The Year of Fog (6 page)

12

S
EVERAL YEARS
ago, I visited New York City with a girlfriend to celebrate her thirtieth birthday. A guy I knew from college, someone I once loved intensely, was living there. We hadn’t spoken in many years, though I had thought about him often. I didn’t have his address, and his phone number was unlisted. That didn’t stop me from looking for him everywhere I went: Dean & Deluca, a ballet at Lincoln Center, the Shakespeare Garden, the C train traveling uptown.

Twice, from a distance, I believed I saw him, but when I got up close, it turned out to be someone else. I began to wonder if I would even recognize him these ten years later. What if he had gained weight, or cut his hair short, or developed a fondness for business attire? Was I fooling myself to think I would know him from his face alone, the arch of his eyebrows, a certain gesture? Was I looking for him, or for the person he was ten years before? I began to wonder whether I had already been near him unaware, whether I had sat next to him at a restaurant or brushed arms with him on the street.

Emma, now, is everywhere. Every time I round a bend, every time I open the front door of my apartment, every time I go to the bank. I haunt the parks and playgrounds, restaurants, cinemas. I visit the grimy motels of the Tenderloin, the four-star hotels at Union Square, the chaotic shops of Chinatown, the trendy cafés of North Beach. No female child of Emma’s approximate height is exempt from my curiosity and my hope. I wander up and down the hills of Noe Valley, peering into faces of children on their bikes. I go to health clinics the city over, searching the glum faces in the too-bright waiting rooms. I hike the hills of Oakland.

On the morning of the tenth day, I drive out to Point Reyes, climb to the top of the lighthouse, and scan the surrounding beach and ocean with binoculars. On the way down, I watch for a small foot or hand sticking out of a nook in the tower. On day eleven, I comb the Laundromats and burger joints of the Richmond, the crammed residential streets of the Sunset. That night, I spend ten hours straight riding Muni from one point to another, crisscrossing the city like a madwoman, quarters jingling in my purse. On the twelfth day, I do BART. On the thirteenth, Caltrain.

On day fourteen, I take the cable car out to Fisherman’s Wharf, push my way past tourists buying postcards and saltwater taffy. I order crab and sit at a sidewalk café, watching the crowd. The faces of strangers take on murderous features. I spot a man coming out of a souvenir shop. He’s in his fifties, pale, wearing jeans and a tasteful sweater. Under one arm, he holds a package wrapped in delicate white paper. Even as I follow him, I know this doesn’t make sense. I know the chances of this man being the kidnapper are about twenty billion to one. I know I’m behaving irrationally, and yet I can’t stop myself. I walk close behind, but not close enough to attract his attention. I follow him to Ghirardelli Square, into a café where he orders a cup of coffee and a piece of lemon cake. Then down to Pier 39, where he settles on a bench to read the
Chronicle.
Finally a Larkspur ferry arrives and the passengers disembark. An attractive Italian woman in an unusual red hat pushes toward him through the crowd. After they hug, he hands her the gift. I walk away, feeling lost and utterly foolish.

On day fifteen, I wander the Embarcadero, up Stockton, left on Montgomery, and climb the narrow stairway past quaint apartments with slanted doors, up to the top of Telegraph Hill, where Coit Tower stands in the center of Pioneer Park. Inside the tower, I circle the lowest level, with its larger-than-life murals, soft shapes, and brilliant colors—women picking calla lilies, broad-shouldered men drinking pints of ale at polished bars. I take the winding stairway to the top and look out at the streets sloping down to the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the island of Alcatraz. From here, the water looks calm and pleasant, perfectly safe.

Outside at the refreshment cart, I order a Coke and hot dog. I pay the vendor and hand him a flyer. “I lost my little girl.”

He moves a pair of glasses from the top of his head to his face, holds the picture up close. “I saw her on TV,” he says. “I feel for you. I do.” He gestures toward the stack of flyers in my hand. “You got some extras there? I’ll be happy to pass them out. I sell lots of hot dogs, talk to lots of people.”

On day sixteen, I rent a bike near the Presidio and ride it out to China Beach, Fort Point, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and into the towering Headlands. I take a room for the night at a youth hostel perched over the roaring Pacific and poke around the empty hallways. Over a breakfast of eggs and toasted sourdough bread, I show Emma’s picture to a dozen backpackers. They listen sympathetically to my story, say they’ll keep an eye out, then return to animated conversations about scoring cheap hash in Phuket and getting dysentery in Bombay.

