys with sketchbooks and guitars. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”

Recess in the region of broken families, of divorcées and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The special yellow smell of Sunday evenings when the mothers who worked as secretaries poured peroxide on their hair. The tiny implications of illumination from the one lamp you were allowed to turn on. Electricity was an extravagance. Their San Francisco was a medieval oasis, ocean at your face, desert at your back. There were warlords at the utility companies with incomprehensible capabilities and powers. Phones were instruments of terror. It cost money every time you touched them. Long distance calls were rationed, like chocolate during a war. The world as it was, before hotlines that could put your father in prison.

“I still have nightmares about the apartment in Daly City,” Clarissa reveals. “At every St. Regis and Ritz, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, I wake up shaking. At the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the Palazzo Sasso in Ravello, for Christ’s sake. The plot complications vary but somehow I’m back there.”

“Remember the neighbors?” Zoë asks. They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. She is dizzy. Her arm burns.

“The wetbacks and hillbillies? The identical blondes with drawls?” Clarissa is unusually bright. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you, Zoë. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, You’re playing colored music? You’re putting colored music in my house? He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”

“That was me,” Zoë corrects. “It was Marvin, not Jerry. And he used the ‘n’ word.”

“We had the same father, metamorphically. A barbarian with bad grammar who thought a yarmulke was a ticket to prison. A guy who could plaster and drywall. They were house painters. When they were employed. House painters.” Clarissa stares at the bay.

“Like Hitler,” Zoë points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”

“Rachel? She was on the verge. She was becoming River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

Zoë remembers Clarissa’s mother. A woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.

Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction. Zoë envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families. The brothers in juvenile detention. The sisters who disappeared. Soon, if Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. Perhaps she could escape the anomalous caste consigned to stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind wires and no white picket fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even secondhand cars were an aberration. If she got placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight As and then won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. A stay-at-home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies could call her Elizabeth or Margaret or Christine.

“Did you realize we were Jewish?” Zoë wonders.

“I was instructed to never to reveal this. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa answers. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”

“I wanted a bat mitzvah,” Zoë suddenly remembers. “I don’t know how I even knew the word. Marvin said, You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.”

“Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a thirteen-year-old?” Clarissa asks.

It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive, indelible like a personal mutilation.

“Jerry said, I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5'2”. He’s got a three-inch dick. He mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said, Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?” Clarissa turns back to the bay.

“Is that when it happened? When you moved away? You disappeared. The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” Zoë tries to form a chronology.

“Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. Jerry thought a ditch with a turnip in it was a party. I was chattel. Rachel left and he just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were hanging in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”

“But she came back for you,” Zoë says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”

“You don’t get out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

Zoë examines the bay. There is less agitation, swells softer; a haze grazes what was amethyst. The diagnosis has come. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.

“Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa suddenly asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”

“Mommy did it, actually. She was between mental hospitals that month. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said, Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? I remember precisely. She said, You think you’re a neurosurgeon? You think you’re a symphony conductor? You’re not even human. Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers and they took her in the ambulance.”

They are quiet. The bay, too, is still. Through haze, the sun is lemon-yellow on the heavy waters. There are floating orchards rooted in sand. Wave break and dog bark are a language. Accuracy is a necessary requirement of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. The way you are no longer blind, cold, bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

Zoë and Clarissa’s fingers entwine. Clarissa wears a platinum set Tiffany diamond of at least four carats. And a gold Rolex with the oyster diamond setting. She withdraws her hand.

“You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets and red silk jackets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”

“So you transcend the genre?” Zoë is enraged.

“What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adoles-cences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa stares at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars that are like tiny metallic studs or hooks-they help you shred flesh.

Zoë considers their shared childhood in the already faltering city without seasons. Their parents were Jews who had been disenfranchised for generations; pre-urban and unprepared in a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Plumbing and appliances amazed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately closed. What if it burned out? Then their offspring, who became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow hibiscus and magenta bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red geraniums and brittle canna.

“We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus, and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” Zoë realizes.

“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”

They stand and everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung over. Or in a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.

“But we have instincts.” Zoë is exhausted. Her arm with the gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.

“We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.

“They’ll never take us by surprise,” Zoë laughs. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.

Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Sudden vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. They are beyond known choreography. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.

“I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do schmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that don’t fit right. They were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”

“That’s okay,” Zoë manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”

“I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa seems tired. “This is a search-and-destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. And we must end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”

This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp five-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.

“I brought you a postcard you sent me from Fiji sixteen years ago.” Zoë produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s nude breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” Zoë offers the postcard to Clarissa.

“I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t sound surprised. “That was Anna. We don’t speak anymore. I don’t know where she lives. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona.”

Zoë takes the postcard back. She is convinced their reunions are conceptually well-intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were considered purifying and curative. Also barbequing women at the stake. And garlic for vampire protection.

There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madame Curie, and the extent of her fatigue. Then Zoë says, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”

“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And as an afterthought, asks, “What about you?”

“I’m getting married,” Zoë says. “I’m moving to Pennsylvania.”

“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your half-way-house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.

“Fuck you.” Zoë is incensed.

“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have extreme difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances. It’s unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”

“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” Zoë stares at her, so startled she’s almost sober.

“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.

The stylish phone opens, the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists and in our pockets. Clarissa’s phone is voice-activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”

“Does your arm hurt?” Zoë wonders. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire.

“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles, “keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. The cause is just.”

Zoë realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.

Suddenly Zoë feels she is on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi five hours from Goa. Then the six-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for seven hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally the fourteen-hour flight to New York. Seventy hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies of vertigo in free fall where no time zones apply.

Clarissa and Zoë no longer hold hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.

“Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved cousin.”

“And you, my first and greatest love,” Zoë says. “Another high-risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”

“We’ll get red hearts around our names next time. Our next tattoo,” Clarissa smiles.

They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They have slid into an interminable foreign film neither of them has interest or affection for. She knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.

There is a certain pause just before sunset, when the bay is veiled in azure.

It’s the moment of redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone-fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.

“My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.

Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, sunglasses with an ear attachment she imagines CIA field operatives employ. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. Zoë refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, Zoë can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk now, in the alleys and sides of residential streets with ridiculous, insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Point View. Who do they think they’re kidding?

Keep walking and shadows find you. They are the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. Such shadows taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Use them for bath oil and become immune to infection. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you are more dangerous than they imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.

There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delu-sionary construct, like movie and real-estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re in our genes, passed down the generations, like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. Zoë senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she is grateful. She never wants to see Clarissa again.

LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR BY ALVIN LU

Chinatown

For K & T

Face à face avec la profondeur, l’homme, front penché, se recueille.

Que voit-il au fond du trou caverneux? La nuit sous la terre, l’Empire d’ombre.

– Victor Segalen

The young people in Chinatown are afraid and confused. We don’t know what to do with our lives,” Michael Munroe read in the February 1970 issue of Getting Together, a mimeographed newsletter published by I Wor Kuen, a Chinatown-based anti-imperialist group somewhat ludicrously named after the late-nineteenth-century Chinese secret society whose members believed mystic rituals and spirit possession would make them invulnerable.

Three years out of Princeton, Michael had thrown in with the revolution. He had turned his back on a life of privilege, by any standard, and left his home in Illinois for the West Coast.

He worked as a postman in the East Bay, inside a stretch of black neighborhoods, and organized there. Recently he had been coming across the bridge to discuss tactics with another postal organizer, Francis Chao. Organization was effective in the post office. The P.O. had a high percentage of black workers, who in those days were highly politicized.

Meeting Francis in Chinatown, coming from the East Bay, was an abrupt transition. Walking routes in West Oakland, Michael felt he had miraculously made the great leap from one world to another; his role as deliverer of welfare checks afforded him access to ordinary black lives few white men experienced. But Chinatown was different. There were a few of the cadre there, both American- and foreign-born, who could move, not always with ease, through that underground world, an entirely other country only two blocks wide extending from Bush to Broadway, and they offered Michael glimpses of how it worked. Francis was one of them.

The struggle for Chinatown’s soul between Kuomintang and CPC (Communist Party of China) sympathizers was then at its peak. IWK and Wei Min She (literally, the “Serve the People” Association) opened storefronts in the basement of the International Hotel, located in Manilatown on the corner of Jackson and Kearny Streets, and plotted to overthrow the power structure. Radical activists, propelled by Third World strikes at San Francisco State and Berkeley, descended on the bewildered community, some of them calling themselves Red Guards, talking about Yellow Soul. Politics in turn exacerbated already existing petty rivalries between American-born and foreign-born gangs. A pool hall-soda fountain run by a group of reformed American-born at 615 Jackson was adorned with posters of Huey P. Newton and Mao Tse-tung, while a large gang known as the Jo-Boys amounted to strongarms for the tongs, who continued to assert their fading influence.

What all these groups, including the ruling Six Companies oligarchy, fought to represent could be narrowed down to one square block, Portsmouth Square, in the heart of the community, which had been recently defaced by stenciled graffiti bearing the image of Chiang Ching. It was the site of innocuous fairs, well-meaning rallies, and, increasingly, conflicts. One could imagine, in the years of the Barbary Coast, when it was the makeshift center of San Francisco’s gambling traffic, a gallows being erected there. But most of the time now, it was just the immortal old men, playing Chinese chess or a variation on bridge. Some nights, the fog would stroll down the hills of Washington and Clay Streets, you could hear the foghorns, and the Stockton bus would roll up. No one knew the future.

Michael and Francis regularly met at the Hunan Cafe, across the street from the I-Hotel, but the atmosphere there had grown too thick with intrigue, and Francis suggested a little-known restaurant elsewhere, frequented entirely by locals who spoke only in Toisan dialect. The two of them were to meet an acquaintance of Francis’s there, who was researching a documentary film on the nascent Asian-American “movement” and wanted to interview Francis incognito.

Francis wore a blue Mao tunic, jeans, and black kung-fu shoes. He was clean-shaven, and a helmet of straight hair covered his ears. Though smallish, he projected confidence and power-rumor had it that he was a black belt, and even Michael, who was a big man and a star college lacrosse player before he blew out his knee, felt tough walking beside him. The two of them, as members of the rather rigidly Maoist Revolutionary Union, worked closely with WMS, their Chinatown affiliate, and tended to regard IWK, who after all were from New York and were behind the curve that way, as suspiciously reformist. Nevertheless, at this optimistic time, there was still hope a united front could be built in Chinatown.

“I hear you’re going to be sent somewhere,” Francis said.

“Where?”

Francis leaned his head to one side, then made a kind of quarter-turn with it, his abbreviation for shaking his head. He took a gulp of very attenuated jasmine tea from a porcelain cup with the faded image of a red, green, and yellow dragon printed on it.

“Why?”

“To retrieve something.”

That could mean anything. To San Leandro? For burritos? But Michael had an idea of what Francis was talking about. Both of them had joined RU around the same time, coming from very different directions, and they’d risen quickly through the ranks. In the spirit of competition, Francis liked to keep Michael off balance with hints that made it sound as if he were closer to directives being made in the inner circle, but Michael knew it was just smoke. Michael had personal ties to the upper echelons of the leadership that Francis didn’t have. On the other hand, one never knew what one faction might be planning without another’s knowledge. And there were plenty of factions.

“So tell me about these Red Guard guys,” Michael said.

“They have a lot less to do with the Red Guard in China than with talking black and acting like the Panthers, but without half the political commitment. Most are ex-Leway and are in it strictly for the image.”

Francis had a way of sizing up, dissecting, and dismissing someone in a sentence or two that matched RU’s reputation for sectarianism. Michael, who was prone to see both sides of an issue, thought there was truth to the accusation that they didn’t get along with anybody, because they didn’t cut anybody any slack. He also knew it was worse cutting everybody slack all the time, over anything. One needed parameters. But even in their own group, Francis was thought to have a very refined palate.

“Look at their position on militancy.” He pointed to a line printed in the newsletter. “Our Constitution says we have the right to bear arms. Our? This is about bringing the whole system down. As far as their politics go, it’s strictly ‘black cat, white cat.’”

He was making reference to rifts that had grown within the ranks of the CPC itself, demonstrating a fairly high-level awareness of issues that Michael only understood in a blurry way. Groups like IWK and elements within RU’s own national ranks reflected the rightist thought of the Liu Hsiao-chi/Teng Hsiao-ping revisionist party clique that the radicals, including the student Red Guard and Mao himself, were resisting. Somehow that internecine struggle had radiated out from the capital of worldwide revolution to this remote outpost.

Michael had only heard of the Red Guard less than two years ago, before he joined RU. He didn’t know much about China then, much less the Cultural Revolution. But there had been a great deal of hoopla around an American, a white man, who had returned to the Bay Area from China and had participated in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a Red Guard himself. By chance, Michael had gone to his presentation and was mesmerized, particularly by the photos that were passed around, clipped from Life magazine. One showed a group of Red Guards in surgical masks ham-mering apart a Peking opera house. Michael didn’t understand exactly why they were destroying the building, but he thought it was probably because opera was something for rich people.

