All Stories Are Love Stories (19 page)

Gene hustled through the dark streets, his head down and his hands in his pockets. With nothing in his arms, he felt oddly light, like a man stepping back onto shore after being at sea, newly desperate to get home, to get to Franklin. As he continued his walk north on Taylor—the fire to his right an approaching beast he could sense but didn't want to face—he thought of the girl who wanted to reach her home no matter what she might find when she did.

The closer he moved toward the heart of the city and the makeshift fire evacuation zone—black
X
's spray-painted on tilting buildings, cones, handwritten signs on folding chairs—the more hollow it was, devoid of people and activity, though the hollowness was so still that it had its own energy. It echoed in Gene's chest, an emptiness he wouldn't have thought he could sustain. All the things he thought he'd done, invested in—Franklin, and the desperate belief that he would stick around just because Gene needed him; the carefully charted maps of the world, as if lines on paper could be as powerful as the global foundations they represented—had proved easy to upturn, spinning uselessly on their sides.

At Sutter, he paused at a cute little red pub with striped awnings and iron arrows on the door. There was no visible sign of damage, but it projected abandonment, a yawning,
black emptiness. It was just the sort of place he would have wanted to try had he passed it any other day. Could buildings sense their fate? A fresh gust of wind tore through, whipping open the door to a vacant sushi restaurant, tripping its bell. He tried to tell himself that all would return to normal, eventually, this was a city that could, in fact, rise from its own ashes—had done exactly that before—but he couldn't shake the sensation of walking through an abandoned set, the structures only cleverly designed props for a play that had suddenly been canceled, a play that had, until this afternoon, included his life among its plot lines.

Involuntarily, he looked up. Then, hypnotized by what he saw, east. Several hundred feet down Sutter, a fire surged behind the high-rises like the monster in a bad horror film: defined, inescapable, a hopelessly obvious villain. His lungs registered the smoke in the air. It hadn't just been fear creating the tightness in his chest.

He began to run. What if he couldn't get home? What if he didn't reach Franklin in time? He had been taking a dead man home. That girl was going home. Homes disappeared in the blink of an eye, the bad fate of an afternoon.

Now nearing Nob Hill, he was surprised to find crowds again, people trying to save valuables from their $2,500-a-month studios. Maybe the wealthy were the slowest to sense their own danger. People were running around with their belongings or their loved ones, hands clasped, too close to the fire and too attached to what it consumed; those who hadn't already run seemed hypnotized. He wanted to stop one of them, to shake him and point the way to safety. But
he didn't know the way. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flutter of bright blue come to the ground.

He turned expectantly at the cheerful color, but the blue had been the lightness of a coat on a girl who had jumped from the upper floors of a brick-walled apartment building. To a person, the crowd around him began to surge, moving like a school of fish, cautious but determined, avoiding the body or assessing it. A few broke rank, darting toward it, compelled to help long after help was an option. Staring dumbly up, Gene saw that nearly every window of the building was blackened or consumed by fire. A man near where the woman had jumped was weeping into his arms while voices from the crowd shouted up to him, begging him to hold on a little longer. Promises of salvation calling up to him like balloons released with no one to catch them.

Gene turned right to run down Post, but there was the wall of fire. He spun back onto Taylor, his lungs burning, his mind jammed, thoughts tumbling together and then ceasing entirely; fire down Bush and then down Pine, every eastern path he fought his way toward blocked by fire, the north sure to follow soon.

He tried to talk himself down from panic's ledge. If he could just stay on Taylor and get over Nob Hill, hook over into North Beach after that, the fire might be contained by then in the east or have traveled elsewhere.
Surely it couldn't have spread through the entire northeastern quadrant of the city by now
, he told himself, even though he knew exactly how likely it was that it had. He knew he was being stupid, unsafe, doing everything he would have laughed at a man for doing on any
other day before this one. But the voice within that steered him toward safety had been quieted first by shame and was now muted by love.

