All small cute women are agents, he wrote. U can trust no one but creatures.
Concerned, I tried to interest Swan in other subjects. “Hey, Swan, any luck with the car?” Or: “Did you see the crowd outside Blondie’s last night? Man, they’re bringing them in by the busload now.” But he was completely caught up in his work, and I have to say I envied him for that.
Crews, take ur planes! Shoot the officers! Take ur tanks, men. Bomb all hi-rise + mansion areas! Get ready for the Coming of the Great Ghosts!
“What ghosts, Swan?” I asked.
He ignored me.
Bird Wars Rip City, Swan wrote. Riots Blood Flames!
“Hey, Swan,” I said, “did you see, they’re towing cars in the middle of Valencia Street!”
“Only allowed to park there on Sundays,” Swan shot back. “Only for church.”
Despite my clumsy efforts at friendship, we were never as close as we’d been the rainy night when I brought him soup. We would never be even that close again. Swan was becoming a prophet, a role that distanced him from the rest of the world—you couldn’t get too close to a lighthouse. He typed furiously, monopolizing the computer in Java Man, and no one dared ask him to stop. I will burn Spain with a ray from the ether, he wrote, I will crumple your planet like paper. It was as if he were already living in a different world from the rest of us, a world where poets and animals had the power of gods. I’LL show you what blood is, miles of iodine roses piled upon the ocean. O live in the thunder & lightning. Then one day a man who’d been waiting to use Java Man’s computer for half an hour finally shouted at Swan, “Dude, it’s time for you to get up!”
Swan didn’t answer.
“I’m telling you, dude!” the man said. “Don’t you hear me?” He grabbed Swan’s shoulder and some things happened very quickly: Swan stood up and reached out his hand, to steady himself, I thought. The man thought he was being attacked and shoved Swan, who fell to the ground and lay there motionless. “Damn,” the man said. He turned to the barista and said, “You better call an ambulance.”
I knelt by Swan’s head. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” Swan said.
He lay there with his eyes closed for a minute, then got to his feet. He gave us all a magnificent look of contempt and walked out, his shoulders high with prophetical rage. A minute later the ambulance pulled up outside Java Man, its lights flashing, and an EMT came in with his gear.
“Where is he?”
The barista nodded at the street. “He’s OK, I guess.”
The EMT laughed. “OK for now.”
The man who’d provoked the incident sat at the computer, not even typing. He didn’t look at anyone. It was as if nothing had happened. I think that was when I first felt the desire to disappear.
In the bad winter of 1997, when the days lightened imperceptibly out of wet dark and ended in droplets of water sparkling on the windowpanes, at some point in that winter of colds and molds and beaches white with storm-brought foam, I dreamed of sneaking out of my own life and leaving only an empty place behind. Victor and Alex would still fight about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper, buses would still pull up outside Blondie’s, the rain would still rattle the windows, everything would go on, but I would be elsewhere, becoming I knew not what. I daydreamed about renting a room in a single-room-occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin, or staking a claim to one of the Mission’s many doorways. I thought about getting on an eastbound bus and seeing, for the last time, the white mound of San Francisco sink below the horizon. I don’t know why that tempted me so strongly. Maybe it was the weather, or maybe I was afraid to stop being a young man with the potential to become anything, and to be something in particular, an academic historian. Maybe everyone wants to disappear at some point in their lives, and maybe all of us do. Some drop out of sight; others stay in the same place but vanish from each other; still others, most of us, maybe, vanish slowly from ourselves. I don’t know. In the end, I went nowhere, and it was Swan who disappeared.
Ironically, it happened while I was working on my dissertation. After months of watching me mope around the Stanford library, Alex mentioned a grant, a Michigan historical society that invited scholars to peruse their collection of nineteenth-century newspapers. “What do I want with Michigan newspapers?” I asked, and Alex said, “A grant looks good on your C.V. Come on, you’ve got to do something.” I couldn’t disagree with him and remain in academia, so I applied, and to my mild surprise was accepted. My C.V. got to call me a Visiting Fellow, Wagner Center for Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, and I spent a month in East Lansing, a rolling terrain of frozen mud that made me think of the First World War. Against all expectation, I found what I was looking for: The Michigan Midnight Cry, a newspaper published by a society of Millerites—or Adventists, as they called themselves—in Detroit. I had heard of the Millerites before, but I’d never thought of them as a subject worth knowing in detail. They were too religious and too marginal. But everything else in the Wagner Center was worse, and so, diffidently at first, then with curiosity and even something like excitement, I read the complete run of The Michigan Midnight Cry.
