[Metastasis].

Abstract

To describe the life of a city is no small task. One might begin with the buildings, the towering behemoths of steel, glass, and brick that lend shape to the goings-on of everyday life; or perhaps with the general temperament of the citizens, be they gentle or harsh, demure or extravagant, well-educated or uninformed. Perhaps it is in the weather or the traffic patterns, perhaps in the demographics or distribution of wealth, or perhaps simply in the shape of the skyline that we find the animus of a human center. Or perhaps, as in the swirling melodies of a Iannis Xenakis composition, the life of a city is so beautifully, stochastically vast, made up of such a multitude of ever-shifting parts, that we may never grasp its particulars. We may never understand the hierarchies of chaos that must coexist for such a system to come to be in the world. Such a thought can be beautiful, or maddening, or enlightening, perhaps even some combination of the three; yet, what the cognizance of this phenomenon means to the average human being, pondering away at the tapestry he finds himself woven into, is far from clear. To Richard Rodriguez, the heart and soul of his city, San Francisco, lay in the advent of its gay community. In his essay “Late Victorians,” he contemplates the crippling effect of AIDS upon a population attempting to define its new identity in a city old and storied. The city in question has always, as Rodriguez tells us, “taken some heightened pleasure from the circus of final things. To Atlantis, to Pompeii, to the Pillar of Salt, we add the Golden Gate Bridge, not golden at all but rust red. San Francisco toys with the tragic conclusion” (125). He warns us that in this fallen city, the AIDS epidemic is merely another in a long string of tragedies. This sense of context, however, does little to mitigate the effect of this particular tragedy on him. In his exploration of the architecture around him, in his depiction of the faux-masonry paint jobs meant to hearken back to idyllic concepts of Americana, and, finally, in his realization that “in San Francisco in 1990, death [had] become as routine an explanation for disappearance as Allied Van Lines,” our disillusioned narrator admits that San Francisco has fallen prey to the wily demon Chaos, to that which