The Upright Man by Michael Marshall Page A

and saw yes, I could have misread the sign. The angle wasn’t good, and the sun was hazing out the film in a way that would have been difficult to predict when it was being shot. A quick check said there was no Harrington’s still in business either, on the West Coast or anywhere else. It seemed unlikely there’d be two nearly identically named department stores both gone bust, and further web-mining with the new spelling established that the store had once sat on Fenwick Street, and it had been a big deal in its day. Big enough a deal, probably, that my father might have assumed it would be there forever.
    So. I had decided San Francisco was confirmed. My brother was evidently capable of telling the truth.
     
    FENWICK WAS TEN MINUTES ’ WALK FROM THE HOTEL . The streets were crowded, flocks of end-of-the-afternoon strollers and shoppers casting long shadows on clean gray pavements. Though the road had been widened, and just about every ground-level aspect of the architecture had been altered, it wasn’t hard to see I was in the right area.
    When I drew opposite to the huge building that had once housed Harrington’s, I ground to a halt. Peoplecruised around me like leaves skirting a rock in a steady stream. The old storefront had been split into two and now held a Gap and a vast makeup emporium from which women of all ages were emerging with expressions of glee and very, very small bags in each hand. The floors above appeared home to the lairs of attorneys.
    I found my eyes drawn to the sidewalk in front of my feet. I didn’t remember having walked over this precise spot, but I had. I had walked here holding my mother’s hand. My father had filmed us. They were gone but the place was still here, and me along with it. I was older now than they had been then, but at the time I had been about the same age as a toddler I saw being pushed past me in a stroller, a small being so different to me that I found it hard to believe I had once been one.
    Time is strange.
     
    NEXT MORNING I WAS ON THE PHONE AT FIVE AFTER nine. By ten-thirty all I had established was that you didn’t get information out of Social Services in a hurry. After a while I had spent so long pushing buttons in menu systems that I began to be afraid I might eventually be put back through to myself, which I knew would freak me out. So I got onto the street and walked over there instead.
    Within five minutes I wished I’d stuck with the phone. There’s nothing like the waiting room of any office of the government or its allies to remind you how lucky you are. You enter a nonplace, nontime. You sit on battered chairs in murky blues and greens that nobody ever names as their favorite color. You stare at signs that have no bearing on you, nonspecific communiqués from the land that punctuation forgot. You wait until the waiting loses all sense of direction or purpose, until you become like a stone deposited in a field millennia ago by a careless glacier. You are here. This is all you have ever known. In the meantime you are stripped of any sense of individuality, of the idea that you might be different from anyone else in the room except byvirtue of your particular problem; and so you become that problem, defensively, accepting it as identity, until it swells and suppurates and becomes all you are. As a species we’ll tolerate being close to others, but not so close, and not in those circumstances and when we feel so small: we become rows of dry, fretting eyes, hating everyone around us and sincerely wishing our neighbor dead so we can move up one place in the line.
    Or maybe it was just me.
    I spent a long time waiting before I could even delineate my basic needs to someone. It then took us a while to get around the fact that I didn’t have a proper address, and for him to accept the Armada’s details instead. I explained I had a brother who I thought had been taken into care in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s, probably around 1967; that I