By Amanda Knox

Saturday morning I woke up feeling a presentiment. I pondered it while sipping tea and staring out the window. It didn’t much make sense. It was raining out, but I like the rain. I had the day off from the bookstore so I could attend a friend’s housewarming party in Portland, a city I like to visit. My cat, Picard, was curled in my lap and purring.

I decided to sidestep the inexplicable and unplaceable dread. As much as I place my faith is such things, I also place no faith in them at all. Colin woke up, we had breakfast, picked out a housewarming gift on the way to the car (a Serge Gainsbourg album on vinyl), and hit the highway.

Colin drove, which was why I didn’t immediately notice the wind. After a while I did notice that we were just barely going the speed limit and were occasionally swerving slightly within our lane. It made me nervous.

“It’s the wind, babe,” Colin said.

Suddenly it seemed like participating in the traffic coming into Tacoma was less awkward and slow than reckless. The rain was obscuring our vision. The wind was elbowing us sideways. I remembered I was behind schedule in tuning up the Subaru. Portland never felt so far away.

“Should we pull off and catch a breath?” Colin asked.
I nodded grimly.

Coming in over the bridge, the port city was prettier than I remembered. Brick edifices with arched windows and the green dome of the transit station lined the main street. Large outdoor stairways with seating areas connected lower streets to the uppers. I had never felt more relieved driving into a city most memorable to me because it rhymed with “aroma.”

Used to having to circle downtown, we found street parking surprisingly immediately. In fact, we were the only car parked on a street not only devoid of other cars, but also of pedestrians.

We approached the nearest cafe only to find the front door blocked by men installing a giant, lightbulb-studded arrow pointing in the direction of the espresso machine. Ironic, I thought. After a few moments of tentatively toeing at the threshold, the men sidestepped and we proceeded inside.

Over tea, I told Colin about the eerie irk I had been carrying with me all morning, though I was already starting to feel better. I noticed that, except for the blockaded door, it was a nice little cafe: big windows overlooking the water; long, heavy, solid wood tables and benches. My sweater snagged on a rotten piece of the table. Instead of driving through the windstorm to Portland, why not spend a few hours wandering around Tacoma?

Walking along the main street, we were encouraged by the sudden appearance of a bit of a throng of young people huddled around the entrance to a trendy thrift shop. We decided to head in and see what on the inside was meriting such a crowd on the outside.

“Oh, nothing,” muttered the lithe, bespeckled clerk distractedly, folding a sweater.
“So what’s with all the people?”
She shrugged. “Must be just a bunch of students.”

Colin and I took a turn around the shop, but for all their $30 leather bomber jackets from the eighties, nothing quite fit right, and we were once again on the go.

Outside, the crowd had disappeared, leaving the main street empty once again. At least seventy percent of the storefronts were also closed—the donut shop, the sandwich deli...even the chairs in the public plazas were stacked away, not expecting company.

“Where is everybody?” I wondered aloud. “Does no one go out on Saturday here?”
“Yeah...” Colin said. “It’s like a ghost town. All this infrastructure, but no people.”

A darkened storefront with a glowing OPEN sign and guitars and amps in the front display window beckoned us like an ominous oasis. It was a standard music store, with guitars hanging along the walls and keyboards crowding the center of the floor. No sooner had we slowly made our way to the back of the store, however, did the already dim lights go completely out. I clutched Colin’s hand in the dark, waiting for some official explanation to come wafting out of the silence. Nothing. Then, the glow of a dark light from the front of the store. We approached it, and only as we passed did the clerk, bent over the front counter, grunt, “Checking something out.” We left.

A few blocks later we came upon an antique store spilling its wares onto the sidewalk. Always on the lookout for a decent record player, we stepped in and navigated our way through rooms of military uniforms, hollowed armadillo hides, church altars, spherical loudspeakers, rusted pogosticks, and the like. We descended a staircase cluttered with a small sarcophagus in a glass case. Looming wooden wardrobes guarded the hallways like suits of armor. A twelve foot, half-finished model of an aircraft carrier blocked access to a crumbling player piano. The lower we descended, the smaller we felt.

The final straw was the bathroom. Located behind various turns, it was preceded by strange, empty lounges full of velvet sofas, fake ferns, standing lamps with kitschy, fringe-ringed lampshades, and dusty statues of sprawling, naked women. The door opened with a chunky, mad-scientist lever that I wasn’t sure was meant to open again from the other side.

It was time to get out of Tacoma. The wind had settled, the clouds had dispersed, the sun shined. Nursing goose bumps, Colin and I retreated to the car. Even then, it took a few wrong turns before we finally found our way to the highway heading home. We exchanged glances full of the relief Alice felt upon waking out of Wonderland.

“That was weird,” was all I could say.