She is the first person he takes to the shipyard, and as they slip through the fence he wonders if he is making a mistake. Will she be frightened and disturbed by its desolation? Or see it as a sort of post-modern amusement park, a place to bring her friends, to get hammered and build bonfires? That would be the end. They would fix the fence and install cameras. Next would come a Notice of Proposed Land Use announcing a new condo development. But she is worth the risk. Her name is June. Her dimples make him blush and she smells like old books.

He looks back through the fence at the gleaming cars jerking their way through the stop-start traffic. He is not from this city of steep hills and skyrocketing rent, but grew up on his father’s stories of its moral bankruptcy. He arrived to find the hedonistic overclass, as promised, but was not prepared for the grim spectacle of their ostentatious wealth, arrayed as it was against the backdrop of sprawling tent cities, the occupants of which seemed always to have just emerged from a bomb shelter. All that is left of the shipyard, other than the dry dock, is the concrete, broken into a hundred jagged teeth. Some stick straight into the air. Others look safe to step on but will tip over and crush you. Forsaken and decaying but where, at one time, people swarmed in great numbers. He wonders what sort of ships they built. He pictures the place in its pomp, the bustle of collective purpose, and sighs wistfully. Those days are over. There are no great tasks left for mankind. Only relics like this remain, forgotten and unexplained. The bay water peeks up through the cracks, a reminder that they are well out from shore, that the ground beneath their feet is built over the living water which, if left undisturbed long enough, will slowly eat it all away.

June lets him take her hand as she navigates the more treacherous spots. Her hand is soft, the nails short, and she has a tattoo between the innermost knuckles of her pinky, two crossed arrows. He leads her to the dry dock, with its walls climbing up into the sky, rich with flaking rust, littered with rotting spars that had once held the ships in place, along with a few of the bracing pieces used to protect the keels. The cavernous space echoes with the calls of loitering gulls.

Once inside where the footing is less treacherous she slides away from him. She is light on her feet, delicate, and he lets himself admire her, the way she moves, the way everything around her seems to dim. Her gravity is so intense it pulls in even the light. It is both frightening and exciting, not knowing the point at which he will no longer be able to escape her draw. Perhaps that event horizon has already been crossed. She turns to look at him, and he in turn looks away.

What was it like to hoist a wooden ship big enough to carry hundreds of people? The pulleys, the winches, the audacity. To make something of such immensity rise into the air, like a great winged elephant, and then have the faith to scrabble around underneath it, scraping off barnacles, scrubbing off scum, knowing the only thing preventing the thing from coming down on your head was a drawing and some math. June picks up a fist-sized chunk of concrete and hurls it against the wall, sending a deep vibration rolling through the metal and up through their bones.

The first time he saw her June was standing on a street corner inspecting a vintage bottle-brown glass lamp with a tasseled shade. As he watched she took a portable power source out of her bag, screwed in a lightbulb, and turned the lamp on. Who thought to carry such items?

The lamp threw a warm light on her face, revealing dimples, one skewered by a cheek piercing, and a small, sad smile. Short hair, blonde on one side and black on the other, neck tattoo of…a bird?

No. A rat.

He coasted up alongside.

–I’m a monkey.

–Excuse me?

He pointed at her tattoo. Her smile vanished. She reached involuntarily for her neck.

–Sorry, didn’t mean to…

–It’s alright.

He considered a rat joke, but the someone in question might not be an asshole or ex-boyfriend. Instead he asked if she was willing to trade something for the lamp.

–Maybe some tile remnants? I have some nice ones. Real stone.

–No thanks. But I’ll sell it to you.

–Yeah? How much?

–A hundred.

–Bullshit.

She shrugged and handed him a small piece of what felt like wallpaper with a QR code on it.

–I’ll get more than that on Etsy. Here’s my store. It’ll be there tomorrow if you change your mind.

