The boy looks at the moon. Not far from the lower horn: a planet. A pearl of light. And hears himself delivering an address about his neighborhood. The Nkondos’ son, Ryder. Fighting in Persia. The Ganeshwarans. Hindu, not Muslim. And William Banfelder. Had served in Gulf War III …
“And what about you,” the man says.
“Me.”
“Yeah, what are you?”
Not sure what he means. Last year’s genealogy project had revealed a backstory of embarrassing blandness. Anglo-Saxon. Last name derived from a place in England. (Meaning, literally: Watch over an open pasture.) But maybe the actual question is not what were you born as, but what will you be.
“Are you there,” the man asks.
“Yeah.”
“Tell you what. No action in your neighborhood tonight.”
“Really.”
“Mm. If you come to a meeting tomorrow. Of the local chapter. I’d like to expose you to a few ideas …”
And under the crescent moon with its subscript of star, Dorian types the information onto his notepad, not even thinking to not agree to the man’s terms — a meeting, just a meeting, yes, all right, agreed — full not only of relief, but a sense of accomplishment as well; not to mention of optimism that this process of negotiation can be continued, and the whole situation defused gradually, and no one else hurt, and no one ever to know with whom he had to consort to make things right.
12
Time is a constant across all pathways. Though there may, and almost certainly will, at corresponding geographies, be differing weather patterns (violent thunderstorms on one path, a placid blue sky on another), all dates and hours will be synchronized to the millisecond. So, when Dorian Wakefield, at 2:33 a.m. EST on 2 July 2038 in B39 — R61, is asleep in the Province of New York, he is also asleep at 11:33 p.m. PST on 1 July 2038 in R5 — B94 in the State of California. In R5 — B94, his family never left California. On that path, his sister is alive, because on that path nothing ever came hurtling out of the skies over San Francisco. On R5 — B94, the city is undestroyed and Skyler Wakefield is alive; and at 11:33 p.m. PST on 1 July 2038, she is on a beach on the northwest edge of the city, at the strait that links ocean and bay — not far from the bridge whose main cables plunge and rise to the pinnacles of twin towers and whose suspension ropes uphold a roadway that has joined the city to the headlands for more than a hundred years — and she is worrying about her brother …
She is with friends on the beach. Fellow students from the art institute. They have been drinking wine around a bonfire and passing around a ceramic pipe packed with some very exquisite sativa from an indie farm up north. The flames are so bright that, from her vantage on the landward side of the fire, there seems to be, to the west (where the ocean should be), nothing but a blackness, as if everything, all the real world, might have winked out of existence, or never existed at all, and maybe they, Skyler and her friends and the man she is in love with, are floating in some allegorical space, like characters in a parable, whose situation is meant to instruct us and show us a way.
They are all in their mid to late twenties and studying to be artists. Skyler is twenty-six and learning to be a fictionist, a path her father had tried to stop her from going down, avouching that a future of cooking and ironing would be preferable to the humiliations of the writing life. But she hadn’t listened, and she knows that her father is secretly glad of it. She gets up and walks away from the fire, the sand cold on her bare feet. Her brother is eleven. Not a little boy anymore, but still, when he answers, she uses the nickname they have called him by ever since she can remember …
“Dodo?”
“Skyler. What. What time is it?”
“I woke you.”
“What are you doing,” he asks. “Where are you?”
“Baker Beach.”
She turns the eye of her phone (and the image of his face) toward the bridge, though she supposes the video won’t show much more than the vapor lamps of the roadway like a trail of stars in the dark.
“What’s wrong,” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“It’s after midnight …”
“Is it?”
She sits on the sand with the image of him, grainy and monochromatic. Watches him wipe the last of the sleep from his eyes.
“Weird,” he says.
“What.”
“This dream I was just having. All these people in our yard. But it wasn’t our house. Some other house.”
“Yeah?”
“There was a car and … a guy dead in a car. I can’t remember now.”
“Just a dream,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Anyways, I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“What.”
“If anything’s wrong. I just, I got this—” (sort of sensation, some part of her is thinking, as of standing with you at a precipice, a dizzy anxiety that some force will pull you over regardless of how firm my hold on you might be)— “This sort of, I don’t know,” she continues. “That you’re in some kind of trouble.”
He shuts his eyes.
“Are you?”
“Sky,” he says. “You know what I said to Mom the other day?”
“No, what.”
I said, “ ‘You know what, Mom? You’re worse than Skyler.’ ”
“Mm.”
“I’m serious. It’s like …”
“What’s it like.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m not in trouble. It’s summer vacation. I’m playing soccer, I’m doing my summer reading list. I’m trying to get a good night’s sleep cause I’ve got a game tomorrow.”
(and some part of her thinking: Something not right, though I can’t say what it is. A feeling I keep getting. {{examples}} That nightmare I have in which the bridge is gone. I’m babysitting a boy who is Dorian but also isn’t. {{where}} I’m in a house I was in once, up on the hill in Presidio Heights, and I can see everything from up there: the bridge, the headlands, the bay, the ocean. Something happens. {{clarify}} I don’t know. An act of war, an act of God. The bridge is gone {{dead link}} and the Marina District is burning. It wasn’t a bomb, but then it is and I know I should be sheltering in but I’m not, because my brother is in very bad shape because he was looking when it happened and he was watching through a window: his face is bloody and his eyes are sightless. So I carry him on my back until we find a hospital — and that’s where I lose him. No choice but to leave him there, but how can I leave him? {{disambiguation needed}} Leaving him. In other words: leaving home, going to college, moving to the city — when he was so attached to me, dependent on me. {{retracted}} That was nine years ago, nine years. The dream is not about that. It’s not an expression of guilt or fear or maternal instinct. It’s not telling me how I feel deep down; it isn’t telling me that I’m ready to have children or that I’m not. What it’s telling me is that something is wrong — something bigger than myself, of which I am (we are) only a small part. {{elucidate}} I can’t. Except to tell you that the feeling seems to come from over there. {{specify}} The bridge. Whenever I’m near the bridge — like now — and much more so when I’m crossing it …)
“Dodo,” she says. Are you there?
His image is frozen.
“Dorian, can you hear me?”
Low bandwidth. The call has dropped. He looks less alive than archived. Grainy, grayscaled, and motionless. As you must look to him. Why does that scare you? He is in his bed at home, breathing, as you are on this beach, breathing. And the bridge is there. It was never not there.