In later, grimmer years Francis would go to jail for infiltrating a U.N. Security Council meeting and throwing plastic bags filled with pig’s blood at the U.S. and Soviet council-members.

Francis’s acquaintance, the filmmaker Cletus Dong, arrived at the same time as the twice-cooked pork and honey walnut prawns. As he approached their table, conspicuous in cowboy boots and big silver belt buckle, Francis muttered under his breath, “Cultural nationalist,” which to Michael was a codeword for “reverse racist.”

Cletus introduced himself as “the Chinese-American Jean-Luc Godard,” which struck Michael as an odd thing to aspire to be, considering Cletus was the only Chinese-American filmmaker he’d ever heard of. Couldn’t you pretty much call yourself the Chinese-American anything? But with a name like Cletus Dong he wasn’t going to be the Jean-Luc Godard of anybody.

Michael’s attention was immediately taken away from Cletus anyway, because he’d brought a girl. At first Michael had taken her to be his girlfriend, but it later came out she was his sister, in the literal sense. Unlike the girls Asian “movement” guys tended to hang out with, the ones who wore granny glasses over humorless expressions, she had all the qualities of a classical Chinese beauty: green eyebrows, reedy silhouette, straight ass-length hair. There might be something too brittle about her, as in one of those lamenting maidens in a poem by Li Po, but on closer look one saw this was not the case, especially in the eyes, which were steely and unsentimental. Thick, bold strokes made up her face. She had dark eyes and a full mouth. Her name was Candy. She chewed gum.

Michael immediately fell in love with her.

She stuck her gum to a napkin and smoked a cigarette with heartwrenching elegance, while Cletus and Francis went over the details of the party platform. If it wasn’t for the entertainment Candy provided, Michael would have quickly grown bored. He respected Francis, because he knew he was dedicated, but even then, he always thought the worst thing about being a Communist were the endless meetings, speeches, and discussions over total abstractions. Despite his own class background, which he was still trying to live down, he tended to connect more with ordinary working-class people, the good citizens who lived on his delivery route.

“Your idea of revolution, like most people’s, is romantic,” Francis concluded. “In fact, our work is like ‘washing one’s face,’ as Chairman Mao put it; that is, it takes place on a daily basis. Chinatown is capital-scarce, deteriorated, urban terrain. We have to be frugal and diligent and, as Mao says again, ‘do more with less money.’”

“What’s so different about that from your run-of-the-mill penny-pinching Chinaman?”

“Well, there are comrades, even when talking about revolution, who only see it in terms of economics and benefits. Of course, we should try to do more with less-as guerrillas we have no choice about that-but not at the expense of political awareness. Getting results is one thing, but isn’t it as important to understand how all the pieces fit together? The correct path is to see economic pragmatism and political consciousness as a dialectic. My point was, we can’t achieve our goals with sweeping gestures. That’s what the capitalists did when they wiped out Japantown and the Fillmore.”

“Speaking of less money,” Candy suddenly broke in, “I have to get to work.”

Francis acknowledged her existence for the first time by nodding his head.

“I was giving her a ride to the Richmond,” Cletus mumbled apologetically.

“Who do you think’s supporting this kid?” she went on.

“And what do you do?” Francis asked.

“I’m a bartender.”

“What kind?”

“What do you mean, what kind? What kind of question is that?”

“I meant, are you happy with your work? Is it a good job?”

“What do you mean? It’s the kind of job that makes money. What do you do?”

“We’re postal workers.”

“You mean mailmen?”

“Okay, so you make a lot of money. And what are you going to do with all of that money when, if, you get enough of it?”

“Get outta this place! A girlfriend of mine just moved to Vancouver.” She pronounced it Van-koo-fah. “She says it’s real nice. Plenty of jobs. Big houses. No Chinese. Once I save up some money, I’m moving there.” She gestured theatrically to that promised land, like one of those actors in the opera house wrecked by Red Guards. “This time next year, I’ll be there, I promise. I hate this place. It stinks.”

Michael was impressed. He was always moved by hope. He introduced himself and held his hand out. She didn’t take it. He took a deep breath. He didn’t normally give in to impulses, he was one of those people who tended to mull things over and act only when it was too late, but it was as if a spirit had taken over him. He wrote something down on the back of a chopstick wrapper and handed it to her.

“Here’s my number. Call me when you get to Canada.”

“What for?”

“I just want to know if you get there, like you said.”

“Who are you?”

He looked around. “The only white person in this restaurant, it looks like.”

She laughed at that. She wrote something on the wrapper and handed it back to him. “This is the number of the restaurant my girlfriend works at. Call a year from now and ask her if I got there. Okay? Bye bye.”

With that, she dragged Cletus off into the cool San Francisco night. Only after they were out the door did Michael realize everyone in the restaurant was staring at him. Francis just went about opening his fortune cookie. Michael couldn’t help grinning. He was aglow. Here, in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant he in all likelihood would never be able to find his way back to again, in Chinatown, where it seemed, for someone like himself, it was all but impossible to make a human connection, he’d had one. Not just any connection, either, but with her. The people in the restaurant eventually went back to their business. Michael couldn’t understand a word above the din they were making. They could have been talking about anything within the confines of those four walls, and without.

The following summer, Michael traveled back to the Midwest to see some old friends and to have his draft physical. He wore a T-shirt with Mao Tse-tung’s face silk-screened on the front and the phrase, “All political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” on the back. He flunked the physical.

Before he flew back to the Bay Area, he took a detour to see a fellow RU member of high standing.

Ariel Rabenstein was a former CPUSA member, who now lent RU a certain legitimacy. Like Michael and Francis, he was employed by the post office. Unlike most of the young cadre, he had actual experience with mass organizing mayhem on a grand scale. The rest of RU were in comparison children, working in a vacuum, sealed off from history by McCarthy and the fact that the Soviet Union had stopped being revolutionary. Ariel was hiding in Chicago after having been out of the country for a number of years. He had run afoul of the police in San Francisco when a reporter for the Examiner, acting as an FBI informant, had exposed him, and he had to leave the country. He took a freighter to China and somehow made it into circles that reached as high as Chou En-lai. There had been a handful of Americans in China then, a collection of outright defectors, Korean War deserters, double agents, and old CPUSA and Soviet sympathizers who’d run into bad police situations, all of whom knew each other and did similar things like teach English. The Chinese premier’s group became Ariel’s main contact, and they arranged for Ariel to bring $600,000 back to the States, where he was “to start organizing a new revolutionary group.” This was in 1968. It wasn’t clear what the significance of the six-hundred-thousand figure was, but when Michael first heard the story, he assumed it must have been a round or lucky number in Chinese.

Ariel’s apartment was located in a weathered brick tenement on the South Side. It was around eight million degrees that day and seemed hotter inside the tortuous hallways. Michael had been told Ariel had something for him, nothing more. It could have been materials or it could have been information. After winding his way through the building’s infernal interior, he was prepared for just about anything, except what greeted him there.

A beautiful, young black woman with a natural, wearing a wine-colored Chinese silk robe, answered the door. She escorted him in without a word. The apartment looked like the interior of a souvenir store on Grant Avenue, full of things Ariel had brought back with him-lanterns, screens, embroidery, bronzes, scrolls. Ariel, in a black robe, waited for Michael in the inner room, seated with one knee upright on a kang, smoking from a copper water pipe, writing in a notebook. Michael didn’t know how old Ariel was, but he looked a hundred, and not a good hundred. He’d lived a hard, uncompromised life, and he smoked from that water pipe nonstop.

Ariel and the woman exchanged some words in what must have been Mandarin. She left and then returned with a freshly brewed pot of tea and performed what seemed like a brief ritual involving pouring the tea from the pot into variously sized cups and then repouring them into other cups. When she was done, she left the room.

“We met in China,” his host explained, going into no further detail. “Drink up. This pot and these cups are made of yi-hsing clay. It’s said to enhance the flavor of the tea. Let me know if you taste anything. My taste buds are shot.” He stuck his tongue out.

Michael declined because he was dying in the heat, but his host insisted, saying the Chinese believed drinking hot tea actually cooled the body, which sounded like utter madness.

“You’re to be sent somewhere,” Ariel declared. “You’ll be traveling with me to pick up some money. I can’t say when or where, for now. Everything will be conducted on a ‘need to know’ basis. We don’t want you to lose your job at the post office, where you’re doing good work. So as we get closer to the date, we’ll tell you how long you’ll be gone.”

“It won’t be that long then?”

“About a week.”

“Will it be just you and me?”

“There will be checkpoints and handoffs. But yes, most of the time it will be just you and me. That’s all I can tell you for now.”

Michael nodded. Ariel stopped talking. It was very odd, regardless of the bizarre trappings of the apartment, to see this rough-hewn man taking such delicate sips from a teacup the size of a thimble. Ariel didn’t have any materials for him to bring back. Probably the purpose of this visit was just to check Michael out. Michael took a sip of the offered tea, now lukewarm, before he left. It was green and stronger than it looked.

On his way back, he felt an uneasy sense of elation. When Ariel mentioned money, he immediately thought of the $600,000 the old man had delivered from China. Michael could only assume they were going there for more. That he was being sent to the command center of world revolution at this juncture in his young career, for such a sensitive task, was quite unbelievable. Very little in his life, besides a few trips to Chinatown to discuss tactics with Francis, had prepared him. “China” had always been to him more a revolutionary ideal than an actual place, existing only in cloudy rumors he and the other local cadre, like courtiers stationed in a distant colony, attempted to decode, or else otherwise in those abstract, stiffly translated tracts they were sent, their lifeline to inter-pretation. Very few of them had access to cleaner information-Francis, who could understand some Chinese, and Ariel, with his contacts there, among them-and even their throughlines were questionable, though enough to lend them a certain priestlike authority. But the more Michael thought about it, the more he was convinced his life, so far, had been a preparation for such a trip. What, for instance, had led him that night to the lecture by the former Red Guard, which sent him off on his own trajectory into the revolution? As an advocate of science, Michael didn’t believe in fate, but he trusted the unconscious. His life so far had been defined by great, blind leaps. He had gone from the Midwest to the Ivy League to San Francisco. He had never left the country before. Now he was going to China.

When he thought of why he had been selected to go, though, the picture grew darker. It was clear he was going, on the one hand, to take care of the money and keep it from capitalists and opportunists, in case Ariel, who was old as shit, had a heart attack or otherwise dropped dead. On the other, and this was the part of his job he was uncomfortable with, he was probably there to keep an eye on his companion. Or rather, they were to keep an eye on each other, in case either person, and the people who backed them, tried to muscle out the other. This was not something he liked to think about. Ariel had built factions within the organization, probably based in the Midwest. Things were lining up, Michael understood though only very vaguely, along the same faults that were fracturing the CPC. Everyone knew Ariel was a Chou En-lai guy, but which way did Chou go? With Liu Hsiao-chi? Lin Piao and the PLA? Or the radicals? Michael had been selected, he believed, because he was trusted on all sides. That had always been his best trait: he got along with everybody. And he could also take care of himself, if he had to. Certainly he could against an old man. But he did not want to think he couldn’t trust Ariel, or the organization. He was sure of his own commitment. He believed the group was sure too and would take the necessary precautions for his safety. One good sign was his receiving only the information he needed to know, which, he understood, was for his own protection.

On returning to the Bay Area, he ran into Francis. Michael was on his way to the People’s Bookstore on Brenham Street, off Portsmouth Square. Francis was coming out with some books tucked under his arm. On that gray day, he looked uncharacteristically like an ineffably old Chinese scholar, strolling through Tien An Men on his way to the Forbidden City.

The two of them talked among the pigeons. The square was unusually empty. Droplets of mist condensed in the air. Playing their game of one-upmanship, Michael mentioned the job he was being assigned and that he was traveling with Ariel. His disclosure was strategic as well. He wanted to gauge how much Francis knew.

“Well, you know the score,” Francis replied, unperturbed. “Don’t let Ariel out of your sight once the two of you pick up the money.”

Michael nodded. He couldn’t tell if Francis was playing the same game, talking as if he knew more than he did. All of them did that to some degree, Michael supposed. But maybe Francis did know things about Ariel that Michael didn’t.

Without having mentioned that China was the place he was being sent, he asked Francis where he might buy a decent Chinese phrasebook and maps. “I came here for that, but I was thinking there are other places in Chinatown I could look.”

“There are places you could buy maps,” Francis replied, without missing a beat, “but because most of them are printed in Hong Kong or Taiwan, they’re inaccurate.” They depicted nonexistent rail lines and provincial boundaries, he explained, and some still drew the national borders as if it were the height of the Ching Dynasty. “The capital is Nanking, while Peking doesn’t exist at all. It’s called ‘Peiping,’ the Pacified North. You’re better off sticking to our own bookstore.”

“All right then.”