A few days later he scanned the QR code. Sure enough, the lamp was there, already marked “sold” for two hundred dollars. He scrolled through her other listings. Mostly home furnishings, all vintage, all expensive. He clicked on her profile image, in which she wore a knit beanie, head inclined to throw shadow across her features and hide her cheek piercing. He looked at the picture often but didn’t see her in person again for a couple weeks, when he found her flipping through a box of LPs at a yard sale. He told her he had already gone through them and found nothing of value. She nodded without looking up.

Did Etsy tell her who visited her page? Did she know he had been mooning over her profile photo? Lumped him in with all the other weirdo creep perverts? Was that even legal? His father would know. To which he thought, Fuck you, Dad. He had yet to tell his parents that he had dropped out of art school—to keep the allowance checks coming each month.

She looked up from her flipping, as though sensing his consternation. He untwisted his mouth and tried to smile, but it felt so unnatural that he raised a hand and reset his face. He told her where he worked, hoping to save her the time of sifting through the worthless records, but worried it made him sound pompous and apologized. June let the LPs slump back against their tired cardboard box.

–I used to sell records there. But that guy Rick is a fucking asshole, and his prices suck.

–No wonder he’s going out of business.

This earned him a polite laugh as she ducked inside to look at the furniture. A moment later she popped back out.

–Do you have a truck?

He said yes, a lie, knowing he would have to spend the rest of the day finding one to borrow. Later, as he helped her lift the loveseat into her house, he asked if she’d ever been to the shipyard. She cocked her head.

–Is that a bar?

June lives in a large Victorian on one of the city’s hills with three musicians, three artists and a rotating cast of semi-feral cats. The house is old and majestic, but the roof is failing and there’s rot in the beams. The owner is old too, and rumor has it when she dies her kids plan to sell the place to developers. The residents treat it like the teardown it is, knocking out walls and erecting new ones, punching holes in the floor, creating new spaces for their art installations and practice spaces. The place is a warren. Doors appear in strange places, hallways end abruptly. Paper sculptures filled with multi-colored lights, mostly abstract shapes and starbursts, loom from the lofted ceilings.

Her roommates accept him being around, though he notices an aloofness, as though they are waiting him out, like a cheap candle that burns bright but not for very long. One of them in particular grates on him, a pale, slender creature with a rakish mustache and dark eyeliner. This waif-man floats around the house with an oversized mug carried in both hands as though it is made of lead, complaining about how exhausted he is after staying up all night working on his latest objet d’art.

It takes one to know one, and he knows waif-man on sight. Waif-man comes from a wealthy family. Also waif-man is a fake. The art is an affectation. Waif-man—like him—has some natural talent, but doesn’t care enough about anything to know what to do with it. It is how he ended up at art school, which he assumed would provide him with some sort of direction. But the other students, who seemed to live in a parallel dimension dominated by ethereal, smudgy angst, looked down on his realist charcoal drawings of the cityscape. After a year he dropped out. The experience made him despise artists, whose code of conduct was stricter than any he’d encountered. They only accepted you if you looked and acted like waif-man, a fussing dandy primarily concerned with how to curate the empty gallery space of his life. He no longer thinks of himself as an artist, though he still has his charcoals and still likes to draw. He now defines himself as a scavenger.

Claiming things that would otherwise become garbage makes him feel virtuous, but he worries sometimes. He shudders at vaguely Scandinavian coffee shops and their minimalist décor, filled with slender, soft-handed men in bespoke lumberjack attire. Is that what he looks like? Are his tastes his own? Or has he, like everyone else, been manipulated by the dark arts of advertising?

This worry begins to deepen the day he brings June back to his apartment. She is radiant, sitting in the Danish teak chair by the window where the best light comes in, her hair a perfect match for the blonde speaker cabinets, her black denim jacket the perfect attire for sitting beneath his charcoal drawings, which he has tacked to the wall in a deliberately haphazard pattern.

