Daphne_A Novel Read online

  When you insulate yourself against disaster, you’re always waiting for it to arrive.

  TWENTY

  SUMMER, REAL SUMMER, DIDN’T ARRIVE UNTIL SEPTEMBER. Then every day, eighty-five, ninety, the skies a pale, pure blue, the parks thronging with people in various states of undress and elation, the bars up and down 16th and Valencia and 24th pumping out desire and sweat, everyone out, searching, scrambling to gather up all the bliss the city promised—finally, in September, it felt like the San Francisco we all need to imagine.

  The homeless, too, were out in force, selling old paperbacks, VHS tapes, and scrounged trinkets on blankets on the sidewalk, the junkies scoring in broad daylight, nodding out against my building in the hazy afternoon sun. The guy with the stringless violin played his excruciating concertos down in the BART. And Jeff was still on his corner. He’d give me a bleary smile as I rushed by on my way to work, drawl, “Hey, pretty girl.” But as often he didn’t even notice me, his eyes milky with curdled ecstasy.

  Ollie had been glued to the TV—the hordes on Wall Street picketing and milling—and to my phone, reading hastily constructed websites with pages and pages of unformatted text, endless speeches and the minutes of “general assemblies.” He paced, waiting for updates or groaning at the snide pronouncements of some perfectly coiffed CNN anchor. “As if you’d even understand their agenda, you perma-tanned pod lady!”

  “Why don’t you get your own phone?” I said.

  “Sorry, Daph, I’m just . . .” Then he’d go off on another rant at the TV. He started talking about buying a ticket to New York. “Listen, let’s just go.”

  “It’s on every hour of the day. What else is there to see? Or do you just want to go live in a tent and antagonize some cops?”

  “It’s making the movement visible! And if the cops let themselves get used as private security for the kleptocracy, then, yes. God yes!”

  I told him that if the protestors really wanted change, they should call their senator, raise money, donate, go out canvassing. They talked about real democracy, but no one wanted to slog through legal challenges, legislation, lobbying, fielding candidates, campaigning. “Too much hard work. All of the drums and chanting and meetings and speeches”—I grabbed my phone from him, tossed it on the couch, took his hands in mine and wrestled with him, letting myself brush up against a little attack—“they’re just to make people feel like something’s happening.”

  “Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you voted for the fucking ‘Maverick.’ ”

  “I voted for the guy I thought could do the job.” We were on the couch now, poking and tickling each other. “Simple as—Ah! Don’t make me laugh!”

  I was being coy. That night in 2008, I’d wanted to be out in the street with that beautiful mess of people hugging strangers and climbing on top of cars to pop champagne. From my window, I’d watched a Muni bus get stranded and abandoned in the middle of a block of revelers, a whole city paralyzed by its joy.

  “I know you don’t like activists,” Ollie said. “But maybe those animal rights guys have a point. Global capitalism only works if you keep everyone else in a cage.”

  He’d been getting a little personal lately. Someone had been stencil-spraying SAN FRANCISCO: SANCTUARY OF THE RICH on every corner in the Mission, and Ollie had started saying “Okay, back to the sanctuary” whenever we’d head home to the Grove.

  “Yeah, but you know what a caged animal does?” I snapped and bit at his fingers, getting a little sloppy with my aim. Then we were kissing. I played with the condition, let my eyelids and jaw go, brought them back, let myself ragdoll a little in his arms. We’d been going further over the last few weeks. He’d let me get him off, then I’d go over on my back, let him tease me with his fingers and tongue. Once, the outfit I was wearing got peppered with the sawdust he always brought home on his clothes, and I said, “Blow it off,” and he did, and I quivered and shimmered with pleasure. But when I felt myself teetering on the precipice, a breath away from tumbling over, the buzzing raced up, too, and I pulled away. A couple of times, I went limp when I really wasn’t, closed my eyes, splayed out my arms. Maybe I fooled him. Maybe it made him feel better. I’d let him fuss with my hair, run his fingers along my body. And maybe I was content just to lie there, cocooned by his presence.