Michael went ahead and bought all the maps he could find anyway. When he went home and compared them all, including the one in the World Atlas in his local library, he wasn’t surprised to find the discrepancies Francis had mentioned. He was no stranger to political fictions. In practice, he lived to fight against them, but he had to admit, he was dismayed to encounter such a black-and-white instance of contested reality. On the one hand, there was the version promulgated by the United States, which pretended a government representing one billion people practically did not exist. On the other, there were remote areas in the southwest of China the size of California that he knew could not be considered under Communist control, no matter how cleanly delineated. The maps, far from providing a composite picture of something resembling the truth, only made the place he assumed he was traveling to seem all the more unreal.

When they arrived in Seattle, having driven up, just the two of them, they stored Michael’s car at the local organization headquarters. He and Ariel moved into the backseat of another car. Two local cadre sat up front to drive them past the border.

In Vancouver, they made a brief stop. Michael stayed in the car. Ariel entered an apartment building. A few minutes later, he reemerged with two passports with their photographs and new identities. Michael felt a chill. He hadn’t handed a photograph of himself to anybody, and this particular photo he’d had taken in a photo booth at Ocean Beach, with the only prints he knew somewhere in his desk at home. Ariel told him, none too reassuringly, everything was being taken care of “on the other end.” He also had another item with him: a suitcase full of something, clothes presumably.

“You’re going to check this piece of luggage in under your own name,” one of the Seattle operatives told Michael. “You’ll get a ticket for it, but you won’t need to replace the contents with anything. In fact, once you check it in, you won’t see it again until you get back to Canada.”

On the long flight across the Pacific Ocean, the two of them didn’t speak much, sleeping most of the way, but for the few hours both of them were awake, Ariel turned surprisingly chatty. He broke into his life’s story, how he once ran off to join a puppet troupe, decided to become a Communist before he turned forty, even going a bit into China. Michael appreciated how friendly he’d become, after the long, tense drive from San Francisco, but grew unsettled the more it went on. Somehow, every time Michael tried to steer the topic of conversation toward actual information, such as going into greater detail over the handoff protocol, Ariel batted it away. It was very subtle, Michael couldn’t say at what precise moment he’d been deflected, but it happened repeatedly. Despite the fact that Ariel’s stories sounded too nutty to be made up, Michael eventually realized that what seemed like casual candor was boldly executed diversion. The more Ariel talked, the less Michael knew.

Ariel was in a grand mood, though, and, once he got going, went into his theory on why Vietnam was just a prelude to a global war between the U.S. and China.

“Either the two superpowers are going to enter into an alliance against China or, more likely, the U.S. is going to simply beat the Soviets into reneging on their commitments to international socialist solidarity, to the point, if you ask me, where we’ll see the collapse of the U.S.S.R. as a political entity. At that point, we enter a new phase of the Cold War, where the balance of power isn’t between the U.S. and Soviets, but between the U.S. and China. This will all happen within the next twenty years, by the way. Moreover, everyone knows this already, which is why the real target of U.S. strategy right now the world over isn’t the U.S.S.R., but China. By the time the crucial battleground will have shifted to the Pacific Rim, the Eastern Bloc will be just a memory.”

Michael couldn’t help feeling excited. Or maybe it was just the straight drive, without stopping, and to finally have got up in the air. Either way, he thought there was a grain of respectability to the scenario Ariel had just painted. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. in twenty years? China as the world’s second superpower? A shift in the global balance of power to the Pacific nations? It seemed unbelievable, and yet here they were, suspended in the stratosphere, somewhere between San Francisco and Tokyo, on a mission to change the world.

Japan was no different than, say, La Guardia, but once they boarded a Russian passenger jet bound for Shanghai, Michael felt he had entered another world. The cabin looked like the interior of a kids’ clubhouse. There was no crew to speak of. Or passengers, for that matter. Just a few black-haired heads scattered about the narrow cabin, none of them in a seat next to another. He and Ariel sat in the first row, with their interpreter/guide/watchdog, a thin woman in a blue pantsuit with a bob haircut.

A minor hubbub went up when their guide remarked in fluid Queen’s English that they had entered Chinese airspace. Out the window, Michael could see the coastline of the continent, marked by a few small fires here and there. It was happening. It was one thing to take cues from translated texts that wore the dry air of the exotic and esoteric, another to be confronted with a glimpse of a world of real lives and a landmass that, reaching across impassable stretches of time and space, had bore the near totality of human civilization. The idea of that history, rolling back from the shoreline he was now tracing through the dark, was incomprehensible. All that made such a thought tolerable was the counterforce of the equally impossible fact that the most radical social revolution the world had ever known was taking place here too. Michael had spent a lifetime in exile from everything. For the first time, he felt as if he had come home.

They touched down at Hung Chiao International Airport in the dead of night. Michael picked up the luggage he’d packed for himself, but not the suitcase he was given in Vancouver. The streets of Shanghai, one of the world’s most populous cities, former Whore of the Orient, Paris of the East, as seen from the backseat of a Chinese government sedan, were pitch dark.

They were put up in a hotel room. The next day Ariel went out for a few hours, but Michael was forced to stay the whole time in the sparse, narrow room. Most of those hours were spent catching up with his jet lag. A rotation of chain-smoking young men in the same kind of blue jackets Francis wore stood watch outside the door. They didn’t speak English. Every time Michael opened it and asked if he could go out, the response was the same sheepish smile and bout of mute head shaking and hand waving.

Around 3 in the afternoon, he was staring out the window when he saw, miraculously, three white people walk by. He tried to get their attention by banging on the window and yelling, but they didn’t hear him, or acted as if they didn’t. He tried to see where they were headed, but they quickly disappeared from view.

That evening they were put on the train and spent the night in an isolated car. They arrived in Peking by morning. They were put in another hotel room.

They spent most of day two cooped up in the hotel room together, with Ariel being called out for a few hours in midmorning.

When Ariel came back, he was not any more forthcoming about whatever he was doing, or what was going on, than he was about anything else. But like almost everyone else they had met on this trip so far, he had a case of nerves.

It was apparent they were being handled very carefully. So far, every time they had been met by someone, picked up, or taken around, the atmosphere was tense. No one looked directly at anyone or anything. The passing off of the Americans from one handler to another was an especially serious affair. Their sponsors tended to be young men, and occasionally women, dressed in identical blue suits, although there were a few seniors here and there. So far everyone they encountered either spoke fluent English or none at all. They all smoked constantly. People were only grudgingly friendly. They ground their teeth when they smiled and were otherwise businesslike. Too businesslike for Michael’s taste. There was something flinty in their behavior; with any misstep in the complex operation going on, Michael felt he (and Ariel?) would be sacrificed. Michael recognized some of the m.o.: They tended to travel in pairs in which the partners clearly did not like each other. As with Ariel and himself, they were there to keep an eye on each other as much as on their charges.

Admittedly he hadn’t seen much of China so far besides the interior of cars, trains, and hotel rooms, but the whole country seemed on edge. In September, the Minister of Defense, Lin Piao, had died in a plane crash in Mongolia, while trying to flee the country. Michael didn’t know Lin had failed to execute the “571 Plot,” an attempt on the life of Mao Tse-tung while aboard his special train. Nor could Michael have known-it would have peeved him if he had-that his journey to China was preceded by that of Henry Kissinger, who had made a secret trip in July to prepare the way for Nixon’s planned visit the following year.

While Michael and Ariel told each other that their sponsors were being overcautious-after all, they weren’t here to cause any trouble-Michael understood the danger was real. The secrecy was for their own protection. What if one of them got out and fell into the hands of one faction or the other, and something happened? Somebody could make a big deal over it. And what if something were made to happen?

What if they had already fallen into the hands of the Chou group, Ariel’s group?

Thoughts like this occupied him while he waited for Ariel to return from a second, afternoon summoning. It wasn’t pleasant, wondering whether Ariel was plotting against him, while he was kept in a hotel room, a sitting duck.

He went over again in his mind what would happen when they returned to Vancouver. It was his understanding that the money was to come to both of them at the same time. Everything had been prepared, he had been told between Seattle and Vancouver, to ensure that no one had a particular advantage in seizing it. A clear chain of pickups and handoffs would occur after they received it. Who would be in a certain place at a certain time. Who would hand the money to whom. If the right people weren’t in the right place at the right time, they were not to hand off the money. Instead, there was a backup handoff plan they were to go to.

Michael understood his role once the money landed in their hands. No one was to pry Ariel away from him for any length of time, and he was to keep anyone from stealing it. There were people within the organization who might try to steal it from Michael, and both Ariel and he knew that. To avoid anyone trying to engineer a setup, each team only knew who they were getting from and giving to. No one knew the entire chain, where the money would eventually wind up. Michael supposed that the people on Ariel’s side might try to kill the people on his side when the money was given over. A balance in the number of men on each team was meant to ensure that wouldn’t happen. Michael supposed one or more people might switch teams, or that Ariel’s people might have killed his people by the time he arrived at the handoff point. If that happened, if it was only him against the others and he was outnumbered, then, Michael decided, he wasn’t going to fight. Then they would kill him, or maybe something would happen right there on the spot. Michael had traveled for four days with Ariel. Despite some testy moments, they had gotten along. He didn’t like to think Ariel might kill him or that he might have to kill Ariel. They didn’t teach you this stuff at Princeton. This was what it was like getting into the movement. Trouble was real trouble, and it came real quick.

It was all very strange. He was in China.

To take his mind off its current depressing trajectory, he tried focusing on the environment around him. The room they were given couldn’t be considered a cell, but it wasn’t exactly luxurious either. It was like much of what he’d seen of the entire country itself. There did not seem to be one item that was anything other than absolutely essential. Two beds, with two layers of sheets, one slightly heavier than the other. Each of them had been issued a thin hand towel, about one foot wide by two feet long, that was to be used for the duration of their stay. There was a light. No phone. No pen or paper. No ashtray, but cigarette burns in the carpet. Toilet paper, of sorts, was brought in once a day. Somehow their hosts were able to calculate exactly what amount was just enough.

There was no mirror. In those days, Michael kept up a thin Fu Manchu. Both his hair and mustache he wore much longer in his hippie days, but these days he tried to keep up a neat appearance. It was a proletarian thing; his attire consisted of T-shirts, a single sweatshirt, jeans, boots. He’d meant to trim his mustache before he left, but he’d been in a rush to get out. Now he didn’t want his hosts to get the wrong idea about him, so with the free time fate had granted him, he learned how to shave without a mirror.

That night, under curfew, the old man started to lose it.

“I want to go out, see the sights, get laid. This sitting around here all night, man, is driving me nuts.”

“Hey, at least you’re out during the day. Think about me. I burned through the two books I brought with me by the time we left Vancouver.”

That seemed to elicit some sympathy at least. Ariel told Michael he would talk to someone tomorrow about letting him out, even just for a few hours with a chaperone.

“You haven’t told me a thing about what goes on when you go out there with them.”

“I haven’t told you anything because I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”

“There’s some shit going down, isn’t there? Who are we dealing with?”

“I have no idea. I don’t know these people.” Ariel lit a cigarette, one of the Chinese ones a youth stationed outside the door had given him. It smelled awful and quickly suffocated the entire room. Michael thought his roommate was using this method to kill him. Having not gotten over his jet lag yet, Ariel chain-smoked for most of the night, but by morning Michael was still alive.

“Hey, Ariel,” Michael asked as the dawn was breaking. Neither one of them had said a word for hours. “Are we in trouble?”

The old man detected the note of fear in the younger man’s voice and his stony expression softened.

“You’ll be all right,” he said.

Michael didn’t know what to make of that. Did it mean that Ariel wasn’t? Or was he just reassuring Michael? Either way, Michael felt ashamed.

On day three, there was considerably more traffic going back and forth from the room, and Ariel spent more time out than in. His pleas on Michael’s behalf worked to the degree that Michael was handed a stack of English-language Peking Reviews.

Michael felt better in the morning. At least he got the sense that the old man was as confused and frustrated as he was. Of course, all of that may have been a put-on, but he preferred not to think so. He seized the day, trying to make the best of the hospitality that was offered. He sat down to read the Peking Review. In the first issue he read, he found an article, in the “Arts” section, with the headline, “Music with No Words Is Reactionary”:

Beethoven’s music is inherently reactionary. Because there are no words, you can’t know what it means.

The prose style and reasoning reminded him of something Camus had written about Saint-Just’s writing style: “It is the style of the guillotine.” This, then, was the style of the dull butcher knife.

In the afternoon, he poked his head out the door and saw a girl sitting in the hallway. He assumed she was “guarding” him, though this was the first time he saw someone sitting instead of standing. Maybe they were getting the idea he wasn’t going to challenge them.

When she looked up, he was startled. He thought he recognized her, but that would have been impossible: He didn’t know anyone in China. Then it occurred to him that she resembled Cletus Dong’s sister, Candy. It took a bit of imagination to make the transfer: imagine Candy without makeup, her long, straight hair chopped off just above the chin, wearing a sexless blue suit. When she stood up, he could tell they were about the same height, too.

“I’m sorry. I fell asleep for a little while,” she said, in only slightly labored English. That was a major plus. Every single person that had been posted outside his door until now hadn’t said a word to him.

