6. SHADOWLANDS

Poking through the still interstices between the blinds, morning sun stenciled jagged yellow lines along the far wall of my studio. I laid in bed studying the phenomena I would only see on the weekends, when I would get to sleep in past dawn. The lines are too fat, I thought, and are going in a vertical direction, not horizontal, but they resemble the lines of a stock chart buy low sell high and always cut your losses. I tilted my head ninety degrees to shift the lines’ axes the right way and, satisfied, relaxed my head back onto the pillow and looked up at the textured ceiling. In the filtered light, it appeared full of tiny motionless clouds of pastel blue and gray. I wondered what question they had for me or of one that I should have for them. We stared at each other for a while in silence.

I did not want to, but I got up and took a shower. Then I dressed and stood at the front door, the fluorescent light from the hallway outside peeking at me from the crack under it. There I stood, my shoes not quite touching the hallway light, my hand reaching for the doorknob but me not wanting to turn it. But I was hungry, so I opened the door and walked a block down Brannan Street and across the Embarcadero and headed over to Red’s for a coffee and a bagel. 

I sat outside on a wooden bench, its knobby surface peeling with flecks of green paint, and ate breakfast alone while looking out on the bay. Along the water’s placid surface, untouched by the winter air blowing light and cold, a line of gray birds flew in silent pilgrimage. There must have been hundreds of them, or a thousand maybe, all beautiful and dark and mysterious creatures, flying as serene as the still water just below them. For a moment, the earth was quiet and I looked up into the sky, empty except for a lonely pale sun, and I felt the vastness of God’s creation and my smallness before it.

After finishing breakfast, I walked up the Embarcadero toward the Ferry Building, the anonymous noise of weekend tourists rising as I approached. All of them headed for the Wharf, I thought. I crossed over onto Market Street and made my way toward the Financial District. As I veered up Pine, the streets and sidewalks turned empty and still and felt cavernous beneath tall building tops which cut off the sun. The soft pat of my shoes against the sidewalk echoed lightly off the buildings and storefronts next to me. My dim reflection moved along silent and ghost-like in their windows as I passed by. I had no plan, I just kept walking. I’ll walk these streets all day, I thought, but I’ll be back at work on Monday. Monday will come soon enough.

The Bank of America building was ahead, arching proud and angular into the expanse above. I stopped at the plaza on California and Kearny to look up at it. The plaza was cold and empty except for a few pigeons flapping away in the shadows. Looking up, the mass of the building seemed to suck up the sky and swallow the sun whole. Lots of money floating around up there, I thought. Lots of money for you too, if you play it right  people will love you when you make it…or if you ever do. I kept staring up at the building, watching the clouds get lost behind it. An eerie stillness brooded, except for those pigeons and an occasional shrill from the brakess of a taxi a block or two away. The longer I looked up, the more the building itself seemed to come alive—its ruddy exterior rippling a bit here and there, its hard corners swelling and bulging in long waves running up and down the building, and then the whole thing swaying back and forth and finally bearing down on me like an eager and untamed animal give yourself to me. I screamed at it like some kind of wild animal myself, just screaming inside until I felt my heart squeeze and my veins burn. And then I heard one of those taxis squealing again. Somehow it had pierced my own scream. I looked over from where the noise came and saw a cab heading down Kearny towards North Beach. 

I followed it and soon began to see a line gathering for dim sum outside the House of Nanking. More tourists, I thought, on a weekend like this. As I approached its large sign hanging overhead, black with letters in carnivalesque greens and blues and pinks, the sensuous aroma of pork and shrimp prepared in spices came wafting, and of soy sauce and fry oil and dumplings. I slowed down to look inside. I don’t know why. I wasn’t hungry. There was the clinking of tea pots and tea cups and plastic chopsticks on ceramic plates, and the murmur of indiscernible conversation. 

Leaning into the window to peer inside, squinting a bit from the light glare coming off it, I saw seated at a table for two along one of the side walls, a woman about my age. She was looking into the eyes of her partner with her gentle shining eyes, her hand lightly touching his on the table as he spoke to her. I watched her, admiring the graceful lines of her brown face which glowed under a single light hanging down above them. She kept staring at him with her bright eyes, nodding approvingly and not eating. I wondered what he did that warranted his company and what it would be like to be looked at that way she’d never go for you, you’re not interesting, what would you say.

