by Jim Nelson
However, the tourists were not posing before Alcatraz at all. The photographer had erected a trompe l'oeil backdrop for them to stand against. The backdrop was a photo of Alcatraz on a perfect day. The bay waters swelled against the sharp rocks surrounding the island making a buttermilk-colored cream. Not a wisp of fog was to be seen in the cornflower sky, nor a ferry, nor a sailboat, nor a single tourist in the distance.
The backdrop completely blocked the real Alcatraz behind it. The bay was chopping hard that day from stiff bursts of wind off the water. The sunlight wasn't as refreshing as the sun in the backdrop. Clouds covered the real city like an army blanket. An armada of tour boats ferried sightseers around the bay. Tourists crawled over the prison like ants. The backdrop was what the photographer was selling, the dream of modern tourism: a perfect vacation untarnished by the presence of other vacationers.
Look! we cried in unison.
The Everywhere Man was in the backdrop. He stood at the end of the pier. He slumped forward, arms dangling like anchor lines, with that awful splay of graying brown hair dripping down his skull like spent wax. We lunged to the backdrop to see his face.
We were disappointed again. His face was a cherry-gold blur, like half-mixed oil paint hastily smeared on a canvas.
The assistant took our arms and pulled us away. We were interfering with the photographer and his customers.
"You're wondering about that man in the background," the assistant said to us. "One of those Telegraph Hill parrots flew between the camera and him just as the shutter snapped. Those birds fly around Fisherman's Wharf all the time."
Do you know who the man is? we asked.
"All I know is, I take photographs all over the city and he's in tons of them."
A family of four left the backdrop and approached the assistant, cash in hand. The assistant pressed a key on the computer and the printer went to work.
"I left Cleveland to come here," he told us. "I wanted to be the next Robert Frank. Cleveland hates art. I thought San Francisco loved its artists. Instead I’ve got this craphole job and no girlfriend and debt up to my ears. I'm nobody here."
The photograph emerged from the printer. Another smiling family of four, another beautiful shot of Alcatraz, and the Everywhere Man off to one side and in the distance, lost.
The assistant pointed to the backdrop. "I prepped that photo of Alcatraz. I Photoshopped everyone out of it. The ferries, the sailboats, I don't know how many people I removed. But not the man with no face. I refuse to ignore him the way everyone else has. I've lost a lot of things since I moved to San Francisco, maybe even my soul, but I won't lose my heart to this city."
We Give Chase
Tourists buffeted us from all directions. We left the photographer’s assistant and pushed through the crowds snapping random pictures with our cameras. There! One photo caught the Everywhere Man up ahead, on a corner. We bolted. We dodged pedestrians left and right and ran through halted traffic. On the sidewalk, a man hauling two buckets of crab stepped out from a side door and into our path. We ran around him at full speed with our hands up in apology. He snapped something at us in Italian. When we arrived at the corner, the Everywhere Man was gone. Then one of our cameras spotted him again and we were off, pushing through people and leaping up to see over the crowds. It didn't matter. Once again we lost the Everywhere Man to the slow-moving river of humanity coursing through Fisherman's Wharf.
Across from us, a street magician was working a good-sized crowd. He was linking and unlinking wire hoops. Then he pulled a stream of colored handkerchiefs from his balled fist. It was that kind of magic.
On the periphery of the audience, humped over in a brown windbreaker wearing no-name blue jeans, was the Everywhere Man. Stunned, we needed a moment to realize we'd actually found him. We gingerly advanced, soft in our step. Like caging a feral cat, our instincts were of patient advancement. If he fled again we'd lose him in the crowd.