They drink tea. He plays records and flutters around the room, drawing her eye to his midcentury furniture, the well-tended Ficus controlling the corner, his flock, small but carefully selected, of ceramic birds. She is carelessly, supremely disinterested, and he begins to sweat.

June was raised by a single mother, bouncing back and forth between the Bay and the Valley. They moved for new boyfriends, new jobs, to escape bad boyfriends, when the rent was due. To make ends meet, June and her mother would “pick,” the word she uses for buying out abandoned storage units, sifting through them, and reselling anything of value. But there was rarely much, and often nothing, of value.

–You never found any Nazi artifacts? Civil War stuff?

–Mostly rat nests and spoiled food. You spend most of your time moving stuff from the locker to the dumpster.

–I think that would be really interesting. Going through, seeing what people decide is worth holding onto.

–And how quickly it becomes garbage. Cellphones, for example. You hang onto your old phone just in case, right? And before you know it the thing is obsolete, sitting in a box in the back of your storage unit, with rats pissing on it.

He considers this. She holds her mug up close to her face and peers at him coyly through the steam.

–Fascinating, don’t you think? To look at them as a way to understand how our society conveys status. And how fickle those rules are.

–Totally.

He relaxes slightly. It is not that she does care for his things, but that she does not care about things in general. He has never seen her use her own phone, for example. There are no favored earrings, no worn satchel with her initials burned into the leather. Objects pass through her hands without friction.

–So you just do it—picking—for the money?

–What other reason is there?

He thinks about this for a moment, during which she finally takes in the drawings on the walls.

–I like these. They feel…fair. All by the same artist?

–Yes.

–Someone local?

He could probably find a way to say it that wouldn’t sound haughty, but he pauses. Here at last he has found something that she wants. He isn’t giving it away for free. He shakes his head.

–He’s not from around here.

He rummages the bins at a yard sale and withdraws a slender plastic puck. A Nokia 3585i: flat dumb phone, blue case with gray trim, black pixels on a dead beach, pulled from a pile of charging cables. He recalls what June said, how our old cellphones are just trash tying us to the past. But what if those memories are special? What if those ties are what connect us, not to the shitty plastic, but to one another?

He buys it for a dollar, cross-wraps it in jute twine, and leaves it dangling from one of the tines of her mailbox. When he passes the next day the phone is gone. His heartrate slows and his fingertips and toes begin to tingle, a feeling he associates with a good curbside find. It is a feeling he is always chasing, and here he has found it in an unexpected place.

Again, he thinks.

Next is a Motorola T720: flip phone, silver case, small external display (black pixels), second larger display inside (color), hard keys, nub antennae. Found in a plastic tub at Saint Vinnie’s, complete with coiled car charging cable, hidden under a half-finished crochet hoop, yarn splayed like innards. He conceals it in a gutted paperback and leaves it leaning against her door.

They have a date to visit the swap meet in Alameda. He imagines the two of them as pirates, searching for treasure together, waiting to climb on top of their pile of riches and take in the view. At the swap meet they buy matching overalls and fill the pockets with knives, flashlights, Zippos. They stroll through the ranks of folding tables and blankets arrayed with wares, trying to guess one another’s preferences. June arches an eyebrow and nods subtly toward a set of earthenware mugs. They’re beautiful, the working consistent while still showing the human touch, the subtle imperfections. He desires them at once. But there is something else: a swift swell of resentment. Somehow it isn’t the same if she sees it first, and she always sees it first. She is a marvel, a picking savant, always a step ahead, first to the spoils, the wheels of her skateboard on pavement the grinding of his bones. He pulls her to him in an embrace he realizes at once is too desperate, smells the rank plume of his own nervous sweat. He tries to turn the tables, plucking what he thinks is a vintage t-shirt from a bin: extra-short sleeves, reinforced cuffs and crewneck, with a bold road, rainbowed in browns and oranges, disappearing into a blank horizon. She holds it up, twirls, shows him the dimples, and tosses it back in the bin.

