The End Has Come

LIKE ALL BEAUTIFUL PLACES Megan Arkenberg

The damned thing is, I still don’t like San Francisco.

The present tense sounds wrong. It catches on the way out, like a ballpoint pen running dry and dragging an invisible indentation in the shape of a letter. But after everything, after the end of everything, it’s the truth.

I still don’t like the city, its steepness, its damp chill, the feeling that something is lying in wait behind the crest of every hill. All those crowded sidewalks, slabs of concrete unevenly pieced together like a half-hearted mosaic, the cracks gathering cigarette butts and blackened chewing gum. People everywhere at all hours, and that sour smell that hangs in the air of seaside cities, unless you’re close enough to the ocean that the salt is burning your sinuses instead. I never was a city girl: Mama was right about that, in the end. Right about me, and right about him.

Felix. Fucking Felix-from-fucking-San-Francisco, Mama always said. He has nothing to give you but heartbreak, Grecia. What are you thinking?

You can hate someone who’s dead, can’t you? And some place — it’s the same thing. You even feel the same guilt, saying it.

There’s nothing left now. The rain has stopped, and a bare skeleton of a city remains. I borrow Mahesh’s binoculars, stand in the prow and look out across the bay, and every time the sight turns my stomach. There’s a few cement pylons clinging to the hills, tangles of steel, and slabs and slabs of white concrete broken and pocked like a sponge. Just north of us, the frame of the Bridge still arcs out toward Yerba Buena, but then it disappears. Down into the black water, its eerie stillness turned iridescent by the sun, like a puddle of oil. There’s life returning to Oakland, or at least scavengers; late at night, you can see the lights bobbing through the ruins south of the port. But San Francisco is still and quiet.

And here, on a container ship grounded in the Oakland Outer Harbor, I have this recurring dream.

I’m stepping out into the courtyard behind the tiny theatre in the Mission where Felix rigs the lighting. Or I’m standing on the fire escape outside our kitchen window, at the top of a Victorian row house that no one bothered to paint properly — the layers of trim lost in a uniform pastel pink, like the chalk they give you to cure an upset stomach. Or I’m cresting one of the hills — Potrero, walking home from the theatre, my arms laden with groceries or costumes that need repair — and I half-expect to meet a monster on the other side. I half-expect to find the end of the world, the whole city sliding down a sheer cliff into nothingness, just ocean as far as the eye can see.

And in the dream, I’m right. There’s nothing on the other side of the threshold. No downhill street, no rows of homogenous-hued Victorians marching like lemmings toward the freeway and the sea. No murals of goddesses and butterflies or undulating koi fish over the overflowing dumpsters behind a Chinese café. Just gray static, like the analog television in our bedroom that collected stacks of unpaid bills. There’s a faint ringing in my ears, a buzzing sound like fat garbage flies.

Does it count as a recurring dream when it’s the only one you have? I think I ask myself this question every time, just before I wake up.

“Again,” Lena says. “Please.”

Coming out of the immersion is excruciating, like all my senses are being slowly dragged across sandpaper. My eyes water as I peel away the visor, and for a moment the inside of the shipping container vanishes, and I’m caught again in the gray world of the immersion — scentless, colorless, the only sound the faint static prickle in my earphones. The coolness along my left side tells me the container’s sliding door is open, letting in light and the clear, dry air that smells like absolutely nothing. I blink the tears away, and Lena looks up from her computer screen.

“Let’s do it again, please.”

On the table in the other end of the container, she has her own set of pieces laid out. Compression gloves, the hood with its broad blue-tinged visor, and yards of rubber-coated wires to link the suit and a miscellaneous suite of suction cups back to her computer. Her dark hair, damp with sweat, is flopping out of her barrette. I see the traces of gritty saline paste at her temples, which means she’s been trying to record again. Which means the flicker of memory I felt inside the immersion, the lapping rhythm that may have been waves and the roughness of something against my palm — steel? concrete? — belonged to her.

“Give me a second.” I sit up slowly, feeling the blood rush to my head. My legs feel asleep below the knee. “I felt something, right toward the end. Rough and solid. What was it supposed to be?”

Lena sighs, leaning against the corrugated wall. She slowly drags her fingers through the loose strands of hair.

