The hotel was on Taylor and California, catty-corner from Grace Cathedral, which squatted, gray-white and hulking, like a model built for God. He loved the Cathedral and its stolid air of reassurance. He couldn't help drawing solace from it, as if, were you to believe in something hard enough, you might make it true.
The first time he'd set foot inside had been when he lived here, to attend services with his friends Jack and brooke after a July 4th car wreck on highway 101. Even then, it had seemed strange, since none of them were believers. Their faith was in an invented mix of magical thinking and serendipity. He could never see the Cathedral without thinking of that moment, the three of them so young. Brooke wore a skirt. He and Jack were in clean jeans and collared shirts, sighing in relief that they were here at all. If he had thought about it, he would have understood how out-of-place he was. But then, that had been the point: to break with the expected, to step outside the narrative, to create not the world that had been imagined for him but the one he had imagined for himself.
And yet, what was this world he had imagined? He couldn't say. He hadn't come here to make a real break, but instead to take a break. Maybe this was why that time tugged at him—not because of what it said about his possibilities, but because the whole thing had been an illusion, a story he liked to tell himself. He could see how he looked at eighteen, long-haired, wearing a Guatemalan pullover, the same kind Jonah now wore when he went to Venice Beach with his high school friends. He remembered wandering the streets of San Francisco like a mendicant, through all those endless loops and meandering spirals. Maybe what had made it so intense had been his understanding that it was temporary, that here, for a year anyway, time had stopped. Maybe that was why he had paid attention, because he had known all along that it wasn't going to last. Briefly, the image of Sylvie, out in the yard with her six-year-old, flickered across the inside of his eyes. Be here now, he found himself thinking. Be here now.
There it was, he thought, as he turned into the lobby of the hotel, up the short flight of marble steps, one, two, three, to the reception desk. The central irony of his adult life was that of all the ideas he had ever tried on, the whole thing turned on…Ram Dass? Even as a teenager, he'd never taken him seriously. Yet, here he was, murmuring his most famous phrase as it were a mantra. Strange, he thought, strange what sticks and strange what doesn't, as he got directions to his room.
Upstairs, he threw his bag on the bed and opened the shades, looked out at the city spread before him in a tableau. His window faced east, towards the Embarcadero—although he couldn't see it. He could barely glimpse a sliver of the Bay Bridge, angling beyond the foot of California Street like an iron web. He watched a cable car chuff up the hill, stopping next to the Fairmount, tourists climbing on and off like animated figures in their multi-colored clothes. Nothing seemed quite real, as if seeing the city from a distance left him at an unbridgeable remove. He stood at the window for a long moment, trying to imagine his way into the scene. It would have been nothing to go downstairs, walk into the brilliant noontime, and yet he couldn't bring himself to move. Instead, he turned and unpacked his laptop, tapped into the wireless network of the hotel. Another window, he thought, another kind of window, as he checked his email, confirming his meeting, the time and place. It was a formality, this meeting, a loose face-to-face without much at stake. It was the sort of thing that could have been done over Skype or even the telephone, except for the vague factor of good will. But that was okay. He was happy to be in San Francisco—or, at least, he thought he was.
THREE
Secret History
The truth was, he was in San Francisco in pursuit of history, a secret history kick-started on Facebook. He had joined with the belief that it would let him keep watch over his children, who seemed to live within its pages, wandering the endless weave of cyberspace as he'd once walked this city's streets. He watched Jonah and Sadie from a distance, lurking, a word that caught the flavor of it precisely, as if he were looking around the side of a virtual wall. Then the friend requests drifted in: colleagues and co-workers, other parents, serendipitous contacts, and, at last, a slow trickle of old friends.
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