“Really?” He threw down the cigarette and stepped on it.

“Really. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll get together, I’ll eat a whole pile of food. You can watch.”

Besides, I hadn’t been lying when I said I was planning on having breakfast. Just not right away.

I didn’t own a car, which wasn’t supposed to be a problem in San Francisco. It’s said to be one of the world’s great walking cities-fairly compact, with temperate weather and beautiful neighborhoods. All true, but even so: forty-nine square miles. In my first weeks here, I’d chronically underjudged the time it was going to take me to walk places. Now, of course, I had my bike-an old silver Motobecane, very fast, with drop handlebars and paint rubbed off the top tube where someone had probably kept a chain wrapped around it.

I’d been a messenger for eight months, long enough to develop the cyclist’s long, flat ellipse of muscle in my calf-I didn’t have that even back east in school, when I’d thought I was in the best shape of my life. Now a short, easy ride brought me to my destination, the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever since I’d come out to San Francisco, it had become something of a habit of mine to come up here when I didn’t have any big plan for my day.

If you’ve driven in California and visited the Bay Area, the bridge you most likely drove on was the Bay Bridge. It connects San Francisco to the East Bay. It is heavily trafficked, double-decked, beautiful in an industrial way. But it isn’t an icon. The Golden Gate Bridge is, largely due to its location: It serves as a kind of borderline between the enclosed waters of the Bay and the open water of the Pacific, between the American continent and the rest of the world. It is open to cyclists and to pedestrians, many of whom are dazzled tourists. In its most mundane sense, it is the bridge between the city and the Marin headlands. But to twenty or more people a year, it is the bridge to eternity.