THREE

The Window of Erich Zann

SHE ARRIVED, LIKE SO many, on a Greyhound bus.

Also as with many, she had little clue where to go, no idea how to find a home. Until the moment when she first glimpsed the iconic Golden Gate Bridge looming in the sun-warmed fog, it hadn’t properly occurred to her that this was going to be an issue. Sure, she’d need somewhere to sleep, and wash, but the city would provide, right? Everything she needed was waiting there for her, for them—manifest destiny reinvented for the first generation to realize they were a generation, a harbor from which to set off for parts unknown.

Not every person on the bus was on that journey. Some were leading regular lives. Coming back from visiting family. Going to the city to look for work. But history tends to forget that majority who are merely keeping on keeping on, and one in five believed they were going on to something bigger and better, traveling inexorably toward some higher place—ignoring the fact that in reality many of them were also moving away. Leaving behind old places, old people, old lives, casting them off like old clothes, skins that chaffed and constrained. Most who arrived in San Francisco that year were barely old enough to have given old lives a chance, but all knew they were ready for something new. Something different.

That this was their time.

And so Marion clamped down on the tension in her guts, telling herself it was unworthy of this great adventure, that worrying about where she was going to sleep was precisely the style of petty bourgeois bullshit she’d left Illinois to escape. Nonetheless, she was relieved when the girl next to her—a petite and serious-looking girl from South Dakota, wearing what Marion guessed was her grandfather’s waistcoat (over otherwise very straight clothes) in an attempt to look fashionably old-timey, a single layer of hippie on top of a hometown girl—turned nervously to her.

Her name was Katie, and she’d climbed onto the bus late the previous evening, in Montana. It had been pretty full, with many seats taken up with people crashed out full-length, and the girl had stood in the aisle, looking apprehensive.

Marion moved along her seat and smiled up at her. “There’s room next to me.”

Katie sat gratefully. The two girls had talked a little since, though Marion spent much of the night looking at the darkness out the window. Katie had slept, or read.

“Do you have somewhere to stay tonight?”

“No,” Marion admitted. She had enough money for maybe three nights in a cheap hotel, five if it was really cheap. After that she’d be putting herself in the hands of fate.

“So what are you going to do?”

Marion shrugged, glad of the chance to appear unfazed, cool, and finding that—for a moment at least—it made her feel that way too. “I don’t know. Ask around, I guess?”

“Can we do it together? Look for a place?”

“Sure,” Marion said, and smiled. She was aware this would make it harder, but she could tell that Katie needed reassurance, and a temporary friend.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” a voice said from behind.

Marion and Katie turned cautiously. A girl with a huge frizz of red hair was leaning toward them, elbows on the back of their seat. “My cousin,” she said. “Been here a month, got a place. He says there’s space for me. If we scrunch up small, there’s space for three, right? I’m Cindy, by the way.”

“Are you sure?”

The girl grinned, broad and crooked, the grin of a girl who was sure about pretty much everything. “My mom’s annoying as hell, but I don’t think she’d lie to me about my actual name.”

Marion laughed. “About the house, she means.”

“That too. Done deal. And it’s right in Haight. You’ve heard of Haight, yes?”

Of course they had. Haight-Ashbury, the wellspring of everything that was going on in the city—in the whole world—and the epicenter of cool. Marion nodded, her stomach relaxing. See? The world was on her side.

She was inevitable.

Forty minutes later the three girls got off the bus together, brave new spirits arriving in the promised land.

Five weeks later Marion moved out of the house. It was a Sunday, and she left in the late morning and tried to find Katie and Cindy before she went. Though she was tired and hungover, she was dogged, and eventually located Cindy under some guy in one of the bedrooms. Both were passed out, as were the six other people spread around the room. Thirty seconds of poking in the side from Marion resulted in the redhead eventually opening her eyes, one more slowly than the other.

“I’m leaving,” Marion said. “Catch you soon, okay?”

Cindy looked at her without apparent recognition, blinked, and then passed out again.

Katie was nowhere to be found. The girl had steered clear of anything stronger than pot since the disaster at the end of the first week, so Marion thought she was most likely fine, and at her waitressing job. Katie’s shit was pretty much together.

On the way out Marion passed the kitchen. She preferred to pass this room whenever possible, on the grounds that it was safer than actually going in. The place was a health hazard, as she knew to both her cost, and benefit.

Everybody was super-enthusiastic about experimenting with cooking—on very limited budgets, people who until recently had relied upon their moms to fill their plates, and who therefore had only vague and idealistic ideas of how you turned raw ingredients into something edible—but much less good about clearing up the mess afterward. That’d be too square, too obsessed with appearances, too much the way their appallingly unhip parents did things. And so the sink was piled precariously high with dirty plates, and the cold, murky water a minefield of silverware, while the counters, floor, and parts of the walls were encrusted with multiple layers of grime and spilled remnants of food.

Marion estimated that she’d lost seven pounds in weight since arriving in Frisco. Katie was holding steady, because she got one square meal a day where she worked and could actually cook a little, too. Marion had long-ago clocked the fact that Katie’s timid request that they find a berth together on that first day had been not a sign of weakness but indicative of a quiet, focused ability to judge the best way of achieving what she needed. Meanwhile, a diet of sex and drugs seemed to be suiting Cindy just fine.

There was a guy in the kitchen. At first Marion didn’t realize who it was, because everybody looked pretty similar. Denim. Layers of shirts and waistcoats. Long hair. When he turned toward the door, she saw it was Dylan.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was a croak, his eyes bloodshot. He peered at her face for a long moment, then at her backpack. “You, you’ve, like, got your bag.”

“Right. I’m leaving.”

“Cool. I mean, why?”

Dylan was Cindy’s cousin. The guy who’d opened the door when they arrived, already majestically high, and said sure, come join the party, step right in and pull up a joint. Which was basically how it had gone on—a tidal, day-after-day party, under the influence of one thing or another, or more often several things at the same time.

On that first night, and for the next week or so, it had seemed utterly exotic and far out and exactly what they’d come to the city for. Everybody was talking nonstop about the Revolution, and what they could do to help set the old ways on fire. Planning meetings for anti-war protests. Impromptu jam sessions, where an inability to play an instrument was no barrier. Long—freakin’ endless—discussions about how to get the message of what was happening from here out into the world at large. It was only as the second week wore on and the effects of consecutive hangovers began to take their toll that Marion began to get a clearer fix on her situation.