  But then I couldn’t stand to be cooped up inside. We roamed the neighborhood in the sultry evenings, climbed Bernal Hill, sweating and panting.

  “I must be getting old,” I said. “I feel like puking after that.”

  We stood on the ridge, caught our breaths looking out over our gently thrumming city. “Speaking of which,” Ollie huffed, “not too late to do something for your birthday.”

  Oh, Jesus, my thirtieth. I did not want to think about my thirtieth.

  “Let’s rent out a space,” he said. “Sound system, couple of kegs. Blow the whole thing out. Or a surprise party? We could throw you a surprise party!”

  “Ollie . . .”

  “What, no points for at least attempting a joke?”

  The evening sun spun threads of honey over downtown and the bay, draping everything with nostalgia, echoes of a life I almost could’ve lived here in this golden peninsula on the edge of the world. “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Plan it. Just don’t tell me what’s coming.”

  THAT MONDAY, HIDALGO knocked on my door. I knew what he needed to talk about. I apologized for not getting back to him about overtime, mumbled something about the schedule being on the back burner since the break-in.

  “I know you been real busy.” Hidalgo took his hat off, looked at me with eyes reeling with worry. “Sorry to be asking. It’s just . . .” They’d found out why Angela was sick, a bad mold allergy, which meant they could finally stop taking her to the doctor. But he’d paid to have his building retested—didn’t trust his cheap-ass landlord—and found spores everywhere. They had to move, and with how expensive rents had gotten . . . “I’ll work whatever they need. Or maybe, you know, they need someone to clean at night? Whatever they got, whatever.”

  I heard myself discoursing on MedEval’s earnings reports, they’d had some shortfalls, they needed everyone to tighten their belts. This man was practically begging me, and here we both were saying “they, they, they.” Not “you,” not “I.” The taste in my mouth was so awful I kept gulping my coffee just to get it out.

  When I finished, he murmured, “Thanks anyway,” pulled his hat back on, turned up his heavy metal, and was about to slip his headphones back on.

  “The music,” I said, “how can you stand it?”

  “Qué?” I’d taken him by surprise.

  “It’s so angry. How can you listen to it all day? Doesn’t it make you so angry?”

  “The music?” he said. “Man, I can fall asleep to the music.”

  “Jesus, you can?”

  “It’s everything else keeps me awake.”

  “Right.” I took up my coffee again and swallowed hard, and the space between what I could do and what he needed grew and grew. All of the sacrifices you had to make to raise a sick kid, all of the pain of being powerless to change anything—I thought of my mother, wanted to help, had no idea how I could. “Thanks for coming in to talk.”

  “De nada,” he said and closed the door behind him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  WE WERE GOING TO ANOTHER CONCERT AT THE Tubes. Yet another perfect, temperate evening, and I wanted to drink beer and hear some music, erase myself for an hour or two. After ignoring music most of my life, it turned out I didn’t just like but actually required it.

  “Hey,” Ollie said, as the BART howled up from under the bay into the evening sun over the Oakland dockyards, its skeletal cranes throwing long, geometric shadows.

  “Hey, what?”

  He gave me a pinched, foggy look, like I was going to have to pry it out of him. “I was thinking maybe . . . we could make a stop downtown. Before we go to the show. But only if you think you’d . . .” More hes
itation. “There’s supposed to be, well, kind of a rally. I just wanted to take a look. A quick look. Very quick.”

  “A march? I really don’t know if I . . .”

  I surprised myself by considering it, and Ollie leapt into that gap. “We’ve got time. The music won’t start till eight or nine. We won’t have anything to do. Anyway, we’d probably only catch the end. The march was supposed to start an hour ago.”

  Our flirty, antagonistic debates over the last few weeks must’ve been working on me. I wanted to see it. Or at least stand on the edge for a minute and peer in. “You set me up.” I poked him playfully in the ribs. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  We got off at 12th Street/Oakland. The platform was all but deserted. Up above, we could hear the muffled bark of an amplified voice and the dull, rhythmic echoing of drums in the distance. “Shit, they already started,” Ollie said. “Maybe we can catch up.”

