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.
Three
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.
Four
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.
Five
“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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance.
DANCING WITH A STRANGER IN THE LAND OF NOD
Will McIntosh
As the closing music to The Lion King rose from the back speakers, Teale fumbled for the next DVD in the stack, keeping her eyes on the empty, snow-covered highway. She lifted the DVD into her field of vision. It was Frozen.
She lowered her window halfway and tossed it out.
“How about some music?” She glanced in the rear-view mirror, at Elijah to the right, Chantilly to the left. The only thing to indicate they were alive was the occasional blink, the gentle rise and fall of their chests. “It’s Elijah’s turn, isn’t it? How about Rich Homie Quan?”
She dug out the CD, popped it into the Mercedes R-350 minivan’s CD player. Before the nodding virus, Teale had despised hip-hop, but now Elijah’s music was a comforting link to the days when Elijah could jump, run, and dance. In the rear view, Elijah’s eyes darted around as if he was frantically looking for something. His eyes — and only his — did that from time to time. She had no idea why.
Teale reached across to the passenger seat and patted Wilson’s knee. “Don’t worry, the grown-ups get a turn next. Maybe some . . .” The thought vanished as she noticed the temperature gauge on the dashboard.
The needle was higher than she was used to seeing — almost in the red. Had it been like that the whole time she’d been driving? She’d taken the minivan straight from a dealership for the trip, so she wasn’t familiar with its settings. The one thing she couldn’t afford was to break down in the middle of Colorado, in winter. That’s why she’d picked a brand new Mercedes. What could be more reliable than a brand new fucking Mercedes?
The needle crept higher. Closer to the red. What would she do if the car broke down? It was twenty degrees outside.
She watched for exit signs.
“Come on.”
A hint of smoke whipped out from under the hood.
“Come on.”
&
nbsp; It grew thicker, blacker.
Teale tried to remember when she’d last passed an exit, or spotted a town through the thick foliage. Twenty miles, at least. If the car broke down, she’d have to head forward and hope the next exit was closer than that. How long could her family survive inside the van with no heat? She had no idea.
The van bucked, sputtered. Teale pressed the accelerator, but the van didn’t respond.
“Shit. Shit.” She slapped the steering wheel, her heart racing as they rolled to a stop on the shoulder. There was nothing in sight — no buildings, no side roads, nothing. Wilson’s face was slack, as always, but there was bright, wet alarm in his eyes. Their eyes were the only part of them that seemed alive, as if their entire selves had retreated inside them.
She turned, faced the kids. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m going to get us another car. I’ll be back soon.”
Opening and closing her door as quickly as possible to keep the heat in, Teale raced around to the back, opened the hatch and pulled out the suitcase holding their winter gear. She put coats, gloves, and hats on the kids, trying hard to seem calm as the kids watched, terrified. She wrapped them in the comforter, gave them each a drink from their thermoses, startled as always by how animated their faces became when the straw touched their lips and they sucked on it reflexively. After dressing Wilson, she pulled on her own gloves, scarf, and hat, then leaned over and retrieved the handgun from the glove compartment and stuck it in her backpack.
“Okay, be strong and keep the faith. I’ll be back before you know it.”
A gust of biting wind hit her as she left the warmth of the van. She locked the door, then took off at a sprint, aware that her family was watching and that she had to look fast and strong, had to look like she could sprint the whole way to the next town like it was no big thing.
The End Has Come Page 4