The house—though a tall, narrow, and dilapidated Victorian of approximately the same style—was not in the Haight district after all, but a fifteen-minute uphill walk away in a neighborhood that was far less happening and much more scary, especially at night. Each room looked like some other entire house had been upended into it: An ever-evolving chaos of guitars, art materials, half-finished canvasses—some of which had been used multiple times, shadows of earlier terrible paintings dimly visible under the current image—stained mattresses, dirty clothes, fliers and posters, discarded take-out food containers, and a screen-printing contraption that a number of very stoned people had tried to fix several times and so was destined to never work again.

And people.

God, yes, people.

When Marion and Katie arrived, there were already at least four sleeping to a room. Every day, though people came and went, that average had increased. Generally, newcomers knew at least one person in the house, or had met someone before. It had been getting up in the small hours to take a pee—and don’t even try to imagine what the bathroom was like—to find a complete stranger passed out in there, his penis hanging flaccidly out of his pants, that made up Marion’s mind to leave. This was not the scene she’d come to be a part of. There was somewhere better, and she was the girl to find it.

“You know there’s some half-naked dude in the john?”

“I just talked to him. He’s okay.”

“So who is he?”

“I have literally no idea.”

He beamed. Marion liked Dylan, she really did. Though apparently incapable of turning down any intoxicant that was passed in front of him, he seemed solid in the core. Or relatively so. Some of the others . . . not so much. A few, not even a little bit. There were people who’d brought darkness with them, or an emptiness so deep and profound it was somehow even worse. She needed to spend more time in the city before unconditional acceptance of others was going to play for her, and preferably do it somewhere that didn’t smell of burned lentils and armpits. She knew there were houses where the cool/chaos balance was better. She needed to find one of those.

Dylan took a gulp of coffee, and winced. “So where are you going?”

“Met a guy in City Lights yesterday. He said he knew somewhere I could stay. Less crowded.”

Dylan raised an eyebrow. “Hot guy?”

She laughed. “No. Old.”

“They’re the worst.”

“Not this one. Or, I don’t think. He seems cool. If it’s a problem I’ll bail.”

“Cindy will be bummed you’ve gone.”

Marion wasn’t too sure about that. The primary message she’d been getting from the other girl in the last couple weeks was that she felt Marion wasn’t letting her hair down hard or fast or often enough, and that she was bordering on being officially uncool. “Tell her I’ll see her soon.”

“But you’re coming Tuesday afternoon, right?”

The event half the house had been preparing for. “Of course. And look, also tell Katie I’ll drop by in the next couple days, okay? Tell her especially.”

“You got it.”

Marion was pretty sure he’d have forgotten by the time she left the house, but she thanked him and walked out the door into the sunshine on a mission.

He’d said he’d meet her in the bookstore at five-thirty, but at nearly seven o’clock she was still in the poetry room upstairs, waiting. Wondering, too, if she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t unrecoverable: if the guy failed to turn up, she could simply hike back to the house and say it didn’t work out and people would shrug and pass a joint and that would be that.

But she didn’t want to. It would feel dumb.

It would be a big fail.

So she stayed there, as the day faded outside, watching people cooing over the books, explaining poems to each other, necking, hanging out. After a while the lights began to look strange to her, a souvenir of the disaster in the first week. After three days in the house she’d gone with Katie and Cindy to a big happening in the park—somewhat reluctantly, because though she totally wanted to go, her stomach had been feeling weird since breakfast. It was crowded and sunny and loud and fun, and The Dead played a set, and there had been buckets of Kool-Aid and friendly people encouraging newcomers to quench their thirst, and maybe some of the drinkers had known what they were getting into, but not all of them.

Sure as hell not Marion and Katie, and that’s why Marion had reason to be thankful for the unsanitary conditions of the kitchen of the house. It turned out her stomach gripes were the harbinger of a violent food poisoning episode that suddenly had her vomiting into the bushes—purging her body of a large portion of the LSD before it had time to kick in.

Katie had not been so lucky. She’d spent the next eight hours on a roller-coaster of alternating laugh-out-loud euphoria and catastrophic paranoia, including a long episode where she’d been convinced that the wide grass of the park was in fact a part of the bay. She’d infected Marion with this vision, and the two of them spent a period of unknown duration clinging to each other, trembling, convinced they were on an invisible raft slowly spiraling around a cove, while everybody else danced and sang and ran in circles.

Eventually Marion (who’d only been suffering about 20% of the effects, but was still intermittently barfing) managed to get the two of them back to the house, where someone far more experienced managed to plane them back toward normality with a regimen of herb teas, chocolate, and pot.

Marion and Katie decided the next morning that the doors of their perception were quite wide enough already, and had steered the hell clear of LSD ever since. There were times when Marion still felt affected, though that had to be an illusion, surely. It’d been a month now. But certain types of light still looked strange to her, as if the glow existed between her and the object causing it, rather than in the lamp or bulb itself. And once in a while she heard . . .

She could hear it now, in fact.

Music.

A faint single line of notes, which—though she assumed it was something she’d heard in the park that afternoon, and had become locked in her head—was unlike anything she’d heard before. Different from what she’d normally think of as music, in fact—though a lot of local musicians liked to explore those kind of sounds, to show how liberated they were from outdated conceptions of melodic yadda yadda yadda.

This was a little louder than she’d heard it before—so much so that she turned in her seat to look out of the window, expecting to see some guy with a flute (she thought that’s probably what it was, though she wasn’t sure, maybe a piccolo or something) busking on the sidewalk.

Fog had begun to roll in. The Broadway/Columbus crossroads was pretty crowded—this borderland between Chinatown and North Beach had become a mecca for both real hippies and buses of tourists who came to gawk at them—but there was nobody obviously playing.

After a moment, however, she spotted something (or someone) else, and got up and hurried down, out of the store.

The man was standing on the corner.

Short, half-bald, rather stooped and overweight. His nose was large, the skin of his face liberally sprinkled with moles, some disconcertingly large. Though his clothes looked as though they had once been well-tailored, they were now somewhat shabby. Not at all a hot guy, bottom line.

“Hey,” Marion said, diffidently, as she approached. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Aha,” he said. His voice was soft, with the trace of an accent. “There you are.”

“You said to meet inside. At five-thirty.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was hard today. I couldn’t finish in time.”

“Finish what?”

He shook his head. “It’s done. Come. Follow me.”

