A middle-aged man living in Los Angeles takes a business trip to San Francisco, where he lived, briefly but intensely, when he was just out of high school. Over the course of a long afternoon and evening, he confronts the echoes of his history in the patterns of the streets he obsessively wanders. A strange interaction with a couple of old friends brings him face-to-face with his unfinished past.

David L. Ulin is the author of The Lost Art of Reading and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, which was recently published by Viking Penguin. He is also the author of Cape Cod Blues (Red Dust, 1992), a book of poems, and the editor of two anthologies of Southern California literature: Another City: Writing from Los Angeles (City Lights, 2001), selected as a Best Book of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology  (Library of America, 2002), which won a California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club of California, and was selected as one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review.