5
An excerpt from
Going to See the Elephant By Rodes Fishburne Excerpted from Going to See the Elephant by Rodes Fishburne Copyright Š 2008 by Rodes Fishburne. Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
A free excerpt courtesy of Bantam Dell
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Chapter Five
The first thing Slater Brown did upon exiting the Trumpet building was to throw his hat high in the air. Next he stomped out what passed for an Irish jig as the stream of pedestrians adjusted their flow around him. A story! They want me to go find a story! How hard could it be to find a story? Stories are everywhere in a place like this. All you have to do is walk down the street and look and LISTEN. The greatest unknown writer in the history of the world tilted his head. Hemingway had started out as a newspaperman. So had Orwell. And Dickens. And Balzac. The list went on and on. Newspapers were where writers of promise found their footing. As long as you shine, what does it matter which lantern you use? he wrote in his yellow notebook. Even if the lantern is a Trumpet! Looking around the main thoroughfare, he caught sight of the afternoon light. It stopped him cold. In a trance he stepped into Market Street to get a better look.
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It was four o’clock in the afternoon and Market Street was bathed in a peculiar end-of-the-world light known only to San Francisco. All up and down the boulevard the afternoon sun fell in heavy angled columns that cast the buildings in a bronze glow and caused the trolley rails to shine like silver tears. Anyone who has been in San Francisco for longer than a day recognizes the light is different. Some think it’s because she is a north-facing city, and some think it’s because of the salt mist in the air, which clings to everything, even the light, and gives it a texture, and some more mystical minds think the light is different because the city itself is straddling two worlds: the visible world of stars and sun, water and edges, and the invisible world, which can only be felt. The light from these two spheres mixes in San Francisco, they say, the way an eddy in a great river mixes not only water, but also fish. Sunbeams with a curious texture, wrote Slater in his yellow notebook, just as the first car swerved to miss him, the words “muuther foooker” hurled out the window as it sped past. The next car slammed on its brakes, resulting in a slowmotion domino effect down Market Street, past the Civic Center, the Hibernia Bank, the San Francisco Sun, the curbside chess games, the Sun of San Francisco, a conclave of pogo-stickers, the Farmers’ Market, until it had caused a traffic backup all the way to the intersection of Van Ness Avenue. Slater Brown was unconscious of his impact on the traffic. For a moment the city had become timeless, like a photograph that moved, even as he slipped into it, walking around her streets, dancing down her marble stairs, across her glassy surface. He stared at the movement around him, thinking
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“That, I want to capture that.” It didn’t really matter if he did it in a book, or story, or newspaper. It wasn’t so much what was happening—although goodness knows the what was interesting—but it was the movement that enchanted him. Without movement a city would be nothing but a yellowing photograph. It was the living, breathing city he loved. Like a woman he loved her. Like a sister and a mother and a beautiful girl all wrapped into one. And she had her eyes on him, of that much he was certain. Her voice called out to him, vibrating up from beneath the pavement. At the very moment he was about to be run over by a beer delivery truck, a human sacrifice in the name of commerce, a heaving monolith whooshed to a stop across the street. A fleshy black face appeared, framed in the driver’s window. “Child, you best be removing yourself from this thoroughfare.” He looked up at her. In his glassy eyes was the reflection of the invisible world. “C’mon now, don’t be a heartache tonight.” The honking cars heckled him all the way across the street, until he’d stepped onto the sidewalk, and the bus, lowering itself to the curb with a pneumatic wheeze, folded its doors open, like a beckoning hand.