He went through a parking lot at the end of the bridge where other bridge walkers had left their cars, and continued into the city. It had been a long walk from Red Bluff, and he had a longer walk still to go, but there was plenty of time to make it. As long as he didn’t linger too long at any one place. The trick was to plan his city excursion. The stranger took out a well-thumbed city guide, at least ten years old. He examined the dog-eared pages, compared them to his map, and plotted what looked like a good route, tracing promising fault lines and old cemeteries that had been plowed under during one of the city’s fabulously corrupt building booms.

San Francisco was a dense city, but it wasn’t large. He’d once walked from its far eastern edge to the ocean in five hours. This time, it only took him two hours to reach his first stop: an old music club he’d been to with friends years earlier. He walked through the SoMa district, got lost twice, but eventually found the address. But not the club. It was gone. All that was left was a weedy, fenced-off vacant lot with a sign showing a picture of a gleaming twenty-story condo tower that the sign said would soon occupy the lot. There was a phone number of a realty company and a photo of an attractive man and woman in matching company jackets. They looked like brother and sister. Or clones. Did everybody know how to clone yet, or was it just real estate companies? It was something to look into.

The stranger tore the page from his guidebook and dropped it into a recycling bin on the corner before moving on.

He walked to North Beach, past the Tosca Café, Specs’ bar, and City Lights Books. He’d been to all those places on earlier trips and was relieved to see them still there. Just across the alley from City Lights was the Vesuvio Café. That, too, was still intact. But he’d also been there before, so he decided to try somewhere new. The stranger walked around the corner onto Broadway and down the block, looking at the Bay Bridge in the distance. He checked the address of a café in his guidebook and went inside.

He ordered a double espresso from a young man at the counter. A lot of the people in the café had various piercings and tattoos. The stranger also had tattoos, but he kept them hidden. They weren’t for anyone’s eyes but his and those of a few close associates. He hoped for a reunion of sorts soon, but not today. Today, he would sit in a café, drink coffee, and look at his guidebook.