Remembering (8 page)

He walks again, crossing on Jackson to Powell, and turning again northward. The names on windows and awnings are in Chinese now. The street reeks with the smell of yesterday's fish.

A figure lurches upright out of a doorway ahead of him. The man is bearded, long-haired, his head bound with a rolled bandanna. He wears a fringed buckskin coat.

“Hey, man!”

“Hello!”

“Say, brother, could you spare me a buck for a little breakfast?”

Andy feels in his pocket, finding, if he is not mistaken, two nickels and a quarter. “I thought the toll was a dime.”

“This ain't 1930, man.”

“Well, when is it?”

“How would
I
know? Later?”

Holding his wallet in his one hand, he will be disarmed.

“I mean, a good breakfast, man, that's a good start on a good day.” The man is chanting, dancing a little, as if to a rhythm independent of himself that might carry him abruptly up the street, empty-handed.

Madness or charity, he holds his wallet against his waist with his right forearm, and with his left hand plucks out a bill, and it is a five, and another, and it is a one; on impulse, he gives them both.

“Oh, wow! Far out! Thanks, Tex. You a man of a better time.”

When he has crossed Broadway he can see the lights of the westward tower of the Bay Bridge centered in the opening of the street, the lights of its cables swaying down symmetrically on either side. Above a dark cloudbank in the east, a pale light is in the sky. The traffic along Broadway is thin but constant, its sound established, the day begun.

A walker in the dark, he feels the touch of the light of the sky around him, but he is not in it. He reminds himself of himself.

In Washington Square, the trees are loud with the cries of sparrows. The little park is an island, green, tree-shaded under the lights; on the far side is the lighted pale front of the church of Peter and Paul. Andy sits down on a bench in the shadows near the firemen's monument. The sparrows clamor overhead. Lighted buses go by, the people inside them sleepy and quiet, on their way to work; as the buses move and stop, the people sway in unison in their seats, unresisting as underwater weeds. Joggers pass, striding long, their breathing loud over their footfalls. A dog passes slowly, his short legs trotting fast. A fat Chinese woman walks by, swinging her arms vigorously. Behind her comes a Chinese man slowly rotating his extended arms as if he is a sluggish seabird preparing to fly.

Now Andy can see daylight in all the sky, brighter to the east, although, below, the lights of the streets are still strong and the shadows dark. He sits and watches. He watches the slow waking of the streets, the gentle people exercising in the park, their movements as fluent and quiet as if dreamed. He watches the lights around the square become weak as the sky brightens. On the bench next to him a man is lying asleep under a blanket. In all the stirring in the square, they two are the only ones who are still. When the daylight has come well into the shadows and the night has entirely gone, he gets up; he stands in front of the church and reads the legend engraved across its face: LA GLORIA DI COLUI CHE TUTTO MUOVE PER L'UNIVERSO PENETRA E RISPLENDE.

GOOD EARTH REALTY, INC., and all the rest of the businesses along Columbus Avenue are still shut, dreaming perhaps of opportunities to come later. In their dreams their mouths are open, and people are rushing in with their pockets full of money. There is nothing like a crowd yet in the gray light of the street. The walkers, some going to work, some going to breakfast, some led by little dogs, appear one at a time, widely dispersed, moved along by singular and undetectable purposes.

What draws him to the sleeper in the doorway, he does not know. He sees the man lying there, his knees drawn up beneath a short piece of blanket that does not cover his feet, and he stops. He stops, perhaps, because of some suggestion of the power of his awareness over the man sleeping unaware. The man, Andy sees, is young, his face unlined under his three days' growth of beard. His hair is blond, his beard red. His head is resting on his extended right arm, the forearm propped at the wrist against the kick plate of the door, the hand relaxed and drooping like the bloom of a nodding flower. The hand, like the blanket, is dirty. The young man's mouth is slightly open. He has the innocent look of a sleeping child. And what can have brought him here?

Andy leans, looking at the young man face-to-face. The young man is loosened and easy in his sleep, in his vulnerability unaware, as if in some absolute trust that to Andy is not imaginable. The sleeper has entrusted himself to his defenseless sleep as confidently as a little child to his own bed at home. As if not with his mind but with his shoulder and breastbone, Andy recalls his grandfather's old fingers prodding him through the covers. “Boy? The sun's up.” And then, in pity and sorrow: “And you still a-laying in the bed with the daylight in your face.” And Andy thinks of himself leaning over his own sleeping son. For a moment he is almost breathless with the thought that if he reached out and touched this man, he would move; he would stir and wake out of his dark sleep to live in this new day that has come.

