Prologue

You thunder up the hill, each footstep echoing in the autumn air like the familiar cracks of gunshots on the range. Sweat streams down your face, a pungent medicine that soothes the burns that are spreading inwards, the wave of hot fire, igniting the veins that run under your skin. Every vein in your body is throbbing now, oscillating like the harp’s strings when they are plucked. Except the harp is burning, and each vein is a fuse, flames racing down them, chasing one collective bomb.

You look down at your hands and see that they, similarly, are flushed red and that the sweat is dripping from them like candle-wax onto the dining table. You want to stop, to turn back, for fear of fainting and being found two hours later, sprawled across the sidewalk, by a street sweeper making the Saturday morning rounds. But you can’t. You won’t. You must keep going.

All is silent in the misty morn, high in the fog-world of San Francisco’s Russian Hill. It is your lonely sanctuary, and you know if you cry out nobody will hear you. Your right elbow brushes a cloud as you pass the tall tree at the intersection of Larkin and Filbert Streets, which you can barely see even though it is a mere five paces away. There is not much longer to go, you remind yourself, but you are lying. The fog does nothing in the slightest to tame the inferno consuming you from the inside out.

Will you be too late?

A woman and her dog step out from the house to your left, close the door, and descend twenty steps in ten seconds until they’re standing by the sidewalk. The mist swirls and eddies around their faces, and all of a sudden they look like gods, the gods of the unsung yet powerful parts of the world. Gods of the sunrise, the ocean’s waves, and the sky at night.

You reach the top of the hill at last and pass Hyde Street. On some days, the cable car comes whistling down the avenue, as free-spirited and carefree as a purebred on the open plains, or a Roomba let loose in a warehouse. It echoes the songs of the birds that flit from rooftop to rooftop. Today, Hyde Street is lonely, just like the rest of the world, as it bends its back carrying the burden of the city’s fog-roof. A solitary Toyota Camry passes by, carrying its stone-faced driver and his sleeping dog.

You begin the descent down the far side of the hill. The gunshots sounding from under your feet become even louder and more frequent. Both you and the imaginary shooter at the range are on the home stretch, them firing off a rapid onslaught of ammo while you pound your way down the steep incline. Coit Tower looms in the distance, a beacon making sure you don’t stray from your course.

“What if it’s too late?” you think to yourself. “What if they are all out, and there’s no more copies?” If that’s the case, the coming weekend will become a bottomless pit of boredom, an eternity of watching the clock slowly tick its way towards Monday. You didn’t come all the way back to the New School of San Francisco on this forsaken morning, ventured out into a world as deserted as the bottom of the tip cup at the cafe on the corner by your house, just to be too late and there to be nothing left.

You sprint the final stretch, and your head begins to pulsate until it feels like with one more step it will just fall off and roll down the lonesome streets and into the Bay. And maybe there you would make company to the fishes and the plastic bottles sitting in the muck. But no, you are standing in front of the gate to the all-too-familiar redbrick building that makes up your destination. This moment of triumph, of raw unfiltered victory, when you feel ready to rip open the universe and swallow all its planets whole, this is what the world spins for.

I step out of the building, and walk to you, knowing exactly what you want. Without a word, not even a whisper, I give you the last copy of the NewsCool Chronicle and turn around, heading back towards the building.

After a few seconds, you turn around as solemnly and silently as appropriate for such a morning, a pristine mirror of me. As you stride slowly back up the hill, catching your breath, you begin to whistle and a wide grin spreads across your face. You now hold a world in your hands, unspoilt and ready for exploring.