We were eating in San Francisco, my mother opposite me, Lydia to my left, the Galindo family on the right, all of us arranged like a little altar around bowls of chow mein and plates of steamed greens that we would never finish. Market Street was its usual river of bodies and buses, a marching band of advertisements and the soft clatter of utensils, a starling chorus of shoes on tile, the city’s private weather. I remember thinking that the steam rising from my bowl made a cloud that drifted toward a ceiling lamp and dissolved in a halo, and that I could almost pretend I believed in perfect circles again. My mother was telling me about a cousin who had lost a tooth to a walnut, but had gained, she said, “a new smile that shows their courage,” and Lydia, who has always been both skeptical and tender, pursed her lips as if to hold an idea steady between them.
I looked up all of a sudden and I said, “Look.” It was not a shout, more the tone you use when the horizon shifts one millimeter and you aren’t sure if the sun has slipped or your eye has caught a new disease. No one looked. The conversation continued its pleasant scuttle. I said it again, louder this time, “Look.” They turned, almost reluctant to be called back into the immediate world around them. And this world—obedient, extravagant—unfolded itself for our inspection. A building across the way was falling. Not from an earthquake; I know the sound and movement of earthquakes, the way they first write their presence in the bones and only later spell out their cracked syllables on the streets. There was no grammar here, only an uncaused effect: the building across the wide street, as if admitting to a quiet exhaustion, simply divided itself in two like a loaf of bread, and the top portion exhaled forward, becoming a brown-red rain of bricks and splinters and glass confetti.
There were screams as precise as measurements. People filmed with their phones. Some people ran, and some did not. The upper stories—those rooms where people had slept and made soup and spoken into telephones—tumbled to the sidewalk, and all the air lit up with the friction of the falling. The corner awning fluttered, then vanished under a wave of matter. I heard a plate shiver on our table. My mother’s hand went briefly to her chest, Lydia’s fingers flexed on my sleeve, and I understood, not for the first time, that anything which stands is a little miracle pretending not to be miraculous.
Everyone seemed paralyzed, as if the film had been paused to force us to examine a single frame—bricks mid-fall, a woman with a dog mid-turn, a bus driver in mid-expletive. I stood. Then I ran out to the center line of Market street to see whether this was an isolated event or a general policy, whether the city had suddenly remembered something elemental, and if so, whether it would now proceed to remember everything else. Another building was bending forward, modestly at first, like an old man preparing to kneel; then not modestly at all. I ran back. “We have to go,” I told them. “This is going to be big. Don’t sit here waiting for a polite explanation. Move!”
They moved. I have never been a general, but that day I felt a brief sense of authority from the world. We crossed the threshold of the restaurant into a light that had sharpened, as if a hidden technician had dialed the saturation one notch too high. Dust whirled in the air. An officer shouted instructions. The city made the gestures of a city that has rehearsed disaster and now, startled, discovers that rehearsal has become performance. My mother clutched her purse as if it contained directions back to the past; Lydia’s jaw set, and I loved her for that. We angled across Market toward the side street where many people were jammed shoulder to shoulder. Then the road itself changed its mind.
A circle opened without rhetoric. A mouth of asphalt. A sinkhole is a word that sounds rural, a word that belongs to limestone caverns and warning signs near fences, yet here it was in the city, a coin of absence minted by whatever bureaucrat of gravity rubber-stamps these sudden permissions. We watched a parking meter tilt and vanish like a periscope slipping into the harbor. “Avoid the small sinkholes!” someone from the National Guard shouted. “They may become larger sinkholes!” It was the kind of tautology that carries the authority of truth: what is small wants to be large, what is quiet wants to be thunder, what is stable wants to remember its first instability.
We skirted the hole as if it were an animal scenting us. More police. More Guard. A woman in a bright jacket was pointing us toward a green corridor, a stitch of green park, some old veredas you could follow out of the downtown grid, veredas I had never noticed before. “This way,” she kept saying, meaning: any way that is away. The buses loomed; the wires above us looked suddenly delicate as spider silk. A man with a rolling suitcase stood and cried; his suitcase—the little house of his immediate life—tipped toward a fracture in the pavement but did not fall. “Keep walking,” I told my mother, who is brave in small steps and brave in large ones too.
