THIRTY-EIGHT

By four o’clock Lackner and I were atop windswept Twin Peaks. Below us, the city stretched from the bay to the ocean. We could see everything from the piers at the Embarcadero to the shuttle buses in Golden Gate Park.

Lackner had given me his office files, radiation readings that’d been compiled over the last few months, but none of it meant more than an old phone book. I needed to be outdoors, to see the contamination.

“Take a look, Ricky, and make a prediction.”

I worked myself into a trance and first looked at the Tenderloin. The soup kitchen line at St. Anthony’s Dining Room was two blocks long and direct from a 1930s Dorothea Lange photograph. The sidewalks were congested with vendors selling books and clothes, hustlers pacing by the check-cashing store on Market. Up the street was the citadel-like Twitter headquarters.

I trained my powers on the Haight-Ashbury. Homeless crusty punks were powwowing in the Panhandle. They sat in a ring by the basketball courts, straight out of central casting from Lord of the Flies.

I focused my energies on the Mission. Salvadoreno cowboys in big hats promenaded down Clarion Alley. The regal New Mission movie house’s marquee was an angel of grief backlit by the palm trees on Mission Street. Further away, UCSF’s Mission Bay complex confronted the crosstown freeway overpass for supremacy of the sky.

“What do you say, Ricky?”

“Nothing good.”

I did a one-eighty and took in the city’s westside. The Bank of the Orient and Wu’s Healing Center on Clement Street bustled with customers. The Great Highway teemed with traffic running south to Fort Funston and north to the Cliff House and the Golden Gate Bridge. Ocean Beach was drenched in Fukushima waste. I was done divining.

“I’ve got enough information.”

“So what do you think?”

“It’s bad.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets as more rain flogged the backside of Twin Peaks, white fog lapping against the condos on Diamond Heights. Despite my cashmere coat, I was chilled. My kicks were totaled, heroically kept intact with duct tape.

“How bad?”

Heller said it best nearly two weeks ago at Eternal Gratitude: “Ricky, you should be on anti-depressants, some kind that has a sedating component to it. You’re the most stressed out person I’ve ever met.”

But I didn’t need anti-depressants. What I needed was sleep. A hot meal. A reason to believe everything would be all right in a world beyond repair. Lackner believed I was in sync with his strategy. He was off-base. I decided to make him suffer for it.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow, okay?”

“That’s not acceptable. You’re working for the city on the clock.”

“Then dock me.”

“But we need to know now.”

“Fuck you, man. I’ll talk when I’m ready.”

I limped down the hill’s slope to Crestline Drive, to where Lackner had parked his Ford Crown Victoria. Grudgingly, he followed. He opened the driver’s door and got behind the wheel.

“I should make you walk.”

I vaulted into the front passenger seat. He started the car, turned on the radio. The jazz strains of Pharoah Sanders’s “You’ve Got to Have Freedom” heated our ears as dusk, solitude’s favorite hour, curtained the city.