  He practically bounded up the escalator. Above us, the drums and megaphone seemed to be trailing off, an army already gone to battle. But as we emerged into the close, concrete heat of the East Bay, all around us, enclosing even the top of the escalator, were marchers. They hadn’t moved down Broadway but only paused to listen to a speech. “There!” Ollie said, pointing to the far side of the street, where a man on a small platform hunched over a microphone, his voice echoing and splintering off the downtown buildings, as if he were everywhere:

  “Everyone’s been asking, Why are you marching? Well, I say, Why aren’t you? We can’t just speak our minds on Facebook, in newspapers, magazines. We’ve got to show up. And here we are, America! Wall Street wants us to just shut up. They’re hoping and praying we get tired, that we’re just gonna give up. Then they can get back to robbing the ninety-nine percent, to robbing the planet, polluting the Gulf of Mexico, writing themselves blank checks we’re all gonna have to cash, robbing from tomorrow to get paid today. So, now we’re out here. We’re marching to say this is our country. This is our world. And this street—this street you’re standing on right now, this street laid down with our taxes, swept up and kept up by people like us, with businesses run by people like us, with music and poetry and justice made by people just like us—well, that means this is our street! Oakland, you feel me? Whose streets?!” the speaker cried out.

  And on cue the crowd roared back. “Our streets!”

  “Whose streets?!”

  “Our streets!”

  It went on like that, the call and response. Ollie offered his shoulder for me to lean on, but I shrugged him off. I was just far enough outside all of this. “Our streets,” I said crisply, remembering volleyball, the wild pulse of the crowd, feet thundering on the bleachers, songs and cheers cannonading around the gym, the bright, untamable energy, life-eating routine being burned away, everyone yearning together for the same thing, public emotion so much more annihilating than private. “Whose streets?!” I yelped, caught up. “Our streets!”

  Ollie had crept up a few paces. He was chanting so loudly, so percussively, he was going hoarse. People kept turning around to look at us; I didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed. Not wanting to lose him, I stepped forward, too. Just then, a newly arrived group pushed in between us. “Ollie . . .” He looked back at me, his eyes dialing back into focus, groped for the sleeve of my jacket, tried to pull me toward him. The voice on the platform rose: “We got these CEOs in our crosshairs! Let’s pull the trigger, y’all!” The crowd convulsed. “Whose streets?! Our streets!!”

  “Shit, Ollie . . .” Bodies pressed in from all sides. No one could move with more than tiny, shuffling steps, but we were all being shoved forward. I tried to hang on to him. “Ollie, please, I need to get . . .” My voice was buried under a sudden eruption of drums and whistles.

  We held tight to each other’s clothes. The march kept jerking forward, then coming to an abrupt halt, then forward again. Finally, Ollie pulled me through a knot of kids in black hoodies. “You okay?” I shook my head. “Over there.” He pointed to the doorway of a nearby office building. “We’ll duck in there, let everyone pass.” The drums and chants battered in from every direction. “Excuse me,” Ollie said, as we edged toward the doorway. “Sorry, sorry.” I’d been bearing down, trying to stay calm. But, god-fucking-dammit, he picked the shittiest times to be polite.

  Another amplified voice joined the one sounding out the chants, louder, deeper but leaden, monotone. The first voice crackled back, jabbed and wheeled; the second kept droning, “If you do not disperse . . . without proper permits . . . following the designated route . . .” The crowd started chanting, “Fuck the police! Fuck the police!”

  I glanced behind me, saw two cops in riot gear and masks, close enough to catch the looks in their eyes. One was icy, implacable, the other puzzled, as if caught in some too vivid dream. His partner raised a black metal tube and angled it toward the sky. The puzzled cop looked over at him, raised his own, flinched as it flared orange and yellow. For a moment I thought: fireworks. Then two soft, hollow pops sounded. Fifty yards ahead of us, a sulfur yellow cloud billowed, a loud cry went up—then someone rammed into me and everything blurred into lurching slow motion . . .

