So leaving San Francisco was, for me, an opportunity to set aside the few things I couldn’t be without for longer than a day or two, and to dispose of whatever else was left. From a single bookshelf in my bedroom, I kept the essentials: a dictionary, some anatomy textbooks, a few outdated but still useful forensic reference manuals. The rest I bagged up and took over to Moe’s in Berkeley, who had a booksto-prisoners program. From the kitchen cabinets, I selected a couple of wineglasses and coffee cups, stuffing them with leaves from the same newspapers I’d used to double-wrap my plates; I boxed the cookware and the silverware separately, and that was that, except for the furniture.
My friend André, who, like me, had moved to San Francisco after graduating from Cal Poly, helped load up the U-Haul. There was nothing really wrong with my futon, so I folded that and tied it with a bungee cord; I’d had my writing desk, a real antique, since college, so it had to go on the truck, too. Its exact vintage was a mystery; but it had to’ve belonged to a newspaperman back in the forties or fifties—an editor, maybe. Great blotches of India ink Rorschached its surface, and several deep grooves scarred its grain, probably inflicted in haste or anger by some unknown hand wielding a letter opener.
It weighed a ton. “Do they not have Office Depot in Milpitas?” André asked me, grimacing as we maneuvered it down the narrow stairway that led from my old apartment to the street.
“Sentimental value,” I grunted.
“You’re a cheap bastard,” he said, followed by, “Fuck!” as the desk mashed his finger against the banister.
“Well, that’s true, too,” I said. “Flip it up onto the side?”
“Might as well,” he said. There wasn’t really enough room in the entryway for maneuvering; it was an irritating game of inches, and it seemed to take forever. But when we finally emerged on the sidewalk to find the smallest available vehicle in the whole U-Haul fleet parked and waiting for us at the curb, it felt momentous. The place I’d lived in for an age was no one’s place now. What traces there were of me still in it would never be parsed by anyone: Twin half-moon grooves in the floor because I’d thought I could drag the futon in its frame over to a less sunny spot without anybody’s help. A deep chip in the porcelain of the kitchen sink from when I dropped an antique champagne bucket into it after signing away the movie rights for Omens. A smudge on the bedroom wall that an ex-girlfriend put there on purpose late one Saturday night, applying lipstick to the heel of her hand and dragging it across the paint: “In case you need something to remember me by,” she’d said. After the cleaning crew came, there’d be no trace of that memory left in the world.
* * *
THERE WAS SO MUCH PAPERWORK. I was a first-time home buyer; everybody working billable hours was very happy to see me. We walked through the property with an assessor, we sat on facing sides of cheap tables in banking offices, we read through reams of fine print on legal-sized paper. I got preapproved. It seemed like a lot of work for a small brick building whose ultimate fate was clear to everybody involved; maybe it would change hands another time or two before somebody knocked it down and opened up a Mattress Firm, but such exchanges were stalling tactics. The writing was on the wall.
We were scheduled to close Monday, but I drove down early Friday afternoon. All my things were in shrink-wrap on pallets or secured to the floor of the truck; even my pillow was in there. For an idle moment I considered getting a cheap sleeping bag and pitching camp in the grassy side yard of the house; I wouldn’t be the first to seek shade in the shadow of the freeway, I knew. There were some narrative possibilities in the idea, I thought: but I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. So I booked myself into the La Quinta, fifteen minutes by car from the place I’d move into as soon as I collected the keys.
The motel room had two double beds; I used one as a combination work desk and dinner table, eating pizza as I went over my notes and printouts. The idea was to immerse myself deep enough in the facts of the case to make my arrival the next day feel like a return. You can do this to yourself, if you try hard enough: obsess over blueprints of houses whose original incarnations you never saw, memorize meaningless details of rooms you know only from pictures, sneak through hidden doors into imaginary spaces. Eventually it burrows into your skin, the place you’re attempting, remotely, to haunt. You fabricate empty memories of walking from room to room, testing out light switches, knocking on walls. If you stay up too late doing it, it starts to feel a little risky, but that’s the point of the exercise. It’s like staring at an optical illusion for longer than the seconds needed to make it work. When you close your eyes, it’s still there.