While East Lansing froze and crackled in one of the coldest Februaries in memory, I learned about an apocalypse long past. The Michigan Midnight Cry was part tract, part newsletter; articles explicating the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation alternated with stories about people in Detroit who needed a few dollars to get through the winter, recipes for “Jubilee Pie” and other such treats, poems, announcements of weddings, meetings, auctions. If it weren’t for the weird phrase if time continues, which was appended at the foot of every published schedule, the Millerites could have been stamp collectors, pony breeders, almost any special-interest group in America with a developed body of knowledge. And yet I found myself getting strangely engrossed in their obscure debates about the fall of the Ottoman Empire—had it happened yet? was it a sign of the end times?—and the return of the Jews to Israel. I shared their enthusiasm as the summer of 1844 brought all-night bouts of singing and prayer, and their anxiety as the final days drew near. When was it too soon to give away everything you owned, and when would it be too late? No one wanted to be homeless in Detroit in October, but no one wanted to be burned up for covetousness either.
The popular press called the Millerites “raving maniacs” whose imagination had run away with them, but as I read The Michigan Midnight Cry another picture emerged: of people who continued to build houses and fences, to buy and sell livestock, to attend concerts and lectures, to read poems, to marry and give birth to children. Some of them spoke out against slavery; they argued for temperance and woman suffrage. They believed in reform, albeit the way you might believe in cleaning your house before you left for a trip. I didn’t understand why these ordinary, good-hearted people had believed the world was about to end. And why then? The first half of the nineteenth century in America was a time of progress and rapid expansion: the number of states in the union doubled and the population grew by a factor of five; canals were dug all across New York and Pennsylvania and even in Ohio and Illinois, where, because of drought, they were useful only half the year. Steamboats plied the Hudson and the Mississippi and crossed the Great Lakes. The railroad was invented, and the industrial printing press, and the telegraph. Why, in such a giddy and optimistic time, had the Millerites dreamed of apocalypse? I thought of San Francisco, of money and the Mission, and I wondered if rapid change made some people want the world to end. I heard my dissertation ringing like a church bell, clear and close at hand.
I came back from Michigan in March and lost myself in research. I needed to know more about technology in early nineteenth-century America, about Michigan and also upstate New York, where William Miller had lived: the region was a hotbed of religious enthusiasm in the 1830s. So my project returned me indirectly to Thebes, to my own history, which increased my sense of its rightness. This was what I was meant to be doing, and I was the one who was meant to be doing it, I thought,
and if I didn’t ever put the thought into words, it was always there, a living shape frozen beneath the ice of my unbelief in destiny. Enthusiastically, I spent weeks assembling a delicious absence, a palpably hollow space in the tangle of recorded knowledge, which my dissertation would fill.
When I looked around again, Swan was gone. He wasn’t at Java Man in the morning; he wasn’t asleep in an armchair at the back of the Latin Quarter Bookshop. At night Swan was not to be found on any of the doorsteps where he usually slept. I asked Peter when he had last seen Swan, but Peter couldn’t remember. It must have been a busy time for all of us. I asked Josh, who lived on Twenty-fourth Street, if Swan had migrated to another part of the Mission, but Josh hadn’t seen him either. In fact, he was going to ask me, had I seen Mr. Babylob? The one who stood on the corner of Twenty-fourth and Mission with a sign, WHORES OF BABYLOB, REPENT, FORNICATION IS DEATH. Whether Babylob was a deliberate misspelling or not, no one could say. Had something happened to them both? Josh said he would ask his friend who worked at the needle exchange, and was in touch with a lot of the street people. Weeks passed; I saw Josh but he didn’t mention Swan. When I remembered to ask, he admitted that he had been too busy: this full-time thing, you know, there was more truth in those words, full and time, than he had ever imagined. He was on it now. The rainy season dragged on, cutting the short days even shorter, leaving the sky, in the rainless intervals, a washed-out blue that was the closest thing to winter you could find on the California coast. I wondered if Swan had died, he was older than most street people, and he smoked foul brown cigarettes, and his skin was yellow like an old tooth. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to get pneumonia.