–It’s new.

Faux vintage: the death sentence. He looks again. Damn. She’s right. She’s always right.

She reaches a hand inside his shirt. When she turns the full wattage of her gaze upon him it is too much, all her captured light released at once, and he averts his eyes.

–Let’s go home.

They spend a series of rain-washed days in June’s bed. Eventually she rises, stretches, silhouetted against the oily light coming through the open window. Something about her mother she must tend to. He remains sprawled for a time after she is gone, but the room, bare save a modest dresser and a flimsy hanging rack with a few dresses, emphasizes her absence. Restless, he surges outside. The rain is still coming down, soaking everything at the curb, chasing the pickers indoors. He can think of nothing to do but go to a thrift store and look for another one.

The box is sun-bleached but original, and inside the phone spotless, the manual uncracked, the peripherals still in their tidy little dope bags. Pulsar SCN2387A: gray brick car phone, pleather case, black illuminating buttons, single numeric display. A rare gem. This one gets a bow and ribbon, also from the thrift store, the sort of gift wrapping that comes in a heat-sealed plastic sack, ninety-nine cents. He thrills as he hands the cashier the money. He has an idea that she will begin a collection, each phone a vivid artifact of a place and a time, the paving stones of their relationship path. So what if most objects are trash, destined for a place in that garbage patch the size of Texas floating in the ocean somewhere. This? This phone? Is a tangible artifact of his feelings. He imagines June’s face as she raises the receiver shyly, the dimples come out, a blush across the bridge of her nose. But when the moment comes to present it a shyness takes him. He thrusts the box at her. She holds it with the tips of her fingers, face frozen in a lopsided grimace, eyes abstracted.

–Don’t you like it?

–Sorry, it’s just... It reminds me of when I was a girl.

He beams. She folds her arms.

–Why are you doing this?

–Sorry. I thought…I guess I thought it was romantic.

She frowns.

–You don’t need to—

–June, please. I want to do this.

He takes her hand and gently massages the arrows on her pinky.

–For you.

Suddenly they seem to be everywhere, the only thing he can see. Old phones in boxes, hanging from street signs, sitting on trash cans. Panasonic EB-3500 (placed in the refrigerator, concealed in an egg carton). Sony CM-B3200 (her shoe). LG 300G (in the bathroom vanity, taped to her bottle of Lexapro). He studies vintage phones, learns about the rarities and the collectibles. One stands out: the Motorola Aura, engineered with the quality and craft of a Victorian pocket watch. Stainless steel housing, chemically etched in PVD coating, aluminum buttons, crystal-clear circular display protected by domed 62-karat sapphire crystal, Swiss-made rotating mechanism with 200 tungsten-coated steel parts. Idiotic, of course. Cellphones weren’t heirlooms and it became obsolete almost immediately, like all the rest, discontinued after a very short run. The industry went back to their chintzy plastics. And now Motorola Auras, some with encrusted diamonds or customized gold inlay, are collector’s items. He resolves not to rest until he finds one. It will be the crown jewel in her collection. A sign that the time has come to take their relationship to the next level.

Several weeks and a dozen phones later he is wandering the halls of the house with a Blackberry. Having exhausted every obvious hiding place he is forced to go further afield, poking in and out of rooms, from one of which he hears jumbled voices. He pushes open the door to find the space unoccupied and dimly lit. As his eyes adjust he sees the phones, all of them, have been attached to the walls, the flip phones flipped, all of them plugged into overcrowded power strips, wires running everywhere, an electrical fire imminent. But what are they saying? It is difficult to isolate one from the other, so he inches up close to a Motorola ROKR E1 from which emanates a nasal male voice.