At the university where she used to work, back in D.C., Lena says they had an almost perfect immersion. A fairground, somewhere in Nebraska, programmed and rebuilt piece by neural piece. They’d spent years, first, assembling the brain scans and the sensations — the feeling of dusty gravel underfoot, the sound of blowing grass, all the smells and motions and minute variations of light. She has them all copied, here, in the dozens of drives scattered throughout her makeshift containership laboratory. She also has me, and Mahesh and the half-dozen other survivors on board, and all our memories of overpriced coffee, uneven sidewalks, poorly painted Victorians, and the soft crunch of cigarette butts on our doorsteps.

Enough, she thinks, to remake San Francisco. A ghost of it, at least. As much as you’d ever find in a museum, or as much as you’d ever remember at a funeral. An outline with a few spots of high relief, as sharp as the day you first felt them — that’s what she’s hoping for.

What we’ve gotten, so far, is gray.

A lot of fog again. Guess that’s why you picked San Francisco. I make the same joke every time, and Lena always smiles. But it isn’t the truth.

She picked San Francisco because she loves San Francisco. Because it was home for her, years and years ago, long before the quakes and eruptions and atmospheric decomposition, and long before the rain swept away everything that was left. If you’re going to raise a ghost, it should be one that you loved.

“That was supposed to be the bridge,” Lena says. Her fingers have reached the end of her ponytail, and she flips it back over her shoulder. “The Golden Gate, I mean. Walking across it, going north. Nice and iconic.”

“I never did that,” I say. “Too touristy.”

“You’re kidding.”

“About the touristy part, sure.” I wink at her, and she smiles, just a brief flash of teeth. “But I really never walked across the Golden Gate. Didn’t have that kind of . . . leisure time.”

“Fair enough.” She knows I’m teasing her now. She stands up a bit straighter, stepping away from the wall and rolling her shoulders. “I only remember it because we didn’t do it often. My sister and I, we made that walk maybe five, six times in all the years we lived there.”

I know better than to ask what happened to her sister.

I think there’s a paradox here, and it’s starting to frustrate Lena, whether she’ll ever admit it or not. When a city is wiped out as completely as San Francisco was, the people who really knew it are gone. Gone in all kinds of horrible ways, burned or suffocated or sunk to the bottom of the sea. The only people who remember it are the ones who went away. People like Lena, who had to leave — or people like me, who ran.

The city has millions of stories that I don’t know. Never did and never will.

“Okay,” I say. I flip the visor back over my eyes, and the container flickers away behind a wall of blue. “Let’s do it again. Same thing. I think I almost got it.”

For Lena’s sake, I always try again. As many times as she asks. No matter how I feel about this city, I can admit — you deserve to be remembered by someone who loves you.

I wonder if anyone alive remembers Felix.

What a disaster that turned out to be. I hear this in Mama’s voice, although of course I never heard her say it. She had a bad feeling about Felix, and now it colors everything in retrospect. I close my eyes and see him approaching me like a harbinger of doom, all honey-colored beard and blue eyes like the heat death of the universe. Tight black turtleneck sweater, showing off a trim waist and hiding a beautiful map of ink, sleeving both arms and tracing his sides from hip to collarbone. I can’t remember half the images, only the brightness of the colors.

He came up to my register with a bill for a turkey sandwich and small coffee, and handed me his phone number with his credit card. “Felix,” I asked, “is that ‘happy’ or ‘lucky’?” I don’t think he understood the question, but I called him anyway.

I did love him, at least at first. Enough to follow him north and west to what felt like the edge of the world, a finger reaching up into the Pacific, reaching or pointing for something unimaginable. Not that I saw the ocean side with any frequency. Our home overlooked the bay, if you stood on tiptoe and squinted through the gap in the houses, over the distant slice of 280. On warm nights, we stood on the fire escape as long as we could bear it, sipping wine from CVS out of plastic cups and pretending it was romantic.