The magician produced a dove from a cage. The dove shook itself and fanned its wings. He wrapped the dove in a black velvet sheath. Then he counted to three and heaved the bundle into the air. All our faces shot up to watch its rise. The black magic ascended and hung midair for a millisecond and a half, then exploded with a hollow pop. Confetti bloomed and fluttered down. The magician caught the velvet sheath with a flourish and demonstrated it was empty. Then he reached inside it and produced the dove, now visibly shaken at being stuffed into whatever hiding spot the magician had utilized. Over the sustained applause he thanked his audience for their time and asked for cash contributions. This verbal tear gas dispersed the crowd. They swallowed the Everywhere Man whole.
As thin as the magician's magic was, we were mesmerized by the act and had forgotten our prey. We rushed for him. The tidal forces of the human ocean buffeted us once again. We swam against the vacating ebb until we reached the spot where he'd been standing. The Everywhere Man was gone, just like that, like a fist when you open your hand.
We stood there staring at each other, stricken and a touch sick to the stomach. A company of wild parrots flew overhead clattering to one another. Their wings chopped up the evening air. On the ground where the Everywhere Man had stood was an oval slip of copper. We picked it up and turned it in our hands. It was a penny, stretched and embossed by a hand-cranked machine. It was a souvenir from the Cable Car Museum. We had no idea what to make of it.
The sky was darkening. Our time was up. We had to return to the office the next day. There were deadlines to meet. We turned and trudged to the nearest cable car turnaround wondering if we would ever see him again, and in the flesh.
Part Three
We Return to the Work at Hand
For fifteen years he had sagged rather than stood, posing for the camera much the way a bag of cement would. He was always off to one side or another, a bit out of focus or partially obscured, all but invisible in millions of photographs. He had been stuffed in one-hour development envelopes, faded in and out of screensavers, and hung on wall mounts throughout the world. What was it like to be so visible and yet so unknown?
William Arbeit was rocking in his ergonomic chair when we told him about our failure at Fisherman's Wharf. We waited for him to say something, anything. We were prepared for him to fire us. Only after a dreadful silence did he speak.
"We're deep in the hole and it's time to quit digging," he said. "We'll deal with this man later. Just build me a cable car I can show the world."
We went heads-down after that, going morning to midnight at the keyboard hacking code. Our backs began curling from disuse and our shoulders were falling inwards. We put on weight and grew beards and long greasy hair. At night, we bussed to our apartments across town. In our cramped drafty flats we ate our microwave dinners standing over the sink and then fell into bed, exhausted. We'd made few friends here, and so we began working on Saturdays. If it meant chipping a bit more off the deadline, it was worth it. We'd fled our hometowns and families and escaped to San Francisco with visions of a better, brighter life. We thought there would be so much more here.
More Real Than Perfection
William Arbeit had planned the most ostentatious release party since the Dot Com Boom. It would be held at a four-star restaurant at the top of Nob Hill, the Big Four. There would be live jazz for the social hour and a swing band for the after-party. The press and all our investors were invited.
We did not socialize much that night. We'd set up a workstation in the Big Four's kitchen pantry. We were checking in code during the party, desperate to patch every bug that time allowed.
Over the kitchen clatter we heard Arbeit announce that the bon voyage would commence in half an hour. An instant later he was at our side.
"What's the prognosis?" he asked, grim and smelling of the Scotch in his rocks glass.
Only auto-pilot is stable, we said. If the console freezes during the ride, you'll need to reset the connection.
"It won't freeze," he said.
And we haven't tested manua
l control at all.
"It's going to work," he said. "Make sure of it." He downed the last of his Scotch and returned to the party.
Hallidie's Folly
Before launching the cable car, William Arbeit told his audience a story. It's an old story, actually. It's about a man named Andrew Hallidie.
Hallidie was a Scottish immigrant who made a fortune during the Gold Rush, not off the gold itself, but by selling pulley systems to miners. His company erected wood towers throughout Gold Country and ran a loop of steel cable over trees and across ravines and rivers. Carts suspended from the cable traveled the loop. At one end, the carts were filled with the day's diggings. At the other end, the carts were emptied and the ore was processed. When the Gold Rush was over, most of the miners had little or nothing to show for their labor. Hallidie, however, was a rich man.
