“It’s your turn,” he said finally. “Now you do me.” He pulled up a chair in front of her and closed his eyes. “Jungle cat preferred!”
An hour later, the people returning from jobs in the city paused to glance at the sight on the stoop: an old woman in an oversized sun hat and a grown man who sat with his legs splayed like a six-year-old in a sandbox, their faces altered by a mess of pigments. Beside them sat a time-yellowed cream-colored radio, the taped antennae resting on the lip of the stone step above, and they mouthed the words of the songs that came in over a base of static. The last of the commuters saw the nest of white hair bent into the neck of the man, who stroked the head and sang a thirty-year-old commercial jingle for squat, rounded figurines marketed as untippable.
Weebles wobble
Weebles wobble
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.
Multicolored and projecting a two-headed shadow, they were still sitting there when the streetlamps came on.
IN THOMAS’S ABSENCE, Adeleine felt a distinct anger: at the way he had entered her home and classified it as strange, at how he had decided her relationship with her possessions needed broadcasting: the night before he had boarded the airplane, he’d set up an array of recording devices and urged her to catalogue her songs.
“They should be heard,” he had said, posturing with an authority she found obnoxious. “The creation is only ever the first part of it. The next is letting it go.” She had started to buzz, was still buzzing, with the familiar anxiety that used to sound when someone urged her to do something with her talents. Songs were fine and good, she thought, but they were not the water that turned seeds to plants, or the materials that built steady houses, or the ointments that healed a wound. Once, when she had voiced concerns along these lines to a psychiatrist, he had asked her why she hadn’t become a farmer or a carpenter or a physician. She hadn’t had an answer, and had hated him for asking.
In an attempt to smother the old temper in her stomach, she washed the dishes and scrubbed the perpetually grimy bathtub, but the activity only heightened her heart rate. All she had ever wanted, she realized, since she was a little girl who turned away from doting cameras, was to be left alone.
Lying on the floor with her palms up, hoping to receive some wave of calm, Adeleine could hear, layered under the fluttering notes of Paulie’s keyboard, warped, feral sounds. She pressed her left cheekbone into the hardwood until it ached and listened until she recognized the noises as coming from Edith. Without further thought, she rose and approached the doorframe, watched her wrist and palm rotate the knob.
THOMAS HADN’T VISITED San Francisco since losing his old body, but there was a time he had flown out once or twice a year: he would casually tour the spectacular heights and views, stay with friends and spend unfocused hours on foggy rooftops. He had always arrived with no definite plans and found a city that didn’t require any. As he looked away from the airport’s organic grocery store, its rainbow bounty of produce, as the escalator carried him down from ARRIVALS to GROUND TRANSPORTATION, he reminded himself of the wholly different shape of this visit. Imagining himself as he’d last been on the same steel moving walkways—his linen thrift store slacks, his military-green duffel bag, his carefree stroll towards the line of cars outside and the warm way he’d greeted the friend who’d picked him up—he constricted and grabbed for the handrail.
There was no one pulling up in a car for him out front, no one waving and grinning: he hadn’t let anyone know he was coming, couldn’t imagine summing up the last two years or explaining his total lack of plans for the next few. He followed the signs to other transportation, fumbled with the unfamiliar ticketing system, pulled his rolling suitcase into the train car, and waited for motion.
—
HIS PLANS WERE VAGUE, loose as algae. He had wished—so hard that he’d begun to expect—that he would divine some clue or plan from the sea-brined air, the Victorians that seemed to lean crookedly uphill. Instead he was a man in a city not his own, holding the decades-old mementos of someone’s lost daughter, standing at the exit of an unfamiliar station with no itinerary besides a stop at the library. He had smothered such hatred of himself since meeting Adeleine, had distracted himself with the unfolding mystery of her, but now he felt the creep of fog under his light sweater and tugged at his sleeves, furious with himself for failing even to look after this basic aspect of survival.