Twenty minutes later he suddenly stopped walking. Marion had been getting more and more confused—they were heading away from the places where people actually lived, the kind of people she knew anyhow—but for an older guy he walked super-fast, a relentless beetling motion that covered the ground quickly. She asked at one point if they could take a streetcar instead, but he just shook his head again.

“Why are we here?”

They were standing in front of a tall, weathered building in the Financial District, on a narrow side street at the corner of California and Battery. The structures here were tall, constructed of stone or sometimes brick, making the alleyway feel like a canyon. There was a sense of heavy permanence to the area, despite the excavations they’d passed farther up Market, part of the process of installing the new BART/Muni system. Everything in sight seemed to be either a bank or business, apart from a battered neon sign on the opposite corner for something called YUGGOTH wreathed in the fog coming in more and more thickly from the bay.

The old man didn’t answer. Instead he stood looking at her, head cocked to the side, his sharp blue eyes narrowed, as he’d been doing when Marion first noticed him, in City Lights on the previous afternoon. “Do you see me?” he’d asked then.

She’d frowned. “Well, yeah.”

He nodded, and somehow from there they’d got to how she came to be in the city, and where she was living, and its insufficiency. He’d made the offer of somewhere to stay, and her initial reaction had been to laugh—she’d been hit on at least three times a day since she’d been there, though you weren’t supposed to see it that way because everybody (or the guys, mainly) were framing rampant promiscuity as “generosity of spirit,” something they were all supposed to have.

Cindy had discovered enormous generosity within herself, very quickly. The very first night, in fact. Katie was having no truck with the whole concept—you can take the girl out of the prairie, but extracting the prairie from the girl is a whole other thing. Marion was adopting a wait-and-see policy and trying to be open about it, but she was damned sure this elderly, foreign-looking guy wasn’t going to break the dam.

She realized he wasn’t looking salacious, however, or hopeful or even desperate. More thoughtful, even a little sad. Sometimes you’d see that in older guys—an awareness of how undignified and gross their lingering drives were making them appear—but it didn’t seem to be that either. If anything he looked paternal, and not in a weird way.

So she’d agreed.

The building they were now standing in front of looked even more ancient than the others around it. Battered, stained, stoic. As the old man got out keys, Marion noticed the name PENTIMENTO chiseled into the stone above the door.

“Italian?” she asked.

“I believe so.”

He opened the door and they stepped into a cramped vestibule. The old man flicked a switch and a pale, dusty bulb illuminated the space. Scuffed-up floorboards, stone walls. In the corner, rusted ironwork in front of a tiny elevator.

“Doesn’t work, I’m afraid,” he said, indicating the narrow steps that led from the other side.

Six flights later, she was glad to see they’d reached the top of the building. There had been no windows on the ascent—just another old bulb on each landing. Then finally this upper space, with a single wooden door.

“This is it,” the old man said, as he unlocked it. “Now, don’t get your hopes up. It was the caretaker’s place.”

On the other side lay a room, perhaps ten feet wide and twenty long. It was bare, with dusty gray floorboards and peeling wallpaper that looked old. They were up in the roof, and so the ceiling bore sharply inward on one side, revealing beams. A single bed had been pushed into the corner. A small table. One chair. A small area on the right-hand side evidently designed to serve as a kitchenette, with a hotplate. There was a narrow doorway open next to it. Beyond was a tiny room with a toilet and a shower stall, both of which looked like they had not been used in twenty years. Overall, it felt like a cabin belowdecks on an old wooden ship.

In truth, it would have been a pretty depressing place, were it not for one thing. Marion walked straight toward it.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s cool.”

The old man stayed where he was, back by the door to the stairs. “I suppose so. There are two conditions. The first is that you bring nobody else up here. Ever. This cannot become another flophouse filled with free spirits and freeloaders.”

“Works for me,” Marion said. “That’s exactly the scene I’m bailing out of.”

“The second is that on Tuesday evenings I need this space myself. Not for long—a couple of hours. Between eight and ten. I require you to be elsewhere during that time.”

“Sure thing.”

“That’s all.”

“And you really don’t want me to pay anything?”

He shook his head, handed her a pair of keys, and turned away. She said thank you to his back, and he raised a hand in return as he started down the stairs.

As the sound of his footsteps receded, Marion closed the door and took stock. Sure it was dusty and smelled weird, and the ceiling made it feel kind of cramped, and in general it was a long way from nice, but listen . . .

It was silent.

Nobody talking. Nobody playing the guitar badly. Nobody snoring. Nobody . . . just nobody.

She smiled, then wandered back down to the room’s biggest and most redeeming feature. A window. The window, in fact. It was the only one, but it was large. Circular, with different colored panes divided by spokes that came out from the center: the panes broken up into further sections by a tracery of leading. What they called a “rose window” in a church. She dimly remembered from childhood—there’d been such a feature in the chapel back home—that they were usually placed at the western aspect, and wondered if this was the case here. Maybe.

She stood for a while and looked out across the rooftops, at the city lights that stretched toward Nob Hill and beyond. Without realizing she was doing it, after a few minutes she slipped the pack off her back and set it gently on the floor, continuing to stare through the multicolored glass as night fell.

She followed the people as they marched, and after a while they were all singing and shouting, and if you’ve never been part of a crowd like that, a swell of humanity all driven by the same cause and dreaming the same dream then you simply don’t know how it feels. You can’t know what it’s like to become a part of something that blurs every individual into one, all their single candles turning for a bright and shining afternoon into a sea of infinite light—a light that each one of them believes will be enough to illuminate the universe in ways it has never been before.

They strode along the streets together, chanting the same slogans, waving at the straights and squares standing mired on the sidewalks, as they frowned confused at the free spirits in their midst—and as they progressed toward Haight, more and more people started to join them at the back, and from the sides, impulsively throwing off the shackles of their lives and swelling this tide of humanity into a fleet of souls too powerful to resist.

People sang and played instruments, weaving together one enormous song. Guitars, flutes, drums. And after a while Marion realized she could hear something else too—a high, keening melody played on a single violin.

The thing she’d been hearing for days now, and that spoke to her, sang in a way that was dark but direct and true. It took all this noise and joy and condensed it to a single note.

She turned her head back and forth, tried to see where it was coming from, but there was no sign. By then the crowd around her was so loud that it sounded as if the tune was coming from between her own ears, and so she forgot about it and rhythmically punched the air with her fist like all the others.