“Uh, that’s okay. If I’d known earlier, I would have made a run for it.”

“Do you enjoy your visit to China?”

“Sure. It’s been great.”

“Good. Please let me know if I can do anything for you.” Michael pondered that when she followed up with a question: “Where are you from?”

“Me? America.”

“What city?”

“San Francisco. Well, not exactly the city itself. I live in the East Bay.”

“Is that near New York?”

“No, it’s on the opposite side of the country.”

“Really? I thought it was next to New York.”

“No. You’re thinking of New Jersey.”

“Would you like a cigarette?”

“Do you smoke?”

“No. I am offering you.”

“That’s okay.”

“Yes, or no?”

“‘That’s okay’ means ‘no’.”

“Strange. You don’t like Chinese cigarette, eh?”

“I don’t smoke…tobacco.”

“American cigarette taste better, right? That’s what I hear.”

“My friend,” he gestured inside, meaning Ariel, “says that Chinese cigarettes are better. More tar.”

She shook her head. “How much does one cost in America?”

“One cigarette? Or a pack?”

“Pack.”

“I dunno. I never bought one.”

“That’s very strange. Is it true Americans eat raw vegetables?”

He blinked at that one. It took him a moment to realize what she was talking about. “Yes. We eat salad. You don’t eat salad in China?”

She shook her head. “We cook. Only barbarians eat raw food. Like Japanese.”

He nodded. It made sense.

Their conversation went on in this manner, with her peppering him with questions that sounded genuinely curious. It was the most fun he’d had in days, though he couldn’t help noticing that every time he tried to come back with a question about China, she would clam up and ask another question about America. He got the message after a few tries: Talk about America, don’t talk about China.

“You’re very curious about America.”

“I would like to travel there someday. I know it’s difficult right now, but I think the relationship between our two countries will improve in the future.”

“I hope so. There are a lot of Chinese people in America, especially in San Francisco.”

“I would like to see them. There are a lot of things I would like to see in the world.”

“Light out for the territory, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“‘I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.’ That’s from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.”

“Marx…?”

“Not Karl Marx. Mark Twain. American author.”

“I don’t know him. Have you read any Chinese authors?”

“Just Mao.”

She took him down to the basement, where he met the hotel kitchen staff. Nobody could speak English, but they all waved at him, smiling. A crowd began to grow around him. He was, he supposed, something of an attraction. The enthusiastic reception he received seemed to go beyond mere obligation. The spontaneity was a welcome relief from the uptightness of the bureaucrats and flunkies he’d encountered so far. His guide asked the staff to show him what they were making, and they took him around the kitchen. In one spot, a group of women were wrapping what looked like won tons. The people there had the friendly, unpretentious appeal of blue-collar workers who, while they weren’t exactly happy, weren’t as miserable as they once were. It reminded him very much of the post office.

The next day, he and Ariel were taken out for a drive to a village on the outskirts of Peking. He got a good look at the countryside surrounding that gray city. It was a brisk autumn day, and the trees were in full color.

Their hosts were going to treat them to a banquet and took them to a restaurant that resembled a union hall. Michael and Ariel and a group of men in blue suits sat around a table and ate and drank. One of those in attendance, Michael believed, was Wang Hung-wen, the former Shanghai cotton mill worker who had been promoted by Mao to the number-three position in the party hierarchy, and who later joined Chiang Ching in promoting the “Criticize Lin Piao, Criticize Confucius” campaign.

Their hosts ordered a number of “delicacies.” There was an ugly thing that felt like eating a dead rat. Then they ordered a round of sea slugs, which didn’t have any taste at all. It was like sucking down snot. What fucking culture considered this sort of thing a delicacy? Michael thought their gracious hosts were bringing out these dishes out of sheer perversity-they weren’t delicacies at all. By the end of the night, their hosts had drunk them under table with moutai, a clear liquor that tasted like turpentine. They repeatedly toasted the Americans in Chinese and laughed, and the whole time Michael thought they were saying, “Don’t hold your breath waiting for the revolution in the U.S.A. This is the best we got! Ah ha ha ha! ”

That was their last day in China.

Michael picked up his luggage at the carousel. There was the suitcase he’d originally packed, and following, the suitcase he’d received in Vancouver, which he hadn’t seen since he’d checked it in for the Pan Am flight to Tokyo. It felt heavier than he remembered, but that was hard to say. He looked at Ariel once he had it, expecting some kind of response, a raised eyebrow, smirk, or nod, but Ariel had his poker face on. They went through customs. The officer checked his luggage ticket and waved him through.

They entered the arrivals lobby. There was no one to pick them up.

In the seconds that he scanned the crowd again, looking for the people who should have been there but weren’t, a flood of thoughts went through Michael’s mind. He was sure the exact same thoughts were now going through Ariel’s mind. Michael was carrying the suitcase. It wouldn’t be hard for him to outrun the old man. Pushing him down or hitting him would only cause a disturbance that would draw attention to him. If he just ran, it would take the sparse crowd around them awhile, whatever Ariel’s response, to realize what was going on, and even then, if that, security was light. Ariel didn’t have a chance.

He could lie low in Canada. There would be a lot of people out to kill him. It was a lot of money. He could steal the money and become a capitalist.

The two men from the Seattle group came running up.

“Sorry we’re late. Traffic.”

They followed them to their car.

In Seattle, the four met another two, and the money was handed over. The two with the money left in a separate car. Michael and Ariel were driven back to Seattle HQ.

Michael thought he was driving to San Francisco with Ariel, but Ariel told him he would be staying on.

At the curb, Ariel stopped him. “You weren’t thinking about running off with the money back there, were you?”

Michael just smiled. They didn’t say goodbye or shake hands. It was the last they saw of each other.

In 1983, long after he’d stopped being a Communist, Michael came across an obit in the Chronicle. Ariel Rabenstein, a patient who had suffered from Alzheimer’s, passed away in a Jewish old folk’s home in East Oakland.

Some time after that, on a trip very unlike his first one there, Michael stepped into a bar in Vancouver and saw behind the counter a woman he believed to be Candy Dong. Her youthful beauty had long since withered away, but the vitality she had displayed that night in Chinatown was still in force.

He reintroduced himself, and she remembered him. He told her this story and mentioned how he had passed up a chance to run off with the money.

“I was going to take it and find you. I still kept the chopstick wrapper with your friend’s phone number on it.”

She looked at him with an unreadable expression. Then she mentioned she had left for Vancouver shortly after they’d met and hadn’t been back to San Francisco since. Was the restaurant still there?

He had tried looking for it, but couldn’t find it. Chinatown hadn’t changed much, though. In that way it seemed to exist in cyclical as opposed to linear time, life went on there much as it had before. Of course, politically, everything had changed. All the old battle lines that had been drawn up and which they’d all fought over so heatedly had been irrevocably erased. Things that used to matter, like the Kuomintang, now mattered little. The old I-Hotel, he didn’t know if she’d heard, had been torn down after a great struggle. All that was left on the corner of Jackson and Kearny was a hole in the ground that had remained for almost twenty-five years.

“And your friend Francis? How’s he doing?” she asked.

“He went to jail and kind of disappeared from view after that. What about your brother, the filmmaker?”

“He went into real estate,” she said. “He bought up properties all over the avenues, and now he’s immensely rich.”

LARRY’S PLACE BY MICHELLE TEA

Bernal Heights

It was the beginning of October and it felt like the height of summer, even way the fuck up on the rotting hillside that was my Bernal Hill neighborhood. Not that the weather would dry my moldering basement apartment; we’d need a year of San Francisco Octobers for my home to become livable, to staunch the flow of moisture that dappled my crumbling walls-my own little waterfall, I liked to think of it. This was when I wasn’t depressed, when I had some levity to spare. My own little waterfall, like I’m living in the tropics.

And it’s true that my back door opened up to a lush backyard, it’s true that though it was horribly overgrown and almost entirely weeds, it was green. On the days when my depression had receded like a landlord’s hairline, I could appreciate it all-the chest-high weeds tossing in the perpetual wind, the sheen of dew pimpling the walls of my subterranean apartment, my overall fungal existence. I was some sort of elf, a smallish person dwelling in a mushroom, which bloomed on the gloomy backside of Bernal Hill.

Two things happened that first week of October, and they both involved breaking and entering. First, I was the victim, later, the perpetrator. I’d come home from a call and I was feeling cranky. It was an early-morning client, unusual, a business guy from Seattle in town for a conference. I should pay more attention to what my tricks do. Some of them are almost certainly controlling the world-balding white businessmen, past middle age, with a lot of cash to blow on hookers. Their suits are expensive and their briefcases look like they come from the leather of a superior cow. I visit them at the Fairmont, at the Mandarin, at every single downtown hotel; a blur of elevator buttons and soft-carpeted hallways that muffle the clack of my heels. These guys are involved in dirty business, they’re profiting from the war, are Republican, are getting rich on the backs of girls like me, I know. Sometimes, I think I should be a spy, fuck them better, make them like me, seduce them into telling me the secrets of their occupations so that I could do-something. So close to these rulers, in plush locked rooms, with their curdled white bodies. Surely I could do something; a certain sabotage seems close, so close, but no. I zone out when they speak to me, leave my body when they climb onto me, give them the dullest fuck, and they don’t bat an eye. They’ve been having lousy sex since they were fourteen, they’ve been getting it on with women who want nothing to do with them since puberty, they can’t tell the difference. They roll off me and I’m gone. Down the elevator, I’ve got my hand jammed into my purse, wrapped around the money, counting the bills from touch, discretely. I’ve already forgotten what he looked like.

Usually I’m nice to the cabbies. I have them drop me off at the tip of the sharply angled, dead-end block my ramshackle house sits, melting, at the end of. I walk myself careful down the steeply sloping sidewalk, gashes cut into the concrete sidewalk for traction. Getting to my front door is like rappelling down the side of a cliff. If you ask me, houses shouldn’t have been built down here. These little block-long streets cease abruptly at the open space that remains on the side of the hill, and the hill is angry that development has crept so close. It whips these pathetic homes with a battering, constant wind. It sends soggy clouds to sit damply atop the roofs, trickling stagnant moisture, birthing deep green molds. It sends its monsters, the horrifying Jerusalem crickets, up from the soil to invade basement apartments, looking like greasy, translucent alien insects. They drive me crying into the bathroom to strategize their eviction from my home.

The hill hates the houses, and my dead-end street is a study in bad feng-shui-the sinister vibes rising on the wind. It’s my plan to move someday, when I’ve saved enough money to afford it. It’s my hope that the rents will go down in this town. I’m biding my time here on the side of the hill, a growing stack of cash in a box on my bookshelf. I worry about it there, the soft paper of it. I check in on it daily, to make sure the damp hasn’t dissolved it into a mushy lump of pulp.

Anyway. My street is difficult to drive down, harder to get out of. You can back up but it’s sort of scary. You can turn around in the driveway across the street, but that’s a bitch. Plus, the scrappy little dog that lives there will bark at you the whole time, making the task even more hellish. Usually I tell the cabbies to let me off at the corner and I hike down to my door.

That morning I felt surly and bossy, like a tired old whore, even though I was only twenty-five. I’d been up till 4 a.m. fielding late-night alcoholic phone calls from my recent ex, Jenny. They’d started around last call, from the pay phone mounted on the wall at the bar. I could hear the rumble of voices behind her, smacked with sharp laughs and the sound of glasses, music low from the jukebox at the other end of the room. Jenny was louder than all of it. She must have thought I couldn’t hear her, but I heard her fine, she was screaming. I heard her fine and I bet half the bar did, too; heard all my business and Jenny’s drunk opinion of it. The call would last until her money ran out and then I’d have a break as she hit the bar for more change or bummed some off her friends. I’d lay on my futon in the silence, listening to the subtle ping of water falling somewhere in my apartment. Waited for the phone to ring and it did. Heard the bartender holler last call; later heard her say, Hey, Jen, Don’t You Got A Phone At Home, Come On. We’re Closed. Mentally tracked the eight-minute walk down Mission, to Jen’s place upstairs from the produce and piñata store. Counted minutes for the huffing climb of the stairs, the drunken fiddle with the locks. Imagined her pause at the narrow closet that held her toilet, to piss out a bunch of what she’d just drank; figured in some time for her trip into the kitchen to check the empty fridge for beer; then another sixty seconds for her to stomp into her room, fling herself onto her bed, and start calling me again. I picked up the phone; I didn’t have anything else going on. I laid the phone on my ear and stayed rolled on my side upon the futon.

She sounded crazy because she was crazy. This was good for me to remember. These phone calls were the best breakup present Jenny could have given me. I listened to her psycho-ramble, and sometimes, when it was appropriate, I’d say, Yeah, I’m Sorry For That. Sometimes, the sharp reality of her pain really got me and I’d feel it, too; a haunting glimpse of what it must be like to be trapped on the inside of Jenny’s brain. As shitty as our tortured relationship was for me-this shitty, dramatic ending was worse for Jenny. I was getting away, but she was going to be stuck there inside her head for the rest of her life.

