Among the Living (54 page)

They call it
nightside.
The second shift at the newspaper. The business offices are closed, but the guts of the paper are churning. It’s the time of day when it all looks most like you’d expect a newspaper shop to look. Maybe no chain-smoking, green-shade-wearing editors anymore, shouting “Get me rewrite!” to the copy boy, not even any clattering typewriters these days, but busy, purposeful, noisy, even dramatic. That was nightside at the
Chronicle
. There was work to do. In the morning there would be San Franciscans waiting to be pulled back into their communal lives by the slap of the paper on the driveway, on the doorstep, on the plush green cut pile carpet of the Mark Hopkins.

Like the coroner’s office, the
Chron
by night was surprisingly wide open as far as security went. It wasn’t midnight yet. Maybe the bomb-throwers came around later. Jimmy parked the Porsche on the street, on Mission Street, and came in one of the workers’ entrances. The first floor was where the presses were, where the pressmen wore square hats folded out of newsprint, at least the old-timers, what was left of them. Jimmy came in as if he belonged there, and nobody stopped him.

Duncan Groner wasn’t in the city room. They said he was in the library, what they used to call the morgue. (Back at the coroner’s, did they call it the library now?) Once Jimmy had gotten up to editorial, he had run into a few questions. He talked his line, spoke Groner’s name. He got an escort, a kid. Good thing, because the library was in the windowless bowels of the place. He never would have found it on his own. There were big leather couches. Groner was asleep on one, flat on his back, his hands over his sternum, fingers laced. He looked like he was positioned to go down the chute at a water park. Only he was snoring. The kind of snoring that comes with exclamation marks at the end of each declining sentence. One terminating snort was loud enough to wake him. His eyes popped full open.

“How long have you been there?”

“Just walked in,” Jimmy said.

“I’ve been
sleeping
lately,” Groner said, sitting up. “Odd.”

Jimmy didn’t say anything.

“Have
you
?” Groner said.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“And
wanting to
other times when I’m unable.”

“It must be spring,” Jimmy said.

“That’s it,” Groner said. “Spring.” He extracted his flask from his trouser pocket and popped the cap and took a boy-oh-howdy. “Spring in September.”

“I don’t get any blue from you,” Jimmy said, looking down on him on the couch. “Same with a lot of the Sailors here. Some do, some don’t.”

“I probably extinguished it,” Groner said and raised his bottle to finish the thought.

“A clean-cut kid down on the waterfront working at a crab stand . . . A pair of thug boys I saw beating another Sailor, my first night in town . . .”

“I’ve always heard the azure edge was stronger down your way,” Groner said. “More visible. Readable.”

“I never heard that,” Jimmy said.

“Funny, you don’t look bluish,” Groner said. Before his nap he had taken off his shoes, placed them side by side on the carpet next to the couch. He retrieved them, slipped them on. When he went to tie the laces, his fingers were uncooperative, a little shaky. You couldn’t tell if it was age or alcohol.

He must have noticed being noticed. “ ‘Sure, I’m a old gnawed bone now,’ ” he said in a rangy voice, “ ‘but don’t you boys think the spirit is gone. I’m all set to shoulder a pickax and shovel anytime somebody’s willing to share expenses.’ Now there’s a movie.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. Why don’t you make them like that anymore down there in Lost Angeles?”

“I don’t make movies.”

“I meant the collective, editorial
you
.”

“So why are all these people killing themselves?” Jimmy said. He was still standing over the other.

Groner leaned back on the couch. “If you ask me, a better question is why not?”

Jimmy waited him out.

“I guess the ten of them this morning prompted this,” Groner said.

“And then there was another one tonight,” Groner finished. “But the overnight ones were the headline. It’s a helluva story, I have to admit. Dayside got it, unfortunately.”

“The one tonight was the girl I told you about,” Jimmy said.

Groner heard that and knocked off some of the “colorful character” show.

“The girl I was supposed to be watching out for.”

“We didn’t have a name for her.”

“Lucy,” Jimmy said. “Her name was Lucille. I didn’t know her last name.”