As the wind toyed with the smoke clouds, Gene could see the moon behind them, full and bright. When he was younger and would grow fearful at night or during other dark times, worrying about death and other tragedies, he'd become obsessed with ways that his own life might suddenly be snatched out from under him, that death could come without warning. His mother would tell him people didn't die that way.
You don't die from a cold. You don't die from climbing a rope at school, Gene. You don't die from a little teasing
;
a little of this
,
a little of that.
But as he grew older, those reassurances were chipped away like the layers of paint on the old things around their house, around the house itself, smooth layer upon smooth layer, so that you could see that, underneath, the house was only some old wood and nails, that even your home could take in water and warp. That it could burn. Gene knew that what his mother was really trying to tell him was that being gay wouldn't kill him. Except it might. Homosexuals were killed all the time, violently and impersonally. People died all the time in countless ludicrous and unexpected ways. People were found dead in the most inane places and ways—on airplanes midflight; beside a ladder used to fix a lightbulb; in their bathtubs with toppled appliances. Children ran into the street, blithely forgetful in the middle of games and laughter.

The thing was, he already knew that his time with Franklin was coming to an end. He'd known for months, he
realized, now that he was awakening to it. It was a knowledge he'd come to without knowing how, in the same way the music shifts near the end of a movie and you know the story is almost over. Except it wasn't the music that had changed in their life together, it was the silences—horribly musical in their own right—the quiet spaces delivering the message no one knew how to say aloud. Midway through the Sunday paper, Franklin took his glasses off and closed his eyes, leaving Gene to read the Bay Area and advice columns aloud to him. And even though the days were getting longer again, Franklin's afternoon naps still extended until dusk. He took longer in the shower, too, though Gene couldn't hear him doing anything different in there. And the pauses between sips of wine or bites of food had grown agonizingly longer.

The smell of smoke was stronger than ever, thick in the wind.

Gene trudged doggedly up the final block on Taylor, the climb so steep that California in front of him looked less like a street than a path to the edge of the earth. Catching his breath at the vacant corner outside the Masonic Center, Gene wondered how far this city could fall, how it was both comforting and awful to dwell and die in a place where any one person's life, no matter how important, was insignificant compared to the place where he lived it. He'd felt the strangeness of this before, when traveling across the Golden Gate Bridge or taking in a movie at the Castro Theatre—how odd it was to see the particular details and memories of his life shimmering before legendary buildings and streets like an intricately woven, private silkscreen over a larger
reality. Before he'd moved here, he'd seen the Golden Gate Bridge only in movies and pictures: a great, luminously sunset-colored mirage of a thing, giving off the impression that it hadn't so much been designed as willed into existence. Now he knew it as the bridge he and Franklin took to go for ice cream in Sausalito on summer weekends when the city was too cold, sitting outside and licking their cones while they watched the poodles and shih tzus march by, Muppet held close on Franklin's lap, the cloud cover over San Francisco looking from a distance like a beast with a body that could be touched. The Castro Theatre was plastered into the background of thousands of photographic moments in the gay rights history class he couldn't quite believe he was lucky enough to be allowed to take when he started as a graduate student at Berkeley, but it was also where they'd gone to the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus sing-along
Messiah
every Christmas they'd been together, because Franklin's old neighbor Steve was the director and it didn't matter that neither of them could sing. It wasn't Christmastime until they'd hopped on the bus on a night when it got dark too early, and shown up in their scarves to warble along with the virtual nation of an audience Steve had assembled in his doomed but contagiously optimistic effort.

Maybe the city was a living thing in its own right, an entity that had never wanted to be settled. A sort of bucking horse of a metropolis. How many times had it burned down already? Six? Seven? And that had been almost a hundred years before the study of plate tectonics explained why and where big earthquakes occurred, when most people still
thought the shaking of the earth was an act of the gods, a spiritual scolding.

Cutting across the lush greenery of Huntington Park was as strange as walking across the moon, familiar in a disproportionate sort of way. Gene knew it as a wide, empty expanse, dotted with children playing and old women practicing tai chi. Now its order was out of place, unsettling; the tidy playground, the fountains miraculously still running, the groomed fences and walkways inviting a leisurely stroll. But overhead, the sky was full of smoke and the fire was close enough to ruffle the tops of the trees with a hot wind. The whole place had a look of open surprise; a place meant to be filled seemed all that more ominous when it was empty.

When he'd first begun to study the earth, Gene had been entranced by the idea that the ground beneath his feet stretched farther down than one man could ever hope to go, no matter whether or not he was a disappointment to his father. Inside the thin eggshells of tidy laboratories and stuffy lecture halls, Gene first learned to trust in something larger than he was. It hadn't exactly been a religion, but it had been a belief system. Science had been a siren song to his trusting soul. And now Gene couldn't shake the feeling that a great trust had been broken, though the earth had never promised anyone anything.