He got me a job at the theatre, coming in after each performance to clean up the lobby and the seats. I swept up water bottles, abandoned programs, the ends of joints, and sometimes unspeakable or unidentifiable things more suited to Hazmat than the lighting guy’s girlfriend. I hated the job, but for his sake I tried to love the city. And sometimes I even succeeded. There was a corner shop with reasonably priced cigarettes that smelled like incense and played Lebanese pop on an ancient boom-box behind the counter. The panederia across the street sold delicious spiral-shaped cookies rolled in pink sugar. But mostly, I failed. And the more I hated where I was, the more I hated who I was with.

Oblivious. That’s the kind word for it. Self-absorbed. But it was worse than that, stupider, and maybe more tragic. A snake chewing on the tail of its own failing ambitions. A house building itself on a foundation of mud and quicksand. A city straddling a fault.

Then the earthquake came, like a miracle. And I ran.

The last time I saw Felix, he didn’t even look sad. He was on the phone with the electric company, running down his battery for no Earthly reason other than that scolding other people made him feel like he was accomplishing something. He waved me out the door, the phone still raised to his beautiful pink lips. Didn’t even hand me my suitcase.

But the damned thing was, I couldn’t stay away.

I didn’t even make it back to Mama. Got stuck a little south of Stockton, out of cash and out of breath. I thought I was going to die there, in that motel room with its hundred staring eyes of knotty pine.

But the rain came, and I didn’t die.

And when the rain turned out to be toxic, chewing through stone and metal like battery acid, I found a job with the relief efforts. They gave us truckloads of filters and pH balancing tablets to distribute, and we drove back to San Francisco. I looked for him, first thing, as soon as I could get away from the desperate lines on Mission. But by then he was gone — the apartment empty, the theatre boarded up. Everyone was looking for everyone and no one knew where to start.

The rain kept coming, and soon everything else was gone, too. Pounded into powder and washed out to sea.

Lena and I found each other because of the ship. Before he died, one of my co-workers had told me where the filter shipment was coming in. “It is, without exaggeration, the most important thing in the world,” he said. “Do you understand me? If something happens to me, you get to that ship.” Hours later, the house we were staying at in Oakland collapsed into a sinkhole, and whatever was left of him wasn’t strong enough to climb out. I went to the harbor, and saw the massive container ship grounded on the shifting floor of the bay.

Lena and Mahesh were already there. They had come here for precisely this purpose, all of Lena’s equipment loaded into two trucks, looking for a city to save. I found them hooking up generators and solar panels, labeling each container by its contents. Food, water, filters and medical supplies — keep. Plastic crap — toss, pallet by pallet. They mapped paths onto the exposed roofs of the lower-level containers, little squares of tape placed end to end like dominoes: green for east, yellow for west. So you know where you’re going, if you’re going anywhere.

Not knowing what else to do, I stayed.

So the question now is fairly simple. If you put aside Lena’s project, put aside the questions of its value and its feasibility, if you bracket the question of what I’ll find on shore. The rain has stopped, and life is returning to the hills, so shore must be survivable. And knowing that, the question is easy to ask: Do I leave, or do I stay? Go out into a world whose shape I no longer recognize, without even the thought of a person who might be looking for me? Or stay on the edge of the corpse of a city that I still don’t like, with the people who are trying to raise its ghost?

If Felix has taught me one thing, it’s that I have never been good at making choices.

When you have a hard decision, Mama said, close your eyes and count to five. Then say the word out loud. Your heart knows what it wants, if you stop ignoring it. You just have to listen.

Once, only once, I tried to go back.

I had a reason, maybe, but not one I could articulate. We were six weeks into Lena’s project at that point, and hadn’t exchanged so much as a breeze, a whisper of leaves in the gutter, the faintest whiff of coffee. I didn’t think I was going to find anything, exactly. Maybe I was trying to convince myself that there was nothing to find.

We didn’t have gasoline for the container ship’s lifeboat, but there was a small canoe-like contraption that Mahesh had put together early on, when they were shuttling equipment from Oakland to the ship. It would hardly have been seaworthy a year ago. But now, the bay lying flat as a mirror, it was exactly what I needed.

I set off early in the morning with a few water filtration packets and a bag of chips for company. Left a note tucked in my sleeping bag for Lena, if she came looking for me, just to tell her I wasn’t gone for good. But I didn’t tell her where I was going, either.

And then I rowed. And rowed. And rowed.

