The Year of Fog (24 page)

55

A
CCORDING TO
Isaac Newton, time flows of its own accord, a uniform movement entirely independent of human minds and material objects. It is like a broad river with no beginning and no end, staying its course through eternity. Centuries before Newton was born, Aristotle conceived of time as a cyclical entity grounded in astronomy. When the heavenly bodies returned to the positions they held at the moment of the world’s inception, time would begin again.

In the fourth century, Saint Augustine gave us the measurements of B.C. and
anno Domini,
ascribing to time a linear scale based upon Christianity. He also argued in favor of the subjectivity of time, postulating that time might not be tied to planetary movement. But it was Einstein who revolutionized our concept of time, claiming that each inertial system in the universe has its own time parameter; therefore, there is no such thing as absolute time.

I think of Mrs. Monk, my third-grade teacher, standing on top of a chair, tacking a homemade clock to our classroom wall. The felt hands were color-coded: red for the hour, blue for the minute, yellow for the quick, predictable seconds. There was no hint in this system of the true complexity of time, no accounting for the number that Nell has recently brought to my attention: 9,192,631,770.

It is a youthful number in the long, controversial history of time. 9,192,631,770: the number of oscillations of a cesium atom’s resonant frequency that occurs within the unit of measure we know as a second. A single, tiny second. It was only in 1967 that the cesium atom’s natural frequency was formally recognized as the new, international unit of time. Today, the Coordinated Universal Time is defined by a group of atomic clocks around the world, the most impressive of which, NIST-F1, is housed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. The NIST-F1 is so accurate that it will neither gain nor lose a second in twenty million years. Imagine this: twenty million years of seconds, following one by one, in a precise, brilliant choreography of time.

Anyone can see that a second by these standards is, in and of itself, nothing at all. A second is an irrelevance, a trifle, a laughable and passing thing.

I keep coming back, hour after hour, day after day, to those few seconds on the beach. In the long, elegant march of time, they are nothing; but in a single life, those seconds—each one perfect in its synchronicity, each one lasting exactly as long as the one before and after it—are everything. I imagine that Newton was right, and time is a smooth-flowing river. I can see Emma, alone, standing on the bank, never changing. In my mind she is always exactly as she is in the final moment I saw her—a small girl with a black ponytail, a yellow bucket, her back to me. On the river there is a figure—me—floating by. The cesium atom swings back and forth with impossible speed, each minuscule oscillation, each second, taking me farther away from her.

56

D
AY 214
. I park in front of Dean’s Foggy Surf Shop. Goofy is inside, behind the counter. She gives me a little salute. “You’re back.”

“Any luck with those?” I ask, pointing to the two police sketches mounted on the wall behind the counter.

“Sorry. Nada.”

“I have a question for you.” I lay a piece of paper on the counter in front of her. It’s a drawing of the frog from the surfer’s board, re-created to the best of my limited artistic ability.

Goofy smoothes the paper with both hands. Her fingernails are short and trim, glossy. On her right hand she wears three silver rings—one with a topaz stone, one a miniature chain, one that looks like a wedding band.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“I saw it on a surfboard.
His
surfboard.”

“Looks familiar.” She turns to a door leading into a back room. “Hey, Luke?”

A guy comes out. Balding, early forties, all muscle except for the beer paunch straining his T-shirt. “Yeah?” He looks as if he just woke up.

“My friend says she saw this symbol on a board out at the beach. You know it?”

“Sure,” he says, scratching his head. “It’s a Billy Rossbottom, you know, the Killer Longboard.”

“Oh, right,” Goofy says. “I heard about that board, but I never saw one myself.”

“Most people haven’t.”

“Who’s Billy Rossbottom?” I ask.

“Who
was
he, you mean,” Luke says. “He used to have a great store in Pismo. Rossbottom was a real artist. Only used balsa from Ecuador, wouldn’t touch polyurethane foam. There are hardly any of them around; they’re worth a hell of a lot. Sad about Billy.”

“Sad?”

“He was killed in a plane crash last year, twin-engine Cessna taking him to Miami to meet with the bigwigs at Panama Jack. He was working some deal to license his name. Some think he was lucky to kick the bucket before he had a chance to sell out.”

“Doesn’t sound so lucky,” I say.

“Depends on your perspective. A real tragedy about the boards, though. After he died, his sister closed the shop for a few weeks until she could figure out what to do with it, and one night it burned to the ground. Lost twenty boards.”

