A

SAN FRANCISCO



In our land, in the Bay Area, the crescent of the day moon hangs like a boomerang in the clear afternoon sky…
	From afar, it is all one sees.
	And suddenly, as one travels closer by the highways, one realizes what haze, what was the blue shadow on the underbelly of the day moon. The skyscrapers of San Fransisco stand stacked in the distance.
	Up close, the skyscrapers are barely visible, even as their height issues violence to one’s sight. But we live there. Now, our mother has opened her apartment window.
	It seems everyone else is asleep in the city, that only our mother has woken up; she looks at us, drooping her arms over the windowsill, lazy and loose in her summer bedclothes.
	The sky, lifted up by its panel, suddenly distorts the rest of the structure, showing a dark space and our mother’s leaning figure, which is slanted; we remember that our skyscraper is on uneven ground, and that we have been walking faster and easier than should be.
	A disalignment is sent through the system, and every other panel, their limits and frames now discerned, reorient into a slant, as if a puzzle had been unsolved.
	The mesmerism is momently broken as if it seems all at once, the San Franciscans wake up from their afternoon naps. My little brother Tomo and I are no longer the only ones on the streets. A vendor nearby…
	Thus, the tower in front of our skyscraper, whose back it has been reflecting perfectly thus far, seems to shimmer in the air of my mind. For some reason I had not taken it into account, as if it in this afternoon it were a chameleon, only now becoming visible, and rather than drift off its mirrored panels as a child shimmying off a dress, many windows open up like skin-flaps, a bit tattered, to let out the circumambient atmosphere the cool inside air.
	Sometimes, because of the perfect reflection of our skyscraper, I would get the increasing feeling that all of San Francisco was made of mirrors, God’s shining city set on a series of overlapping hills. For I could hardly bear to be impressed with some visual lights…
	As if in the afternoon, by city ordinance, the sky descends upon the ground and erases the street signs so that people cannot wander the streets without getting lost, to practice rest. Though, in practice, it is only I who get lost into a trance of color and light…
	So now I realize what is the weird shadow upon the leftmost side of the skyscraper. It is a residential building. Its concrete tan structure, with many a window opening into darkness, is immense, a single thing standing in the sky. It turns out that there are many people around, after all…
	On the previous skyscraper, ours, it was reflecting its change, showing up as a distorted self. So that, like a tan image present in a thousand panels of blue, the vast body of the blue skyscraper had changed color, smeared with concrete tan…
	I was walking beneath them, still going downhill. The afternoon is coming on; the skyscrapers are reverting to normal, removing my hypnosis, as if one by one, their scales of sky fall off, and a normal city is revealed beneath.
	But just for one moment, that concrete tan seems to swim a path of panels, full of shadows, replete with the pathway of incrementing digits, as if, when I took a step to the left, each color of tan slooped into the next border, filling its edges out in a soft, obsequious fashion. Reappearing in the adjacent panel, along with a host of tan, it is like a shadow of concrete is yet being turned on-and-off on the various panels.
	When I stop, the concrete reflection stays still; but as soon as I take a step, holding onto my little brother’s hand, trying to hide this from him lest its intensity makes him fearful of me, such a mobile swimming fragmentation rings my head with astonishment…
	It kills me through, with the most terrific most terrific mental revelation that I cannot state.
	Every afternoon I see such a mental picture, and hear in my mind the spangles of metal-disks shimmering with sound in a tambourine.

2.

During this time, also, I once went up an abandoned concrete skyscraper during the sundown, where the shadows becomes stark on the tan structures.
	Entering in an abandoned apartment whose doorways let out into the violent open air, I would walk and now and then, taking a glance, as if an arrow had been shot through, the doorways would align. For the apartments were built in a repetitive structure, each in the same format, so that their doors looked out perfectly onto the next door.
There would be framed, deepening it infinitely, and with its distance filling it with mystery, a city hazed with lavender shadows in the evening air…
	And I would stand and be astounded, and have to hurriedly take the steps down, for fear of throwing myself off the building in some wild impulse.
	This was our city, San Francisco.