“Doesn’t work, I’m afraid,” he said, indicating the narrow steps that led from the other side.
Six flights later, she was glad to see they’d reached the top of the building. There had been no windows on the ascent—just another old bulb on each landing. Then finally this upper space, with a single wooden door.
“This is it,” the old man said, as he unlocked it. “Now, don’t get your hopes up. It was the caretaker’s place.”
On the other side lay a room, perhaps ten feet wide and twenty long. It was bare, with dusty gray floorboards and peeling wallpaper that looked old. They were up in the roof, and so the ceiling bore sharply inward on one side, revealing beams. A single bed had been pushed into the corner. A small table. One chair. A small area on the right-hand side evidently designed to serve as a kitchenette, with a hotplate. There was a narrow doorway open next to it. Beyond was a tiny room with a toilet and a shower stall, both of which looked like they had not been used in twenty years. Overall, it felt like a cabin belowdecks on an old wooden ship.
In truth, it would have been a pretty depressing place, were it not for one thing. Marion walked straight toward it.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s cool.”
The old man stayed where he was, back by the door to the stairs. “I suppose so. There are two conditions. The first is that you bring nobody else up here. Ever. This cannot become another flophouse filled with free spirits and freeloaders.”
“Works for me,” Marion said. “That’s exactly the scene I’m bailing out of.”
“The second is that on Tuesday evenings I need this space myself. Not for long—a couple of hours. Between eight and ten. I require you to be elsewhere during that time.”
“Sure thing.”
“That’s all.”
“And you really don’t want me to pay anything?”
He shook his head, handed her a pair of keys, and turned away. She said thank you to his back, and he raised a hand in return as he started down the stairs.
As the sound of his footsteps receded, Marion closed the door and took stock. Sure it was dusty and smelled weird, and the ceiling made it feel kind of cramped, and in general it was a long way from nice, but listen . . .
It was silent.
Nobody talking. Nobody playing the guitar badly. Nobody snoring. Nobody . . . just nobody.
She smiled, then wandered back down to the room’s biggest and most redeeming feature. A window. The window, in fact. It was the only one, but it was large. Circular, with different colored panes divided by spokes that came out from the center: the panes broken up into further sections by a tracery of leading. What they called a “rose window” in a church. She dimly remembered from childhood—there’d been such a feature in the chapel back home—that they were usually placed at the western aspect, and wondered if this was the case here. Maybe.
She stood for a while and looked out across the rooftops, at the city lights that stretched toward Nob Hill and beyond. Without realizing she was doing it, after a few minutes she slipped the pack off her back and set it gently on the floor, continuing to stare through the multicolored glass as night fell.
She followed the people as they marched, and after a while they were all singing and shouting, and if you’ve never been part of a crowd like that, a swell of humanity all driven by the same cause and dreaming the same dream then you simply don’t know how it feels. You can’t know what it’s like to become a part of something that blurs every individual into one, all their single candles turning for a bright and shining afternoon into a sea of infinite light—a light that each one of them believes will be enough to illuminate the universe in ways it has never been before.
They strode along the streets together, chanting the same slogans, waving at the straights and squares standing mired on the sidewalks, as they frowned confused at the free spirits in their midst—and as they progressed toward Haight, more and more people started to join them at the back, and from the sides, impulsively throwing off the shackles of their lives and swelling this tide of humanity into a fleet of souls too powerful to resist.
People sang and played instruments, weaving together one enormous song. Guitars, flutes, drums. And after a while Marion realized she could hear something else too—a high, keening melody played on a single violin.
The thing she’d been hearing for days now, and that spoke to her, sang in a way that was dark but direct and true. It took all this noise and joy and condensed it to a single note.
She turned her head back and forth, tried to see where it was coming from, but there was no sign. By then the crowd around her was so loud that it sounded as if the tune was coming from between her own ears, and so she forgot about it and rhythmically punched the air with her fist like all the others.
And they marched on.
That evening she ate sitting at the little table. The meal consisted of two vegetable egg rolls from a place she’d found a five minute walk away, all she convinced herself she could afford. It wasn’t impossible to find casual work in the city. She’d washed dishes. Waited tables. A few nights of bar work before they found out she’d lied about her age and was only eighteen. What was tougher was keeping your position. Hardly anyone was offering stable employment, because they knew there were countless other girls and boys out there desperate to earn a little cash, and they didn’t trust hippies to be reliable. Most people got hired by the day, or even the hour. The only person Marion knew with an actual job was Katie.
After eating she read for a while, a water-damaged copy of The Naked Ape that an older guy named Karl, the manager in City Lights, had let her take on permanent loan.
At ten o’clock she went to bed.
Haight-Ashbury. Ground zero. Heaving with humanity. Placards. Chanting. Protest songs. Men and women on soapboxes, all shouting different things, but they were all the same thing at heart, and so it spiraled up into an extraordinary new music, a choral symphony of those who would upend the universe.