And they marched on.

That evening she ate sitting at the little table. The meal consisted of two vegetable egg rolls from a place she’d found a five minute walk away, all she convinced herself she could afford. It wasn’t impossible to find casual work in the city. She’d washed dishes. Waited tables. A few nights of bar work before they found out she’d lied about her age and was only eighteen. What was tougher was keeping your position. Hardly anyone was offering stable employment, because they knew there were countless other girls and boys out there desperate to earn a little cash, and they didn’t trust hippies to be reliable. Most people got hired by the day, or even the hour. The only person Marion knew with an actual job was Katie.

After eating she read for a while, a water-damaged copy of The Naked Ape that an older guy named Karl, the manager in City Lights, had let her take on permanent loan.

At ten o’clock she went to bed.

Haight-Ashbury. Ground zero. Heaving with humanity. Placards. Chanting. Protest songs. Men and women on soapboxes, all shouting different things, but they were all the same thing at heart, and so it spiraled up into an extraordinary new music, a choral symphony of those who would upend the universe.

For the next forty minutes, Marion was happier than she had been in her entire life. Happier than on the sporadic days as a young child when her mother remembered she was around, and spent some actual time with her. Happier than when a little older, and her bedroom door for once did not open in the middle of the night. Happier even than when she went to sit alone in her grandmother’s yard, away from everyone. Away from her uncle especially. Happy as only a person can be when their mind, every molecule of their bodies, their very soul is in tune with the world around them.

Happy, happy, happy.

She saw Cindy walking by, swigging from a plastic cup, her arm around some guy, grinning and pumping her fist. She ran over when she saw Marion and planted a big kiss on her lips before dancing back away into the crowds. Marion spotted Dylan too, and some of the others from the house, and for a moment felt a keen stab of loneliness, but convinced herself it didn’t matter because, look: here they all were together again—that all of them would always be together, preserved in moments like this, when they stood together and changed the world, fierce insects frozen in the warm amber of history.

They all sang together, and somewhere in the background or deep inside, that simple un-melody played.

When Marion woke, at first she wondered if she’d heard a noise. She lay in the narrow bed, listening, before realizing it was more likely the lack of noise that was unusual. For weeks she’d been living under the kind of conditions they use to soften up political prisoners prior to interrogation. There was no noise here. There were no people.

Once she’d realized that was the difference, she turned on her side and tried to get back to sleep. Soon it felt as if the silence was pounding in her eardrums, however—so loud it was almost like tinnitus, a single note, varying in pitch. It compelled you to listen, to unsuccessfully predict where it was going next, like the strangest kind of experimental music. She’d heard more than her share of that over recent weeks (Dylan was an enthusiastic, though unschooled, bass player), and learned something.

If you could actually play—and a few people in the house could—then your hands and ears wouldn’t let you leave the path. However much a real musician tried to be random and free, previously learned patterns ensnared them. Muscle memory pulled you back to the norm, to the established shipping lanes of melody. You had to be wholly ignorant of the process to play something truly new, and even then a vestige of recognizable rhythm would eventually emerge as utter incompetents bashed clumsily on out-of-tune guitars with only four strings. Humanity, the things we learn without even realizing, intervenes and re-gathers. To truly throw the past aside and become new requires both strength and a willingness to throw yourself into the void.

This sound, the sound her ears or brain made without intervention . . . it sounded like that. After a while it had woken her sufficiently that she sat up. It was only then that she understood what had really roused her.

She got out of bed and walked to the window.

It was light out there. Not like during the day, of course—she checked her watch and found it was a little before 3:00 A.M.—but starkly moonlit, bright enough to flood a multitude of colors into the room. Below that shining level, the buildings all around were wreathed and enveloped in fog.

In the moonlight, everything looked psychedelic.

Marion pulled the chair over to where she could sit and look out. Though she’d spent a while gazing out of the window earlier, she must have been looking at a slightly different angle. Fog, like snow, will make a place look unfamiliar. Presumably that’s what was making the angles between the buildings look altered. And presumably it was the fog that was turning the few lights a curdled yellow, almost as if they were running on gas, instead of electricity.

She moved the chair right up close to the window, noticing something. Sounds, from outside. This wasn’t the single note thing, but the kind of noise people made. Distant shouting. Not in anger, but workmanlike shouts, the kind you heard when men were engaged in some kind of task.

Then a screeching cry, like a seagull.

Perfectly possible, of course—the building was only a ten-minute walk along Market from the bay and the moldering piers and warehouses there—but combined with the shouts, it reminded her of something. She couldn’t work out what it might be.

Now that she was close to the window, she could see some of the individual panes in the design were mottled, making the views through them crooked, twisted. They also somehow magnified the effect of the fog, causing it to seem to move more quickly, sinuously, as if with intent. As she panned her gaze slowly down one of the nearest buildings, she noticed tendrils of it feeling their away around some bricked-up windows and then moving on, as if seeking some easier mode of entry. Silly, of course, just a nighttime thought, but nonetheless she was glad the fog didn’t reach up as high as her own window.

She kept bending her head, slowly, looking farther and farther down, then suddenly stopped.

For just a moment the fog had parted, giving her a glimpse right down to street level. But it hadn’t been a street she’d seen, or even a sidewalk.

It was water.

She knew from the time before, that first happening in the park, not to drink anything that anybody passed her, however much it looked and smelled innocent, or if they told her it was fruit juice.

But she was hungry, as well as thirsty—and there were cookies and brownies being passed around. And once she’d had a few of those her guard started to slip, and probably she did have a drink, or two, and then there was some guy with tabs and blotters, and Marion was standing with Cindy at that point, and when Marion shook her head and said no, she didn’t want any of that scene, no thank you and no way, Cindy rolled her eyes and made fun about how her time in the city wasn’t changing Marion at all, she was still the same uptight small-town girl she’d always been, nothing was ever going to help her evolve—and she’d never dance like the rest of them.

The other people with them thought Cindy was joking, just playing around. But Marion looked at her and saw twinkling lights around the girl’s eyes, probably only the sun glinting off glitter and makeup but still so bright and sharp, and in their lights she saw every girl in school who’d looked at her the same way, those exact same girls, the girls who’ve always been there, and realized Cindy was no different even if she floated like an angel with layers of velvet and denim and secondhand silk, even if her skin was clear and shone like milk, even if she walked through this place like a fairy queen. The uniforms change, the times change, but deep inside everybody stays the same.