Though he had made promises, hadn't he? He'd promised himself that he would find a way to help others live in an unsteady place more steadily, would ease worries that the promised land was just an illusion, too good to exist, sure to disappear in a puff of smoke. He could still recall the thrill
he felt when he first learned that, while earthquakes couldn't be prevented, there was a good chance that they could be detected in time to secure the lives they'd upend. He'd felt the same strange tingling as he had as a child emerging unscathed from a Kansas basement after a tornado had passed, amazed that even someone small and weak could escape forces capable of shredding an entire city.

He'd loved geology once, he realized suddenly, simultaneously wondering if he didn't still love it now, if he hadn't for some time. So much of his scholarship had shifted into professional priorities, the desire to be considered learned slowly crowding out the desire to continue learning. When was the last time his research had made him feel half as excited as that morning's conversation with the dean? He'd grown complacent, too, focused on his future after years of living on ground that seemed as likely to hurt him as he did to hurt himself.

Gene suddenly understood exactly how well he fit into this, his chosen city. He was a man running so far from his own suffering that he'd both climbed an ivory tower and set his sights on the last possible place on the continent where one could build a life without falling into the ocean. As if a beautiful house in a wealthy city was a defense of its own against haunting memories and a foundation built over water. And it had only been getting worse now that Franklin was sick. Gene suddenly wanted to hold tight to some mythically constant thing, to some path that would never alter. He was no different from his parents in that sense, so desperate for things to be a certain way that he was developing
a myopia around the way things were. And it hadn't been enough to believe he could escape his own suffering; he'd become obsessed with being the kind of hero who could help others escape their suffering, too, a sort of Pied Piper destined to rid the world of rats and children, suffering and vulnerability eradicated in one act of terrifying magic.

As the fire that had already eaten most of Chinatown climbed steadily, now feasting on the meat of those buildings and gaining strength before making the leap toward Max and Vashti and everyone and everything else on Nob Hill, they talked as they had when they were teenagers, unwittingly detached from the sort of obligations that demand a sense of what a life might hold.

“It's so quiet,” Max whispered. He had to remind himself that her ankle was still in his hand, that he was still touching her. “Like snow.”

She thought about that. “What is snow like?”

He smiled. “You've never seen snow?”

“Not real snow. No.”

He had to close his eyes to bring the memory back. His mother was good in an emergency, he reminded himself. They'd lost their lights a few times in winter due to power outages or unpaid electricity bills, and she'd always been quick to jump for the candles and the blankets, to make a game of difficulty. And then there had been the years-long emergency of how to survive without his dad. He wondered how she would be faring, trying not to let the ache of not knowing get to him. Surely this stillness was temporary. The world would soon be back on, the lights and power and
heat and warmth and help—it was so much more likely that everything that had been would be again, quickly covering up the lapse in civilization.

“It gets really quiet just before it snows. It's like a blanket goes over the sky, you're looking up at the underside of it from down on the ground. It's sort of grayish, but also white with the lightness of the snow itself. And it's very cold, but not too cold. I liked it best when it snowed at night. It made it easier to sleep.”

“How?”

He thought about that. “It hushed everything, I guess. In a real snowstorm, it falls in these fat flakes that muffle everything they land on, and the more they pile up, the more muffled everything gets. You can walk through it and not even really hear cars passing on the street. But the quietest part is after it falls, just after. I wish you could see a field of new snow. It's like staring at the ocean or the sky. But then you get to walk out into it.”

“Why did you never go back, Max?”

“To New York? I don't know. I guess my life was here.”

It was true. The life he had in San Francisco had sneaked up on him, becoming essential without his consent. There was his mother, of course, but it was also that he could lead a life that was both achingly lonely and joyous at the same time, and that he could see reflections of these emotions everywhere he went, in the city itself and the people it attracted. It would never feel like a home, exactly. It was a beautiful place, but it was too busy being beautiful to feel like a real home, much like a woman in a magazine whose expression
insists she would rather be looked at than held. Still, he felt comforted surrounded by people who accepted beauty with its barbed edges, so many of whom had come to this spit of a city on the edge of a continent in search of new lives and opportunities, people who didn't let how much they missed their hometowns and countries prevent them from reveling in the foreign beauty around them, the endless days of mellow weather and wide spaces beckoning to be explored. He remembered again those early bus rides he took when he first moved to the city, how some of their greatest thrills lay not in what he saw around him, but in the vistas that unfurled when they crested the tops of San Francisco's many hills.