Day seventeen, near Alamo Square, I slink around dark bars that reek of pot. I visit tattoo parlors and head shops before heading toward the Upper Haight, where I post Emma’s picture at pricey boutiques, show it to a group of tourists standing outside the Grateful Dead house on Ashbury. I wander the vast aisles of Amoeba Records, where Jake and I used to come to unwind, and pass out flyers to the hipsters waiting in line. In Cole Valley, I question florists and waitresses, work the back patio at Reverie, and talk to the clerk at Cole Hardware who’s been selling me a tiny Christmas tree each year for the past decade. Everywhere I go, I pass out my phone number indiscriminately, urging strangers to call me if they see anything. Everyone has the same thing to offer: sympathy, but no answers.

On day eighteen, I pace the quiet alleys of Chinatown, looking like a stranger in a sea of Chinese faces. Old men in no hurry, with hands clasped behind their backs, stop and stare. On Waverly Street, the clatter of dice drifts from behind the closed doors of gambling houses. I become a tourist in my own city, an observer of neighborhoods, a watcher of faces, a spy. San Francisco, which has always seemed so small, now feels impossibly large, a vast topography of irrelevant things, all working in tandem to obscure the truth. I have no idea what I’m looking for, no inkling of where I should look, what street, on what day, and at what time. Emma is everywhere, and she is nowhere.

Jake, meanwhile, is pulling farther and farther away. Most nights I sleep at his place. He insists that I stay there while he goes out in his car, searching. “Someone needs to be here, just in case,” he says. In case what? It is as if some part of him believes that Emma will just walk up to the door.

When he returns from these nighttime searches, his clothes are dirty, his hair a mess, his eyeglasses smudged. His transformation has been so rapid, so complete, that if you were to put two photos side by side—one of him three weeks ago and another of him today—they would look like photos of two different people. I know he is trying not to hate me, trying not to blame me. But sometimes I’ll catch him staring at me—across the table in the morning when we’re drinking our coffee and planning the day’s search, or at night as he’s coming out of the bathroom, his body still steaming from the shower—and what I read in his face is nothing like the look of a man who has found the woman he wants to marry. It is a look of confusion, anger. I know he would easily trade all our months together, all our plans, for just one more second with Emma. I am startled to realize that I would do the same.

13

A
N ORANGE
Chevelle. New paint, old tires. Windows halfway down. The Virgin Mary dangling from the rearview mirror. In the driver’s seat, a man. Gray hair. Blue shirt, five o’clock shadow, reading the paper. I saw the headline as we passed:
Relations with China Strained
.

“Look,” Emma said. She pointed to an army of ants carting a tiny, dead sand crab across the pavement. She crouched over the procession, mesmerized. “Where are they taking him?”

“Home.”

“Oh,” she said. “They’re going to look after him.”

“That’s right,” I said. I was marveling at her endearing innocence when she did something unexpected: she took her red plastic shovel and brought it down hard against the crab, crushing the shell. The ants stopped moving.

She looked up at me, gleeful. “I killed them!”

“You did.”

But then the shell began moving again. This time, she lifted her foot and stomped both crab and ants to oblivion. “There,” she said, swinging her yellow bucket. We continued across the parking lot toward the beach. I glanced over at the man in the orange Chevelle. He was still reading his paper, drinking his coffee. There was a hula girl ornament on the dashboard, which he kept tipping back and forth with his finger as he read.

Each day, I seem to remember a bit more of the man’s face, another small detail about his car: a scratch on the hood, a yellow stripe down the side. But the clearer the details become, the more I doubt my own memory. Memory, it seems, should become more impressionistic as time passes, the lines going soft, the colors muted, one shape blending into another. Instead, what begins as impressionism moves steadily toward close-up photography, until one is left, ultimately, with alarming specificity. How many of these specifics are true, and what have I simply conjured?

During my freshman year at the University of Tennessee, I took a required course in collegiate study methods. The first half of the class was devoted to memory. I have forgotten most of it, but one thing that sticks with me is the relationship between physical space and memory. A student who sits in the same desk every day will retain information better than a student who moves around. If one is at a loss as to the specific order of some event, it generally helps to return to the place where the event occurred. By viewing the layout of the place and the various details of setting, one’s temporal memory may be jogged. And if you lose something, you should retrace your steps, back to the last place you remember having possession of the lost object.