The morning of my call with the guy from Seattle, my face was puffy and I was almost hallucinating with sleep deprivation. I smeared some Preparation H under my eyes, which had submitted to a bit of crying during some of Jenny’s more expressive calls. I learned the Preparation H thing from a girl I worked with at a house in Oakland. It shrinks the little red saddlebags under my eyeballs right down. I wobbled into an outfit, packed my purse with the minimum; no toys, too early, just the condoms and the lube, my wallet, key, and that smear-proof lipstick. I swear, a million whores rejoiced when they finally came out with this stuff. Blowjobs require enough of a sacrifice of dignity without having to worry about looking like a clown, red smears all over the place, when you’re done.

The call was easy; the guy was still sleepy himself. I left him fumbling with the hotel coffee pot and hailed a cab outside. Down there? the cabbie asked as he crested my street. Yup. He sighed. I could feel him asking if he could just dump me out at the corner. Not that morning, not in those shoes, not in the condition I was in. I was ready to plunge back into my damp bed and sleep the day away. Barely 10 a.m. and I’d already made my money. The cab turned down my block, crawling carefully.

That little fucking dog started its yapping. The poor thing never saw the inside of a house; it was just roped there to the chain-link fence that separated our paltry civilization from the wild roll of hillside. Its hair was long and its body was small. It looked like a bad wig someone had tossed onto the street, sort of matted and dingy. I bet it’d look like a real fancy pooch if someone ever cared to clean it up, but for now it looked like a piece of trash come to life. I tipped the driver well. If he were a good driver he’d be off my precarious street in about two minutes; if he were a hack he’d be out there forever, the dog ruining the day with its noise.

I knew something was wrong right away, because my door was open. The latch that held it shut had been busted off. It hung there on its hinge, the door. Thankfully, we were experiencing this summery weather up here, or else the wind would have been flapping it open and closed, open and closed, like that damn dog’s mouth, advertising to the shady neighborhood that my apartment was accepting explorers.

My neighborhood consists of: a gang of young boys who try to be intimidating and usually succeed; a shiftless family who occasionally steal my mail; the dude across the street who owns the dog, an Archie Bunker-type who looks like he’s stockpiling weapons and has American flags hung in his window in lieu of curtains; the little boy who lives downstairs from him whose efforts to befriend the ragamuffin canine result in bellows from the patriot and a scolding from the boy’s squat grandmother; a lesbian couple who bought the nicest house on the block-a dubious compliment-and who’ve allowed fear of their new surroundings to turn them into hostile bitches. Oh, and there’s Larry, lord of the mold, the man I pay rent to, who lives in the apartment above mine. It’s not exactly Mister Roger’s Neighborhood here. It’s like everyone has Seasonal Affective Disorder and we spend a good ten months of the year ensconced in clouds. The serotonin has all gone away, we’re unhappy people here on Porter Street.

I kicked off my heels and grabbed one in my fist, stiletto out, as a weapon. My front door gaped open behind me. I descended into the cave that was my home. Hello? I yelled. Hello, Motherfucker? Show Yourself, Fucker! I paused. Larry? I called. He has been known to come into my apartment on landlordy business, unannounced, totally illegal, I know, but what am I really going to do? Like I said, I’m biding my time here.

In my kitchen there’s a note. It’s on the back of a takeout menu, scrawled in a dried-up Sharpie. It’s faint and hard to read. I could decipher the word “you” and the word “fucking” and there was an arrow that went in the general direction of my back door, which was also wide open. Kicked open, busted. I felt a swell of anger. Whoever did this had to break my front door in order to get in. Okay, I get that. But the back door was easily unlocked from inside my house. Whoever did this broke my door just for the fuck of it, just to be a dickface.

I grabbed the menu and walked toward the door. I tried to study the text in the sunlight that shot down from the sky and pooled in the slight clearing of weeds outside my door. The phrase “nice fucking life” was visible at the bottom of the page.

Out in my yard, there was a clear path where the weeds had been trampled. I followed it, barefoot, my feet getting all gunked up. In the middle of the yard, I looked up at Larry’s apartment. What a jackass. What a totally useless landlord. He makes no repairs; he lets the yard turn into a jungle and my apartment into a mold-ridden health hazard. The only thing he was good for was simple presence; he was reliable like that. He rarely left his upstairs apartment, save for beer runs. He sat up there and drank and watched cable. He was a bulky guy with a lousy attitude, and I figured I could at least rely on him to ward off burglars, a simple crime deterrent. But he wasn’t even good for that. The sun reflected off his windows, making it impossible for me to see into his place. He could have been standing at the window looking out at me. I flipped him off just in case.

I followed the skinny trail of crushed weeds to the back of the yard. There was a depression there, a cement clearing that maybe an optimistic former tenant had once tried to garden in. It was filled with dirt that had turned muddy with trash and pooled rainwater. Who knows what else was in there. Today my life savings was. I could see the tips of bills sticking out from the sludge, like they’d been packed into the wet dirt and then stomped deeply into the skank of it. Yeah. There were footprints mashed into it, overlapping footprints going in all directions, like someone had just freaked out and moshed my money into the ground. The box it had all been stored in was off to the side, lying in the weeds, open and empty to the sky above us.

At first I felt nothing; and then quickly, swiftly, I wanted to die. As I stood there wanting to die, I could feel the sensation morph. I could feel it become energized and then it became the more dynamic feeling of wanting to kill. Then it lessened, became heavy, and I was filled with the desire to just kill myself.

I looked down at the mud. Maybe it was salvageable. I gently tugged the protruding corner of a hundred-dollar bill and it came off in my fingers. The mud was sopping, it was like coffee with a lot of grounds in it. It was, as I probed it with my fingers, more of a puddle than anything. I scooped up a liquidy pile of cash. I draped the paper across some bent stalks of weeds and it tore there, slunk into the ground like slurry.

My life was dissolving. I plunged my hands back into the puddle and brought out some more palmfuls of dark, indistinguishable nothing.

I started to cry. I started to hyperventilate. I thought of all the guys I’d fucked. I thought of all the mouths, gummy and slick, that had suctioned themselves to my breasts. I thought of my sweet, chafed pussy, and all it had been through. The gropes. The sweat-that beaded chests like the condensation on my bedroom walls-how it had splattered upon me. Oh, the noxious grunts, the gross sounds they made, the plain and hideous sight of their nudity. It was as if I had fucked them all for free. All I had were the bills in my purse, and rent was due today.

Fucking Jenny. Fucking sick Jenny. She didn’t even steal it. She was as broke as me, broker even, with a bigger drinking problem, more of a need for cash, and she didn’t even steal it. Her need to hurt me had blotted out even basic self-preservation. Under all my despair was a new fear now; fear of Jenny. She might as well have killed me, I thought, or at least sent someone to kick my ass.

I thought again about the men. The simple destruction of the money, the basis of those consensual trysts, now made every call an act of violence survived. I was shaking. I went back into my room and laid down on my futon. With both doors open to the beautiful day, I passed out.

When I awoke it was evening. The wind had stirred up on the hill and was blowing through my apartment like a little hurricane. My broken doors whined on their hinges. I padded into my kitchen, still in my whore clothes: a shimmery skirt-cheap from Ross-and a blousey lady-shirt, sheer, the ghost of my push-up bra a hazy vision beneath the fabric. Jenny had loved me in my whore outfits, months back when we had first hooked up. She had thought the getup hilarious, and it was. I remember her sitting squat on the dank wooden floor of my bedroom, her tiny hand spidering out around the fat bottle she was drinking from. Red-cheeked and giggling, she watched my transformation. I strung the lingerie around my body, pulling back my fried hair, removing my heavy horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and dusting my lids with shimmery powder. We’d fucked that first time, there on the floor, the splintery wood scraping my ass, scuffing my Payless pumps, and I didn’t even care; her mouth cold from the beer and tasting of bubbles.

Three months is not a long time for a relationship unless you’re a dyke. After the first few days, we were together all the time; I knew her story and she knew mine. We had one real good month together, and then things started to slip. She’d get moody and I’d turn bitchy in reply. We stopped fucking at home and instead did it in bar bathrooms, when the first flush of alcohol-induced good mood washed over her. By the time we got back to one of our places she’d be in a different state, sour, and we’d fight. I always regretted it. I know better than to argue with a drunk person-both my folks were drunks and it’s like trying to have a logical conversation with some loony on the street. My points may have been good, may have been right, but in the morning Jenny wouldn’t remember anything I said. It took a full month of things being real lousy between us for me to call it off, and I was ashamed that I’d stuck around that long. But she never stopped looking good to me; and she had charm, a glow that the beer both fed and ruined.

In my kitchen, I startled a small, feral cat; a black thing mottled with bits of orange. So tiny, it hissed ferociously and darted out my back door into the weeds. I tried to jam the door shut but it was useless. Same with the one upstairs. I made coffee and emptied the dregs of a box of cereal into a bowl, dousing it with soy milk. I tried to get a plan together. Even though I always had my rent ready on the first of the month, I made a point not to pay Larry until the fifth. I liked to put off spending my money until the last possible moment. The first was four days ago; at the time I had had all my rent and more. Today was the fifth and I had one hundred and fifty dollars. Rent for this damp but spacious basement apartment was seven hundred dollars. People liked to tell me I had a good deal. They would gasp when I told them. Seven Hundred Dollars? And You Live All By Yourself? They would moon dreamily. I suppose it was a good deal, and that said a lot about this town. I would have to tell Larry that I didn’t have the money. I decided against telling him about the break-in. I didn’t want him knowing I kept my cash in a box rather than a bank; didn’t want him to know about my romantic drama, or anything about me whatsoever. It was none of his business. I’d tell him that I’d have it for him as soon as possible, and leave it at that. Let the fucker evict me, what did I care. I seemed to have awoken at a certain bottom. All I could figure to do was call my service and have them put me on call twenty-four hours a day for the indefinite future, and then try not to think too hard about what that would really entail.

Out on the street, I banged on Larry’s front door. I’d given it about a half-dozen whacks before I remembered the man had a doorbell. I guess I just wanted to hit something. The rag of a dog across the street responded to my violence with a series of futile yaps. The sky above was perfect and blue, but a bank of clouds were in the distance, blowing my way.

Larry! I hollered. I banged and rang.

The dog was barking itself a sore throat. Then I looked down. Coming out from under Larry’s door was a bit of hair, brown hair, sort of oily. Just a little greasy tuft, sliding out from inside the house.

Larry? I asked, in a normal voice.

I crouched down and touched it. It felt like real hair. A wig? Why would Larry have a wig? I had a flash of him, drunk and outfitted in attire common to the opposite gender, and then a flash of sympathy for him and his poor attitude. We all have our secrets, don’t we? I gave the wig a tug, but it didn’t shift. It felt attached to something heavy, like a body. I cracked open Larry’s mail slot and peered into the darkness. The crumpled mass lumped on the other side of the door looked like my landlord.

You lookin for something?

The voice made me jump; I sprung up in my stocking feet and spun around to greet my neighbor, the militia man. His belly preceded him, jutting out of his undershirt like a round, hard melon. He looked like he was sneering but it was simply the set of his face. A rifle would not have looked out of place in his arms.

I Live Here, I reminded him.

Every so often, this would happen. The guy would accost me as I fumbled for my keys, or as I lingered outside my door awaiting a taxi. I’d notice him peering out from behind his tattered flag, and then he’d be galumphing down his front stairs and confronting me in the street like I was set to burgle the neighborhood. I rapped my fingers on the door again, and moved a fish-netted foot to cover the lock of Larry’s hair, which protruded onto the sidewalk.

You live here? he asked suspiciously. How come I ain’t seen ya?

You Have, I said. We Do This All The Time. You See Me Out Here, Ask Me What I’m Doing, And I Tell You I Live Here. I sighed patiently.

That other girl lives here, he informed me. The redheaded one? Forgot her keys this morning and busted her own damn door in. He chuckled with affection for who I could only imagine was Jenny, breaking into my house.

Oh, Yeah, I nodded. She Lives Here, Too.

Uh-huh, he nodded, looking me up and down. Stalling briefly on the gauzy outline of my bra and moving on up to my face. You all keep leaving your keys behind and breaking your doors down, that man up there’s gonna get rid of ya. He gave his chin a chuck in the general direction of Larry’s apartment. He your dad? You two sisters?

Six months I’ve lived on Porter Street and this guy has never spoken to me beyond clarifying that I’m not a criminal. He picks this moment, this bizarre and creepy moment on this strange and terrible day, to inquire about my life.

No, I tell him. Larry’s The Landlord. Me And That Girl, We’re Just-Roommates.

Norma, he nods.

Right, I’m Norma. I’m losing patience. He frowns.

No, that other girl, she said her name was Norma. Now he’s suspicious again.

Well, She’s Fucking With You. She Likes To Do That. And Actually, She Didn’t Lose Her Keys. She Broke The Door Down Cause She’s Crazy, And If You See Her Around Here Again Breaking Things, I’d Appreciate It If You Could Call The Cops.