There are several factors to weigh before you decide. Go through them one at a time, map out any complications that might not reveal themselves when looking at the factors in isolation. The bond market doesn’t respond very well to liposuction treatment, as the saying goes, so you’ll want to mitigate for that. Furthermore, and I think I mentioned this earlier, circumstances can change quickly, so you will want to establish—

Is it a recording? Or is the person actually speaking. He puts his mouth next to the receiver.

–Hello?

The voice drones on.

He moves to another phone. A woman’s voice, speaking in French. Another is Chinese, he thinks. The din is terrible, the voices, in aggregate, cold and unfeeling. It is too much. He moves into the center of the room, to a spot marked out on the floor with tape, and into a cocoon of quiet. He can still hear the voices, but faintly, as though they are coming through a thick wall, or the sound waves are canceling one another out. As he is pondering the effect waif-man enters in a moth-eaten, too-small yellow sweater, hands wrapped around his biceps like he’s trying to keep his arms from falling off. He leans against the doorframe.

–It’s quite a neat trick, isn’t it? The quiet spot there. I call it ‘The Eye of the Swarm.’

–Where’d you get the phones?

–Someone left them in our trash.

He looks at the wall again. Finds the Nokia 3585i, the Motorola T720, the Pulsar SCN2387A. There can be no mistake. He pushes waif-man aside and stomps out of the house, into the street, and down to the shipyard, where he drinks himself nearly blind. He staggers to the boutique hi-fi shop on 15th and spends his entire savings on a five thousand dollar rosewood turntable with bronze bearings, but is too drunk to get it working and so instead he disassembles it, waking the next morning to find the pieces strewn all over the floor.

For the first time since they began dating, June calls him. He doesn’t answer, watches it ring, wonders what sort of phone she owns, resents that he does not know, curses himself for not knowing. Now when he looks into bins all he can think of are her lectures about resale potential. He cannot even muster any enthusiasm for the Motorola Aura he finds at an estate sale in the suburbs, though he does allow himself a wry smile at besting the professional pickers, all middle-aged men with sour breath, several of whom eye his score jealously. Back at home he lies on the floor amid the pieces of the disassembled turntable and holds it up close to his face. It is an undeniably well-made little fucking thing, but he wonders what exactly that means. The rounded face makes it feel like he’s looking through a magnifying glass the wrong way, into a world of miniaturized mysteries. He has always relied on instinct to determine what deserves to be rescued, and what should be banished to shoeboxes and scrap bins, but the Aura defies categorization. He places it under a light and spends several minutes looking at it before, with a heavy sigh, reaching for a pad of paper and his charcoals and begins to sketch out its dimensions.

She arrives in the passenger seat of waif-man’s vintage Volkswagen Beetle. If she is surprised to see him she does not show it. She gives him a hug. He smells her sweat, just a little bit funky. He likes it. As she steps back she seems to remember the paper coffee cup and holds it away from herself sheepishly. He thinks of the mugs at the Alameda swap meet.

–It’s all garbage someday, right?

She asks how he’s been, where he’s been. He ducks his head, fingering the drawing thrust into his pocket, the sketch which he suddenly realizes is of poor quality, trivial, stupid. He tells himself he will make her another, better drawing, then thinks again of the phone-filled room and wonders if he even wants her to know that he draws. He reaches around for words, discards them, and instead stands awkwardly, shifting his weight from foot to foot, slowly massaging his drawing into a ball of sweat-soaked pulp. June stands on the porch, watching waif-man’s futile attempts at parallel parking and waiting for an answer. After another minute she sighs, does a little turn-and-dip, something like a curtsey. He knows he has missed his moment, and wonders if another will come. She disappears inside. When she is gone he slips the Aura out of its leatherette case and presses the cool metal against his forehead. The waif-man, finally finished parking, pulls up short.

–Is that a…phone?

He recognizes the covetous light in waif-man’s face.

–I’ll sell it to you.

Waif-man’s eyes narrow.

–How much?

He slides the Aura back into its case and hands it to waif-man to inspect.

–Make me an offer.