“Know anybody who has one?”

“Sure, a neurosurgeon who lives in Pacific Heights.”

I point toward the sketch posted behind the counter, the one of the man from the yellow van. “He wouldn’t happen to look anything like that guy, would he?”

“Sorry,” Luke says. “It’s not your man. The doctor’s a bona fide senior citizen.”

“I’ll ask around for you,” Goofy says. “Hey, you got somewhere you have to be right now?”

“Not really.”

“What say we go over to the Bashful Bull 2 for that breakfast special I told you about?”

“That’d be nice.”

We walk up Taraval in the fog. The silence is broken by the L-Taraval rattling past, carrying a single passenger. I turn around and walk backward a few steps, so I can see the ocean down at the end of the avenues, the gray beach. “This city just kills me,” I say. “I’ve lived here most of my adult life, and it still gets to me.”

“I know what you mean,” Goofy says. She turns around, too, and we stand for a minute looking down. The fog is rolling in from the ocean, a white mass moving toward us. A stray seagull wheels overhead.

“You ever read any Armistead Maupin?” she asks.

“A little.”

“He has this quote from Oscar Wilde at the beginning of
28 Barbary Lane.
‘It’s an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.’ He left out the best part: ‘It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.’”

“Sounds like my town.”

“The problem with San Francisco is it’s easy to get stuck,” Goofy says. “You can’t imagine living anywhere else, so you stay. And then one day you realize five years have passed, and you haven’t done anything yet.”

“You’re twenty-four,” I say. “You’ve got time.”

“Not that much time. I turned twenty-five a couple of weeks ago.”

“Happy birthday. Twenty-five is a great age to be.”

I remember how, when I was her age, nothing seemed quite clear, and the lack of clarity was liberating. There were so many options, so many directions my life could take. I never would have imagined
this
direction,
this
life.

Inside the diner, Goofy heads straight for a booth in the back. “You want to go for special number two,” she says. “Two eggs, hash browns, bacon or sausage, toast, and coffee. Special number one, the French toast, is nothing to write home about.”

I’m mesmerized by the way she eats—completely absorbed in her food, as if breakfast is an event. She polishes off the hash browns, then folds two pieces of bacon into her toast. “What about those surf lessons?” she asks, in between bites.

“I grew up on the Gulf Coast. I don’t think I’m cut out for cold water.”

“You wear a wet suit. You get used to it.”

“What about college?” I ask, changing the subject. “Are you still planning to go?”

“I looked into it. Turns out U. of Hawaii is too expensive.”

“San Francisco State is pretty good, and tuition is reasonable.”

“As much as I love this city,” she says, “I need to see something different. Where did you go?”

“Tennessee.”

“The South could be interesting. I’ve never been down south.” She finishes off her scrambled eggs. “Hey,” she says, “you got family?”

“I have a sister in North Carolina. My mom died a little over five years ago, and I rarely talk to my dad. He lives in Germany.”

“My dad picked up and left when I was ten, and my mother died a couple of years later. I had a few foster families, but I kind of lost touch with them.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Sucks, but you just kind of make do. Having a lot of friends helps, but it’s not the same. Must be cool to have a sister.”

“It is. It’s nice to have somebody who remembers what things were like when I was growing up, a shared history.”

We’re interrupted by the waitress bringing the check. “Okay then,” Goofy says outside.

“Thanks for your help.”

At the same time, both of us lean in to say goodbye. Goofy goes for a hug, I go for a kiss on the cheek, and what we accomplish is an awkward cross between the two.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she says.

57

F
OR THE
next couple of weeks, I bury myself in work. A wedding at the Olympic Club, a CEO’s fiftieth birthday party at the Top of the Mark, a restaurant opening in Redwood City. To look through the viewfinder and see someone else’s life is a kind of relief, not unlike the feeling of stepping into a dark movie theater and getting caught up in someone else’s story, someone else’s problems, an alternate view of the world. When things were really bad between my parents, when the fighting reached a fever pitch, my mother would load a purse with soft drinks and candy bars, grab a wad of cash from my father’s wallet, and tell me and Annabel to get in the car. Then we’d drive to the five-screen dollar theater on Airport Boulevard, splurge on jumbo bags of popcorn, and watch movie after movie. Annabel and I didn’t care that the theater always smelled of urine, or that the movies were second-run, or that the popcorn was stale. If we concentrated hard enough, we could almost believe that the world onscreen was more real than our own, that our problems had vanished. This is what it’s like to walk through the world with a camera: hiding behind the lens, I can almost forget what I’ve done and what it cost, if only for a minute or two at a time.