The man took a step back, as if the breath my speech had been carried out on was laced with something noxious.

No need to use language like that. I don’t believe in calling police. I don’t think our tax dollars should be going to a gang of government thugs. I don’t believe in a police state. You’ll have to handle your differences with Norma yourself, she seemed like a nice person to me. We had a nice little talk about the government out here this morning, all about the unconstitutionality of the present tax system. He swallowed and nodded. That’s right. You girls just settle your grievances without bringing the government into it, why don’t you. Can’t go crying to the government every time life throws a problem your way.

All Right, I agreed. All Right Then. Thanks A Lot.

Down the street the lesbians who bought the house on the corner paused at their SUV, watching us.

Then there’s all that, the guy said, gesturing toward them.

Yeah, I said.

You okay over there? the butchier one yelled over in an uncharacteristic display of neighborliness. Where were all these concerned citizens when my house was being robbed? I ask you. Well, we know where the guy was. He was chatting up and befriending Jenny, perhaps even helping her out with a weighty hip-chuck to my front door.

Fine, Thanks! I gave a wave. They paused a moment and turned to look at one another, perhaps communicating via a special telepathy lesbian couples acquire when they manage to stay together past three months. Then they climbed into their mammoth automobile, lumbered over the crest of our street, and were gone.

SUVs, the man said. He flung a meaty hand at the wake of dust and trash their car had stirred. Don’t get me started.

This Has Been Nice, I said. It’s Nice To Be Neighborly. But I’ve Got To Run.

Maybe you girls want to leave a spare set of keys with me, he suggested. If you’re always locking yourself out.

I Don’t Think It’ll Happen Again, I told him.

Better safe ’n sorry, he said.

I turned my back on him and descended into my subterranean apartment. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched the crack of light in my busted door, expecting him to follow. I waited there for a few minutes and when he didn’t come, ran through my house and out the back door, climbing the shabby back stairs to Larry’s. The stairs shook with the slam of my feet, a snowfall of dried paint sifted down onto the weeds.

Larry! I banged on his back door. My voice carried out into the quiet.

Larry was an unconscious heap at his front door. I don’t know why I was attracting all this attention to myself when I knew I was going to have to break into his place. I pulled and pushed and otherwise strained at his back door. I wasn’t good at this. I’d never broken into a place before; my particular illegal inclinations hadn’t ever brought me to such a situation. I’ve picked a pocket, shoplifted, and been guilty of an occasional drunken assault on equally drunken men behaving rudely in bars or on street corners. But I’d never broken into a home. I rattled the dully gleaming doorknob. It figures that Larry’s doors have adequate locks. Doesn’t that just sum up the whole thing?

Larry had a few ceramic pots on his back stairs. The plants inside them were long dead, all dried up. Cigarette butts were stubbed out in the dirt. I grabbed one and hurled it against his kitchen window, where it shattered in a rain of terra cotta and dirt that plunged to the yard below. I threw a second pot at the window and experienced a similar explosion. Jesus, I whined. The dirt was in my hair, smudged over my blouse. I grabbed a shard of pottery and used it to gouge a hole in the screen, tore it away. Now it was just the glass and me. The third pot bust through, sending a whole mess onto Larry’s linoleum floor. Huh. Linoleum. Must be nice.

As I climbed in through the shattered window, ruining my fishnet stockings on a jutting piece of glass, I realized I had never been inside Larry’s apartment. I stepped gingerly onto a recycling box piled high with beer cans.

Larry? I called.

I walked into a small pile of dirt and plant roots. Broken glass glittered. I skipped quickly to the fridge and leaned onto it for balance.

Larry? I cried out again, my voice little more than a croak.

Oh fuck. I pulled open the fridge and spied a lone Budweiser, its plastic loop of rings still noosed around its aluminum neck. I yanked it out, set it free, cracked it.

I moved through Larry’s place. It was nice, much nicer than my watery grave below. Good stove in the kitchen, ample cabinets. The floor was linoleum, and where it wasn’t, carpet provided a soft relief on my feet. The living room was in disarray. The rest of the six-pack rolled empty on the floor alongside a glass bottle of something stronger. The television was set to ESPN. Some electronic device whirred in the corner. I studied it and discovered it was a dehumidifier. Fucking genius. I made a note to buy one when I had money again. Then I remembered that Larry was almost certainly dead and I could probably just take it.

I crept to the edge of the hall stairs, took a deep breath, a gulp from the can, and then switched on the light. There was Larry. His head was smooshed against the front door at an awful angle. His neck looked incorrect. His eyes were disturbingly open, as was his mouth. He was not alive.

Larry? I asked, just in case.

Nothing. Outside, the dog barked and barked. In the living room a sports team won something and the crowds in the stands cheered in unison. I finished my beer.

That was all about a month ago, perhaps a little longer. San Francisco’s autumn summertime is all but gone, and the winds have brought their cold damp; they lash the house with it like a locker room of jocks snapping soggy towels. The wind is so forceful that it actually shakes the house. Before I became used to it, I would wake in the night thinking an earthquake had struck. I would stare at the ceiling in terror and wait for the upstairs apartment to cave in onto my bed in the basement. Then I would remember that I was upstairs, and it was only the wind. I would turn up the heat that hummed gently out from the vent in Larry’s bedroom and fall back asleep.

I haven’t seen Larry since I drug him into the bathroom and heaved him into his claw-footed bathtub. I shut the door with a click and I do not open it. I pee in an empty pickle jar and, when I must, slip out into the backyard and shit in the weeds like that tiny black-and-orange cat who lives out there, too. I shower in the hotels and private homes of the men that I trick with. One shower before and a longer one after. I can’t bring myself to return to my basement, not even to use the toilet. I poked my head in only once, and it was as if the mold had accelerated in my absence. The moisture seemed heavier, wetter; the decay, palpable. It scented the very air of the place. There was an animal turd in plain view on the wooden kitchen floor, and a scurrying sound in the corner I did not investigate.

Upstairs, in Larry’s place, I can hear my broken doors squeak like a strange wind chime in the gusting air. Upstairs, in Larry’s place, I watch cable TV and eat the last of his food; bring home six-packs for the fridge. I drive his car to my calls. I’ve taken up smoking. When I cannot sleep, which is more and more frequent, I stand out on the back porch amidst the dirt and smashed pottery, and I smoke. The kitchen window is secured with cardboard and shiny gray duct tape; the light from inside does not shine on me there.

I stand in the dark night and the powerful wind steals the smoke as it streams from my mouth. I know that this will all end soon, and the understanding makes me jumpy. Last night, as I stood smoking, I saw beams of light in the wild hill below; the wide swath of land between my home and the housing projects at the bottom. It was a cop or two, prowling with flashlights, searching in the unruly grass. It seemed an omen. I’m not sure what I’ve done or what sort of punishment I need to outrun.

Late at night, as I smoke cigarettes, I can hear my telephone ringing through the open door downstairs. It’s just past last call and I know the ringing won’t stop for hours. I stand and smoke in the chill until it’s quiet. The man across the street tries to speak to me when I let myself into Larry’s with the key I took from his pocket. I ignore him. It makes him mad and he yells, and his yells inspire the dog, and I close my door on the decaying block and all of its angry inhabitants.

In the night, it is the hardest to be here; when I come back from a call and the television greets me. I have thousands of dollars in my box. I’ve been working so hard, so very hard.

Lately, I imagine I can smell him-the scent of Larry’s collapsing body coming out from under the bathroom door on a terrible breeze. Certainly it is time to leave. I think I would like to live in Russian Hill; in a glinting apartment with a chandelier in the lobby and a man who holds the door open as I come and go.

I stand on the back stairs in the afternoon light; and when my cigarette is half-done, I look down and see that man-the one who lives in his undershirt-standing in the weeds beneath me, looking up. And I know before I see her that Jenny is behind him.

THE OTHER BARRIO BY ALEJANDRO MURGUÍA

The Mission

It stood on the corner of Sixteenth and Valencia-the Apache Hotel, a once elegant residence for out of town visitors, more recently a rundown joint for several dozen single men and some desperate families. Every time I go by the spot I still hear the screams, the cries for help of those who were caught in the fire the night the Apache Hotel burned down.

The newspapers screamed the headlines the next day: SEVEN DEAD IN FIRE. It didn’t state the cause, but I knew I would be dragged into it. And I didn’t want to be dragged into it. I had cited the place three times, but not for fire hazards, just the common stuff-garbage and rodent infestations. Had there been a fire hazard, God himself could not have stopped me from making sure the owner took care of it that very day. Now it was going to come down on me. That’s why Choy had taken me off the case. He was my shithead boss at the Department of Building Inspections, and my job was on the line if my report had failed to mention a fire hazard, which it did not. Seven people had died and I wasn’t going to carry those dead. They weren’t my dead. Let whoever killed them carry them.

It was Friday evening, and Choy’s order to report for a Monday morning meeting had appeared on my desk as I was leaving work. I decided to take my file on the Apache Hotel with me; I had the weekend to find the cause of the fire. Sometime after my Wednesday inspection, maybe thirty-six hours afterwards, the place had burned down in a raging fire. It’s not easy for a building that size to burn that fast. No one downtown was talking, to the papers anyway. This wasn’t going to be easy or fun to be involved with. But it wasn’t just my skin on the line-there was my own outrage at what had happened. There was no reason for those people to have died. No reason at all.

The fire had likely started early Friday, about 3:00 in the morning. The newspapers mentioned witnesses and I had to track them down and get their story firsthand. In particular, the person who’d called 911. They’d been identified as workers leaving a nightclub. I’d have to hang around the ’hood till 2 a.m. to interview them. In the meantime, I was nursing a beer in a little dive on Twenty-fourth Street; mindlessly staring at the yellow spot on the brown bottle neck, trying to make sense of this case and my own life.

I was living in a former can factory on Alabama Street, now converted into a den of unwashed but creative folks, who’d taken the iron-age dinosaur and made it somewhat habitable. Now the dot-comers were popping up like mushrooms in cow shit. Or you’d see them cruising in their beemers, calculating how much it would take to run everybody out of here. And in all irony, I was working for the city as a building inspector. I wasn’t interested in being a cop, I just made sure that rental units were habitable for human beings. My girlfriend Amanda had left me. Going to our formerly happy loft usually put me in a funk of depression, so I stayed away as much as I could. Usually in places like this, bars without names outside, a couple of Mexicanos shooting an easy game of pool, and Miss Mary from San Pedro Sula, with her smile wide as her hips, pouring a beer.

Don’t get me wrong, the city is beautiful, but I live in another barrio. The dirty, low-down, underbelly side of town. Places that practically make the hovels of Calcutta look like the Taj Mahal. The garages turned into in-laws where three families live packed tight and desperate as boat people. Closets redone into bedroom suites. Such is life. And death. I was going to go visit death at 9 o’clock in General Hospital. In the morgue where the dead are kept. She wasn’t dressed liked you expect but there is no mistaking her when you meet her.

At 9 o’clock I met La Pelona face-to-face in the basement morgue of General Hospital. A Samoan in scrubs and flip-flops led me into a walk-in cooler the size of a taquería. Inside were row upon row of gurneys, each with their own stiff. He pointed out a corner where seven of them were stretched out on the floor. “We ran out of tables,” he laughed. I took no offense.

When I lifted the sheet on the first one, I was surprised to see the face was contorted like those mummies of Guanajuato, but unburned. “What happened?” I asked.

“They died of smoke inhalation,” the Samoan said.

Nobody even knew these poor bastards’ names. I could see the process that would now start: immigration tracking clues, an envelope with a name, or perhaps a phone number in one of their pockets. Find their hometown, relatives most likely, and tell them. Arrange for transportation. These guys were human sacrifices-but to what god? Why did I go see them? I wanted the rage to keep me going.

Valencia Street on a Friday night is an hormiguero. Suburbanites afraid of their own shadow crawling around in groups of ten. Sometimes more. One of them was standing on the corner, speaking into his little cell phone, asking for directions, looking like a character in that TV show Lost. It’s for them the ruins are being created, the families forced out, the murals destroyed. The other night I overheard one of them ask, “What’s this neighborhood called?” And her blond friend replied, “I don’t know, but it used to be called the Mission.”

I slid behind the counter at the Havana Social Club, the walls covered with the photos of poetas, famous and obscure, many of them dead. I ordered the specialty of the house, ropa vieja. Don Victor had the box booming “Chan Chan” by Compay Segundo. I’d just heard that Compay had checked out after ninety-three years of smoking cigars and that his real name was Francisco Repilado. This year my poet-friend-brother Pedro Pietri had moved to the other barrio, too. And today was the anniversary of my comadre’s death, whom I’d known thirty years. Now there were seven more checked into the other barrio.

The dead were all around me, urging me to keep on living, to keep their memory alive.

I paid up about midnight and still had two hours to kill.

I stepped outside and there was a white SUV with its engine running at the curb. Two creeps with necks like wrestlers sat inside. The uglier one rolled out.