“Hers was one of the better ones, actually,” Groner said. “Very public.” In the next breath, he said, “I was considerably less . . .
entertaining
myself.”

You never asked a Sailor how they’d died. You waited for them to say it, if you cared to know one way or another. Jimmy didn’t usually care. He had found out early that it never really added much to his understanding of another Sailor man or woman, so he never asked. Some people needed to tell you. If they decided to tell you, you listened. Or at least stood there and let them empty the bucket.

“A bullet to the brain, which I thought at the time was the source of my gloom,” Groner said. “Small caliber. A little chrome-plated Colt .25 automatic. I thought I was minimizing the mess. I had no surviving family, so I guess my concern was for the sensibilities of what we now call ‘the first responders.’ I didn’t know then how quickly they become dulled to the offal.”

“What year?” Jimmy said, surprising himself.

“Nineteen twenty-two,” Groner said. “So I didn’t even have the excuse of the crash, Black Friday. It was a Black
Tuesday
, actually. I was fifty-one.”

“What are the overall suicide numbers now? How many total?”

“Aha, you’re looking for a reason! For your Lucy’s act of negation.”

“Is there anything that ties them together?”

“United only in death . . . Twenty-eight Romeos and nineteen Juliets. Which is unusual, the ratio, the high number of women. Usually the men far outpace the women. As whites do blacks. Hispanics are moving up on the outside rail. Asian women, almost never. Asian men, after the age of sixty. Before sixty, they lag behind almost everyone, hari-kari, seppuku in popular entertainment aside. They’re spread all over the city, which is something of a surprise.”

“What about suicide contagion?” Jimmy asked.

Duncan Groner wasn’t the sort to raise an eyebrow in surprise, but
something
registered on his face. And it took him a beat before he spoke, as if things had to be aligned in his head. Or realigned.

“You
are
engaged in the subject,” he said.

“Well?”

“Even as we speak, I’m sure great committees are meeting, with the wringing of Great Hands,” Groner said. And here he paused with intent. “A number of the suicides now appear to be in response to the earlier ones, to the publicity. In response to, as you say, ‘the contagion,’ a wonderfully melodramatic phrase.”

Suicide contagion wasn’t the result of some recent research on Jimmy’s part. He’d run into it before.

“Copycats.”

“Not exactly,” Groner said. “More like,
Now I see that life is maybe not so sacrosanct after all
. With people hurling it at the fronts of buildings and such.” He stood and put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and said, “Something we in the brotherhood have known for some time.”

Jimmy looked at the bony, skeletal hand on his shoulder.

“I’m off work,” Groner said. “Rested and refreshed. Let’s go pretend it’s happy hour. I know a place where Sailors drink free. And freely.”

The people of San Francisco didn’t
look
like they all wanted to die. Of course it was morning and, if the sun wasn’t exactly shining, it was up there somewhere on the far side of the “marine layer.” Jimmy was walking. Marina Green. They didn’t
look
suicidal. They didn’t look like the creeping cloud of death had o’ertaken them. The people of San Francisco looked like they wanted to play tennis, at least the ones standing at the back of the open hatch of the Porsche Cayenne all in white, in the parking lot of the private waterfront tennis club. They looked like they were thinking ahead to dinner, the ones coming out of the Safeway with a bag of groceries in each arm, a stick of French bread sticking out of one, just like in the movies. They looked like they wanted to go to work, the ones going past him in their cars all fresh and clean in their laundered starched shirts, in their ties, with their suit jackets folded lengthwise at the collar, like a butterfly, and laid over the back of the empty passenger seats beside them.

Die? They looked like they wanted to jog in matching outfits, earbuds in their ears. Then meet for brunch. They looked like they’d just had their teeth bleached and wanted everybody to see ’em. They looked like they wanted to sail the bay in forty-footers, loop around Alcatraz, out and back under the Golden Gate, the kids up front with their legs over the side. They looked like death was the furthest thing from their minds.