For the next forty minutes, Marion was happier than she had been in her entire life. Happier than on the sporadic days as a young child when her mother remembered she was around, and spent some actual time with her. Happier than when a little older, and her bedroom door for once did not open in the middle of the night. Happier even than when she went to sit alone in her grandmother’s yard, away from everyone. Away from her uncle especially. Happy as only a person can be when their mind, every molecule of their bodies, their very soul is in tune with the world around them.
Happy, happy, happy.
She saw Cindy walking by, swigging from a plastic cup, her arm around some guy, grinning and pumping her fist. She ran over when she saw Marion and planted a big kiss on her lips before dancing back away into the crowds. Marion spotted Dylan too, and some of the others from the house, and for a moment felt a keen stab of loneliness, but convinced herself it didn’t matter because, look: here they all were together again—that all of them would always be together, preserved in moments like this, when they stood together and changed the world, fierce insects frozen in the warm amber of history.
They all sang together, and somewhere in the background or deep inside, that simple un-melody played.
When Marion woke, at first she wondered if she’d heard a noise. She lay in the narrow bed, listening, before realizing it was more likely the lack of noise that was unusual. For weeks she’d been living under the kind of conditions they use to soften up political prisoners prior to interrogation. There was no noise here. There were no people.
Once she’d realized that was the difference, she turned on her side and tried to get back to sleep. Soon it felt as if the silence was pounding in her eardrums, however—so loud it was almost like tinnitus, a single note, varying in pitch. It compelled you to listen, to unsuccessfully predict where it was going next, like the strangest kind of experimental music. She’d heard more than her share of that over recent weeks (Dylan was an enthusiastic, though unschooled, bass player), and learned some
thing.
If you could actually play—and a few people in the house could—then your hands and ears wouldn’t let you leave the path. However much a real musician tried to be random and free, previously learned patterns ensnared them. Muscle memory pulled you back to the norm, to the established shipping lanes of melody. You had to be wholly ignorant of the process to play something truly new, and even then a vestige of recognizable rhythm would eventually emerge as utter incompetents bashed clumsily on out-of-tune guitars with only four strings. Humanity, the things we learn without even realizing, intervenes and re-gathers. To truly throw the past aside and become new requires both strength and a willingness to throw yourself into the void.
This sound, the sound her ears or brain made without intervention . . . it sounded like that. After a while it had woken her sufficiently that she sat up. It was only then that she understood what had really roused her.
She got out of bed and walked to the window.
It was light out there. Not like during the day, of course—she checked her watch and found it was a little before 3:00 A.M.—but starkly moonlit, bright enough to flood a multitude of colors into the room. Below that shining level, the buildings all around were wreathed and enveloped in fog.
In the moonlight, everything looked psychedelic.
Marion pulled the chair over to where she could sit and look out. Though she’d spent a while gazing out of the window earlier, she must have been looking at a slightly different angle. Fog, like snow, will make a place look unfamiliar. Presumably that’s what was making the angles between the buildings look altered. And presumably it was the fog that was turning the few lights a curdled yellow, almost as if they were running on gas, instead of electricity.
She moved the chair right up close to the window, noticing something. Sounds, from outside. This wasn’t the single note thing, but the kind of noise people made. Distant shouting. Not in anger, but workmanlike shouts, the kind you heard when men were engaged in some kind of task.
Then a screeching cry, like a seagull.
Perfectly possible, of course—the building was only a ten-minute walk along Market from the bay and the moldering piers and warehouses there—but combined with the shouts, it reminded her of something. She couldn’t work out what it might be.
Now that she was close to the window, she could see some of the individual panes in the design were mottled, making the views through them crooked, twisted. They also somehow magnified the effect of the fog, causing it to seem to move more quickly, sinuously, as if with intent. As she panned her gaze slowly down one of the nearest buildings, she noticed tendrils of it feeling their away around some bricked-up windows and then moving on, as if seeking some easier mode of entry. Silly, of course, just a nighttime thought, but nonetheless she was glad the fog didn’t reach up as high as her own window.
She kept bending her head, slowly, looking farther and farther down, then suddenly stopped.
For just a moment the fog had parted, giving her a glimpse right down to street level. But it hadn’t been a street she’d seen, or even a sidewalk.
It was water.
She knew from the time before, that first happening in the park, not to drink anything that anybody passed her, however much it looked and smelled innocent, or if they told her it was fruit juice.
But she was hungry, as well as thirsty—and there were cookies and brownies being passed around. And once she’d had a few of those her guard started to slip, and probably she did have a drink, or two, and then there was some guy with tabs and blotters, and Marion was standing with Cindy at that point, and when Marion shook her head and said no, she didn’t want any of that scene, no thank you and no way, Cindy rolled her eyes and made fun about how her time in the city wasn’t changing Marion at all, she was still the same uptight small-town girl she’d always been, nothing was ever going to help her evolve—and she’d never dance like the rest of them.