“You Morales?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Mike Callahan wants to speak with you.”

“I’ll have to check my social calendar.”

The creep said nothing but opened the back door for me. He was maybe six-feet-four, three hundred pounds with his suit on.

“I was going that way myself,” I said.

I named the muscle-head driving Huey, and the ugly one Dewey. I knew Callahan, Irish Mafioso, head of a renegade builder’s association; he moved around City Hall like a man with a lot of muscle behind him, which he had. Muscle, but not the brains. The thugs he’d sent to pick me up were quiet the whole time they drove. Except when Dewey farted and Huey said to him in all seriousness, “God bless you.”

We drove to another part of the city. We were in that industrial area near the freeway. A long time ago, we used to play in these empty lots as kids; riding our bikes down Pot Hill, as we called it. Now, giant commercial buildings, all chrome and steel, were in the throes of birth. We went under the freeway, took a side road behind a construction site, and parked. We were in Mission Creek. I knew this place well, another childhood hangout where we’d gone swimming. Now, fancy houseboats were docked with an occasional massive catamaran or sailboat. The pier creaked like backpacks on Guatemalan Indians. Nearby, the freeway roared with traffic headed downtown, and I could see the skyline of the city like a giant neon dollar sign flashing billions.

Huey indicated I should go to dock number 10. It was a fancy houseboat, but without any class; in fact, it was painted whorehouse-red. Callahan was alone in the back room, the air thick with scotch I could smell from where I was standing, ten feet away. He indicated I should sit down.

“You smoke cigars, Morales?” He was about to light a big stogie with a gold-plated lighter.

“I hate cigars and Republicans.”

“Don’t be so uptight. We’re relaxing…follow me?”

“Okay. So we’re relaxing…”

“You know what these are?” He handled the stogie like a pool stick in his big hamlike hands. “Cohibas. The finest of all Cuban cigars.” He let that sink in for a moment. “And-illegal in this country.”

“What’s it to do with me?”

“Hey-I’m trying to show you that we all have our imperfections. But you’re not listening. So what you pissed off about? Go on, spit it out.”

“I cited the Apache Hotel.”

“The one that burned?”

“But never for a fire hazard. Because none existed.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It burned on my watch. I’m the fall guy, and I don’t want to be the fall guy.”

“If that’s what you’re worried about…”

“You don’t get it. Seven people died. I don’t think it was an accident.”

“It was a fleabag hotel. Everything changes.”

“It’s against city ordinance to tear down low-income housing.”

He shrugged. “Someone was careless…that’s the way to look at it. It won’t be an inconvenience to you.”

The way they looked at people as an inconvenience made me sick.

“Why don’t you explain it to the seven stiffs in the morgue?”

He rose from his chair, cigar swinging in his mouth. “Take a look outside. There, out the window.” He gestured to the lit-up skyline, the buildings glowing, sucking up whole dinosaur herds of energy, perched like toxic towers spewing radiation. “That there, let me tell you, is the highway to the future. You can ride it or you can, well…be run over by it.” He laughed at his own joke, his jowls trembling with fat.

To me it seemed like a nightmare. “I intend to find the source of the Apache Hotel fire…in case you’re wondering.”

His eyes turned gray like those of a great white shark. “You have a loft that’s not warranted. It’s, ah, how shall I say?…a safety hazard.”

“I have the permits.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. One of your neighbors might file a complaint. Claim it was illegal.”

“We’re all illegal here. Except the Rammaytush. And we killed them all.”

“So you’re a do-gooder, is that it? Look, Morales, nobody appreciates a smart-ass like you stirring up trouble for other people. Let me remind you-with your illegal loft, your shit smells just as bad. So think about it.”

He went back to his cigar and I knew the interview was over.

Huey was waiting for me.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll walk.”

At 2:00 in the morning, Sixteenth and Valencia is a current of human electricity, AC-DC all the way. I’d caught the last show at Esta Noche, the tranny club on Sixteenth. I wanted to see “La Jessica,” advertised as one of the most beautiful illusionists in the world. The soft spotlight in the smoky club made her indeed seem beautiful, at least the illusion of beauty, draped in sequins and sheer glittering gowns that gave the impression she had a body like Angelina Jolie.

But at 3 a.m., when La Jessica was out of costume, she looked like any other vato hanging around waiting to pick up a drunk to bounce or bed for money.

She smoked a filtered cigarette and the apple in her throat bobbed with each phrase.

“Mira, I was standing right here, mismito. And the flames just shot up at once, dios mio, it was like a woosh, licking up the side of the building.”

“The flames didn’t come from inside of the hotel?”

“No, chulo, from the outside.”

“What else you see?”

“Two men running away.”

“You sure of that?”

“I’m sure they were men. As sure as I’m La Jessica.”

That was proof enough for me. That and the burned-out hulk of the building across the street, standing like some pre-Hispanic ruins in the jungles of the city.

“These men, could you identify them?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Did you get a good look at them?”

“Well, they had big muscles, they were you know, muy fuerte.”

I thanked La Jessica and went home to Alabama Street. I would have to return the next day, sift around for evidence. I walked into my loft without turning on the lights, without checking for messages, just letting the glow from the street fill up the emptiness inside me.

I had nightmares, screams and bodies burning, people leaping from buildings to their deaths. I woke up early and reached for my file. There wasn’t much there-kinda like Oakland. The notes on my three visits, including the one Wednesday, three days ago, described the minor stuff I’d cited. The listed owner was F. Delgado, et al. The address was on South Van Ness, one of those old Victorian mansions in the heart of the barrio. It was on my way to the ruins of the Apache Hotel, so I dropped by on the off chance F. Delgado might be around. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I can look someone in the eye and right away tell you if they’re up to something evil.

In another century, the nineteenth to be exact, South Van Ness was millionaire’s row. Victorian mansions lined the blocks, ornate ladies in wood lace and wrought-iron curlicues. Even old man Spreckles, the sugar baron, had his digs here, on the corner of Twenty-first and South Van Ness. Later, after the earthquake, most of these notable scoundrels parked their hats on Snob Hill, leaving the best weather to us poor folks in the flats.

At the door of one of these mansions from that era, all restored and pretty, I knocked once, twice, nothing happened. After I leaned on the doorbell, a maid finally cracked the door, but kept the security chain latched.

“Look lady,” I said, “I carry no stinking badges.”

She blinked once but didn’t budge. So I repeated: “No soy policía. Busco a un tal F. Delgado.”

“No Delgado here…this Señora Lopez house.”

Then a voice came from behind the door: “What’s the matter, Carmen?”

A woman I had not seen in years and thought I would never see again stepped out. Sofia Nido was beautiful as ever. And seeing her brought back that summer in Puerto Escondido, so long ago it seemed like another lifetime. Ten years ago we had spent a torrid summer together, dancing on tables, making love on the beach, living like the apocalypse was here. But to her it had been a fling; she had come back to her fiancé, and we had gone our separate ways. I had never gotten over her and had drunk many a beer in her memory.

“Roberto-what are you doing here?”

“I guess I could ask you the same thing. I came to see a certain F. Delgado. Ring a bell?”

“Can’t say that it does. But maybe my aunt might know. I’m her attorney.”

“Any chance I can talk to her?”

“What’s this about Roberto? Are you with the police? That is so unbecoming of you.”

“It’s a bit complicated.”

“I see. My aunt is very ill. She really can’t see anyone right now.”

“Maybe when she feels better?”

“Perhaps. But Roberto, excuse me, I’m late for an appointment. Can I give you a ride anywhere?”

“I’m on my way to Sixteenth and Valencia.” It didn’t faze her, which was a good sign. I wanted to see how she’d react to the fire scene. But I forgot all about that watching her drive, her profile like an Indian goddess, her eyes big and dark.

She drove a red roadster and moved smoothly into traffic headed down South Van Ness. “I hardly recognize you, Roberto. So, you’re with the city?”

“Department of Building Inspection. I go after deadbeat landlords who don’t provide habitable housing. And with rents so high, many landlords are ripping someone off. Especially in this barrio. And you-why such short hair?”

“I’m between men. Short hair makes me feel in control.”

“Yes…and my girlfriend just left me.”

“You mean you’ve lost your touch with women?”

“It happened when I lost you.”

She looked at me hard and I wished I hadn’t said that.

But she didn’t slap me, so I changed the subject and took a crazy chance. “Say, there’s a band playing tonight from Nueva York. You feel like maybe…?”

She shook her head, in exasperation, I guess. “I can’t believe you asked me that. I guess I’m an idiot, but sure, why not? Haven’t gone salsa dancing in years.”

I bailed out at Sixteenth and Valencia. “Pick me up around 9:00, in front of the old can factory. Later, alligator.”

I watched her drive away. My emotions were so tangled up knowing how dangerous it was to be involved with her. And yet, that was exactly what I was doing. It wasn’t till later that I realized I’d forgotten to check her reaction to the smoldering remains of the Apache Hotel.

A chain-link fence surrounded the area. Two cops were guarding the site, looking bored. A big tractor inside the gates was headed for the burned-out walls. I whipped out my camera, but one of them jumped in my face.

“Morales-what the hell you want?”

“Photos of the site.”

“For your scrapbook? Get outta here.”

Then the tractor slammed into the building and knocked down half a wall.

“Hey, you’re destroying evidence. Who gave you the right?”

“You’re a day late. The D.A. has all the photos they need.”

“How can he, if you’re knocking down the building?”

“Are you doubting me, you flat-assed Mexican?”

“Look, Johnson, I know you hate my guts, but seven people died here. I want to know why.”

“I bet you do. It’s on your ass, isn’t it? You’re the one that overlooked the fire hazards. This is on your conscience. If liberals like you have a conscience.”

“Have it your way, pin-head.”

The word was already out on the street, the frame was on. The bulldozer had knocked down the side of the building facing Valencia Street, but the fire had started on the Sixteenth Street side. I stood in front of Esta Noche and shot a whole roll, clearly showing the charred side of the building where La Jessica claimed to have first seen the flames. It was obvious to me what had happened. Something had caught on fire in the passageway, right underneath the fire escape. The bastards could have spared the fire escape, giving those inside a chance to get out.

I saw Johnson on his walkie-talkie, so I made myself scarce.

I wanted to meet with La Jessica again. Show her the photos and have her mark where she saw the two men and the flames.

I went back to the bar on Twenty-fourth Street to drink a beer with the yellow dot on the neck and mull over the file. I went over my notes and wrote down everything that had happened. It was clear someone was trying to bury this thing, and quick. It was too messy for them. But who were they? Who was F. Delgado and the et al? They owned the Apache Hotel; their business address, the one on South Van Ness. I figured Sofia’s aunt was part of the et al, and Sofia was lying to protect her. Or, Sofia didn’t know anything about it-but as her aunt’s attorney, that seemed far-fetched. As a precaution, I left my files, my notes, and my camera with Miss Mary, and just kept the empty briefcase.

I walked home to my loft in the deep gloom of evening. I was so absorbed that when I reached the gate that leads to the courtyard, I wasn’t expecting the reception I got. Someone grabbed me from behind in a chokehold. I rammed an elbow in his gut to break free, but then something that felt like a brick smashed me across the face. BLAM! Stars, fireworks, nothing quite describes the sensation. I dropped my briefcase and stumbled to one knee, my head spinning. Far away, I heard thunder, then a flash of lightning that seemed like a spotlight; but it was a pair of headlights shining on me. I couldn’t believe it was Sofia in her red roadster.

She helped me to my feet and I felt like a lame idiot. “I got jumped. They stole my briefcase.”

“Come on. Tell me in the car.”

As she slid behind the wheel, I couldn’t help but notice how her dress fell between her legs in ruffles. Not now, I said to myself-don’t think about it now. It started raining before she even pulled away from the curb.

The view from Sofia’s apartment took in the wet palm trees of Dolores Park and the fragmented lights of downtown. The pale halo of a street lamp floated in a black puddle. Rain fell over the rooftops of the city and on the rows of Canary Island palms lining Dolores Street; the rain washed down the buildings and the cars, sloshed into the gutters. I stood looking out her window, haunted by that infinite nothing that is everything, that certain emptiness of every nameless second.

She switched on the light in the kitchen and the ochre-colored walls were covered with portraits of Frida Kahlo, the patron saint of pain. One had Frida with a necklace of thorns scratching out drops of blood. Another wall had Frida as the goddess Tlazoteotl, a bed sheet over her face, her legs spread, a dead baby half out her womb. And above the stove-Frida as a deer pierced by arrows. The kitchen looked like a monument to suffering, an apocalyptic gallery of pain and despair. I had a flash of Amanda-she liked to be tied to the bed-and shook it out of my head.

I rested on the living room couch while Sofia wiped the blood from my brow, and I told her what had happened. “I didn’t get a chance to see their faces.”

“The neighborhood is going downhill, getting so violent.”

“I don’t think it was that.”

“Then…?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Men always bring trouble. That’s for sure.”

“I’ll leave whenever you want.”

She tried to light a cigarette, but her hand was trembling. I took the cigarette from her mouth, lit it, and put it back between her lips.