An old familiar feeling came over Jimmy, that
I’m here all alone
feeling. He had his own kind of hope, but he didn’t have it this morning.

When he made it back to where he’d parked the car there was a white flyer tucked under the wiper, white with a rainbow. A free concert on the Panhandle in Golden Gate Park. Three or four bands, food, holistic healers . . . Just like the last thirty-some years hadn’t happened. Over the rainbow, it said: Celebrate Life!

Midmorning. The Haight was just coming alive. The sun had broken through. Down at the corner on Central, down the hill from Lucy’s, the white-haired, ponytailed man who lived over the wine store with his black-tongued dog was out on the side of his place with a hose, watering a color-coordinated square of flowers around the base of a sapling staked out in the tilted sidewalk. The chow sat on the stoop in another of his old-man poses.

The ponytailed man made a point of not looking up when Jimmy parked the Porsche against the curb halfway up the hill, halfway between the corner and the Victorian apartment.

The nonlook made Jimmy go up to him. Or, rather, down.

“How’s it going?”

“Good morning,” the man said. He kept watering, kept his eyes on the stream as if he had to watch it or it would all go wrong.

“The woman who was staying on the top floor, up at the corner . . .” Jimmy began. The man nodded, nodded in a way that said he knew what Jimmy was going to say next.

“So you know she’s dead?”

The man nodded again. Jimmy got the idea somehow that this one had known more death than most, maybe even more suicides. But he still watered flowers.

“I was looking for the boy,” Jimmy said.

The man shook his head.

“Her brother.”

Nothing.

“You haven’t seen him?”

The man shook his head again.

Jimmy decided to see if he could blow things wide open. “I’m an investigator. From L.A. I followed her here.”

At least now the man looked at him.

“I was supposed to keep her safe, keep an eye on her, anyway.”

“Nothing you could do,” the other said.

Jimmy saw him look up the street. Machine Shop was standing on the corner next to the apartment, on the corner across from the Catholic Home.

Jimmy thanked the man with a wave. The man said
No problem
with a lift of his head. The rain from the garden hose kept falling on the petunias, which by now must have been screaming for help.

Jimmy climbed back up to the corner. “You got leaves in your hair,” Jimmy said to Machine Shop.

“I slept up there, in the park,” Shop said. Then he heard what he’d said.
Slept.
“I’ve been sleeping lately. Funny.”

“Why up there? You got a place, right?”

“I thought the kid might have gone up into the park,” Shop said. “You know, when you can’t stand to be around the other person’s stuff . . .”

Jimmy knew.

“Actually, I used to live up in here.”

“In Buena Vista Park?”

“Sometimes,” Shop said. “First Days. First Month.”

Maybe Machine Shop was about to tell the rest of his story, after the part about the plug-in radio landing in his bathtub.

But Shop stopped short. “So what are we going to do?”

Jimmy looked up at the apartment. “You sure he’s not up there?”

“I pushed the button. I heard it ringing. I tried last night, this morning. There was one light burning all night, in the hallway. He’s not up there.”

“Well then, let’s break in,” Jimmy said.

There was a way around the back of the apartment building, up a little alleyway where they stored the garbage cans, behind a white latticework shield. They really
were
fixing up the Haight. Even the alleys looked healthy.

“How many times you done this?” Jimmy said, when they were standing in the middle of the living room.

“I’ve done it. Seeing what’s in the icebox, that’s what creeps me out,” Shop said. “Or a half an apple, on the table.”

“Like the people at Pompeii,” Jimmy said.

“Pompeii. I used to put that shit on my hair,” Shop said, which was another way of saying,
Can we talk about something else?
He walked off toward the bedroom.

There were two toothbrushes in a Coke glass on the back of the white old-style pedestal porcelain sink. Hygiene, right up to the end. For Lucy, anyway. The boy had left his behind, wherever he’d gone. Jimmy had to find him. He had a special worry for the people left behind. The faucet was dripping, slow, three seconds apart. With the kind of sound that yanks you out of bed at midnight, that a Sailor can hear when nobody else does, day or night, anywhere. Anything like a clock.