Labyrinth. David L. Ulin

      Open Door

      ONE

       On a Plain

      He was thinking, as the waters of the Bay rose up outside the airplane window in those last moments before the landing gear touched the tarmac, of a scene he had witnessed through another window a few months before. It was a garden party. The Sunday afternoon, warm in Los Angeles, was one of those dry november days that shimmer up like mirages. The air was sere and desert dusky, the light as thin and hollow as a watercolor wash. He had been drinking a beer in the kitchen and talking to someone, he couldn't remember, when he noticed annie's friend Sylvie pushing her six-year-old son on a swing set in the yard. Sylvie would push and the kid would giggle, and then she'd spread her arms in an exaggerated X, like a scarecrow in a field.

      Sylvie was thin like that, just sticks and skin. Her face was a collage of protuberances arranged beneath a crown of lank brown hair. Through the window, he could see her clenched fists, the tilt of her head, the forward angle of her hips. If he'd been outside, he knew, he would be able to hear her, a little bit frantic and excited at once. Sylvie had just had a double mastectomy. Over the summer, she'd been diagnosed with a particularly fast moving breast cancer, and was now, as the saying goes, fighting for her life.

      The first time he'd ever heard that phrase, he'd been six himself, driving around Long beach with his father on the morning after robert Kennedy was shot. Senator Kennedy is fighting for his life, the radio kept saying. He'd imagined the wounded man lying on a stretcher, fists balled and swinging, as if he were duking it out with death. Thinking about that, he glanced again at Sylvie's hands, so small and bony they looked like walnuts. They didn't appear strong enough to battle their way through the fading autumn light.

      And yet, this was precisely what Sylvie was doing, fighting the good fight, standing up for as long as she could. She was out in the yard, with her kid, really with him, as if whatever connection she might make here would leave a trace that would linger, for a while anyway, after she was gone. Annie hated it when he thought that outcomes were inevitable. But what annie didn't understand was that he didn't begrudge the battle: not Sylvie's or anyone's. That it was futile only made it more necessary to be here now.

      It was a lesson he was trying to learn also: to find a way to get clear of all the noise. Maybe, if you could fully inhabit one moment, all that other stuff would fade, leaving only the paleness of the sunlight and the image of a mother and a son, in the instant before time betrayed them, playing together in the yard.

      The plane touched down with a series of skidding bumps. The brakes kicked in and he was pushed forward in his seat. Outside forces, all these outside forces. The older he got, the more he felt…buffeted the word was, as if he himself were caught in turbulence, tossed from side to side. He didn't know why Sylvie had come into his mind. He was not dying (except, of course, in the way that we are all dying), and it had been years since he had pushed a child on a swing. Yet he could feel the betrayal, that time was not his friend any longer. (Another illusion: that it had ever been.)

      His restlessness was intensified by the proximity of San Francisco, towers glittering across the Bay. It had been his first city, and its streets were a labyrinth of memory. He had lived here the year after high school, and the experience still rose up to remind him of…what? His long-lost possibilities? No, although possibility was part of it. He had been eighteen, on his own for the first time, living in a studio apartment in the Haight. All along, he'd known he would not be staying. When the year was up, he would go to college, and yet, this only had heightened the effect of a ticking clock. He remembered taking the Number 7 bus up Market Street, memorizing the storefronts, buildings stark against the sky like jagged teeth. Before or since, he'd never paid such attention to anything. Thirty years later, he could still be stopped by the right cast of white Pacific light, the scent of eucalyptus, the angle of a terra cotta doorway. All those details and sensations, sense memories of the city, in which the moment was equally present and always, always out of reach.

      Finally, the plane pulled up to the gate and cut its engines, and he made his way into the Oakland airport. He was here for the night: an afternoon meeting and then back home tomorrow. He texted annie to let her know he'd arrived. It was late morning, and in Los angeles, she was at work, teaching toddlers in the library until it was time to get Sadie at school. Jonah would come home later on the city bus. His son was a high school student already, big and bearded, not so much younger than he himself had been when he'd come to the bay area. He stepped onto the sidewalk, momentarily stilled by the crisp clarity of the air.

      It felt redolent, but the more he tried to think of what, the more it eluded him. It was like memory—attempt to pin it down and it slipped from your grasp. The only way to deal with memory was sidelong, in a series of glances.

      TWO

       city City CITY

      Yes…redolent. He could feel the past as he walked up Powell Street from the BART station, bag across his shoulder like a sling. He was looking for the easiest way to navigate Nob Hill. There was no good option, so he took a left on Post and went to Taylor, where he humped a ragged passage up the slope. 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