“Did the blood make you nervous…?”

She shook her head. She was blushing now. I could see how needy she was, how desperate for something, I didn’t know what. She turned on the radio. A jazz trumpet drifted arabesque notes that swirled around her cigarette smoke.

It hurt me to know a woman like her, so beautiful and so alone. I wanted to tell her she was beautiful, that I could be a good man to her. Instead, I told her the only thing I had ever kept secret from everyone, even myself. I told her so I could be close to her. In the candlelit room, the words seemed to take centuries to unfold. “I killed a man once.” The silence was so thick it cut. “I was seventeen; it was a gang fight. I hit this vato with a pipe and kept hitting him till he was dead. Muerto. Muertecito.”

I could sense my words running through her like a hand-forged stiletto. Her eyes narrowed and she saw me for what I was, with all my flaws.

“Why do you tell me this?”

“I don’t know; it bothers me sometimes. I never told that to anyone, ever. Can you be trusted?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s why I told you.”

Outside, the rain had eased and the faint rush of tires reached me. After Amanda had jammed, I answered a few personal ads and hooked up with women who didn’t care what I did to them as long as they felt something. Some scenes were sick, and when I started enjoying them I decided to quit. Since then I’ve more or less lived the social life of a monk.

I touched her shoulder and she turned to me. A pale vein in her throat pulsed wildly. She brushed her hair back from her face. The lamp light seemed like a witness to the crime. I reached to turn it off but she stopped my hand.

“I want to see your face.”

“Wait.” I held her hand. “So what’s this about? Who is this Señora Lopez at whose house I met you…?”

“Are you still thinking about that?”

“I don’t know. It’s all related. I can feel it.”

“Everything is related, Roberto. After the last time I saw you…”

“The summer of Puerto Escondido. You were with Raymond then.”

“We were engaged but we never married. It was my last year in law school. A weekend trip to Napa. We’d both overdone it. An accident along the side of the road. It was my fault Raymond was killed…”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You don’t understand.” Her voice was soft and pained in the shadows. “…If I trust you?”

“I’d do anything for you.” I said that, but I didn’t know for sure. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to go on. She didn’t give me a choice.

“I’m being blackmailed. The classic story. A young, gullible, ambitious young woman sells her soul to stay out of jail. I was scared after the accident. In shock, really, for months. Clearly it was manslaughter, but she quietly cleaned it up. She has that sort of power. So instead of being a jailbird, I’m an accomplice. She provides the fronts and I cook the contracts, make sure everything is legal.”

“Your aunt?”

“Who else? Señora Lopez, when she comes out of the shadows. Oh, Roberto, I want out of her grip. It’s like someone is violating you every day. It never goes away.” She took a long drag from the cigarette. “And she’s Felicia Delgado. It’s one of her pseudonyms. Her full name is Aura Felicia Delgado Lopez. I think she ordered the fire.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s an insurance scam. Plus, with the hotel down they can build something new, make a few extra million.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that. A fire like that will cause them lots of trouble, there’ll be an investigation, and…”

“Who do you think you’re dealing with?” Her eyes flashed with righteous anger. “My aunt is rich and powerful and evil. She has the mayor in one pocket and the chief of police, the next mayor, in the other. If you stand up to these people, if you mess with their plans, they’ll hurt you. They’ll hurt you bad, Roberto. There is lots and lots of money involved. The Builders Association? Their whole blueprint for the Mission?”

“I’m familiar with Callahan. I just had a relaxing chat with him last night. But look, it’s a matter of conscience. You have to decide for yourself.”

She was quiet for a minute. “I have the documents in my office.”

“And I have a witness. Tomorrow I’ll speak with La Jessica. Maybe all of us together can bring this vieja Lopez down.”

She shook her head like she wasn’t too convinced and lit a row of votive candles on the mantlepiece. They lit up an eighteenth-century painting of La Anima en Purgatorio, the fires licking up her chained wrists. I couldn’t help but comment.

“What’s up with the burning lady?”

“Oh that? A gift from my aunt.”

“You mean…?”

“The very same…”

“Why do you keep it?”

“Purgatory. Where souls have their sins cleansed by fire.”

She stared at me with those dark eyes that will stay with me a lifetime. Then she said something that changed my life.

“Did you love me then, Roberto? In Puerto Escondido?”

“I love you now.”

“Would you really do anything for me?”

“Double back-flips on a high wire.”

“I’m not joking,” she hissed. Without breaking her lock on my eyes, she held the burning tip of the cigarette an inch from my skin. When I didn’t pull back, she pressed the hot ember against my forearm and held it there for a quick second, just long enough to leave a red ring tinged with ashes. I didn’t flinch.

“Do I pass the test?”

She sat back and took another hit of the cig. “Why don’t we just leave? Turn over the evidence and get out of Dodge?”

“I don’t have it on me. The photos are stashed on Twenty-fourth Street. I’m thinking that’s what those thugs were after. And who would follow up on it? No, I have to stay.”

“Then I’ll stay with you.”

I flicked away the ashes on my forearm and grabbed her hair. I knew this scene. Knew it very well.

“Now it’s my turn, cariño.”

I pulled her to me, and she was on fire. Our mouths kissed, hot and angry.

I finally let her up for air and she said, “I’ve never kissed a man with a mustache before.”

Then I unzipped her dress, stopping my hand on the curve of her nalgas. She turned to face me and shrugged the top half of her dress off her body. She was naked above the waist, without a bra; a string of candlelight danced around her breasts, small as pomegranates. I placed one in my mouth and sucked the juice from it. We undressed each other before rolling onto the rug, the two of us twined together like serpents. I slipped my hand under her back and flipped her on her stomach, pulled her hair, and hissed in her ear-“I want you to be my puta.”

She didn’t hesitate in answering-“Make me do what you want.”

And I did, over and over, all night long.

I woke up alone in her bed Sunday morning. I didn’t have time to relish the night before. There was a note on the pillow and the morning paper. Call me on my pager-and her name scrawled in red. The headlines sent a shock through me: La Jessica had been found stabbed to death in her hotel room. The paper speculated that a john, angry at having discovered Jesus instead of Jessica under the wig, had taken out his rage with a twelve-inch blade. Somehow I was left unconvinced. La Jessica had struck me as flamboyant, a tease, maybe even a tramp, but not a whore.

I still had to wait for Miss Mary to open, so I went to the little hotel down the alley from Esta Noche. That’s where La Jessica had lived, and I wanted to hear what the street had to say about her murder. There was an altar set up in the hallway and her friends were there, weeping and sobbing. They all knew me and they spoke frankly.

“Those cabrones, why did they have to kill her?”

“Because she saw too much. Everyone knows that building was torched. And that’s why they killed her, Mr. Morales.”

“She went home alone that night. Pobrecita. So there wasn’t any john, that’s just lies. Puras mentiras.”

I left the mourners to their grief and called Sofia but could only leave a message on her voice mail. “I turned up some interesting info. Meet me where I told you. Bring the documents.”

I waited in a café till about 6 p.m., Miss Mary’s opening time, and then hurried over to Twenty-fourth Street. As soon as I reached the bar I sensed something wrong. The door was ajar and the lights were off. I stepped in and Johnson and another cop were waiting for me. The place had been turned upside down and Miss Mary was in a corner, frightened to death.

“Lady’s going to lose her license. Receiving stolen city property.” Johnson had my camera and briefcase under his arm.

“The camera’s my personal property, Johnson. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s evidence now. Her license is gone. We’re merely retrieving what belongs to the city. Boy, Morales, did you ever fuck up.”

They left. I had just cost Miss Mary her gig. And I had a pretty good idea who had turned the cops on me.

I practically ran over to Dolores Street, and when I saw her roadster parked outside, I took the steps two at a time. I caught Sofia on her way out, with a little attaché case, all ready to go. I snapped. “You double-crossed me.” SMACK! I bitch-slapped her hard as I could. She stood her ground.

“You think I would do that?”

“You did.” And I let her have it again. SMACK!

“Then why did I bring you this?”

It was the señora’s little black book, listing all the contributions, legal and illegal, to the mayor, the D.A., and the chief of police.

It wrenched my heart that I’d been so cruel to Sofia. “I’m sorry.”

“Let’s leave now, Roberto. Please, before anything else happens.”

“Wait. There’s something I don’t understand. If you didn’t tell them about Miss Mary…how did they know my files were there?”

I led her back inside and started throwing the cushions around, tearing out the stuffings. Nothing. She thought I was crazy. What was I looking for? The lamp? Yes. I tore off the shade. Nothing. Then I saw the painting, the gift from the aunt, La Anima en Purgatorio. And there it was in the frame. The wire I was looking for. I ripped it out.

“Your aunt bugged you. She heard everything we said last night. What do you think of that?”

“You mean everything? What a degenerate.”

“We don’t have a minute to lose.”

“What should I pack?”

“Nothing but your lipstick. Leave no clues behind.”

Night had already fallen as I took the roadster out Dolores Street and onto the freeway headed south. I knew a little cove out by Half Moon Bay, where a friend of mine ran a motel by the beach. We could hang there for a few days, gauge the fallout, figure out our next move. I took Highway 1 to Pacifica and right away we came upon fog. It was rolling in quick and thick, and as I started heading up Devil’s Slide I could tell the ride over would be dangerous.

I put the fog lights on and looked in the rearview. Coming up behind me was a white SUV. I nudged the roadster and it rose like a bird. I lost them momentarily, but at the same time I couldn’t risk hitting eighty or ninety on those twisting curves, blinded as I was by the fog. Headlights were creeping up again-it was the SUV and it didn’t look like it wanted to pass me. It wanted to ram me.

We were going uphill but would soon come to a peak that flattened out before dropping again. With the SUV a few feet from my ass, I revved the roadster and flicked on the bright lights, creating a mirror effect, then snapped them off and did a hard brake onto the narrow right shoulder. The SUV had a choice: Pull over and smash into me, sending us both over the three hundred foot cliffs, or pass me by. It passed me by, but not without a burst from an Uzi. Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta!

“Duck!” I shouted, and pushed Sofia down. The windshield broke into spider webs, the impact of each round making the roadster tremble. Then I heard the SUV fade. I stayed down till several more cars had passed. In case there were more than one of them.

That’s when I saw the blood. Sofia had been hit. The bullet had missed me but had found her right shoulder. She was bleeding in a bad way and her eyes were frightened.

“I’m going to get some help,” I said through clenched teeth. I pulled out her little cell phone but there was no signal in this area, cut off by the sheer mountains. With my coat, I made her as comfortable as I could, but I knew she was in terrible danger.

I found a flare in her trunk and sparked it. Since the roadster was close to the cliff’s edge, I walked back toward the oncoming traffic so I could be seen in the fog and drizzle. Then headlights approached, a car with two guys bullshitting instead of paying attention. And me out there swinging the flare at them in the middle of the road. Till at the last second, the driver saw me and swerved suddenly to the right, onto the shoulder; lost control, bounced fifty feet, and smashed broadside into the roadster. KABONG!

The rest of my life I’ll remember that sound, metal against metal, heart against heart.

I ran to the edge and watched as the two cars went over the cliff, tumbling down together and bursting into a single fireball whose heat singed my face. I screamed, I howled, I don’t know, it made no difference. I knew at that instant this would be the deciding moment of my life; the before and after that would scar whatever life I’d lived and whatever I have left of life now.

I started walking away. I didn’t want to be around when the ambulance arrived. Didn’t want to be anywhere near the scene. If someone figured that I’d been killed in the crash, so much the better. One day, those who did this would pay, and I wanted to be around to see it.

When I got back to La Mission I discovered my loft had been torched. A warning, I guess. The spray-painted graffiti, DIE YUPPY SCUM, didn’t fool me. They would have liked a little wet work on me that night.

Obviously, I never went back to the job. I’ve stayed under the radar ever since. Gave up that whole other life to stay alive. But the circle scar on my forearm from Sofia’s cigarette reminds me every day of the dead I carry.

The newspapers and the Fox Channel all played it another way. A niece of a prominent Mission district real estate matron killed in a tragic car accident with another vehicle on Devil’s Slide. I guess the bullet holes on the roadster were caused by metal-eating termites.

Once the dust settled, so to speak, the Planning Commission approved the permit for the new building at Sixteenth and Valencia, and Callahan’s outfit built it. That’s what you see there now-that chrome shit glass monstrosity. But for a long time there was just a big gaping hole at the intersection, like when you have a tooth pulled. Arson as a cause for the fire at the Apache Hotel was in fact never investigated by the D.A.’s office, the Department of Building Inspections, or anyone else. But the word in the neighborhood is that the new building is haunted by the animas, the souls of the seven people who died that night.

And the big woman, Felicia Delgado, the one who profited from the insurance scam? She didn’t fall. Just too many layers between the hirelings and herself. And too many people owed her. But she’s old and sick, and her greedy heart can’t last much longer, miserable with her bloody money…so it doesn’t really matter. One way or the other, sooner or later, she’ll get her ticket to the other barrio.