The City, Not Long After

by Pat Murphy

“It is,” he insisted. “Books told me about it. Come on.” Taking the lead, he rode to the end of the street. Fine white sand had drifted over the Great Highway, the road that ran alongside the beach. At the edge of the sand, Danny-boy got off his bicycle and walked it to the seawall. When he looked back she was following, still staring at the horizon.

  He leaned his bike against the cement wall, then sat on the wall to take off his tennis shoes. “Take off your shoes,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll get sand in them.” He swung his legs over the wall and jumped down onto the beach. He ran toward the breaking waves, stopping only when an incoming wave swept up the beach to lap around his ankles. Jezebel splashed in the surf beside him, snapping at the wave and barking at the taste of salt. The water was cold and the retreating wave sucked at the sand beneath his feet. He looked back.

  Jax stood at the edge of the wet sand. When a wave washed up, she took a step back.

  “Taste it,” he said, cupping some water with his hand and touching it to his lips. When a wave returned, she followed his lead and sputtered at the taste.

  “Poison,” she said.

  “It’s just salt.”

  She shook her head, venturing no closer. He left the water to stand beside her. She was quiet and tense, but it was a different sort of tension than he’d seen in her before. She was awed by the ocean. She had forgotten to be wary of him; she was fascinated by the distant horizon, straining her eyes to see a faraway shore.

  “It goes on and on,” Danny-boy told her softly. “Mario once sailed his boat straight out for a whole day. He says he didn’t see anything but water and more water.” She didn’t respond. “Come on. Let’s walk along the beach.”

  He took her hand and she did not resist, following obediently. The tide was coming in, and each wave lapped a little higher on the sand.

  “Look there.” Ahead of them, someone had built an elaborate castle in the sand. Seaweed banners flew from crenellated towers. A wide wall of sand linked the towers, dividing the castle’s courtyard from the rest of the beach.

  Jax squatted in the sand to examine the miniature city more closely. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Tiny soldiers woven of dune grass stood guard on the battlements beside a driftwood cannon. An incoming wave washed through the moat, passing beneath a driftwood bridge.

  Danny-boy watched her study the castle. The setting sun painted half her face with red light; the other half was in shadow. Her hands clasped each other loosely. “The waves will destroy it,” she said.

  Danny-boy sat on the sand beside her. “You sound sad.”

  She shook her head, an automatic and meaningless denial. “It’s beautiful. Why build anything so beautiful just so it can be destroyed? If we hadn’t come here, no one would ever have seen it.”

  “Sometimes you make things that won’t last just for the pleasure of making them,” Danny-boy said. He watched a wave take a bite out of the castle wall. “You do it for yourself, not for anyone else. When you make something beautiful, you change. You put something of yourself into the thing you make. You’re a different person when you’re done.” Another wave washed up against the castle wall, nibbling a little bit away.

  “Is that why you’re painting the bridge?”

  “That’s part of it, I guess.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “While you change yourself, you change the world. Make it more your own.”

  They sat in silence as the waves undermined the tower nearest the sea. When it toppled, Jax stood. “I don’t want to watch the rest.”

  He walked beside her as they headed back. They had almost reached the bicycles when she stopped, staring past him. Her eyes were fixed on the sunset. “The sun,” she said in a choked voice.

  The red disc was flattening and changing shape as it neared the horizon line.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “It does that here.”

  “It’s sinking into the water,” she said, and there was a note of panic in her voice.

  “It happens like that every night,” he said. “It’s OK.” He touched her shoulder to reassure her and felt her trembling. “It’s OK,” he repeated. “Believe me. I’ve seen it before.”

  Then he put his arms around her, surprised even as he did it that she let him. He stroked her hair gently and kept talking in a soothing voice, trying not to break the spell. “Books says that the sun is really millions of miles away. He says that it really isn’t anywhere near the ocean. It just looks that way. Don’t worry.”

  She seemed so small, now that he held her in his arms. Her shoulders felt so thin and frail. He could feel her heart beating, hear the whisper of her breath past his face. Her eyes reflected the sunset.

  “You’ve seen this before,” she asked, still watching the sun. “Many times.”

  She relaxed just a little; he could feel the tension in her shoulders ease. When the sun dipped below the horizon, she looked at his face. She hesitated, just for a moment. He fought the urge to hold her more tightly. She lifted one hand and tentatively touched his cheek, an uncertain movement that was checked almost before it was complete. Then she pulled away from him.

  “We’d better ride home,” she said. “It’s a long way.”

  All the way home, he kept remembering the warmth of her body against his.

  CHAPTER 12

  SNAKE LAY ON HIS BED, one arm tucked behind his head, watching Lily unbraid her hair. The windows of the old Victorian house were open, and the evening breeze smelled of wet pavement and growing things.

  Lily was tall and lean. He could see her muscles working beneath her thin T-shirt. Here and there, the darker lines of her tattoos showed through the thin fabric: a curve of vine, the brilliant red of a rose.

  Lily shook out her hair and combed her fingers through the wavy strands. She lay down on the bed, propping herself up on one elbow and looking down at him. He reached up to toy with a strand of her hair, wrapping it around his finger and admiring its coppery sheen. When she leaned toward him, he kissed her lips delicately. She pulled back and studied his face.