You’ve still got that same hang up, I thought. Different cities don't change a thing. You moved to San Francisco when you got the job six months ago and didn’t know a soul here at the time. You left your home and what few friends you had for this job and you still barely know another soul six months later. But it’s worth it I thought. I know it’s worth it. 

Human interaction was tolerable within the context of work, where my existence was tethered to the security of performance, but once outside the setting I lost all confidence in my ability to relate to others and habitually declined offers to go out with colleagues after work where I might risk exposing the empty corners of my life. In those corners were a swamp of feelings I could not untangle and questions I could not understand.

I kept staring at her, I don’t know for how long. A minute or two. Then she laughed at something he said, apparently something quite clever, because it caused her to break her longing gaze. She looked away and her eyes caught mine for a naked instant. My vision narrowed, almost telescoping into her. Her brown face became bigger and softer and her shining eyes brighter and she seemed to smile at me  what would you say to me, what do you want to tell me, make me laugh.  I froze. Then her eyes snapped back away just as quickly as they met mine and she brushed her hair behind her ear with the hand that was holding his. And she put her hand back on his, gently, with me thinking, her hands are warm, I bet. She gazed into his eyes again as if she hadn’t seen mine at all. One day, I thought.

Further up Kearny, more noise—tourist traffic and taxi cabs—and the pale sky above now filling with gray clouds, the winter day growing colder. I turned the corner at Broadway and headed towards the tunnel. In the shadows outside one of the small, dark strip clubs lining the street stood a girl no more than eighteen, dressed in hot pants and a see-through blouse, handing out fliers to any pedestrian within arm’s reach. She finished a cigarette, stomping it out on the dirty sidewalk which smelled faintly of urine from where I was, and walked inside. Her aloneness lingered as I passed by.

I crossed Broadway and headed up Columbus, mounting the hills of North Beach, and cut over on Grant, with its short buildings looking pale under the meager sun and the sky low with clouds. I walked the narrow street and turned down Green for a slice of pizza and a beer at Golden Boy. Sitting at the bar, I looked out through the large storefront window and watched the world pass by, anonymous and indistinguishable, the same people moving along and then reappearing, moving along and reappearing again, like on a looped reel. I had another beer before leaving and hiked a couple of blocks up Green and stood on the corner of Montgomery, staring down the steep street, where at the bottom, cradled in the shadows of the financial district’s edge, was theTransAmerica building. You’re not so big from up here, I thought.

I went back down Green and kept meandering about the neighborhood, stopping in a store here and there. I didn’t want to buy anything, I just kept looking around and checking my watch to see how many hours had passed and how many hours to go until Monday, staring at the men unabashedly walking in and out of strip clubs in broad daylight and couples walking along the sidewalk holding hands. After a while, I stopped for a cappuccino over at Cafe Trieste, sat down and eavesdropped on all the conversations floating around me—the conversations of tourists, lots of tourists talking loud, and of college girls and of old men, Italian men I think, talking about “the War.”  I imagined what I might say to each of them—of course, I’d be clever—and what they’d say to me. Somehow I spent almost two hours in Trieste and over twenty dollars on cappuccinos and pastries and whatnot, and had about five or so imaginary conversations. 

Outside, the clouds kept gathering and the afternoon turned gray. I walked over to City Lights Bookstore on Columbus, although at the time I didn’t read much and only went in to browse the business/finance section and buy the latest copy of Barron’s, if I felt like it. I looked around for a bit but grew bored rather quickly, so I began to wander about the store, deciding to pick up a Barron’s on the way out. 

Glancing up along one of the aisles as I walked around, my eyes locked on the cover of a biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His portrait, consuming most of the cover, rendered him bronze and godlike, and was set against a background of apocalyptic red with the three letters of his nickname emblazoned thickly below it. I stood there motionless studying his face—the hard lines of his jaw; the eyes, grave and distant with the cold stare of implacability. 

There he is, I thought, él guerrillero heroico of the Cuban Revolution. He’s not even Cuban. He’s Argentinian. Well, at least he stood for something. At least he gave his life to something. He knew who he was, Cuban or not. You’re half-Cuban. Your own mother immigrated from Cuba during the Revolution he fought in, but you have nothing more than a child-size vocabulary of Spanish and you haven’t even been to the country much less thought about it for a minute in the last ten years with your Wall Street dream floating around in your head. Well he may not be Cuban but he’s more Cuban than you, I thought. So pay for your damn Barron’s and let’s go.

