ABSTRACT
The last time he went home, cool but summery winds accompanied the car as Deirdre drove, clicking the cruise control switch off and on, off and on—an old habit she had never shaken. He watched as the trees around the hospital gradually receded, then stared as tightly packed city buildings passed him by. They were trapped, for a moment, behind a trolley, vestige of an earlier time, as it slowly dinged and shivered its way up and then down a hill, holding on to the power line that followed its path from above. He saw people huddled on street corners, waiting to cross. He watched as a man with a dog took a step into traffic, then caught himself just in time, reversing his course, backing up onto the curb. He followed their slow progression to the bridge, catching a glimpse of its span just before the first length tipped over to Yerba Buena, then rose gracefully, then fell again into the lower deck of the second half. He turned to peer at the water to his right, seeing the tall giraffes of the shipyard cranes. He saw a tiny tugboat there, skimming across the surface, and briefly wondered if it might be Tim’s. And then he turned back, just in time to see the sudden maze of freeways, tangled together on the Oakland side. They wound and wove around one another, making a mess of things every morning and afternoon; but they made their own kind of sense, granting by fiat that there was no other way to articulate this particular meeting-point of so many vectors of movement.