Each splash of the oars echoed. I remember how vivid that sound seemed, out there on the flat water, under the flat unbroken sky. I had thought about going straight across the bay, along the east span of the bridge and then across the empty water where the west span used to be, landing over what had been the twenty-something piers. But the clearness was tempting, and I found myself wondering. Wondering and turning the boat north.

Under the bridge, around Treasure Island, and I turned west again. And there, between the tips of the peninsulas — on my left, traces of steel and concrete, and on the right, leafless trees toppled like a giant’s stack of driftwood — there was nothing but sky. A sky that seemed too big for itself, too solid blue for too many miles, almost threatening to collapse. The towers were gone, the cables and the six-lane span of road vanished without a trace. Even the concrete that had anchored it to the shore. All of it underwater, being steadily rusted away.

I waited just long enough to rest my aching arms, and then I turned back.

I rowed west of Treasure Island and Yerba Buena this time. Closer to the city’s shore line, which even now was losing sheets of rock and mud to the silent and steadily encroaching water. There was a scraping sound as the bottom of my boat connected with an object beneath the surface, and I looked over the side to see the outline of something vast and rust-black. Huge, and magnified by the water, and my brain ran to sea-serpents and dragons, the monsters you find off the edge of a map.

It was so close to the surface. I wasn’t thinking, not quite. I pushed my sleeve up past my elbow, balanced the oars across each other in front of me on the prow, and then I reached for the fragment of bridge.

The water felt intensely cold, like dry ice, or putting a bare ice cube on a sunburn. My fingertips found the rough steel and I spread my fingers, pressed the flat of my palm against the metal. Rough as an emery board, pocked with holes as large as coins.

The water lapped above my elbow, wetting the sleeve of my sweater, and the scratch of wet wool brought me back to myself. I drew my arm out with a gasp. The thinnest imaginable layer of skin was starting to lift away from my forearm, the skin beneath it showing pink and freezing cold.

I thought I was going to shudder, or groan, or begin to cry. And I knew if I started doing any of those things that I wouldn’t be able to stop. I bit my lip and squeezed my eyes shut until the cold ebbed away and the ache of overtaxed muscles returned, spiked now and then with electric sparks of pain though the damaged skin.

When I opened my eyes, I had drifted away from the ruin. I took up the oars again and started back toward home.

“Again,” Lena says, and I’m in.

The suit flexes around me, channeling warmth. The press of the sleeping bag against my back vanishes and twin needles of sensation run up my legs. Standing. Now walking. And there — the flicker of something against my right palm.

Stronger now. My hand against a rail, curling around a rail. It feels rough and warm, and I remember that file-rough sheet of metal, the ruin of a different bridge beneath the water. Faintly, through the earphones, there comes the sound of traffic nearby, the sound of waves across a vast distance.

And I’ve reached five.

“I got it this time, Lena. I definitely got it.” I hear myself babbling through the sandpaper-scrape of the immersion peeling away. I pop out the earphones and pull off the visor, and Lena is watching me like a woman afraid to believe what she’s hearing.

“Are you certain?” She leans away from her computer, putting some distance between herself and the data, almost as if she’s afraid to breathe on it. “It was definitely a bridge? You could tell it was a bridge?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Everything but the visuals, Lena. You’ve got it.”

“Good.” She clears her throat. “I mean, really good. Thank you.”

She helps me out of the rest of the suit, helps me to my feet, and now I’m facing the open door of the shipping container. There’s a warmth to the air from outside. It might even be spring.

If you really listen, you can hear the faintest lapping of the waves.

“We’ll do it again, later,” I tell Lena. It’s supposed to be said out loud, after all.

“Oh, yes,” Lena says. She’s looking out the door, too. The sun hangs just above the horizon, and the roofs of the containers on the level below us are stripped with gold. The sunset magnifies each ripple in the water, weaving a pattern of light and shadow. “And there’s a whole city after that.”

I still don’t like San Francisco. Although I’m wondering, now, if this place will ever become someplace else. Take a new name, a new geography, given enough time. I wonder if I might learn to like whatever comes in its place.

I’ve gone so many times, stayed so many times without a reason. What would it be like to give myself a reason, for once?

I look from Lena to the water, and from the water to the shadow on the horizon. In the sunset, the ruins look almost beautiful.