But now singing is in the street, and Andy moves away. A man is coming up the street, singing an aria in a fine, strong tenor. As he moves along he is inspecting the interiors of garbage cans, as unfailing in his attentions
as a postman. As they meet and pass, the man does not look at Andy. He seems to be aware of nothing in the world but his quest from garbage can to garbage can. He seems not to hear himself singing.

“No,” Andy thinks. “Maybe it was not absolute trust. Maybe it was absolute despair. Maybe when he lay down he didn't care if he slept or died.” Andy lays his hand on his breastbone as a chill or an ache passes through him and shakes him. He reminds himself of himself.

He is down in the flat now, close to the bay. At intersections he can see Alcatraz with its walls, its lighthouse flashing. A nice gentle-faced woman is waiting at a bus stop alone. Andy says before he thinks, as if in Port William, “Morning!” The woman quickly looks away. Her fear and accusation are in the air around her, leaving him hardly room to pass.

But momentum is going with him now. He is almost outside the network of the streets. And then, at the foot of Hyde Street, he
is
out of it and is standing in the great fall of dawnlight over the bay and its islands, the Golden Gate, the Marin hills and Mount Tamalpais beyond. To the east, beyond the Berkeley hills, the whiteness of the sky has begun to show a faint stain of pink. The air opens and lightens around him, freshening, bearing the cold pungence of the ocean. Seagulls, crying hungrily, circle on spread wings in the unobstructed day.

In Aquatic Park a little lilting surf is running up the beach, the tide going out, and gulls are walking with strange terrestrial flat-footedness among the windrows of drift and trash and seaweed. Andy goes along the curved walk above the harbor into the lee of the high ground of Fort Mason where the air is still and he can smell the eucalyptus trees.

The long pier curves out ahead of him into the bay. He is going over water now. A few fishermen are already leaning on the parapet, watching their lines, which disappear beneath the little waves. The fishermen are already dazzled with expectation and the motion of the water. As Andy stands and watches, a rod tip suddenly vibrates and gestures downward.

A little farther out he encounters suddenly the wind off the sea, pressing in massively and steadily past the bridge. The gulls go against it, and turn, their wings spread to it in overmastering grace; their voices skitter
and quarrel over tidbits of garbage or the possible future occurance of tidbits of garbage. Out toward Alcatraz seven pelicans are flying in stately single file. Westward, the great bridge stands aloof, its tower tops hidden in fog, and out beyond it the immense tremor of the ocean. Fishing boats are coming in from the night. Gulls standing on the parapets of the pier call softly, and then for no apparent reason break into laughter.

Andy walks and stands and walks until he comes to the outermost arc of the pier. There, with the whole continent at his back, nothing between him and Asia but water, he stands again, leaning on the parapet, looking westward into the wind. The air has cleared beyond the bridge now; he can see ships there, waiting to come in; a tug is on its way out to meet one of them.

And now almost at Andy's feet, silently and with no disturbance at all, a head appears among the waves. One moment it was not there, and the next it is. It is a head so black and slick that Andy at first thinks it is the head of a man wearing a bathing cap. But it is the head of a sea lion who looks around with the intelligent gaze of a man, and then is gone so quickly and with so little disturbance that Andy, who was looking at it, cannot be sure when it went. So sudden, brief, and silent was its appearance, so intelligent its glossy eye, so perfect its absence, that when it rises again, Andy thinks, it may rise into a day two hundred years ago.

A gray freighter comes into sight, going out. So far away as it is, it is silent, moving steadily along, already submitted to the long pulse of its engines that will drive it out under the bridge, past the headlands, into the wild ocean. Going where?

Where might he not go? Who knows where he is? He feels the simplicity and lightness of his solitude. Other lives, other possible lives swarm around him.

Distance comes upon him. Nobody in thousands of miles, nobody who knows him, knows where he is. If Flora wanted him now, how would she find him? How would a call or letter find him with news of any death or grief ? All distance is around him, and he wants nothing that he has. All choice is around him, and he knows nothing that he wants.