Excerpt | It’s Always 9/11
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CALIFORNIA
“All I do is sell food particles.”
I was sitting at a picnic table overlooking the Pacific Ocean with Ryan, drinking Galactica Zinfandel from the bottle.
“Don’t denigrate yourself. I think the work we do is important. We’re helping people buy food that’s good for their bodies and good for the earth.” Ryan managed the seafood counter at Whole Foods, our mutual employer. His role in the process was cleaning, deboning, and displaying fish for demanding, ungrateful yuppies.
“We’re just wage slaves,” I said. “We don’t make any decisions that matter.”
“The pay could be better,” he admitted. He edged closer to me on the wooden bench, his slightly fishy scent mingling pleasantly with the salt air. Sheep baaed in the headlands behind us. Our pay was only mildly atrocious. The barely livable wages were, in fact, why I took the job, rather than the unpaid internship I was offered at the think tank in Palo Alto calculating the likelihood of armed conflict in ecologically stressed regions. You don’t work for nothing in the Bay Area unless you have a trust fund, which I didn’t.
“I had no idea how gorgeous it is here.”
Our knees touched. The edge of his kneecap felt smooth against mine. The day shimmered in bright relief. Squawking seagulls skimmed the foamy waves.
“You’re not from California, are you?” Ryan’s enormous green eyes, a few inches from my face, looked like they could drink me up.
“Nope. From New York City. But my cousin Marietta—my roommate—grew up in San Jose, and we visited her family most summers. I always thought of myself as a transcoastal: a West Coast soul in an East Coast body.”
“Cool.”
“I graduated from Stanford last June. But I’ve never been north of Mendocino.”
He sliced a wedge of smoked cheddar and put it in my mouth. “This is my favorite place.”
“I’m glad I’m here instead of at that stupid conference in Manhattan.”
“What conference?”
“It’s called A Better World. My mother’s friend is running it. They’ll be representatives from socially responsible nonprofits from all over the world. A portable stove initiative in Bangladesh, art cooperatives in Laos, that kind of thing.”
“So, you could teach art in Laos?” Intrigued, Ryan angled his head to the right. A remarkable shock of dark curls fell directly over his freckled nose.
“More like administer a series of arts programs. Evaluate their efficacy. I’m on more of the analytical end.”
“Oh.”
The wine bottle teetered in a wind gust, threatening to topple in our laps. I lifted it to my lips, looking north, away from work and San Francisco. A landform jutted out, seemingly floating over the water, sea green and luminous in the fog. “What’s that?” I asked.
Ryan’s angled his head again, to get a better look, and his curls drifted over his nose again. “The Lost Coast.”
“I love the sound of the word lost,” I said, tentatively twisting one of Ryan’s ringlets around my finger. “Can we check it out? Before we go back home?”
“No, that’s not a happening.” His hand crept onto the small of my back. “The highway curves away at that point. The coast is too rough for roads. That’s why it’s lost.”
I tried to fit my mind around that. A place beyond where the highway ends.
“No roads at all? No dirt roads or anything?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s something. You can backpack there. Primitive camping. You have to carry your poop out in a can.” Ryan’s disinterest only made the Lost Coast more intriguing. I kept my eyes on it, as clouds drifted in and out, hiding the land in mist then revealing it again, as we passed the wine bottle between us and discussed Ryan’s favorite indie rock band, some local group called Nitrogen whose drummer had just quit.
“I wish we could spend the night here,” I ventured.
“I hear you. But there’s that thing called work? I’m doing double shifts all week, starting at nine tomorrow morning. I’ll be paying off those school loans until I’m fifty.”
“I took the whole week off for that stupid conference, and then I canceled.”
“What’d you cancel for? Maybe you’d snag an interesting job. Not have to sell food particles anymore.”
Because you asked me out, you idiot, I thought. Because I so desperately wanted to run my hands through your curls. Because I wanted to get lost in your eyes. Because I extrapolated from this one invitation to a week-long idyll on the beach. A relationship. A life. Because this was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and I didn’t want to trade it in for someplace hot, humid, and malaria ridden. “It’s just networking,” I said. “I hate networking.”
As we climbed back in Ryan’s car for the four-hour ride home, I craned my neck, my vision facing northward. In the darkening twilight, the Lost Coast’s defining edges merged with the horizon. We rounded a curve, and it dropped from sight.
It was the afternoon of September 10, 2001.