Marion looked Cindy straight in the eye and took the tab.

And she danced.

“And then I woke up,” Marion said. She shrugged and laughed. “Weird, huh?”

“Woke up where?”

“In bed, in the attic. I hadn’t gotten up at all. I’d fallen asleep, and just dreamed that I did.”

“I had a dream like that once,” Katie said. “Where I dreamed I was where I actually was. It was freaky.”

They were at a table outside the café next door to City Lights, making a pair of coffees last as long as they could. After a morning trying unsuccessfully to find work, Marion had wound up at the bookstore by default. She’d spent a couple hours reading—the staff were cool about people doing that, and the manager (Karl) positively encouraged it—and then looked up to see Katie standing over her. Katie had played it all “Oh, what a coincidence,” but she knew Marion often spent chunks of the afternoon in the store, and the longer they’d sat outside together, the less Marion believed their meeting had been an accident.

“You okay?” she asked eventually, after a pause in the conversation had stretched to a full minute.

Katie took a moment before replying, looking down into her coffee cup. When she looked up, Marion realized how tired the other girl looked. Tired, but resolute.

“I’m fine,” she said. “But I’m done.”

“Done how?”

“I’m out of here. The city. This whole scene.”

Marion felt her stomach turn over. “For real? Why?”

“Because it’s bullshit,” Katie said. “I mean, not all of it. I get that. There’s stuff going down. This is . . . it’s a thing. No doubt. People are going to look back and say wow, far out, man. But right now, for most of us, that’s not in reach. It’s the other side of the windowpane. We can see it, but we can’t touch it. There’re people who are making a real difference, doing real things, having a real good time. I’m not. Any of those things. And I’m done pretending otherwise.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Go home.”

“Doesn’t that feel like . . .”

“Failing? Giving up? Nope.” The girl’s eyes were hard, thoughtful. “There’s a 1% getting things done here. The rest of us are only adding weight. Having ‘fun’—except a lot of the time it’s really not fun—and hanging around. This city right now is like a hundred thousand people jumping in the air at once, and it’s great while they’re still up, but gravity is strong and at some point the love bubble’s going to burst and they’re going to fall back to Earth—hard. ‘Failing’ would be sticking it out until that happens, and finding yourself stranded here afterward. I’m just getting a head start on the inevitable.”

“When are you going?”

“Today. I called my dad last night and told him. He sounded happy, and said cool, and he’d be waiting to give me a hug. He trusted me to make my own decision six weeks ago, and he trusts me again now. Including when I said I might bring a friend back with me.”

“A friend? Who?”

“You. If you wanted. You never really talk about what you left back at home. If it wasn’t good, and you wanted to leave here, there’s a place for you in South Dakota.”

Marion looked at her, blinking rapidly. “But why?”

“When I climbed on the bus that got me here, in the middle of the night, everybody else looked away. You smiled right up at me and said, ‘There’s room next to me.’ You’re a nice person, and my friend, and always will be.”

“Thank you,” Marion managed to say, quietly.

“But that’s a ‘no’?”

Marion realized again how sharp the other girl was, and for a long moment teetered toward a different future. One where she said yes, and traveled with this girl back to the prairies, and they let the world unfold after that. She’d never been to that part of the country, but she imagined herself standing wholesomely in a waving field under a huge sky, smiling, looking into the distance. Maybe wearing a checked shirt. The vision was so strong that she almost thought she could smell the wheat around her, but then she realized the smell was fog instead—the fog that was starting to creep up the street toward where they sat. A fog that smelled of the sea and old things, and said she was staying here because it was where she belonged. The fog that was here even when it wasn’t. A fog that sounded of something.

“I don’t think I’m done here yet,” Marion said.

Katie pulled a pen out of her bag and scribbled something on a napkin. She gave it to Marion. “My address back home,” she said. “And take care of yourself, okay?”

Marion smiled brightly.

Katie got up and looked down at her before walking off down the street, quickly swallowed up by the sea mist.

It was too early to head back to the place where she now slept. There was nothing else she particularly wanted to do. So Marion wound up back in City Lights, in the basement, scrunched up in a tatty chair in the corner trying to read some Kerouac. The light wasn’t good, and the bulbs in the lamps dotted around the space seemed to be flickering intermittently. The pages blurred in front of her.

“Now, what’s going on here?”

Marion looked up to see Karl, the manager, crouched in front of her. He was heavyset, paunchy, with chaotic gray hair that wisped up from his temples to make him look like a kindly owl.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He reached his hand toward her, slowly, giving her plenty of time to understand his intention, and gently ran his thumb over her left cheek, and then the right. She realized both were wet, and she’d been crying, and that’s why the light had seemed strange. And because it was the first time in a long while that someone had done something like that, she wound up telling him about her dream, and that her friend was blowing town, and she wondered whether she maybe should too.

Karl listened and said the right things, and left the right pauses, and let her make up her own mind, and eventually got her laughing about some of the store’s more notoriously weird patrons, and by the end of that she felt okay again.

He walked with her up the stairs and told her to go home and get some sleep—and to eat more, she was looking thin.

“Here’s a thing, though,” he said, before she left.

“What?”

“Your dream. The place where you’re living now. You know that area used to be under water, right?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. I mean, forever ago. But half of the Financial District used to be part of the bay. There was a thing about it a few years back. They found some stuff during an excavation or something. You should look it up.”

She stepped out into the evening. It felt cold, and the street-lights looked strange.

Three hours later she was cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by paper. She’d stopped off at the main library on the way back to the building, expecting it to only take a few minutes. Instead she lost an hour of time—and six bucks she absolutely couldn’t afford—duplicating several old maps, along with sections from a couple of books.

She was holding two of these now, trying to compare them. The picture in her left hand was an old photo. A daguerreotype taken by a man called William Shaw in 1852, showing a wide panorama of the San Francisco Bay, taken from Rincon Point. The far left of the picture held a few shacks and low buildings, and gave a sense of the area stretching behind. Much more interesting was the way in which, as it panned across this part of the bay—a shallow portion called the Yerba Buena Cove—the view became at first dotted and then positively cluttered with sailing ships. Some looked ready to roll, as if they could head straight out for pastures new. Others less so, and a few were in advanced states of disrepair. On the far right of the picture, the two closest to the camera had lost their masts and significant chunks of their sides, looking like sad, bedraggled ghosts.