The other people with them thought Cindy was joking, just playing around. But Marion looked at her and saw twinkling lights around the girl’s eyes, probably only the sun glinting off glitter and makeup but still so bright and sharp, and in their lights she saw every girl in school who’d looked at her the same way, those exact same girls, the girls who’ve always been there, and realized Cindy was no different even if she floated like an angel with layers of velvet and denim and secondhand silk, even if her skin was clear and shone like milk, even if she walked through this place like a fairy queen. The uniforms change, the times change, but deep inside everybody stays the same.
Marion looked Cindy straight in the eye and took the tab.
And she danced.
“And then I woke up,” Marion said. She shrugged and laughed. “Weird, huh?”
“Woke up where?”
“In bed, in the attic. I hadn’t gotten up at all. I’d fallen asleep, and just dreamed that I did.”
“I had a dream like that once,” Katie said. “Where I dreamed I was where I actually was. It was freaky.”
They were at a table outside the café next door to City Lights, making a pair of coffees last as long as they could. After a morning trying unsuccessfully to find work, Marion had wound up at the bookstore by default. She’d spent a couple hours reading—the staff were cool about people doing that, and the manager (Karl) positively encouraged it—and then looked up to see Katie standing over her. Katie had played it all “Oh, what a coincidence,” but she knew Marion often spent chunks of the afternoon in the store, and the longer they’d sat outside together, the less Marion believed their meeting had been an accident.
“You okay?” she asked eventually, after a pause in the conversation had stretched to a full minute.
Katie took a moment before replying, looking down into her coffee cup. When she looked up, Marion realized how tired the other girl looked. Tired, but resolute.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But I’m done.”
“Done how?”
“I’m out of here. The city. This whole scene.”
Marion felt her stomach turn over. “For real? Why?”
“Because it’s bullshit,” Katie said. “I mean, not all of it. I get that. There’s stuff going down. This is . . . it’s a thing. No doubt. People are going to look back and say wow, far out, man. But right now, for most of us, that’s not in reach. It’s the other side of the windowpane. We can see it, but we can’t touch it. There’re people who are making a real difference, doing real things, having a real good time. I’m not. Any of those things. And I’m done pretending otherwise.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Go home.”
“Doesn’t that feel like . . .”
“Failing? Giving up? Nope.” The girl’s eyes were hard, thoughtful. “There’s a 1% getting things done here. The rest of us are only adding weight. Having ‘fun’—except a lot of the time it’s really not fun—and hanging around. This city right now is like a hundred thousand people jumping in the air at once, and it’s great while they’re still up, but gravity is strong and at some point the love bubble’s going to burst and they’re going to fall back to Earth—hard. ‘Failing’ would be sticking it out until that happens, and finding yourself stranded here afterward. I’m just getting a head start on the inevitable.”
“When are you going?”
“Today. I called my dad last night and told him. He sounded happy, and said cool, and he’d be waiting to give me a hug. He trusted me to make my own decision six weeks ago, and he trusts me again now. Including when I said I might bring a friend back with me.”
“A friend? Who?”
“You. If you wanted. You never really talk about what you left back at home. If it wasn’t good, and you wanted to leave here, there’s a place for you in South Dakota.”
Marion looked at her, blinking rapidly. “But why?”
“When I climbed on the bus that got me here, in the middle of the night, everybody else looked away. You smiled right up at me and said, ‘There’s r
oom next to me.’ You’re a nice person, and my friend, and always will be.”
“Thank you,” Marion managed to say, quietly.
“But that’s a ‘no’?”
Marion realized again how sharp the other girl was, and for a long moment teetered toward a different future. One where she said yes, and traveled with this girl back to the prairies, and they let the world unfold after that. She’d never been to that part of the country, but she imagined herself standing wholesomely in a waving field under a huge sky, smiling, looking into the distance. Maybe wearing a checked shirt. The vision was so strong that she almost thought she could smell the wheat around her, but then she realized the smell was fog instead—the fog that was starting to creep up the street toward where they sat. A fog that smelled of the sea and old things, and said she was staying here because it was where she belonged. The fog that was here even when it wasn’t. A fog that sounded of something.
“I don’t think I’m done here yet,” Marion said.
Katie pulled a pen out of her bag and scribbled something on a napkin. She gave it to Marion. “My address back home,” she said. “And take care of yourself, okay?”
Marion smiled brightly.
Katie got up and looked down at her before walking off down the street, quickly swallowed up by the sea mist.
It was too early to head back to the place where she now slept. There was nothing else she particularly wanted to do. So Marion wound up back in City Lights, in the basement, scrunched up in a tatty chair in the corner trying to read some Kerouac. The light wasn’t good, and the bulbs in the lamps dotted around the space seemed to be flickering intermittently. The pages blurred in front of her.
“Now, what’s going on here?”
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 14