During my final weekend in San Francisco, the city was hit by an unseasonal Category 3 atmospheric river that was making its way down from the Pacific Northwest. Meteorologists advised San Franciscans to stay indoors and warned of flooded highways and collapsed power lines. I found out about the storm from a viral video on Twitter of a huge oak tree in Napa Valley uprooting during a wine tasting. Napa was only sixty miles north, so I went to the Trader Joe’s on Hyde Street to pick up storm supplies. There was something staticky and electric in the droplet-filled air you could almost feel on your tongue. At Trader Joe’s, I joined a long line extending out to the parking lot made up mostly of roommate groups and families. They were talking in a weirdly excited tone about the storm, how much property damage it would cause, what would happen to the homeless, which board games they’d play together to pass the time during the stay-at-home order. I just picked up a few frozen meals, a carton of ice cream, and two bottles of wine. After all, I only needed to get through the weekend.
After dropping off my supplies at my apartment, I decided to go for a walk before the storm hit and started trudging up the hill toward North Beach. When I reached the top of the hill, where the road flattened out, the Bay Bridge suddenly loomed into view and you could see down Broadway about three hundred feet straight to the heaving black water. I had an apocalyptic vision of the water swelling up during the storm and swallowing the steep neighborhood block by block—picking up cars, neon store signs, and garbage bins on its way up.
At City Lights Bookstore, I noticed a woman standing by herself in front of the window display. She appeared to be looking at the books in the display, but something about her bearing made it obvious she was waiting for someone. She was about forty-five feet away and facing away from me, but after two or three seconds I got the gut feeling that this woman could be no one other than Vivian.
She started walking again as soon as I got closer. I tried to keep my distance at first, but then she made a sharp left onto a crowded, narrow side street and I had to pick up the pace. Was it just my imagination, or was she moving faster now? I thought about calling out to her, but the fear she might actually turn around held me back. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I saw a Muni bus leave its stop, and the flicker of a black Chelsea boot lift from the pavement.
It was a harrowing way to start the weekend. Back in my apartment, I looked up Vivian on Samarkand and saw that she had been inactive for three days. I tried picking up a job, but couldn’t get myself to focus. I went downstairs to look for Daniel, Tony, and Jeffrey, but realized they had left town hours ago. There were no texts on my phone—not even Lawrence or Jessica checking in about the storm.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the weekend besides the rain battering against the windows and the concurrent crescendo of dread that blared deafeningly in my ears. I closely monitored the string of flight cancellations coming out of SFO. Now that my departure date was so soon, it became increasingly obvious to me that the consequences of my actions had spiraled outside of my control. I began to fear—irrationally, I thought at the time—that I was being watched. In response, I holed myself up in my apartment and diminished to an incapacitated state. The nonstop rain seemed to erode the sense of time passing. Drinking served as a way to lubricate the glacial creep of time, and my only consolation was that every so often Vivian would visit me in my feverish dreams.
On Sunday morning, a few hours before my scheduled departure, the storm cleared. I looked out the window and saw the streets filled again with people. Feeling suddenly afflicted with premature nostalgia, I decided to see the city one last time and started walking downtown with no destination in particular. In Lower Nob Hill, the Hugo Gallery caught my eye—Vivian and I had stopped in here after our Sunday afternoon at SFMOMA a few weeks ago. I made some small talk with the middle-aged curator, an Israeli man with an immaculately groomed beard. He asked me where I lived and I told him I was moving to Beijing today, which piqued his interest. When he found out I was an executive at a Chinese tech company, he rose from his desk and offered me a tour. The paintings were abstract, stimulating, and above all else, gave the aura of priceless objects—all were large format, clearly designed to lavish impressive rooms. I wasn’t paying much attention to the specifics the curator mentioned, only picking up that the broad genre on display was contemporary American abstract, which he repeatedly emphasized the global appeal of, particularly for audiences overseas.
When we reached the end of the exhibit, he told me he had even more inventory to show me on the second floor, so we took the stairs up. I wandered around the floor for a bit and started gravitating toward an unusual oil painting in a poorly lit corner of the room. It depicted a slim, teenage Chinese girl sitting with her legs crossed on an ottoman in front of a sunny balcony. She was wearing a thin, strapless olive-green dress that revealed her brittle, bird-like shoulders and rode up a hand’s length from her hip. Most of her face was obscured by an old-school film camera, and the blackness of the camera lens sucked in the viewer’s attention. Indeed, the zoom lens of the camera seemed to break through the cracked surface of the painting and bore into your eyes. As I studied the painting, an unsettling feeling of recognition started to build up inside me, like coming across something in real life you saw first in a dream. The shape of the girl’s face, her hands and shoulders—was I losing my mind, seeing her everywhere I looked? Then I read the artist’s signature in the corner of the frame: Vincent Lim.
“Excuse me—who is this artist, Vincent Lim?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“Ah, I see you are admiring Girl and Camera. It’s a very special piece, though I don’t know too much about the artist. This one in particular I’m afraid has already been spoken for.”
“How did this get here? And how long has it been here?” I said, suddenly alarmed by how loud my voice was. The curator looked confused.
“We received a special request from a long-standing client overseas to acquire this particular piece on his behalf. I was not personally involved. I really can’t tell you much more. The painting’s collector insisted on the utmost privacy, which is why the piece is on our second floor. I’m very sorry, I should have covered it.”
I looked at the impossible painting once more and felt the terror of discovering an anomaly in the universe. “I’m sorry, but I feel sick. I have to go.”
Now the curator was following me on my way to the stairwell with a concerned look on his face. “I’m very sorry, sir. Would you like a glass of water?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “But I have to go now.”
I rushed out of the gallery and back to my apartment, where I grabbed my bags and immediately called an Uber. On the way to the airport, I found myself turning over the two unexplained events from the weekend in my head over and over again, convinced they must be connected. Surely there must have been some stray detail, a telltale clue that I overlooked. There was something surreptitious about flying by night, and as I traveled over the Pacific Ocean I felt myself steeped in dread, as if past, present, and future were collapsing in on me and I was hurtling toward a fate I’d somehow already been forewarned of.