Curious Notions

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Every now and then, Lucy Woo could pretend San Francisco was a great city in a great country. Sometimes, when she hurried south toward Market Street, the fog would be just starting to lift. Through the thick, wet, salty mist, the big buildings on Market would look as fine as if they were new and in good repair. They loomed up like dinosaurs, grand and imposing.

And dead. When the sun came out, it pricked pretense. It showed the long-unpainted bricks, the peeling plaster, the broken windows. Some of the buildings still had cracks from the quake of 1989, and that was more than a hundred years ago now. Here and there, vacant lots and piles of rubble showed where buildings had been pulled down or fallen on their own. Lucy stayed as far from the rubble as she could. Squatters built shacks and caves from it. Some of them were harmless. Some weren't.

Traffic was a swarm of people on foot and on bicycles. You made your own path and you pushed ahead. If you didn't, you'd never get anywhere. Trucks and rich people's cars crawled along. They couldn't go anywhere in a hurry, either. Even ambulances got stuck. People died on the way to the hospital because they couldn't get there soon enough.

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