Several nights a week, Nell comes by with dinner, and we eat at my small kitchen table, talking. One night, while we’re washing the dishes, she tells me about how she reconciled with her son in the months leading up to his death—sat by his bed, fed him tiny sips of water through plastic straws, changed his bedsheets and diapers, watched him die.

“But I can’t forgive myself for all the years before,” she says, “the years when I couldn’t come to terms with having a gay son. One thing I know for certain is that nothing in your life can prepare you for being a mother.”

She hands me a coffee mug to rinse in the sink. It’s green with red dots around the rim, a birthday present from Emma. I was there the day she painted it at a ceramics shop on Twenty-fourth Street.

“Maybe it’s time,” Nell says, turning the water off and drying her hands.

“Time for what?”

“Time for you to make a life with Jake. You love each other. Before all this happened, you were so happy together. You told me once that you never thought you’d meet anyone who would be such a good match for you. Are you ready to just give all that up?”

“Of course not. But he’s making me choose between him and Emma.”

Nell puts her hands on my shoulders. “At some point you’re going to have to start thinking about yourself, your life. I know you want to believe she’s alive, but the fact is she probably isn’t.”

I move out of Nell’s grasp and rinse the last of the dishes. “I thought you were with me on this.”

“I am with you, and so is Jake. He needs you, Abby.”

“
She
needs me.”

After she leaves, I bundle up in jacket and scarf, go outside, walk to the bus stop, and wait for the 15. I take a window seat.

The bus stops and starts, moving slowly through the city streets. All the while I’m searching.

Later, I call Jake. It’s past midnight, and tomorrow’s a school day. “I know you’re there,” I say into the machine. “Please pick up the phone.” I imagine him sitting at the table with a cup of decaf, grading papers, trying to ignore the phone. “Call me,” I say. “I’ll be up late.” I’m about to hang up, but then I bring the phone to my mouth again. “I’m sorry,” I say. “God, you have no idea how sorry I am.”

58

I
T’S MORNING
, day 221, and Nell has convinced me to accompany her to an art exhibit at SF MOMA.

“I can’t,” I said last night. What I meant was I could not imagine doing such a thing. Going to an art show, as if everything was normal.

“The exhibit is called The Memory Artist,” she said. That caught my attention. “The artist is Franco Magnani, who paints Pontito, the Italian village of his childhood, with amazing accuracy. The interesting thing is that he hasn’t seen his village since 1958. He settled in San Francisco in the sixties, then succumbed to a mysterious illness that caused him to have incredibly vivid dreams of Pontito. Before the illness, he’d never painted, but his dreams were so detailed that they inspired him to try his hand at the canvas.”

“How does he do it?”

“While he paints, he pretends that he’s back in the village. He turns his head at different angles, as though walking through the town. He sees everything before he paints it—his house, the church, the bakery. His memory is like a film reel.”

At this hour, the museum isn’t yet crowded. Magnani’s paintings of Pontito are displayed side by side with black-and-white photographs of the town taken in 1987. The similarities are striking, the paintings so precise as to have a photographic quality.

But there is also some distortion. Some scenes, for example, are composites of several different views. In others, the buildings appear magnified, the way they would if seen through the eyes of a small child. In the painting of the church where Magnani was an altar boy, the steps leading up to the church are wider than they are in the photograph, and the path behind the church leading to Magnani’s childhood home is much more prominent than it actually was. A painting of his grandfather’s house contains a flower bed that can’t be seen in a photograph taken from the same perspective. The paintings present an idealized version of the place.

The literature accompanying the exhibit includes this quote by Magnani: “Memory works as a constructive process that not only reproduces, but filters, changes, and interprets the past.”

The exhibit merely confirms what I already know: memory cannot be trusted. It is too much at the mercy of our desires and emotions. Does Emma, wherever she is, think of the way home? Does she remember her address, her phone number, the bottlebrush tree in front of the house? Does she carry in her mind a picture of the narrow sidewalk leading up to her front door? If I find her, when I find her, will she remember me?