I resisted. Picking up the sizable book, I felt its heft sink anchor-like in my hands. I began to thumb through its pages, pages of history I did not know, and felt the shame that only the sudden realization of one’s own ignorance can bring to bear on a soul—I was a deluded, half-person. I look white but am half-Cuban, I thought, and I have left the Cuban part behind  you’re trying to make something of yourself but you don’t know who you are to begin with. 

When I was a child, sitting at the table for large family gatherings on my maternal side, with the arroz con pollo passing around and the Spanish—guttural and profuse—flying around, I knew I was Cuban. To consume the meal and to bathe in that language, whether or not you could speak it, just to hear it surround you in a stereophonic sea was to become absorbed in a history and a story my little life could not contain. I knew it then, as a boy. And when I was with my paternal side, I knew there was a part of me that was not-Cuban. I did not call it white, just not-Cuban. Yet somewhere along the way in life, I had stopped thinking about the Cuban side because I had passively conformed to the white world and could leave the Cuban part behind. And I had no thoughts about being white because I looked white and lived in a white world and navigated it as a white man, which did not require me to think about my whiteness. What’s left to think about, I thought.

I clapped the book shut and looked at the cover again, the book like an anchor in my hands. My eyes gravitated again to his eyes. They were aglow like ardent flames, luminous and ancient and prophetic  there is a part of you beautiful but invisible, do you remember. I stood inert there in the middle of the aisle staring at those eyes, and began to hear the myriad voices of ancestors calling, the ineffable sound of bloodline calling, the sound of blood coursing through me invisibly, profoundly, feeding my very cells  there is a home of verdant plains you have never seen, of salty air you have never breathed, come and touch the fecund earth, become the blood that is in you so that what is in you is invisible no more.

In the window’s reflection, I could see more clouds gathering and darkening the sky. I turned to head up Columbus. The afternoon had lengthened and the sun was now a deep golden yolk falling contemplatively beneath the blue-gray clouds, its light diffuse in the wintry haze. I stopped at the first bar I could find. Inside, the atmosphere was already thick with the din of weekend revelry. I had a drink and then another, just staring out the window and glancing at the crowd inside every so often. I held the book in my lap as I sat. Looking around again, at all those faces surrounding me, with smiling mouths and eyes crinkling with laughter, faces aglow with companionship, I knew I was in a sea of strangers—in close proximity to everyone but knowing no one. You don’t even know yourself, I thought. 

I had another drink before walking over to Washington Square. I wanted to get away from the crowd, the tourists and their noise mainly. The park was empty with just a few kids playing frisbee on the dormant grass. The surrounding trees were barren and still, standing with eloquent silence in the winter air. I sat down on a bench and thumbed through the book, its words only faintly visible in the failing light. 

After a while I looked up, past where the kids were playing. Across the park stood the old Catholic cathedral, Saints Peter and Paul, staring at me. It shone white and mystical in a patch of light and its two white spires each held a gold cross up to the low sky with its gathering clouds. The crosses flashed like lightning when the light hit them just right, flashes of gold bursting against a background of cold steel blue. 

I just sat there staring at the church and at those crosses, with my mind drifting here and there, and the sound of kids at play carrying me into a kind of dreamy suspension of time. The air before me seemed to thicken and began to shimmer, like a current of clear water running above a field of wintry grass, right past the kids and up to that church. It pulled me along with it.

There I stood, naked, running my pale hands along the doors of the church, feeling them cold and steel-like and locked shut. And I heard the murmuring of people inside, praying for me in a language I did not know. Christ is in there, I thought. Christ is in there, hanging on a cross. I looked away. Then I heard the voice of a boy rolling deep within me, a small timid voice uttering those words I used to recite dutifully back in Sunday school to smiling parents and pastors  I am the good shepherd and know my sheep and they shall hear my voice and there shall be one flock and one shepherd … and they shall hear my Voice … and they shall hear my Voice … my Voice … my Voice 

Do You see me? 
Do You see me wandering this parched earth looking for You, 
In every fallen leaf, in every brittle star?
My life is a question You will not answer.
Your silence like the deep waters of the blackest sea.
Where are You? 
And where is the green meadow? 
I walk Your earth alone beneath Your unseeing eyes, 
My life a question You do not answer.   
Oh, how I love You.   
Oh, how I love you and yet You refuse me,    
Because I left You once. 
And, oh, how I love.
Do You see me wandering the empty hollows looking for You?  
And where now is Your Voice?  
And where is Your rod and staff to comfort me?
I hear the whispers of strangers.   
I have a question only You can answer.