The thought that Swan might be dead would not leave me. It was a hollow feeling, as if I had skipped an important step in a complicated procedure and gone on to the next step, unaware that what I did now no longer mattered because the procedure was doomed to fail. It occurred to me that I could find out one way or the other, that people did not die without leaving a record, if there was one thing I knew from the study of history, it was that people left a record of their death, even when nothing else in their life was recorded. But I didn’t do anything. Then one day I had a fight with Alex about whether or not to buy a car that Peter was trying to get rid of, an ancient Volvo that had once belonged to Norman Mailer, at least that was what Peter said. Mailer had once come to the Bay Area to teach a class at Mills College, this was the story; he bought the Volvo, then he became smitten with one of his students, a nymphet who happened to be the heiress to a canned-pasta empire; and this girl, who, for the purposes of the story, is called Noodle Girl, insisted that he get rid of the Volvo, because it reminded her of her parents, the canned-pasta couple, who were about the same age as Norman Mailer. So Mailer sold the car almost new to Peter, who was in those days a local literary impresario. He, Mailer, bought an MG coupe, and drove to L.A. with Noodle Girl, who left him there, or was left by him, and later became a member of one of the new religions that believed the cosmos was friendly, at least in comparison with the earth. That was the story. And the car was majestic, it had a big, confident body painted the deep blue of the sky in a Northern Renaissance painting, the blue of an illumination in an illuminated manuscript. I had to buy it. Alex said I was an idiot, the story was obviously false, and even tweediness had its limit, which was the cause of our fight, the word tweediness, because I had to point out that I did not own a single tweed garment, or even a pair of flannel pants or a blazer or anything with elbow patches. Alex said it didn’t matter, I was a tweedy person, which cut me to the quick. I thought I dressed like an outlaw, and here my housemate was telling me that I was donnish.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “tweedy is good. This is just a case of taking it too far.”
I bought Norman Mailer’s car that afternoon for five hundred dollars and took it to a mechanic, who told me it would cost another twenty-five hundred to get it to the point where it would pass inspection. Fine, I said. And with the energy I’d got from winning that conflict, because it did seem to me that I’d won, with that rage, I looked up the City Records Office in the phone book and called them to see if they had a death certificate? “In what name?” the clerk asked. And of course I didn’t know. I went back through my file of leaflets. Swan, he called himself, or Saint Swan, or Swami, or Swhandi, or Sewanee, or Swan the Swain, or Mayor Swan. I asked Peter, who said, yes, Swan had told him his name, but it was a long time ago, and he didn’t remember it. David something? He thought it was a Jewish name, which surprised him, because he didn’t think of the Jews as homeless, an irony that he had savored from time to time, over the years.
I should have gone around to all the places where Swan had been and renewed my inquiries; I should have put up a sign, stapled it to the utility poles and hung it in the windows of the hipster shops, to let everyone know that Swan was missing. But I was ashamed to do these things. I didn’t want the neighborhood to know me as the person who was looking for Swan; and if there was some explanation, obvious to everyone but me, for Swan’s disappearance, then I didn’t want to be the asshole who didn’t know what it was. And it was still winter, and the rain still hadn’t stopped, and there was The Michigan Midnight Cry begging to be understood, and perhaps it was a kindness to let Swan alone. If he was not on the street in that ugly weather, maybe it was for the good; if he was unfindable in that dark season, maybe it was because he did not care to be found.