One of the books had informed her that over sixty thousand people arrived in the city in the 1850s, come to try their luck in the Gold Rush. They came on ships like these, and abandoned them in the bay. Not completely—some had caretakers, men who lived in the gradually declining hulks, much as she now sat alone in this room—but the truth was, almost none of these ships ever sailed the open seas again.

In her other hand she was holding a reproduction of a section of an old map published by a San Francisco company called Britton & Rey, from some years later. It showed approximately the same area as the daguerreotype, though looking rather different. Yerba Bueno Cove, which had once stretched from Rincon Point to Clark’s Point, had disappeared. It remained indicated as a dotted line on the map, but where once had been water now lay streets, some of the main ones—like Market, California, and Sacramento—clearly following what used to be the line of the old wharfs into the cove.

From reading a history from 1922, pages of which she’d also copied, Marion knew how one view had turned into the other. As the city grew and grew (bolstered by men returning empty-handed from the gold fields), the pressure for land increased, especially that which had coveted bay access. By scuppering the old ships still languishing there, speculators had been able to make sanctioned land grabs of small portions of the cove. The section of land under your sunken ship became yours by right. Some had even towed ships into position before dropping them. They then got busy with dumping sand and debris into water, which in parts had only ever been a few feet deep, and before long the entire cove had disappeared into prime real estate that eventually became the Financial District.

Marion looked more closely at the map and confirmed that half of Battery Street had once been in the cove, and all of California south of Montgomery. This included the point where Battery and California intersected.

Where she was sitting, right now. Or at least, where the foot of this building met the ground six stories below.

And more than that. She reached across to the last bundle of photocopies, and pulled out the portion reproducing a newspaper article from 1963. She found the sketch map and bent over it. As she did so, she noticed a couple of spots of moisture on it. She looked up, and watched as another drop of water gathered and fell from the wooden roof a couple of feet above her head.

It wasn’t raining. The fog, perhaps, condensing in sufficient quantities to drip. She kept watching for a moment, but it didn’t happen again.

So she went back to her documents.

It was the sound of shouting that woke her this time. Again, not angry shouting. The distant bellows of men working, attracting the attention of others, calling instructions.

She knew now what the sound reminded her of. The noise you hear at a busy harbor, the hubbub of sailors and the men who work the docks. Loading, unloading. Moving cargo to and fro. She got quickly out of bed and went to the window.

The Moon was bright once again, but it looked different from the night before. Then it had been almost full. Tonight it was only a sharp sliver. That didn’t make much sense, but she immediately forgot about it.

All the other buildings had disappeared.

Though fog billowed below, she could see through it right down to a shallow cove. A few large shapes lurked within it, prows and sterns, and here and there a mast tilted like the charred remnant of a forest fire.

Marion pinched herself. It hurt, as she’d known it would. She grabbed her coat and ran over to the door.

She clattered down the steps as fast as she could, and was breathless by the time she got to the bottom. She yanked the big door open and stuck her head out.

It wasn’t there. What she’d seen from above.

Instead she was looking out onto a grimy backstreet, murky in the shadows of the same old buildings. It looked just the same as it had when she’d returned home from the library. All she could hear was the sound of distant traffic.

On the other side of the street, a middle-aged man shambled by, broken by drugs or alcohol. He shouted something incoherent at her.

She closed the door and walked slowly back up the stairs. She went back to the window and stood looking out, even though all she could see now were the buildings everybody else saw. She couldn’t hear the faraway shouting any more.

But she could hear something else. Again. Something so faint it could almost have been her imagination. A melody. It sounded as though someone must be standing somewhere nearby, perhaps even on one of the rooftops, playing this composition to himself, or perhaps up toward the stars above.

Then it was later.

Back at the house. The one where she’d lived for over a month. Even more crowded now. Even dirtier than it had been. It smelled like damp wood and seawater, like rot and decay.

Even louder too. Different music in every room. Two groups of people who couldn’t play, but played nonetheless. And people who danced nonetheless too, arms flailing, bodies contorting, faces smeared with movement and incoherence.

Marion staggered around for a while, looking for Katie. Her vision was foggy at the edges, and sometimes at the center too. She got lost in one room for ages, and couldn’t find her way out even after she remembered that Katie wouldn’t be there or anywhere else in the house. Katie was gone.

It was getting later.

It was getting darker too.

Then she was in the downstairs hallway and somebody gave her another drink. She was very happy again for ten minutes, laughing and laughing, and made it into the living room. But she fell over there and lay on the floor for a while, as people walked and danced around and over her.

She couldn’t get up because she couldn’t work out which way that was. It seemed like she was lying there on her back for about a thousand years, and then she saw blurry shapes and realized it was Dylan and Cindy, kneeling on either side and leaning over her. She smiled and tried to say hi, but couldn’t.

And then the ceiling was coming down to get her, and she was afraid. The ceiling was covered in mold, dripping with salty water, creaking as in a high wind.

“She’s having a bad trip,” Dylan said, indistinctly.

“There are no bad trips,” she heard Cindy say, as the girl pulled at Marion’s belt buckle. “Only bad people. We have to help them see the light.”

She overslept. When she hauled herself out of bed at 9:30, she felt exhausted. Her calves hurt, as if she’d walked a tremendous distance, though she knew it was probably just because she’d waited for so long in the dead of night, looking out of the window, seeing if it would change. It did not.

She stood under the near-cold of the weak shower for a long time. It smelled weird, rusty, salty. It didn’t help much. Her clothes smelled that way too, when she climbed back into them, and she realized it had been a week or more since she’d taken her scant set of outfits to a Laundromat. She needed to find one soon.

Late morning she walked to the café where Katie worked. The owner confirmed that the girl quit the day before. Marion hadn’t doubted her friend’s resolve. But she’d had to check, and now the city now felt very big. Katie was gone.

After that she walked over to City Lights for want of anything better to do. Karl wasn’t there when she arrived, so she sat in a window seat, watching all the people outside walking back and forth, feeling her eyelids start to droop. She wondered how many of them had real places to go, real things to do, and how many were just ballast, ships rocking gently up and down on a shallow tide, with no onward voyage charted. It seemed busier out there than normal, a lot of people headed in a particular direction, so maybe so.

She woke at the sound of her own name. It wasn’t someone talking directly to her, however.

“Her name’s Marion.” She recognized Karl’s voice, even though he was keeping it low. “She’s good people.”