As we walked, as the city behind us made new decisions about its contour, I remembered something as cleanly as a blade scraped across glass. My cousin Roberto and my aunt Gladis had visited us once. We had put them in a motel downtown because that seemed both generous and central, generosity’s geometry often following convenience. They had a car during the day but only went nearby. The desk clerk, a man afflicted with a sense of vague authority, had asked questions about their excursions. Roberto told me later: “He seemed bothered. Like: why did we go only around the block? Who knows why!” He laughed; but it was a laugh with the respect you give petty gods, petty guards. The city expects a certain theatre of movement; if your pattern is too small, some spy of normality marks you down.
We moved now in what the city would consider the opposite error: a movement too large, too decisively away. A sinkhole lipped open in the crosswalk ahead like an ugly rose. We cut left, then left again, threading between stalled cars. The Guard woman steered us to a path. The word vereda came back to me from El Salvador, where I had driven alone at night once upon a different kind of trembling. The moon had been bright that night, and I had taken the little pathways through fields the way a fox might, trusting the lacquered logic of the moonlight. Far off I had seen a tree luminescent, one of those grand ceibas that hold the sky like old servants. “El árbol de Dios,” I had said aloud, not to be pious but to offer a name: when you are small and afraid, even your metaphors crave a ladder with no top.
“Keep walking,” Lydia told me now, as if she had been the one driving that other night, and I obeyed. The path fed us into a strip of grass, then dirt. We moved farther from the geometric pitch of downtown. We saw a pod of small sinkholes that had not yet decided whether to hatch. We stepped over them the way you step over the memory of an insult: gingerly, with more ceremony than maybe they deserve. A child asked if the whole city would one day be a hole. His father said, “No,” with the ferocity of love, which is to say, a ferocity that knows it is lying a little for the sake of the hand it is holding.
Behind us: sirens in layers. The dust lifted its skirts and danced a little. My mother did not complain. She has known buildings that fall and voices that do not answer. She has known the stiff etiquette of official fear. When we reached a ragged strip of sand—some accident of landscaping or an old memory of shoreline preserved by municipal laziness—we stopped. The ground was soft here. Sand does not open like asphalt; sand only takes and gives as if by agreement. “Here,” I said. “Here we are safe from holes.” I said it to persuade the hours ahead to take their shape gently.
The sand reminded me of that other sand, the existential kind. We were in the middle of the city and also not. Market Street was a parable behind glass now. The buildings, those tall teachers, had changed their lesson mid-sentence, and we had walked out into the yard where the school’s chalk dust becomes evening. We stood there with other evacuees, a congregation of the temporarily reprieved, and I thought: it is always the same story. You are at a table. You have a mother, a lover, a cousin somewhere who cares too much about the wrong approval and too little about the correct insolence. You are famished and the plate is ordinary and this is grace. Then something topples, unreasoning. You are initiated into the thought that all reasons are after the fact. You walk. Your feet learn a new alphabet. The city tells you that walking is a sin and a cure.
We crossed the sand as if it would carry us all the way to a desert. In our mouths, the grit of the sand became theology. The Guard woman said something about buses; another officer mentioned a staging area; someone else handed out masks against the dust the city was producing as fast as it unbuilt itself. I watched Lydia tie the elastic around my mother’s ears, the tender clumsy act of fitting safety to a face. “You look like a small bird,” I told her, and my mother rolled her eyes and kept the mask on.
There is an intemperate exposure to sand. It receives you; it abrades you. In that sense the desert is honest: it will not pretend to offer coordinates unless you give it a star or persuade yourself of the presence of a god. The veredas we followed had not been made by municipal planners, they looked older than any plan; they looked like they had been worn into the city by the feet of people fleeing the various devils that take turns wearing uniforms. Desert is what remains after the map resigns. “This is not a geographic trip,” I told Lydia; “it’s existential.” She laughed because she knows when I get philosophical, the wind picks up inside my head. “It’s both,” she said. “And either way, let’s keep walking.”
In the days of my youth—when I believed that everything could be cross-referenced with everything else until the web of words made a net strong enough to catch the meaning that always jumped away—we would have seen the building’s fall as a symbol, and we would have written it down: bricks in the street, no earthquake; the way the light leaned on the dust, the way the bus driver’s hands stayed on the wheel like a prayer; the officer’s confident tautology about small holes becoming large. We used to say that the future changes the present, and so we wrote our omens forward to be remembered backward. I felt that tug in the sand: we were already recalling this hour from some later hour that might never come.