I don’t want You anyway, I thought.  I like the direction of my life just fine and don’t want to derail it with what I might be asked to give up. People are always giving things up for You, as if everyone in creation is to be a martyr or a saint or whatnot. But here I am and I have this career, I thought. And it all takes a certain sacrifice. You do your work and you do it well for however long it takes and things will turn out all right in the end. God knows it. I’ll get back around to You sooner or later, I thought. The right time will come at some point—after I get married and have kids and life slows down. But life’s not about to slow down anytime soon and I don’t want it to. Not now, I thought. Not now. It will all make sense in due time and I will know it when I see it. I’ll get around to You. But not now. God knows it, I thought. Not now. I’ll get around to You. God forgive me. I know I will.

A single sparrow flew out of the trees, up into a thickening twilight of violet clouds. And I was back on the bench.

Well, get yourself off your cross and come find me then if you really love me, I thought. Well, what are you waiting for goddamnit?

I walked home in the gloaming, past the North Beach tourists crowding the sidewalks and through the Financial District’s dark canyons. Once I hit Market Street I took my normal route back from the office, making a right on Beale toward Folsom. A howling, misty wind rushed by as the downtown buildings gave way to the empty spaces and vacant parking lots South of Market. Just past the corner at Folsom, I stopped beside some luxury lofts stacked high atop a trendy thirty dollar-an-entree restaurant that has been long since forgotten. 

The wind died down and a winter moon appeared behind torn gray clouds above. Something about those lofts stretching up like a spear into the dark sky impressed me. I passed them to and from work every weekday and hadn’t noticed them before, not quite in this way. I stood there for a while staring, I don’t know how long, and suddenly someone spoke to me.

“— friend?”

“What?” I looked down next to me from where the voice came. A woman not much more than five feet tall stood there looking at me puzzled and concerned. She had wild grayish hair. The sun was gone now and under the streetlight her skin appeared tawny and wrinkled, the wrinkles crevassing around the corner of her eyes and running deep down her plump cheeks.

“I said, ‘Can I help you?’ ”

“No. Why?”

“Well, you’re just standing there looking up at….” She chuckled. “You OK?” she asked, tilting her head with her concerned eyes looking at me.

“I’m fine. I live right over there. See?” I pointed down the street, beneath the Bay Bridge overpass standing next to us, to where my apartment building was.

“Over there?” She looked back at me. “I bet it’s real nice.”

“It’s small. A studio,” I said. “Where do you live?” 

She turned around and pointed to a small vacant lot between the restaurant and the overpass, on which sat a vast and complex arrangement of cardboard boxes and shopping carts with blankets and tarps strewn along their tops. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“Oh.” I reached into my pocket thinking I’d give her some cash. 

“Do you want a cigarette?” She held out a pack of American Spirits, light blue. 

“No. Well.” I stopped searching my pocket and grabbed one. She lit it for me and one for her. We looked at each other through the smoke.

“So do you like living here?” she asked.

“It’s OK. I work mainly.”

“Doing what?”

“Stock market.”

“Do you like it?” 

“Mostly.” 

“Well, I’m from Santa Fe. I was a nurse a while back. Lost my job and had no family to help out. Been moving around since then. Now here I am.”

“Hmm.” 

We were silent for a moment, blowing blue smoke between us. You could hear the gentle roll of bridge traffic overhead. “All these new lofts and stuff popping up, I can never stay in one place too long.” She pointed a wrinkled hand to the shantytown. “I just keep on moving and seem to get along OK, I guess. There’s always people to help out, you know.”

She took a final drag of the cigarette and put it out. “Well, looks like we’re neighbors then. For now anyway.”

“Guess so.” I said. 

She smiled at me and touched my hand. “Well be good, friend.”

She walked away, out of the streetlight’s circumference, toward the mass of cardboard boxes now dappled in the faint light of the yellow moon.  I walked home to wait for Monday to come again.

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