Years later, Hallidie witnessed an accident while walking up Jackson Street. Ahead of him a team of horses pulled an omnibus up Nob Hill. The carriage held twenty or more passengers. As the driver whipped the horses and yawed them up the incline of wet cobblestones, one horse collapsed from exhaustion. It pulled down the rest of the team, and the omnibus began rolling backwards. The screaming tangled mess of horses and tack were dragged down Jackson Street by the carriage to the bottom of Nob Hill. A few people were injured and taken away. A police officer went to each horse and fired a single rifle slug between its eyes. Hallidie, it is said, witnessed it all.
"He had an idea," Arbeit told his audience. "Hallidie imagined taking his mining carts and cables and turning them upside-down. He would lay the cable beneath the street and run the carts above it on tracks. He told the city his invention would put an end to horse-drawn carriages. No one believed it would work. They called it Hallidie's Folly."
Hallidie built his first cable car and laid a stretch of track up Clay Street. The day he was to demonstrate his invention to the city, the gripman he had hired refused to operate the car. He thought it unproven and dangerous. Hallidie took the grip and operated the car himself. Hallidie was the cable car's first passenger and its first gripman.
"And like Hallidie," Arbeit announced, "I, too, will man the grip for the bon voyage."
Arbeit rested his hands on the keyboard with the light touch of a concert pianist preparing to stroke the first notes of a symphony. Flashbulbs fired and there was a light spray of applause. Overhead, the plasma screen displayed our virtual cable car from the gripman's position. The servers stitched together a fine backdrop, a clear bright day with Alcatraz shining like a wedding cake under studio lights. Arbeit tapped a key. The grip took hold of the cable beneath the street. His cable car shuddered forward and began its first journey across San Francisco.
1.0
Arbeit tapped the up key three times, causing the virtual grip to tighten its hold on the virtual cable. The car jumped forward with a shake. He should only have tapped twice, and not so fast. It wasn't Daytona. As with everything associated with the cable car, better to apply measured adjustments than radical changes.
Arbeit eased off the grip one tick. The car slowed and the ride smoothed. The incline steepened. Arbeit sympathetically leaned back as though fighting gravity, as did the rest of us. He tapped the B key once and then three times. The cable car bell rang the same pattern, optimistic and distinctive, the sound of San Francisco. He dared to release the controls to drink his Scotch.
"Let's open it up a bit," Arbeit announced and tapped the up key. The car reached cable speed, ascending the hill at a steady nine-and-a-half miles per hour. The first corner approached. He waited too long to ease the grip. The car swung around the curve too fast and everyone—Arbeit, the audience, and us—leaned to the right with the simulated centrifugal forces. Then the car began its descent into the gulch between Russian Hill and Nob Hill.
The car picked up more speed. Arbeit stupidly left the grip attached to the cable. The safety kicked in and the grip automatically released. However, it failed to apply the brakes. The car was now free and rolling on its own. This went unnoticed by its gripman, one William Arbeit.
"Beautiful day," he said, and he rang the bell twice.
The car's speed grew beyond our tested limits. It began to shudder. A bend in the tracks approached. Arbeit now realized something was wrong. He tapped the down key with vigorous futility. The car raced down the hill toward the corner. The servers could barely produce images fast enough. Stitches in the landscape grew visible. The background was pixilated and mismatched. This hastily assembled collage of San Francisco blurred past at eighteen or nineteen miles per hour. Arbeit had fully engaged the rear brake and now applied the front. The car plummeted onward.
The car hit the curve at full speed and barreled off the rails. It bounced down the street past blocky pedestrians and patchworks of tall thin houses and storefronts. The city was now broad swatches of primary color, as though built from Lego blocks.
