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Return to San Francisco

by DAN CARVILLE

They landed without much effort. A man inspected the plane and called out to his co-worker, "I am so tired. The morning is an afternoon."

Max found a cab without much trouble. A blinking light on the dash bothered him to no end. The cab driver said, "Without a witness, there's not much to do. You wait for hour, but it's a happy kind of waiting, absent the pressure I thought I would feel."

A culvert trickled water. The house creaked and settled at an angle. He opened every closet to be safe. The caretaker stopped by, rapping on the door with a wrinkled knuckle. He told Max how to turn on the water, to be sure to lock the fridge. The man took a call, and quickly became heated. "Put it back wherever you got it," he screamed.

Picking up a package of hot dogs at 7-11, he spotted an old "friend" who recognized him instantly. "Max!" He could not place his friend's name, but he soon realized it was not necessary - any other synonym would suffice. Eventually he said it: it was Richard. A few of Richard's friends came back and drank all the beer in the fridge, the one he could now not remember how to close. When Dana called to tell him she was coming over, Max kicked them all out, saying, "The jetlag is always worse than you can imagine."

She did not stay long, and appeared substantially more interested in the house than anything else present. Feebly, Max heard himself offering to dogsit for her. She touched every wall with her red fingernails. Before she left he said, "There is a fascination with repeating yourself that I have never been able to understand until now."

In the morning he woke early, but not early enough to view the rising of the sun. All Max recalled of the previous night was her thighs. Could not imagine what kind of work she had done to make them look so smooth, like the crests of waves. When the mailman delivered a few circulars and a book of coupons to the house, he took off a hat with a picture of John Lennon on it and said, "The blue lagoon is closed today. Some kind of problem with shrapnel in the air." Max could only nod as he drove off.

Max walked around the city, up and down it really, quickly getting myself far more lost than he intended. A cadre of Colombians were staging a festival; children oscillated on bouncy castles for as far as Max's eyes could see. Mothers tried to decrease incrementally the velocity of their descent, shouting, "A careful churl comes to no sorrow, slow, slow, slow," in a language he could only half understand.

A crowd had gathered around a magic act on the esplanade. The magician looked young for his skill level; his moustache was obviously fabricated. At some point during his demonstration, the magician shouted as loud as he could that the painting he was about to make disappear was an American classic.

In the daylight the house resembled the burning end of a cigarette. The temperature dropped, and he had packed nothing to insulate himself against any kind of cold. He called the caretaker but the connection was indistinct. All he could hear was a woman breathing very heavily before she said, "March in single file. When we arrive you can eat it."

He thought of calling Dana, but remembered the events of the previous evening with more clarity. Her expression had only been familiar to him at first, but he had difficulty placing its meaning completely. Now, as he placed his phone inside an old drawer, he fathomed what it was: the same expression he had seen on his sister's face at their father's wake. He pulled the phone out of a drawer and called a number. He said to himself, but also to the house, "A mercurial phantom rides a long way. Come now the snow, the dithering in the artifice, to me if not to her as well. I could sit here, but I wait."

Dan Carville a writer living in Brooklyn.

Paintings by Hadas Tal.

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