THE DAY OF OUTRAGE
That was what I thought, but I wasn’t the only one who cared about Swan. Josh had reported his disappearance to a friend who worked for a nonprofit housing-rights organization, and they decided to use the disappearance of Swan and Mr. Babylob and other homeless residents of the Mission as an occasion to protest the city’s policy of harassing homeless people and driving them out of gentrifying neighborhoods. They were going to have a rally and a march. The Day of Outrage, his friends called it. Josh asked if it was something I wanted to get involved in and I said yes, even though I was skeptical about the power of any protest to accomplish what I wanted, which was not the modification of city policy, but Swan’s return. More generally, I was skeptical about protests as such, in particular about the ones Josh and his activist friends staged. I’d been to a couple of them right when I moved to San Francisco and they struck me as being almost completely self-enclosed, as though the world they were changing was uniquely that of the people who took part in them. Still, I felt like I owed it to Swan to do something. And in the back of my mind there was, if not the hope that the protest would bring Swan back, at least the superstitious belief that doing something was better than doing nothing at all.
Josh’s friend had printed a stack of posters, and I volunteered to hang them. I mixed up wheat paste in one of Alex’s Tupperware bowls and went out at night, slathering sticky white stuff on the sides of newspaper vending machines, construction hoardings and utility poles, and pressing posters into the paste to let people know the Day of Outrage was coming. My pasting technique was not good and often as not the posters went on crooked, part of their message swallowed by creases or torn off in my clumsy efforts to get them to stick. It didn’t matter, I hoped. I was spreading the word. The strange, or not so strange, thing was that, as I worked, I came more and more to believe that the Day of Outrage would not be in vain. How could people see the posters I had spent hours putting up and not take action? I imagined a crowd of thousands, a march on City Hall. The mayor would speak to us from a window. We have a sane and reasonable policy, he’d begin, and we’d drown him out with our simple, irrefutable chant. Swan! Swan! Aides would be dispatched to find out what it meant. Records would be searched. Swan! Swan! Sooner or later a clerk would find the file of David Somebody, a.k.a. Swan, transferred from the Mission District to who knew where, on such and such a date. Advisers would tell the mayor to leave him where he was. An old man, in poor health … But by then the chant, Swan! would have become perpetual. SWAN would be spray-painted on the columns of
City Hall; banners reading SWAN would hang from windows all over the Mission; airplanes would write SWAN over the city in ice crystal letters half a mile high. The only thing to do, the advisers would finally admit, was to send him back. One day without ceremony an unmarked white van would stop outside Java Man and Swan would get out, unbowed, making “V for Victory” signs with his nicotine-stained fingers.
If this sounds delusional, you have to understand, first of all, how badly I wanted Swan back, and second, that I was now not alone. Everyone I knew was doing something to get ready for the Day of Outrage, except of course Victor, who had vanished into MySky. We met at the Blue Study with our notebooks, and Josh gave us assignments; we e-mailed one another frantically, asking where the microphone stand was, who had the poster paint, who was going to choose the route our procession would take once it left the park. Erin’s friend Neil volunteered to make puppets that would represent the people who had vanished, and suddenly puppet-related tasks sprang up. A week before the Day of Outrage I was drafted to drive to Hunter’s Point to buy plaster of paris from a wholesaler. He didn’t want to let me go with less than five hundred pounds; I convinced him to sell me two hundred, and got halfway back to the freeway when I drove over a bump and heard something in the engine go snap. I was staring into the tangle of hoses under the hood of Norman Mailer’s car when two men came up and asked if I needed help. Hunter’s Point was a rough neighborhood and these guys looked rough, but in this case need trumped prejudice and miseducation. I said yes, please, help if you can, and the three of us pushed the burdened car a block and a half to an auto-body shop, where a Mexican mechanic diagnosed the problem as a broken fan belt and sent his friend to get a replacement from another garage. The two of them installed it in my car, asked me for twenty bucks and went back into the shop. I looked around for someone else to pay, but no one wanted my money; even the guys who had helped me push the car were gone. The whole process had taken an hour and a half and no one even wanted to be thanked. I drove back to the freeway, full of courage and hope: it was as if I’d just moved to San Francisco all over again, as if I had stepped over a wall that kept me from experiencing the mercy of the world. I delivered the sacks of plaster to Neil’s house in Bernal Heights, we grunted as we carried them up the driveway to the garage where the puppets were being made, already some of them had giant heads and recognizable if unpainted faces, they looked up at us benevolently from the floor. I rubbed my eyes as though to wipe away sweat, in fact tears, small tears.
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