docks and the piers, that high drama, though it was before even his time. A lot of tears shed on these piers.

I cover the waterfront, watching the sea

Will the one I love be coming back to me?

Now it was home to another kind of sailor, off to another kind of war. One of their domains, one of their gathering places here. Every city had its Sailors, if some more than others. Even inland. Kansas City, Chicago. Even Orlando. (Though inland, they still tended to congregate near whatever big water was available.) But the big coastal cities collected the most Sailors, from inland, from all over. From small towns. You didn’t like to be alone. You needed reinforcement, whether you were good or bad. (The new initiates straightway found out there were two ways to go.) Buses brought them every day, trains. They didn’t much like to fly.

Jimmy saw a bright flash of blue around a young woman in a cluster of people at one of the stops. They were street kids, but not too ragged. One boy had a guitar. Even as the streetcar was pulling out again, with that surprising acceleration, Jimmy heard what he was playing, what they were singing, R.E.M., “Losing my religion . . .” Jimmy turned to look back at them, at the girl. Three of them were Sailors, though her blue, the edge of blue around her, was the strongest. So she was the newest, probably, or at least the newest to San Francisco. She had that New look in her eyes. She wore a T-shirt from some Oklahoma barbecue. He hoped that’s where she was from. Oklahoma.

Machine Shop was looking back at her, too, at the cluster of Sailors. He mechanically rotated his head to the forward position again.

Jimmy rotated, too. He pulled the photo out of his pocket, the Leonidas girls beside the ski boat. With two days now past since she’d died, Christina would look different, but not completely different. He wouldn’t have admitted it if someone had asked him, but he was down here to try to find her. There were things to look for. Sometimes the eyes would be the same, if you got up close enough. Jimmy hadn’t known her, never spent any time with her before the dive off the roof. If he had, maybe he’d know her when he saw her. The surest link between the before and the after was gestures, the way you walked, nervous tics, the way you bit your lip, the way you brushed your hair out of your eyes. That was what was left. Maybe you could say that about anybody you remembered.

Jimmy watched Machine Shop do his act for twenty minutes. They’d gotten off two stops after they’d seen the Sailors losing their religion. Shop had been “on” since the Financial District, rolled his rollie down the streetcar steps as a robot, held the doors open for a middle-aged white lady as a robot, moved away as a robot, even sidestepped a cluster of pigeons feeding on a spilled bag of popcorn as a robot. He drew a crowd immediately.

Shop’s act, at least what Jimmy saw, had two aspects: he interfaced with skeptics, and he danced. The interfacing was simple. They tried to make him laugh. Or get mad, in the case of a pair of blocky twenty-something boys, probably in town on liberty from their shitty East Bay jobs. Those two got right in Shop’s face and sneered and said some things, worked in tandem, one on each side of him. In the end, Shop’s answer was a perfectly executed 180-degree pivot.

The dancing was basically a robot on Soul Train or, when the demographic skewed older, American Bandstand. A lot of Ohio Players and Earth Wind & Fire. A little KC & the Sunshine Band, the early years. Jimmy pushed through from the second row and put a twenty in the overturned top hat, up until then empty except for Shop’s own prime-the-pump fiver. A couple of others followed Jimmy’s suggestion. Machine Shop bowed his appreciation in four mechanical stages.

The sun was gone. Here came the night. Jimmy ended up at the crab stand, where he’d gone that first night. Where he’d met the Sailor crab kid who had middle-managed Machine Shop’s beating, apparently for the crime of trying to suggest maybe the twins didn’t have to jump. In Jimmy’s mind, this was Sailor Central. For now anyway.

Crab Boy. There he was in his perfectly white sneakers. The stand