  The crowd buckling, splitting tectonically, everyone scattering all at once, tugging T-shirts up over their noses and mouths, boys in black hoodies kneeling, emptying water bottles into bandanas, tying them on, soft smooth intent faces disappearing into the thickening smoke, two girls with red backpacks with white crosses hacking coughing digging at their eyes, another hollow pop, a second cloud, vile burning taste, eyes all around me white with wildness—willows, willows, willows—a kid with a white mask pushed up on his forehead gagging, a woman with tears and mucus all down her face, a guy with long black hair staggering toward me in camouflage—the army, I thought, they’ve sent in the army—clasping his bloody forehead, staring at his bloody hand, reeling off into a clump of black bandanas hurling bottles at the police, the yellow smoke momentarily blowing away from me, finding myself in a little pocket of calm, maybe able to walk right out of this, Jesus, a miracle, turning back to tell Ollie, to pull us away from all of this, and finding him gone.

  The chaos went still. I stood in the center of it, a hard knot in my stomach. It occurred to me, then, to feel surprise, fear, even rage: Of course he’d brought me here. Better to endanger me than miss this, all to prove his holy righteousness; the second type, the curers, the crusaders, were all the same. Instead I just stood there, staring blankly as another group of protestors rushed my way.

  Someone crashed headlong into me. I stumbled, regained my footing—collided with a guy running full sprint. I managed to throw out my arms to catch myself. Then I was curled in a ball on the gritty street, voices and people all around me. I squeezed my eyes closed, heard shouts and cries, grunts of confusion, scattered footfalls. Someone knelt over me, touched my shoulder, a woman’s voice: “Honey, you okay? Honey, talk to me. We’ll get the medics over. We’ll . . .” She was brushed away in the chaos. Pebbles and grit scattered against my face. Another waft of gas hit my nostrils. A raft in the middle of the current, I thought, a man on the raft, waving. “Shit, look out!” someone shouted. Then I heard a crunch, a boot coming down on my little finger and ring finger, and every corner of my brain flashed blank, phosphor white.

  Seconds or minutes later, I heard someone calling me. Everything echoed. I concentrated, trying to ignore my throbbing fingers. Somehow I’d been rolled over, the sun warm on the back of my neck. Someone was touching me again. I knew the touch.

  “Thank God, thank God”—Ollie’s voice tight with panic—“I’m sorry, I didn’t know where . . .” He caught his breath. “Are you okay? Christ, are you? Please, just—”

  I put out a hand and touched his leg. Another flurry of footsteps padded around us. He knelt over me, making his body a shelter for mine. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” His breath rushed in my ear. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  I pushed myself up to my knees. We both knelt there, watching
the crowd scatter toward the south. “This cop,” Ollie explained, “he grabbed me, put a zip strip around my wrists. I got rounded up in this containment area or something. But they cut us loose . . . Fuck, fuck, fuck. If I’d known they were going to use fucking gas . . .” He was hyperventilating. “Daphne, are you . . . ?”

  “Train,” I said between coughs, my eyes and nose still streaming.

  On the ride back, he held me tight. Or tried to—he was trembling. I was steady. “Your fingers,” he said. “What happened?” They were turning purple, swelling. But now all I could feel was the knot in my stomach, tightening.

  MY PINKIE WAS BROKEN but not my ring finger. A resident at UCSF Mission Bay set it and wrapped a splint with foam. I touched it experimentally. The pain made me suck a sharp breath. But after a cab dropped us at the Grove, the first thing I did was pull Ollie up to the loft. I started battering him with kisses. “Easy, easy,” he said, bewildered. I kicked off my jeans, pulled off my shirt and underwear. “What about your fingers? They said you should take a pain—”

  I got on top. My jaw drooped. I put my hands on his chest to stay upright. I felt it building, flopped onto my back, slurred, “Now.” He was inside me, kept glancing down at my fingers. “Keep going, keep go—” My eyes closed.