  “You seem distracted,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think this is the longest time I’ve ever been on your bed and kept all my clothes on. What’s up?”

  He ran his hand up her back and tried to pull her down for another kiss. She resisted. “Too late to fake it,” she said. “What’s eating you?”

  He looked away from her face, fixing his gaze on the ceiling. For the past year, they had been sleeping together. Their relationship was casual and playful, and neither of them would commit to more. Snake liked Lily. Hell, on dark nights when she wasn’t there, he sometimes thought he might love her. But that thought, when it came, scared him. She was too different from him. At the time of the Plague, he had been a street kid, living in the Haight. She had been a college graduate, working in the financial district.

  He had never talked about love to Lily. Love was not a word or a feeling that he was comfortable with. Still, he reached up and rubbed her back, a tentative reassurance.

  “So what’s got you worried?” she asked again.

  “I was talking to Danny-boy out at the bridge. He really thinks that Fourstar will be invading the city.”

  “Traders have been warning us about Fourstar for years now. You said that yourself at the meeting. So that’s not all of it. What else is new?” She ran her hand over the shaven part of his head, gently rubbing the smooth skin.

  It made him nervous that she knew him so well. He did not want her to know that he was worried. Sometimes he thought that she might already know that he almost thought he loved her.

  “Last night, I went by Kezar Stadium. There’s a wall there that’s just ripe for painting, so I stopped by to check it out. The moon was up and when I walked alongside the wall, I could see my moon shadow, walking along beside me.” He wet his lips. “And then I saw that I wasn’t alone. There was the shadow of a man walking
in front of me and there was another shadow walking behind. The wall was full of shadows of men, all of them carrying rifles and walking all around me, like we were in some goddamn parade.” He shook his head. “I was alone except for all these shadows, all these soldiers that had me surrounded.”

  Retelling the story, he was suddenly afraid. At the time, he had watched the shadows calmly. Living in the city, such things came to seem natural. But afterward, he realized the implications of the marching men. “Bad times are coming. Fourstar’s coming.”

  The muscles in his shoulders and back were tense, and his stomach was knotted in nervous anticipation. He had not fought for many years. Looking back on his days in the gang, he remembered the heat of the fight, the tension and the fear.

  He remembered the moment of crystalline clarity that had come to him during his last fight, just before the Plague made turf battles irrelevant. The other kid, a young Chicano, had lunged for his face.

  Snake saw a flicker of light on the knife and twisted to one side. The air around him seemed to shimmer; the world had stood still. He brought up his own knife up and under, catching the kid in the belly and slicing upward to strike the ribs. He felt warm blood on his hand and stepped back. The kid fell forward and Snake was running.

  The ringing in his ears was so loud that it competed with the sound of distant sirens. As he ran, he touched a hand to his ear and it came back bloody. His leather jacket was slick with blood: his blood, the Chicano’s blood.

  Shadows pursued him as he ducked into an alley and he wheeled on them, brandishing his bloody knife. “Cool it, man. Come on,” someone said. Friends of his—but he almost didn’t recognize them. Their faces were distorted, twisted by the moonlight. “Take it easy.” They helped him: they stopped the bleeding from his ripped ear; they threw away his knife and took him to the apartment that he shared with eight others. They treated him with the respect due a killer.

  Within a week, they all were dead of the Plague. Within a few weeks, no one cared that the Haight was his gang’s turf. Everyone was dead. And the death of the Chicano kid was swallowed up in the thousands of deaths. But he remembered washing the blood from his hands and wondering how much was his and how much belonged to the Chicano kid.

  “Why can’t they leave us alone?” he growled.

  Lily shrugged. “Because we’re different from them,” she said. “Isn’t that always why people fight?” She was beautiful, lying there with the last light of the day gleaming on her face.

  “It’s another turf war. I thought I was too old to fight turf wars.” He stared at the ceiling. “I’ve got to talk to some people about this. We’ve got to figure out what to do.”

  She leaned over and kissed him. “Later,” she said. “They’re not here yet. We have a little time.”

  They took advantage of the time they had.

  Jax felt Danny-boy’s attentions as a steady pressure. She did not know what to make of him; she did not know how to respond. Sometimes she caught him watching her, his gaze as tangible as a touch on her skin. When she returned his stare, his eyes slipped away, as if he had just glanced in her direction by accident.

  She knew about sex. The farm animals had never been shy about fucking. Her mother had explained how men and women made love. But that clinical knowledge had little to do with the tension that she felt when Danny-boy touched her arm.

  When their eyes met accidentally, she looked away quickly, confused and unsure. She was afraid. She was not often afraid, but she was afraid of him. Or maybe she was afraid of herself, of the confusion that came when their eyes met. She wanted something that she could not identify or define. She felt restless and dissatisfied.

  Whenever Danny-boy went to work on the bridge, she explored the city on her own. On foot and by bicycle, she roved the streets with no destination in mind. Alone in the city, she sensed a gap, a break in some internal rhythm, an omission of some kind. As if one tile were missing from a mosaic, one piece from a jigsaw puzzle. If anyone had asked, she might have said that she was looking for her mother, and that was part of it. But only part. She was searching for a sense of completion, for a feeling that she belonged.

