Why I Moved to San Francisco

By Dale Jensen

Harry Lindquist, a youngish bureaucrat in a slightly creepy Federal agency, goes in search of a colleague who has broken all rules of physics and time in his disappearance, and in his search finds that he is breaking the same rules. Counselled (and sometimes impeded) by his equally mysterious Great Uncle Bjorn, he soon discovers that his journey has less to do with his colleague and more to do with the nature of his place in the time-space continuum and his dedication to his friends, his own sanity, and the nature of his own ambitions. Funny, imaginative, and vivid, this novella is for anyone interested in history, time travel, and the far corners of mysticism and human identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dale Jensen
• Release date: Sep 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370221370

Dale Jensen

Dale Jensen was born in Oakland, California, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, and received a master’s degree in experimental psychology from the University of Toronto in 1973, with which he said goodbye to academia forever. In 1974, he embarked on a career with Social Security that lasted until 1999, when he took early retirement. He lives in Berkeley and is married to the poet Judy Wells.Dale’s poetry, which is heavily influenced by the Surrealists and such cut-up writers as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, has appeared in such magazines, journals, and anthologies as Talisman, Lost and Found Times, Ur-Vox, Poetry East, Inkblot, Convolvulus, Dirigible, and many others. He published and edited the experimental poetry magazine Malthus from 1986 through 1989 and continues to occasionally publish books through Malthus Press. He also has published seven books and three chapbooks of poetry: Thebes (1991), Bar Room Ballads (1992), The Troubles (1993), Twisted History (1999), Purgatorial (2004), Cyclone Fence (2007), Oedipus’ First Lover (2009), Auto Bio (2010), Yew Nork (2014), and Amateur Mythology (2017).Dale has two blogs, Dale Jensen's Poetry Page and Things I've Done for Blood. Why I Moved to San Francisco is his first published long work of fiction.

Book preview

Why I Moved To San Francisco

Dale Jensen

Published by Dale Jensen at Smashwords

Copyright 2017 Dale Jensen

INTRODUCTION

The hell with Parisian pickpockets. The hell with frustrated bureaucrats and international criminals. The hell with all disasters, natural and otherwise. Let’s start our story with a little travelogue:

You can see the building from either the BART station or from the Amtrak station right next to the BART station, and your response won’t be one of awe or admiration. What you see is a monstrosity of red brick that looks like a Renaissance castle built by an idiot. As you come closer, on a winding blacktop walkway across a huge and slightly sloping vacant lot, you see that the brick is a façade, that the building is concrete with long grey-tinted windows that define six floors of mystery space.

Or at least you see part of the building. The rest of the building, and the parking lot that serves it, are obscured by a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire and have been ever since a young Romeo from the neighborhood beat one of his rivals to death with a baseball bat (I don’t know where the sympathies of the young woman in question lay) as our bravely armed guard ran for cover into the building. Hence the fence, which has precluded murder among the parked cars for over a decade. Because of this precaution, you don’t get to see the parking lot or the official front of the building, which has ten-foot high glass doors and is fronted by a huge red brick platform that announces the building itself in four-foot high metallic letters: PACIFIC DISTRICT CENTER, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF DEMOGRAPHICS, CHARLESTON, CALIFORNIA.

I worked there for thirteen years.

Once you get into the building, past the glass doors and the guards’ desk, the light as it was outside changes to a light I have seen in cathedrals in Europe, a light almost of another world, which is there caused by sunlight filtering through high stained glass windows and which in this building is the result of the decision to save money by using fewer lightbulbs in the lights in the entranceway ceiling.

There is a bank of elevators near the doors on both the parking lot and street sides of the building, and as the lobby flows on from the elevators, the ceiling goes lower, and the light becomes more what you’d expect in a standard office building. The lobby walls are decorated with tan and grey macramé shapes (tan and grey so as not to offend anyone in higher management) that vaguely resemble large sharks and are attached to wood paneled walls that have accumulated more than a few dents and chips from twenty years of collisions with dollies and shopping carts. On one side of the main corridor is the Charity Booth, a small space of about six feet by nine in which often almost indescribable flea market items are sold to benefit the Department’s campaign to provide small scholarships to children in the neighborhood. The Charity Booth is closed except for lunchtimes and breaks, and, when closed, is separated from the corridor by a cheap bamboo barrier that allows you to see the luscious items inside but does not allow you to spend precious work time sorting through them.

And we’ve left something out in our little tour. Remember the mystery space that loomed over the ground floor? Cubicles! The usual way to get to the work floors is by elevator, although there are grey concrete stairways that you can tromp up as well. All six floors are uniform, with yellowish off-white walls and beige carpets and orderly formations of grey-walled cubicles (which are referred to by management as work apartments) set just far enough away from each other across the landscape so as to destroy any benefits that could be derived from cross breezes or even even temperatures from the air conditioning system, which was installed before demented minds decided that cubicles were superior to work desks. Indeed, the temperatures often go absolutely psychotic with this improved air system, making the temperature tropical on one part of the floor and frigid on another. The overall effect, of course, is that of a rat maze. The men’s rooms and women’s rooms are set against the building wall, separated by an interior wall and a corridor from the work area. At the rear of each of the rest rooms is a small closet used for storage by the janitors.

Sometimes days worked here are very long. On really long days, the rest room can seem like a paradise of peacefulness and quiet.

CHAPTER ONE

Who the hell does she think she is?

Phoebe Wong was as angry as I’d ever seen her, but she let the words out of her mouth in a whisper like the release of compressed air. One did not shout in the elevator, even if the only other passengers were old friends like Hank and myself, because if one shouted the entire building would hear it and misinterpret every word you said.

Who the hell? Ten minutes to four, ten minutes before I’m supposed to leave, she comes up to me and says, ‘Ms. Wong, could you get the Aspberton case done by the time you leave today? I’ll give you special overtime to do it.’ Special overtime! They can’t force overtime here! And the Aspberton case is a monster that we’ve been working on for months! Then she threatens to write me up if I don’t do it!

Phoebe was starting to shout, and Hank put a hand on her shoulder.

Now, now, said Hank, that’s outrageous, but we are in the elevator.

Phoebe quieted herself a little; you could almost see the steam coming out of her ears.

Forget the kids. Forget the shopping I have to do and the drive home to Pleasant Canyon. All she wants is for her little empire to make her look good she so that she can get a work module of her own and get into position to take over an entire floor…

So what did you tell her? I asked. By this time, we were out of the elevator and onto the ground floor, headed to the cafeteria for coffee.

What do you think I told her? Hell, no. And then she threatened me again and walked off. That was yesterday and she’s been avoiding me ever since.

I’d see Mary Davis about this, said Hank. Zelda needs to be brought down a notch, and Mary is actually making the coffee pot case look credible.

Mary Davis was one of our union reps, a middle-aged woman with long braids and a reputation for simultaneous feistiness and rationality in the worst of bureaucratic situations. The coffee pot case involved one of our file clerks, a really fat guy who had had abdominal surgery to decrease the amount of food that he could digest. He had never figured out that that also meant that you had to defecate much more often, and early one morning,