My cousin Roberto—this is how the mind works; it obeys a logic older than the city—waved to me across an imaginary street, laughing about the motel clerk’s disapproval. There is always a clerk that is not happy. There is always a desk that gives him authority. There is always a place where the world of symbols insists on a signature. There is always an index card where your name does not fit exactly. “A saber por qué,” he had said, and we had shrugged, and I had envied his cheerful refusal to be shrunk by invisible rules. I thought then of Aunt Gladis in the doorway of a room that smelled like old coffee and disinfectant, their luggage open like nervous suitcases whose mouths cannot close without biting something tender. The city watches you; the city wants you to be legible. It never quite trusts a pilgrim who circles the block like a satellite around an illegal moon.
The sand made conversation soft. People murmured oaths. From time to time we heard a distant metallic wrench as something else agreed to become rubble. A raven coasted over us, arrogant as always, a little priest in glossy vestments. The Guard woman talked into her shoulder and then told us there would be shuttles. My mother shook her head. “No,” she said with that particular Salvadoran refusal that is unanswerable by official doctrine. “We’ll walk.” She looked to me and Lydia, and we nodded. The city was inventing a temporary geometry; we would be our own guides.
We picked a bearing the way sailors once did—by unspoken story more than instrument. Through a belt of grass, across a second narrow beach of sand that did not know what ocean it belonged to, over a low rise where the wind braided itself into our hair. From that vantage point, the skyline looked broken but not humbled. I have never believed in punishment. I have believed, intermittently, in harsh lessons. The buildings, like us, had learned that balance is not an entitlement. “Do you think it was sabotage?” Lydia asked. “Or stress failure? Or just that the world has had enough of hard angles?” I told her I thought it was the most ordinary miracle: that the unseen workings, tired of being unseen, came out to make themselves known.
Some boys were playing in the sand because boys will play anywhere. One of them jabbed a stick into the grit and said, “This is the tower, and this is what it does,” and he pulled the stick free and left a hole that collapsed gently into itself until it was just a shadow. His mother called him away from our adult sadness. He ran gladly, because the world is catastrophic and glad, and the two qualities are not particularly opposed.
We rested on a lip of concrete that had no purpose other than to be a lip. From here I could see, not far away, a little stand of trees. One of them—taller, patient, lanterned by the light—looked like the brother of that Salvadoran tree, the one I had named God without humor. I told my mother. She squinted. “It will do,” she said. That is her theology: sufficiency elevated to devotion. We walked there. We stood under that green roof and let our eyes adjust.
If the desert is an exposure, the tree is an interlocutor. It does not close the world against you; it opens you to a moment of shade. The leaves made their private arithmetic of wind. Lydia leaned her forehead against the bark as if listening for a pulse. My mother took off her shoes and shook sand out of them and laughed, not because anything was funny but because something had been given back to her—some small piece of the child who once ran across yards barefoot and learned which patches of earth remembered the sun most keenly. I closed my eyes. For a moment I was driving again on a moonlit vereda, the ceiba rising ahead of me with its arms like a mnemonic of heaven. I thought: the machine sleeps, but sometimes it dreams us toward a kind of mercy.
When we opened our eyes again the tree was only a tree. That was also mercy. A helicopter stitched the blue sky. Far off, another siren drew a line under the paragraph of the hour. We were together. We were alive. We were the recipients of a borrowed instruction: avoid the small sinkholes, because they envy you your size and will become large as a kind of vengeance. We were disciples of a borrowed instruction: keep to the veredas, and if the map fails, you still have your feet. We were citizens of an interval in which eating with your mother could change without warning into a rehearsal for exile that is not entirely a rehearsal but is not yet the end.
Later, I would write it down in the language of my tribe: We crossed a zone of sand, and there the danger was diminished. There were no sinkholes in that granular expanse. It was a passage through the desert and the desert signified exposure. It was not a geographic journey, though our bodies insisted upon miles; it was an existential crossing in a country of grains without coordinate, a country where the compass is not wrong but obsolete. I would add: We kept moving until the city’s voice softened, until the brick-dust tasted less like iron and more like the mineral fact of sand, of being here, now, uncollapsed. I would add: a building fell the way a promise sometimes falls, for no announced reason; and we, who have lived among promises all our lives, did the one thing we could do worth doing. We walked out into the open, where the map ends and the tree waits, where the sand does not ask who you are, only whether you can stand and keep on moving.