The servers no longer had time to work with locations, or even time periods. They dug into our full photographic library of San Francisco going back to the Gold Rush. The car barreled through traffic jams from the 1960s and slammed into buses from the 1940s and mowed down pedestrians in top hats and bowlers and peace wigs. It bounced down the hill and into Chinatown. It snapped paper lanterns off awnings and scraped its way down dark alleyways. The car ran alongside a century of Chinese New Years’ parades and dancing dragons and a fleet of dealership Buicks, each with that year's Miss Chinatown waving from the rear seat.
The cable car shot out of the parade and into marching anti-war demonstrators and gaggles of cyclists celebrating Critical Mass. It launched off a hill and floated above a Pride Day march. Men in brides' dresses and women in tuxedoes walked Market Street below us. Then the city was a smoking husk, leveled by quake and fire, and the next instant the city was a jewel case of glass and Sacramento gold. High-rises rose and fell like San Francisco's fortunes, a city built on the promises of wealth and change.
The car landed on level ground going thirty, forty miles per hour. San Francisco's past approached and receded, and our servers could barely keep up.
Throughout it all, the Everywhere Man was there. Whether his face was blurred or distorted or his head was replaced by a question mark, he was a constant presence. Eight, ten of him would appear at once on the street, then twenty would join him, and then more. 1989, 1899, 1902, he was there through it all, slumped and arms dangling, that splay of hair as though someone gripped him from above and would not let go.
The car sped down the aisle of the People's Church, the pews brimming with a congregation of Everywhere Men. Their faces were distorted beyond recognition and lost to time. Through the Tenderloin and past Compton's Cafeteria, Everywhere Men and Everywhere Women in drag were being hauled off by the police. Everywhere Men waited at bus stops and waited in unemployment lines and waited on tables where mayors and rock stars and baseball players feasted on hog and mutton and mugs of icy beer.
The car bounded through the 1906 rubble, and the Everywhere Man stood in the smoking carnage of City Hall. Then the car rumbled and fishtailed down a slippery Kearny Street when it was paved with packed mud and manure. The Everywhere Man stood before a general store alongside a gang of miners. Their pickaxes and shovels rested on their shoulders. The tip of one axe obscured the Everywhere Man's face but not his dungarees or boots or the mining pan hanging from his belt. Nor did it obscure his shoulders slumped in resignation, as though he already knew he would return from the American River more impoverished than he left. He was there in the gold fields, having survived the trip around Cape Horn, freed of his past and of his family and eager to claim a fortune he would be denied again and again. Dear God. He's been here since the beginning.
Then the Everywhere Man was aboard the cable car. His blurred face came at us, growing into a quilt of pixels the size of your fist—and then he was gone. The next Everywhere Man shot forward, this one with a NO PARKING sign blocking his face, closer and closer, and then he was gone. A question m
ark appeared, growing until all that could be seen was the crooked top of the mark, and it too disappeared. He rushed at us faster and in groups until the screen was nothing but unrelenting waves of Everywhere Men attacking us. Arbeit thrust his hands into his hair and screamed. All was lost.
The cable car bounced across the Embarcadero and through the guard rails and soared out into the bay. The room went silent. We had programmed no water sounds, no great splash or lapping of waves against the sides of the car. We did record the parrots of Telegraph Hill. They squawked overhead and beat their wings as the cable car sank into the cold bay waters. It submerged and all was dark.
Part Four
We Hear the Engines
It was a year ago today we discovered the Everywhere Man. In that year, Arbeit wasted ninety million of his own dollars on a virtual cable car now sitting at the bottom of a virtual bay, and the press made sure everyone knew about it. It was too late for an expensive salvage operation or a public relations overhaul. Arbeit could do nothing but fold the company.
We stood in the entry of the Cable Car Museum taking in the unceasing buzz of nearby machinery and the sharp tang in the air of grease and diesel. More than a museum, it's the working hub of the cable car system. The engines here drive the cable, pulling laden cars miles away up and down San Francisco's hills. The barn is where the cars are stored and repaired. We felt a kinship to the goings-on inside this grand red brick building.