“Do you remember the first time we met?”

“On the bus? Of course I do. How could I forget?”

“No,” she said, smiling to herself. “It was before that. I had a job that summer. Selling tokens?” She knew he wouldn't remember, but she wanted him to take the time to try. She had waited a long time to unravel this particular memory before him.

“That couldn't be,” he said slowly. “I would have remembered.”

“But I was behind glass! And you barely even looked up,” she added triumphantly.

He thought of how her lips looked when she spoke, the dimple above her top lip that made a dent there before she laughed.

“But we didn't talk. I would have known if we talked. That doesn't count as a meeting.”

She laughed. “You had a bandage on your chin. Were you
learning to shave? And you had your trumpet case. And your nails were bitten down so far! You looked so, so sad. I wanted to know you. I wanted to make you look at me.”

He closed his eyes, seeing her hands, small and deft, plump but defined, the fingers knowing how to do so many things without preamble, without thought. His own hands, with their wide-spread and long fingers, always seemed so ungainly in comparison. His father had told him once not to be so frustrated with them. “These hands have been passed down to you,” he had said and frowned, tracing their palms. “Think of what your ancestors would have done with them had they your opportunities.” He thought of his father, but he was no longer angry about the letter. He wasn't even all that interested in being angry about his father anymore. Not really. Anger was boring, after a while, a nurse with no milk. All it did was mask pain. But pain's sharpness grew old, could grow brittle and be sloughed off.

“Vashti?”

“Yes.”

“What did I say?”

“When?”

“When you sold me those tokens. What did I say?”

“Nothing,” she said, as if it were a confession.

It was so quiet, he could count the seconds between the times that they spoke as if they were ticking aloud. “Hey, do you know what my mom's latest obsession is? Chocolate ice-cream sodas at Bi-Rite. How long has she been in this city? And she's just discovered them. I swear, the woman is going to waste her pension on chocolate ice-cream sodas. I have to
take her there at least twice a week just to be sure she has a little pocket change left over.”

She meant to laugh, but it was getting harder to breathe. The smoke had changed into the smoke that precedes the fire itself, whispering in and around them, examining its target before pouncing. But it hadn't changed the cold. “Javi's coming home,” she said suddenly, realizing that she'd fulfilled her end of the bargain.

“Where is she?”

“Away. She'll be back at Passover.” Her sister. They had both been flies in their father's web, and now they could feel each other tugging across so many invisible silk lines. Javi would be worried. Was worried. What could she do? What could any of them do?

“Vashti?”

“Yes.”

He had been thinking of how he used to imagine the mother she rarely spoke of, a matter of such foreignness to him, given the fact that his mother was the only steady presence he'd ever known. He used to stare into Vashti's face and wonder if the frank kindness in her eyes—certainly something she didn't get from her father—was an inheritance or a happy accident, if the way she laughed, throwing her head all the way back, was the way her mother had.

The summer she turned seventeen, they'd figured out that she could sneak out of her house and climb up the fire escape and through the window of his bedroom, a fact so exciting—not least because she landed literally on his bed—that they'd make love until they were exhausted and fall asleep with the
blinds still up and the moon shining through. Max would wake with Vashti asleep on his arm, or with her hand on his belly so he didn't want to move. He'd stare out the window as the night faded and wonder about everything, sometimes his mother, sometimes hers, wondering if he would love her as completely—or she him—if they had been completed children, without missing parents.

“Do you remember any of those stories you used to tell?”

It took her a moment. “You mean my mom's stories?”

“Yes.”

It had been so long since she'd even thought of them. “Once upon a time,” she said quietly, “there was a time when there was no one but God.” He waited what seemed an eternity for her to continue. “I wonder if all Persian folktales began with that line, or just the ones my mother knew. What do you think it was like, the time when there was no one but God?”

“Hard to say.” He didn't want her to stop talking.

“Mmm,” she said and was quiet. “I forgot. You don't believe in God. Or anything. On principle, is that right?”

He smiled to himself. “That's right.”

It was astonishing how easy it was to lose your way to the simplest of wants, to resist even the most obvious of joys. Food. Love. Max. What had been in her way? Was it still there? It must be. It couldn't have just disappeared overnight.