Marion opened her eyes. She couldn’t see him, and realized he was on the other side of the half-wall, near the register.

“Has she ever actually bought a book?”

Marion recognized this voice too. Carol, the older woman who acted as manager when Karl wasn’t in.

“Yes,” Karl said. “The Naked Ape. I . . . sold it to her. Several weeks ago.”

“What an excellent memory you have. She’s rather young, though, isn’t she?”

“Fuck off, Carol.”

“Teenagers don’t care about the likes of us, Karl. They’re off on their own journey. Isn’t that what they like to say? It’s true. We’re just the lands they leave behind.”

“If you say so.”

“Well, it’s up to you. But even in these enlightened days free love comes with strings attached. Baggage. And to be honest, she smells.”

“She does not.”

“Not always, I’ll admit. But she does today.”

There was a little more of the conversation, but Marion didn’t listen. She pulled herself upright on the window seat, feeling dizzy. Hunger. She’d forgotten to eat anything this morning. Last night too, though then it had been more of a choice, after she’d spent her money on the photocopying. She was about to stand when Karl came through.

“Oh, hi,” he said, as though he’d no idea she was in the store. A lie, but a small one, and forgivable. Kind.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

“You don’t have to.”

She shook her head, though she wasn’t sure what she meant. “I only came by to say thanks.”

“For what?”

“Yesterday. Cheering me up. And telling me stuff. I looked into it.”

“Interesting, huh?”

“You know they’re still there?”

“What are?”

“The boats,” she said. “They sunk them, then filled in over the top. Easier than taking them away or breaking them up. The boats are still down there, and sometimes contractors find the remains when they’re digging foundations or fixing pipes. The BART goes right through one. There’s a map showing where some of the others are.”

“I’d love to see that,” he said. “After you’d gone, I found out something else that might interest you. You told me there was a name on the building you’re staying in. I thought I’d look it up, see if I could find anything about it.”

Marion nodded. Whatever she might think of Carol, one thing was true: Karl was being very thoughtful. Attentive. “I wondered if it was Italian,” she said.

“It is, but it’s not a name. Or at least, I couldn’t find anybody called Pentimento in city history. And you think they’d have had to make at least some mark, to have a building in their name. Wait here a moment.”

He darted off toward one of the stacks. Marion stood, feeling woozy. She saw Carol behind the register, making a not-very-subtle job of watching her. Marion held out her hands, fingers wide, to show she wasn’t trying to steal anything. Carol looked away. Slowly.

“Here,” Karl said, having returned, holding a battered old paperback. “It’s an art history term.”

Marion looked at the page he was holding open. The word was there, with an explanation: Pentimento (noun)—A trace of an earlier painting, beneath the top layer of paint on a canvas. She shrugged.

“Yeah, I know,” Karl said. “Can’t see why you’d name a building for that. So maybe there was someone by that name, and I simply couldn’t find them. I did find out a bit more about the building, though. It was owned by some guy called Erich Zann. There wasn’t much about him. He seems to have been a musician or something, came over from Europe sometime in the early 1920s. Couldn’t find out anything about him since then, I’m afraid, or who owns the building now.”

Marion wasn’t really listening. She could tell that, at the periphery of her vision, Carol was still keeping an eye on her. “She’s right about one thing,” she said.

“Who is?” Karl asked, confused.

“The register bitch. Carol. I do smell funny.”

“You really don’t.”

“You can’t smell it? You can’t smell the sea?”

“No,” he said. But Marion thought he was lying.

She left him standing there awkwardly and walked out of the store, flipping the bird at Carol in passing.

Outside, she joined the crowds now concertedly heading in a particular direction, and finally remembered that today was Tuesday, which meant today was the day—the occasion of the big protest in Haight that Dylan and Cindy and the others at the house had been planning for weeks. Marion thought that she might as well see if, for a few hours at least, she could float up and join the people who were doing something real. Whatever that meant.

And that is how she wound up back at the house, where it all happened, and she learned that the new ways are just the same as the old ones, and that we live in the shadows of the very dark and very old things that came even before that.

A period of time that Marion would never be able to get back to, even in her most lucid moments. Impossible to tell how long it lasted. An hour, two, three. Split-second snapshots were all she brought with her out of it, and they were more than enough. They were far too much.

Dylan was so high she suspected he barely knew what he was doing. But he still did it.

And so did the other men. She recognized a few of them. The rest were strangers. Either new in the house since she’d left, or part of the protest. Random guys. And a couple of girls, rubbing themselves in her face.

In every snapshot, the people doing these things to her were laughing or smiling. Most because they were deliciously high and assumed this was all part of some generous and giddy game, Marion giving up what she had, because that’s how it worked in this big, new happy world they were making. A wet ritual to the new gods, a way of disappearing inside one another, of them all becoming one.

Others had faces that looked like they were smiling, but in the cracks between their teeth and the dark holes in their eyes you could see the old blackness that pools up there between the stars above our heads, and in their grunts you could hear the animals that wrapped themselves in these human disguises. So many hands, so many fingers, so many other things. Going into her, time and again. Like tentacles.

Marion said no. She said no a hundred times. All she heard in response was the distant noise of men shouting, of miserable cargo being loaded.

And most of all, the sound of Cindy laughing.

And then somehow, some time later, in the dark and alone, she was back outside the building. Outside Pentimento. With no memory of how she got out of the house, or away from the people there. No memory of her journey.

She was dressed, more or less. Her face stung from where she’d been hit. Her lips were bruised. She was battered all over, bleeding in places. Every means of entry to her body hurt.

She saw two men in dark suits walking quickly up the street toward her. Cops? Maybe. She should tell them what had just happened. But she didn’t want to. She couldn’t.

She opened the door and fell in.

Got to her knees and slammed the door shut.

Crawled up the staircase. Maybe there was a loud knocking sound from below. She didn’t care and didn’t stop crawling. It was a long way and took a long time, but what she could hear from up there kept her going.

The door was ajar on the top floor, and, yes, the music was coming from the other side.

She pulled herself to her feet, and lurched in.

The old man stood at the other end of the room, in front of the window, with a viol under his chin. The last unearthly note of his music still hung in the air, like smoke, like fog.

“Oh, child,” he said, when he saw her.

“They hurt me,” she murmured. There was no reason for him to care, but she had nobody else to tell.

“They will. People always will.”

