Telegraph Avenue

attention, then logically, silence would augment it. It was a timeless, placeless transit through a strobe-lit hyperspace of beer and slivovitz, scored only by the quarter-note rumble of I-880 under his tires. Vaguely, he remembered someone reporting a sighting of the airship early that morning, moored somewhere off Hegenberger Road. If it had not already returned to its home base in Southern California, he might find it there, shiny and gigantesque as the ego of Gibson Goode. Let it be huge, shiny, and awesome, then. Nat was prepared—maybe even hoping—to be awed. At least let a failure of his, just this once, partake to some measure, however indirect, of grandeur.

He traced and retraced the barren cipher written in the darkness by airport roads whose names commemorated heroes of aviation. The silence in the Saab was replaced by humming as Nat’s original curiosity about the zeppelin, half larkish, half irritated, mounted in the darkness, until it became a full-blown longing and, as with Ahab’s fish, the airship came to bear the blame, in Nat’s imagination, for all the ways in which the world was broken. And then, right around the time Nat began to understand that he was drunk and lost and would never find the motherfucker, and furthermore had probably already attracted the notice of Homeland Security’s flying robot thermal cameras—around the time he realized that for some reason he was humming the chord changes to “Loving You”—it startled him: a zeppelin-shaped hole cut into the orangey skyline of San Francisco.

What happened then: He must have swerved. Someone threw a big luminous net at the car. After that—all within the span of the three or four seconds it took him to crash through the chain-link fence—came a lot of really interesting sounds. A ringing of bells. A raking of tines. A boing, a thump, a scrape, a crunch. Finally, a gunshot bang, as the same clown who had thrown the giant steel net at the car decided it would be funny to give Nat a face full of airbag.

After that there was a gap in the archive. The next things Nat remembered were a taste of salt in his nostrils, the blacktop sending the day’s heat up through the soles of his socks, the dwindling hiss of the Saab’s radiator, and the consciousness—alas, not yet sober—of having benefited from a miracle. He was fine, whole. And the God of Ahab at last had delivered him from his lonely quest. He stood a hundred feet from his beast in its nighttime pasture. He was not sure what had happened to his shoes.

As he started across the sweep of pavement toward the zeppelin, he tripped some kind of sensor. Stanchions studded with floods lit up all around the airship, snapping it on like a neon sign. Nat fell back into shadow and waited to see what happened. Expecting to find himself confronted by a Bronco full of security guards, an android sentry equipped with lasers, a lonely old night watchman named Pete or Whitey who would leap up from his chair, already halfway to cardiac arrest, as the latest Field & Stream tumbled from his lap.

Nothing. Most of the light from the stanchions was squandered on the gasbag, or whatever it would be called on a zeppelin—the word “envelope” slid in through a slot in his memory—but Nat thought he could make out a few small buildings over on the far side of the asphalt field. Maybe Gibson Goode and his entourage were asleep inside that glossy plastic gondola. It was not hard to imagine somebody in that crew feeling obliged to bust out with a gun and take a few shots at the intruder. Nat wondered if he ought to be afraid. But no light came on in the windows of the gondola.

The zeppelin floated three or four feet off the ground, lashed at the nose to a steel mast that rose in turn from the wide bed of a parked truck that looked small next to the airship but must in fact be massive. The airship lay perfectly still, as if listening for Nat. The breeze off the bay did not appear to trouble it. Yet at the same time it thrummed, verging on some kind of outburst of motion. It reminded Nat less of a whale now than a Great Dane or a thoroughbred horse. An animal strung with nerve and muscle but, for all that, lovable.

“Poor thing,” he said to the zeppelin.

He came out of shadow and went over to the truck, across whose grille in chrome letters ran the weighty inscription M • A • N. The mooring mast was a business of telescoping poles, like the arm of a cherry picker without the elbow. As Nat drew closer, the mast chimed deep inside itself, and the breeze sang along the length of guy wire that held the zeppelin fast. The truck was meant, from the ground up, to be climbed. At the back, three steel steps led up the bed, and then you scooted around the base of the mast to the bottommost of a column of metal spikes or cleats, like the steps on the side of a telephone pole, which led up the lower segment of the mast to a narrow steel ladder, which in turn carried Nat all the way to the top.

Here his lingering intoxication, and maybe a touch of loopiness from the collision, contended against his desire to set the noble zeppelin free. He spent awhile clinging to a cold rung at the top of the mast. He reached a hand, palm outward, fingers spread, like a man feeling for the kick of a child in a woman’s belly. In the instant before contact, he recalled having heard that a static discharge had ignited the Hindenburg. But there was no spark, only the cool taut bellying of the airship against his palm. He wished wildly for an ax, a pair of shears, a torch to cut the cable. Then he noticed a heavy lever on the shaft of the mast, alongside the spinneret from which the cable emerged, helpfully labeled EMERGENCY RELEASE. He opened the clasp that held it in place, snaked his shoeless feet around the poles of the ladder, and dragged down on the release, wrestling its rubber grip with both hands. The lever shunted out and down, and with a whistle of steel against steel, the guy wire whiplashed loose of the mast and swung from the big carabiner that clipped it to the airship’s nose.

“Go ahead, Arch,” he said, perhaps uncovering the source of the sudden flood of tenderness he felt toward the zeppelin. “Fly and be free.”

The zeppelin disdained his gesture of liberation. It continued to hang, drifting minutely, almost invisibly, three or four feet off the ground.

“Ballast,” Nat inferred. “Right.”

He climbed down the mooring mast, dropped to the ground, and took a slow walk around the gondola, looking for something to release, a system of weights, bags of sand like in The Wizard of Oz. There was nothing. He sat down on the ground, abruptly tired, and looked up at the gondola’s underside. There were two round hydrants, sealed with caps. Modest red capital letters identified them as ballast tanks. Nat reached up, went on the tips of his toes, and got hold of one of the caps. He got just enough purchase on tiptoe to pop it loose. The cap tore loose of his fingers. He felt himself hammered by something cold and implacable that turned out to be a hundred gallons of water. The shock of the water sobered him at once, enough to drench him in an equal or greater quantity of cool, clear regret for what he had done, as the zeppelin, with appalling grace and lightness, took to the luminous night sky.

“How did you get home?”

“Walked. Found a cab.”

“You just left the car there?”

“I now realize the folly of that.”

“That’s how the cops found you. From your registration.”

“No doubt.”

“Oh, Nat.”

“I know, I know.”

“You stole the damn Dogpile blimp.”

“Liberated,” he suggested, but he knew that in all its long history, the word had never sounded more lame.

“Where is it now?”

It occurred to him that a grave and narcissistic fallacy lay at the heart of the fear that he was going to look out the window of his house or Gwen’s car and catch sight of the zeppelin. The zeppelin would not be stalking him. It was mindless, trafficking only with gravity and wind.

“Up in the sky?” he suggested.

“You hope! Let me ask you a question. When the police called? Can I ask why you did not immediately confess?”

“Panic? Shame?”

“Nat, the thing could crash into the Transamerica Pyramid, the Bay Bridge.”

Privately, Nat wondered if a celebrated giant landmark was more attractive to catastrophe than, say, an egg farm or a Best Buy. “Maybe,” he said, wishful, “it’ll just keep going up. Right on into space.”

They were a few blocks north of MacArthur, and here came Merkata on the left. It was clad in fake half-