It is with these things in mind that I make a daily pilgrimage to Ocean Beach. Emma went missing at 10:37. I return each day from 10:00 to 11:10, to allow for about a half-hour window in each direction. It’s not only my own memory I hope to recover as I retrace our steps, day after day. I’m looking for the orange Chevelle, the yellow van, the motorcycle, the postal truck, anyone who might have seen Emma on that day. I’m looking for clues.

I find a lot of things along the cold gray stretch of sand, but never what I’m really looking for. At the intersection of Sloat Boulevard and the Great Highway, among the bits of concrete and stone that make up the jumbled seawall, I come across an uneven slab of stone bearing a faded inscription. I can just make out the words
in memory
and
died 187
…the last number has been rubbed away.

I’m reminded of a bit of history Jake shared with me early in our courtship. In the 1800s, Ocean Beach was the outer edge of a vast sweep of sand dunes stretching several miles inland. The area, known as the Outside Lands, belonged to Mexico. It wasn’t until 1848 that the U.S. government annexed the Outside Lands; almost twenty more years passed before it was made part of the city. Still, to San Franciscans, the remote beach, with its dense fog and uninhabitable sand dunes, seemed like another country. For the rest of the century, the Outside Lands were home to saloons and cemeteries.

After a 1901 law prohibited burials within city limits, the cemeteries fell into ruin. By 1950, all had been closed, and most of the bodies had been moved south to Colma. The City Cemetery, a grave for paupers and minorities, was razed in 1909. After removing the unclaimed gravestones, the city put them to practical use. At Buena Vista Park, one often comes across strange words and dates inscribed in the stone gutters. Old photographs of Ocean Beach show sandy hillsides covered with discarded headstones—a makeshift seawall.

In 1912, construction of Lincoln Park Golf Course began atop the old City Cemetery. A few times, Jake and I played golf there. We took Emma with us—she loved the long walk over green hills, the amazing views. From the 17
^th
fairway we could see Golden Gate Bridge and the mouth of the bay. I often wondered if the golfers were aware of what lay beneath their feet. In 1993, during a renovation project, 300 corpses were unearthed. Among the buried belongings were dentures, rosaries, and Levi’s. The discovery led city officials to look into what had happened to the 11,000 bodies interred at the City Cemetery. They could not be accounted for in Colma. They could not be accounted for anywhere. They appear to have simply been left behind.

14

The Holga lens is exactly opposite of what a true optical quality lens should be. It is constructed of cheap plastic, and often has inherent distortions. The result is an unpredictable, soft focus which imparts its own sense of mood and atmosphere.

—Lomographic Society International

I
CANNOT REMEMBER
now if Emma was running or skipping. I try to re-create that moment in my mind, the moment she turned away from me. Was she laughing? And why didn’t I ask her to slow down? I knew she was going too fast, at too great a distance from me. I knew the image would be blurred. And yet I snapped the picture thoughtlessly, as if it were just any snapshot, expendable. How could I have known it would be one of my last pictures of her?

Now, no matter how many times I print the third photo on the roll from Ocean Beach, no matter how much I experiment with focus and exposure time, burning and dodging to adjust light and contrast, the print always comes out gray and grainy, always vague. In the foreground, the seal pup: white fur dusted with sand, black spots, the C of the spine. In the distance, Emma. The black-and-white film and the softening effect of the foggy light lend the images a mysterious quality, dreamlike.

Each photo is a single moment, seemingly complete, but what is missing is the context: the absence of breath, the utter stillness, the fact of the seal pup’s death. What is missing is the kidnapping, which played out beyond my field of vision.

In the days after Emma’s disappearance, as my mind wandered to a million terrible places, I imagined her trapped in the wet depth of a wave, tumbling in the dark, breathing salt water into her lungs. I imagined the awful panic she would have felt as the water pulled her under. But I know this isn’t what happened. Jake and I had taken Emma to the beach dozens of times before that day. Never once had she gone near the water, not so much as to put a toe in. What Jake says about Ocean Beach is true—the waves are wild and unpredictable—but still, in order to have drowned, Emma would have had to wander very close. It simply isn’t something she would have done.