“But why?”

“Because there is no ‘us.’ There is no ‘together.’ We are just sheep milling around the same pen. We are all food. Mouthfuls of sustenance for things we cannot see.”

“Why?”

“Because they are hungry.”

“No—why are you here?”

“Every Tuesday,” he said. “I told you. Every Tuesday night I must be here, and do this. Some other days and nights I do it somewhere else. There is a schedule. Recently it has been hard, even more of a struggle. That’s why I let you stay. I thought perhaps you seeing might help, that another set of eyes through the window would keep what’s out there at bay, and our world in place. This layer of it, at least. But you saw through it, didn’t you? You saw to the other side.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do. And it’s too late to change it now.”

He walked over to the table and put his viol in the case lying upon it. “I’m sorry for your pain,” he said. “But that is food for them too, and perhaps you have bought us a little time. For that, I thank you.”

And with that, he left the room.

An unknowable period of time later, Marion realized that the view had changed outside. She had spent the intervening minutes or hours standing in front of the window, but mired deep inside her head, feeling as though she was running after a musical note, chasing it, trying to catch it—the otherworldly note that the old man had left with her in the attic.

Then she was aware of herself again, and seeing past the fractured reflections of herself in the colored glass to what lay beyond.

It was different now.

No buildings, only the dark ships and the fog. The shouts of men as they loaded cargo, and as she stared down at the cove she finally glimpsed what they were shoving aboard the rotting hulks—the lines of pale men and women, naked and filthy and tied together with chains.

Not slaves. Food.

For the things that live in the star-oceans above.

She turned and limped to the door, and descended the flights of stairs, step by painful step, gripping the handrail to stop herself stumbling and falling, half the fingernails on each hand ripped off in her attempts to pull people off her in the house near Haight that afternoon. The walls of the stairwell seemed to pulse as she passed, as if breathing, the ever-moving intestine of some vast and terrible creature as it digested her, as it digested all of them.

But she kept going down. At the bottom, she tugged the street door open and stepped outside. This time the modern city had not reappeared and the men in the suits were gone.

It was how it should be.

Her feet, which were bare—and had been for her staggering return from the house up near Haight—stood upon wood, not paving stones. The splintered planks of a narrow old wharf. She turned left, knowing what she would see.

She knew, because the sketch map in the article she had upstairs showed the positions of the fossil ships that had never made it back out of Yerba Buena Cove—and so she had known that the remains of one had been buried beneath the foundations of this very building. A ship from Europe.

And there it was. Double-masted, but with no sails. The sides damaged and sliding. A ship called the Pentimento.

A gust of wind came rolling down the wharf, turning the fog into a roiling cloud. She heard a slamming sound behind her. The door to the building closing.

She turned, but the building wasn’t there anymore, just the sound. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t brought the key down. There was no turning back now, and that was the way it was.

She staggered instead along the wharf toward the ship, smelling its rotting interior more clearly with every step. A gangplank reached out to a dark, gaping opening in its side.

This was her ship. This was how she could sail away. It was no coincidence that it had lain all these years beneath the building she’d found herself in, to which the city had steered her. It had been waiting for her all this time.

She stepped out onto the gangway, leaving another bloody footstep on the wharf.

Took another step, and then another.

The rotted wood snapped beneath her, and she plunged down into the water.

Marion could swim, but she chose not to. The water was not deep, but she remembered her grandmother telling her once—long, long ago—that you can lose your life in just two inches of water, if you’re facing down.

She turned facedown, and listened to the faint melody born on the fog, or from it, as she slowly drowned.

There is one place you can make your own. A place they can’t stop you being. It is a land in flux, somewhere you find not with a ship but with your feet, a realm that is yours alone. Unique, defensible through constant movement, created through twists and turns and exhausted footstep after footstep.

If you walk far and long enough you’ll find it, and whatever else people do to you, they can’t stop you being there. You can be there forever, in your kingdom of one.

Marion did not die that day, though others did that Summer of Love—before, during, and after the counterculture bubble burst and all those pretty birds lost the wind beneath their wings, and they came crashing to Earth, a city full of offerings to dark forces they’d never understood. In every era there must be a great sacrifice. There must be blood.

Some perished in random accidents. Many—like Dylan, seven weeks later—through overdoses. Others survived against the odds, in some cases for a long time. Cindy lived to the age of seventy, leaving a fifty-year trail of broken lives and casual destruction in her wake, as she unwittingly served the Elder Gods that live beyond the last layer that sane humans can see or understand. She never understood this, or cared, and died a peaceful death that she did not deserve.

Marion did not die in those years either, though for much of the time that followed she had no idea who she was.

Others knew her as the crazy lady on the street corner, or the woman in rags standing screaming at the bay, demanding that the ships come and take her.

Then, when she was a little older, coming up on thirty, as the huddle of filth that spent the day in bushes at the side of the park, talking and whispering to herself.

But every evening she walked, around and around those streets, following a route that made sense only to her, as she was the sole person who knew that her path took her over every single one of the deeply buried hulks of the ships underground, the vessels that had refused her passage, instead trapping her in the city as a final sacrifice, one whose soul bled for them. Year after year after year.

One scream at a time.

Until one weekend, midafternoon, when Marion was nearly forty years old, crouched in a doorway right by the Pentimento building, gnawing on a three-day-old pizza crust.

A family of tourists slowed to look as they passed. Twin girls in their early teens winced at the acrid smell coming from the woman on the ground. Their father shook his head, and tried to keep them moving, wishing they hadn’t taken this shortcut—sympathetic, but knowing there was nothing that could be done. That every city holds creatures like these, and they belong there, as part of their fabric.

His wife stopped dead in her tracks, however. Despite the thick layers of grime, she could see who lay below.

“Marion?” she said.

Marion looked blearily up at her, seeing the handsome, confident woman Katie had become. The girl who’d seen through it all, back then, and survived to come out the other side, not just in one piece, but twice the size.

It broke Marion’s heart, the distance, and she tried to turn away.

But Katie was firm, and reached down to take Marion’s hand, to pull her to her feet. To yank her back up out of a shallow, turgid bay that nobody else could see.

“Come with us,” she said.

Marion’s voice had soured and broken long ago, and was now little more than a rasp. “Where . . . ?”

“To South Dakota,” Katie said. “You should have done it then, but you can still do it now.”

“But how can I get there?”

“There’s room next to me. And it’s time to go home.”