  Sometimes, when she passed a shop window, she thought she saw her mother’s reflection from the corner of her eye. The specter vanished when she turned to examine it more closely. A flicker of movement—that was all. But she knew that her mother was there.

  Sometimes she felt a sudden sensation—as startling as an electric shock—and she would realize that her mother had walked where she was walking, stood where she was standing. Her mother had sat on this bench; her mother had waited at this street corner; her mother had lingered by this shop window, admiring the rhinestone brooch that still hung on the dusty black velvet stole worn by a mannequin.

  Such moments were rare and unrepeatable. When she tried to return to a place where her mother had been, she could not find the way. The streets looked different, the stores had changed. She searched without success for the ivy-colored house where she had received her name, for the dark alley where she had seen the angel. But the streets refused to take her to these places, leading instead to new neighborhoods, where she had never been.

  In the end, she let the city direct her wanderings. She did not choose a path. Each day she set out in a new direction, paying little attention to her route. She let the city lead her.

  And she found things, though not what she was looking for. Under the reception desk in the lobby of a downtown office building, she found a tiny village built of mud bricks and pebbles. The huts were thatched with eucalyptus leaves that had long since lost their pungent smell. In an alley off Mission Street, she found a red brick wall decorated with running buffalo and deer. In a vacant lot south of Market, she found a tower constructed of crystal doorknobs, clear glass bottles, window panes, wine glasses, and crystal tableware of all varieties. The ground surrounding the tower was littered with rainbows, broken shards of colored light that shifted position with the movement of the sun.

  Sometimes she met people. On a chilly afternoon when the sun had just broken through the clouds, she walked along Haight Street, going nowhere in particular. Halfway down the block, she noticed that someone had painted a series of footprints on the pavement. Two sets of footprints: one in pink paint and one in pale blue. Jax studied them for a moment, then stepped in the pink prints. She tried to follow their path, though it seemed rather odd. To put her feet in the prints, she had to take a big step, then two small ones, then another big one. Following the prints, Jax found herself moving in a peculiar spinning path. She stopped, staring down at the pavement in puzzlement.

  “You need a partner,” a man said.

  She looked up. Snake was watching her from the sidewalk. She recognized him from the meeting at City Hall. He wore the same leather jacket, the same arrogant smile.

  “I’ll show you,” he said. He came toward her and stood in the blue footprints. In a reflex action, one hand dropped to her knife. “Oh, lighten up,” he said in a faintly contemptuous tone. “I’m not going to hurt you. You want to learn to waltz or not?”

  Feeling foolish, she released her hold on her knife.

  “Just relax,” he said, putting one hand on her waist and taking her other hand in his. “Put your hand on my shoulder. Now follow my lead—take a step with each count. One, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three.”

  She stepped in time with his counting. “Just go with it,” he said. “Don’t resist.” The pressure of his hand at her waist made her turn, and her feet naturally took the small steps painted on the pavement. The pattern of footprints began to make sense. Snake stopped counting and hummed a lilting melody that kept the same beat.

  She muttered the numbers under her breath: “One, two, three; one, two, three.” She found herself smiling as they spun down the block, forgetting her initial distrust. “One, two, three; one, two, three.”

  He stopped, releasing her, and she twirled for three more steps. “…two, three; one,
two, three.”

  “You’re out of footprints,” he pointed out.

  She stopped and grinned at him. “Maybe we should paint some more.”

  “I’ll tell Lily you said so. She’s the one who painted these and taught me to waltz.”

  “I like that,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have figured you for a waltzing type.”

  “I’d never tried it before.”

  “I suppose you didn’t get much of a chance back where you came from.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, looking over her head. “So where are you going, anyway?”

  She studied his face and decided that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. What she had taken for arrogance was an automatic sort of protection, a barricade that he erected against the world.

  She waved her hand in the direction she had been walking. “This way.”

  “Looking for anything in particular?” “Whatever the city wants to show me.”

  “Mind if I tag along for a while? I’d like to ask you about this Fourstar.”

  He strolled beside her, his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his jeans, his shoulders slouching. He asked her about Fourstar’s speech, and she repeated all that she could remember. He asked her about Woodland, about the market, about the army. And he nodded as she talked.

  “You see, the way I figure it, Fourstar is scared of us,” he said at last.

  She looked at him and shook her head. “Have you been listening? He didn’t sound scared to me.”

  “Damn straight he’s scared.” Snake’s boot heels clicked on the pavement, matching the rhythm of his words. “We don’t fit into this nice tidy new world he’s building. And he doesn’t like that.” Jax considered this for a moment. “Why don’t we fit? Seems to me we fit just fine.”

  Snake seemed to take no notice. “I was around before the Plague, so I know damn well I don’t fit. You and Danny-boy—you’re so far out of it, you don’t even know that you don’t fit. You don’t know what fitting is. And that makes people like Fourstar real nervous. That’s why he wants to wipe us out.”