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From Bernal Heights, the city of San Francisco spreads north and west, a slow-moving accretion in steel and glass, brick and concrete, of the human desire unleashed and focused upon this terrain by the gold rush of 1848–an alchemical transformation of precious metal into philosopher’s stone upon which I sit and think.

Ian sits behind me on the grassy slope, her fingers anchored into my shoulders, her thumb expertly digging at the lump of knotted muscle between shoulder blade and spine where my keystroking and mousing actions accumulate. We’ve scarcely seen each other these past fifteen years, and never known each other well, in the ways that conventionally count as knowing someone well. But since she’s been back we’ve fallen into a practical familiarity with one another’s bodies, rooted in our shared history of a particular subculture at a particular place and time, that I think of as our ‘dungeon intimacy’.