Sorry… who is this?” I said, though I already knew the answer and was probably breathing too hard into the microphone.
“Come on, you know who it is,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “The girl you left not one, not two, but five voicemails for last night…”
I bit down hard on my lip and buried my head in my hands. Then I peeked above my cubicle to make sure that no one else was listening in.
“Vivian?” I whispered.
“That’s right. I’m at the Powell-Hyde trolley station. It’s leaving in fifteen minutes, I think. Can you meet me here?”
“What? Sorry, but I’m at work right now. And I don’t think I can just take off either way. Can we meet during my lunch break instead?”
“Well, the train is leaving in fifteen, and I’ll be getting on with or without you…”
I looked over my cubicle again and saw Sanjay blatantly playing online poker on his desktop with his headphones plugged in.
“Okay, okay, I’ll meet you there,” I said. “But wait, how will I be able to recognize you? It’s so crowded on that stop.”
“You’ll recognize me,” she said flatly, and hung up.
Google Maps said it was a thirteen-minute walk to Powell-Hyde, so if I left now I’d barely make it in time. I zipped up my fleece jacket and started walking toward Sanjay’s desk, rehearsing some lame excuse about how I’d forgotten about a dentist’s appointment. But just before I got there, I changed my mind and slipped out of the office without telling anyone.
Direct sunlight summoned my hangover from its dark depths. The way to Powell Street was very steep and I gagged as I climbed the hilly sidewalk. By the time I got there, the back of my shirt was damp with sweat. As expected, the station was swarming with tourists. I shouldered my way through a Chinese tour group and scanned the crowd for anyone who could be Vivian.
About 5’9”, she wore dark glasses and stood with her arms crossed waiting, not looking, for me. I almost turned back when I realized there was a chance she was slightly taller than me. The sunglasses accentuated her sharp cheekbones and jawline, which contrasted with her soft nose and forehead. She was wearing baggy white pants over chunky sneakers and some kind of lacy black top that she covered with a purple Patagonia shell.
“Glad you made it,” she said, taking off her glasses and looking at me disapprovingly. We stepped onto the trolley together and found two seats near the front of the car. Now that I was sitting right next to her, I could make out a faint scar that ran from the left bottom side of her chin to the corner of her lip.
“So, do you do this often?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Meet up in real life with strangers from the internet?” She smiled as she watched me squirm. “I mean, seriously, Michael. There was no profile picture. You could’ve been in big trouble.”
“You’re literally the one who reached out to me.”
“I know. And I’m only in San Francisco for a short while. I’m really hoping I don’t regret this.”
I wondered if I still smelled like alcohol. “So, why are you on Samarkand?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just saying you don’t really look like someone who would spend a bunch of time on a coding forum.”
She gave me an incredibly disgusted look. “Wow—sexist much? Haven’t you heard of Girls Who Code? I thought Americans were supposed to be sensitive about these things.”
Don’t panic, but you’re completely fucking this up, I thought.
“Okay, fine, fine. But why did you ask me to meet you on a train that was about to leave? Instead of a coffee shop or something?”
Vivian looked bemused. “I just wanted to see if you would make it in time. Plus, I wanted to go see Fisherman’s Wharf.”
“Why?”
“Because I like seafood?”
Vivian did not care for the seafood at Fisherman’s Wharf, which was mostly served in bread bowls. She wrinkled her nose at the gooey cups of crab chowder we got at the Pier 39 Crab House, which we were now trying to enjoy on-the go. It smelled like sourdough everywhere, and the sidewalks were caked with seagull shit.
“Why is there so much corn in this crab soup?” she said, poking around her bread bowl with her plastic spoon without taking a bite.
“People here think it goes well with the crab. You don’t like it?”
“Okay. Whatever. By the way, you don’t seem to really know your way around here,” Vivian said.
“This isn’t a place real people go. It’s just for tourists.”
She sighed and suddenly stopped in the middle of the street. We were next to a merry-go-round, a boxing punch machine, and a creepy museum of twentieth-century penny arcade games. Vivian chucked her bowl of clam chowder in the trash can. “Sorry, this place really isn’t what I thought it was. I’m embarrassed that I suggested it. You can decide where we go next.”
I called us an Uber to Radhaus, an Alpine beer hall in Fort Mason built inside of an old army machine shop. The place was warehouse-sized on the inside and completely whitewashed except for the oak tables, like an Apple store. We sat by the window at an east-facing table with a direct view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Vivian seemed much happier here. When the waiter came over, she surprised me by ordering in German: trout toast, veal schnitzel, bratwurst with sauerkraut, and two pints of Weihenstephan Hefeweissbier.
“You speak German too?” I said.
“Yeah. I spent a year in Switzerland during uni. Mostly to get away from the insufferable social scene at my four-year-institution in England.”
“Interesting. I heard the skiing there is good. Did you ski a lot?”
“No. I hate the outdoors.” She left it at that.
The food arrived and Vivian went for the bratwurst first, having nibbles of the trout toast on the side and leaving the sauerkraut and schnitzel untouched.
“So what are you doing in San Francisco?” I asked finally.
“Work,” she said. “Why else would anyone come here?”
She had a point, I thought. “What kind of work?”
She looked at me while chewing as if that was a ridiculous question. “I’m really big on the internet.”
After lunch we went next door to the Great Meadow Park at Fort Mason. It was chilly here because of the gusts coming in from the ocean and Vivian zipped up her Patagonia shell. We wandered to the far tip of Aquatic Park, a man-made cove. There were a couple of pay-per-view telescopes that looked out at Alcatraz, but neither of us had any quarters so we just squinted at it with our bare eyes.
“What a beautiful island,” Vivian said. “I wonder who lives there. Maybe a reclusive billionaire?”
“I doubt a wealthy hermit would want to live in a place where people are spying on him with telescopes all of the time,” I said. “Plus, that’s Alcatraz. It used to be a maximum-security prison.”
“Wow. What kind of crime did you have to commit to end up at a place like that?”
“Oh, it didn’t take much. Being late on your taxes, stealing a loaf of bread. Sometimes children were sent there for being disobedient to their parents, but they were usually allowed to come home after a week.”
Vivian laughed. “Do you think the prisoners got telescopes too?”
“What?”
“The city must look small from there. Imagine that every cell in Alcatraz had a powerful telescope just like this one that you could look through to observe life in San Francisco up close, as if you were there yourself. Children eating cotton candy on the Wharf, old couples sitting on park benches. Us standing here, watching them. Could you bear the loneliness?”
“That is incredibly grim,” I said.
“I would probably spend all day looking through the telescope,” Vivian said. “As sad as it’d make me, I think it’d be too painful to live on memories alone.” Then she gave me a long, strangely melancholy look—her eyes looked not so much at me but through me, like I was standing invisibly in front of a ruined coliseum.
“Probably at least half of the cells just face the Pacific Ocean,” I said. “And then you would be staring at nothing. Like D. H. Lawrence said, ‘California has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific.’ ”
“Smooth,” Vivian said, maybe flirtatiously. “Not bad for a computer science guy. But actually, it’s looking at China. Always has and will be.”
With that, Vivian and I took our leave of the forsaken rock and started walking down toward Bay Street.
“There’s some more stuff I can show you,” I said.
Vivian shook her head and pulled out her phone. “Actually, I need to get back to my hotel in SoMa for a meeting. Do you want a ride back downtown?” I nodded.
The Uber stopped in front of the Four Seasons on Market.
“Thank you for today,” Vivian smiled, this time genuinely. “I really had a lovely time.”
“Me too. Wait, when are you leaving again?”
She hesitated. “Saturday,” she said finally.
“So I probably won’t see you again before you’re gone.”
Vivian shrugged and took a long look at me before heading into the hotel. “I’m glad we met. Bye, Michael.”
For the first time since she interrupted my morning, I thought to check the time and realized I’d been away from my desk for more than three hours now, much longer than what I could explain away with a fictional dentist appointment. I raced back to the office, but when I got there, it was obvious that no one realized I’d been gone. Sanjay was still playing online poker. I sat down and started halfheartedly trudging through some of my to-dos from the morning, but my mind was stuck replaying scenes from the morning. At five o’clock on the dot, Sanjay swaggered into the bullpen and started rallying everyone for dollar beers at Foley’s on Stockton. I waited for everyone to leave and headed out on my own.
Back home I had dinner with Daniel in Club Mandarin’s kitchen. We squatted on pink plastic stools and ate a staff meal together, some fried rice with egg and char siu. I asked him if he ended up buying that motorcycle he had mentioned; he hadn’t. Actually, it had been a pretty dramatic week for him. He had just gotten his girlfriend pregnant, so “there would be no need for the motorcycle anymore.” Instead, he was saving up to open his own barbecue restaurant with Tony and Jeffrey, one of those tiny places where they hung the roasted duck and chicken carcasses up in front of the window. Daniel described to me with intense enthusiasm the different lots they were considering and the sorts of meats they would serve. I guess that meant they were moving out, which made me feel sad, but now didn’t feel like the right time to bring it up.
For some reason, I didn’t tell him about my day with Vivian. I’m not sure why; maybe because telling it would make it seem like a real thing, something I should care about, when it seemed pretty unlikely I’d see her again. Instead, I told him about my evening with Lawrence and the two girls from the Y Hotel, which he thought was hilarious. We split a bottle of wine and a few smokes, then I went up to my loft.
At the time of this writing I am sitting in the living room of my apartment and the sun has set over Sydney Harbour. There is no sound other than the whirring of the air conditioner. Through the sea-facing windows I can see the inky dark waters of the bay, feeding into the void Pacific. Vivian was right about one thing: it was too painful to live on memories alone.