Further Out Than You Thought (11 page)

She saw men and some women running the other way, too, back to the neighborhood, returning with their arms full of shoes, clothes, toys, with boxes on their shoulders. The big pack of Pampers. A microwave oven. The new TV for the family, the TV they'd never be able to afford. It was Christmas, without interest. A true miracle.

Gwen thought she might turn around, go back where she came from. But what was there to go back to? Smoke and cars? There had to be a way out if she kept on driving.

She drove—not too fast, not too slow—through the neighborhood that was not hers. She could have been driving down a street in any city. This was not the Los Angeles she knew. Though her drive past this neighborhood was routine, she'd always been in that world of her own making—of her own music and her own thoughts—sticking to the thoroughfare and seeing what she chose to see, driving with blinders on, mostly.

She drove, and the people—a woman with a boy's hand in hers, an old man leaning on his cane, a man carrying a box on his head—watched her in her dirty gray Nissan. They watched her and she watched them.
Them.
When had
they
become
them
? When had they gone from subject to object? When had they become the other? The
they
on which one can project one's own darkness, one's shadow. In order to bring it to light?

What she felt was their anger, frightening and beautiful. And what did they see in her? Privilege? A girl who had gone to college on her daddy's dime? A girl who floated over the engine of the city, who flitted where she liked, who lived where there were trees and shopped at boutiques? No, she reminded herself. She wasn't one of
those
people. The rich ones with assistants and nannies and maids. She wasn't driving a Porsche. She wasn't driving a Jag. She was in a dirty, gray, falling-apart Nissan Sentra, for Christ's sake. And anyhow, this was what
she
saw, looking through her interpretation of their view. It was all made up. How could she possibly know what they saw?

They watched her and she watched them and the street was longer than she'd thought. The street curved to the left and then to the right, and now she was driving faster, and she turned left, because she could see a way out of the maze. And here she was, back on South La Cienega, a few blocks from where she had been stuck in the traffic and the smoke.

This time she wasn't going to wait in line. This time she drove on the shoulder, in the lane that wasn't a lane—past one streetlight, past two, past the smoke and the blockade of cars—until she was free. Free on the open road. She rolled down her window, took a deep breath of the burned air.

The rush of it flooded her veins. It filled her with a new kind of high. She was beyond thought, her every cell feeling for her next move. She floored the gas pedal, and her tin can of a car went a hundred in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone as she passed a fire on her left, a torched store, another and another. Inside the chaos, she was all animal, all instinct; alive to the pulse of her blood, to the prickling of her armpits; alive to each impression—the bitter smell of the smoke, her burning eyes and nose and throat, the flames and the empty streets. It felt like she was in a war zone, and it looked like what she had seen on the news and in movies. But from inside her car, the city seemed quiet, dreamlike and open, as if anything could happen.

And here, inside the slow-motion silence, her stale life was so much ash on the wind. She was light. She was flying through a city of rubble.

In this new space only survival mattered. She reached for the bottle of water. A few drops left. Christ. And she didn't have another. A person could live three days without water, she told herself. At least a normal person could. She swallowed, tried to breathe through her nose.

The gas dial was past empty, as low as she'd ever let it get. And here was a gas station without any line. She pulled up to a pump, looked around. The place was abandoned. She opened the door to the mini-mart: no one. And there were the glass refrigerators, the rows of cold bottled water. She couldn't help herself. She ran and took just one, just what she needed. After all, she thought, shouldn't water be free? Back outside she read the sign
PAY BEFORE YOU PUMP,
but if there wasn't anyone to take her money, was she stealing? Maybe they'd run out of gas, she reasoned. She'd just see. She untwisted the gas cap, fit the nozzle into her tank and squeezed the handle. Gas poured out. She filled her tank. For survival, she told herself, getting back in her car and locking the door. She untwisted the lid to the water and gulped down half the bottle.

She turned left onto Pico. There wasn't a car in sight. It was an afternoon in spring and ash floated like snow under a dark sky. It was a dream of Los Angeles. A postapocalyptic future. The people were gone—the Los Angelenos with their BMWs and their Mercedeses, with their face-lifts and their silicone breasts and lips and cheeks, with their hair plugs, their hair dyes and gels, with their designer jeans and shoes and jewelry, with their millions of tiny plastic water bottles. The plague of people was finally over.

She slowed down. Something was in the road, crossing the street.

She stopped.

Was it a long, very ugly dog? She didn't recognize the breed. She inched her car closer, squinted at the animal.

There, crossing Pico Boulevard, was a cat, a huge wild cat, a mountain lion, she realized, golden in the sepia light, right in front of her car. Where had it come from? Where was it going? It walked as if it owned the city and had decided to come out of its den and make that clear. And then it turned and looked at her. No, not at her, it looked
through
her. In its huge gold eyes, in
her
eyes—the eyes of the lioness—Gwen disappeared. In her eyes, there was no future and no past. There was only this moment—in which Gwen was awake, alive, her pulse beating now, now, now. The mountain lion stared at her, blessed her with that dismissive gaze in which Gwen was nothing after all, so she could be anything. Anyone. Right now.

The lioness turned her head and walked to the other side of the street, where Gwen watched her disappear into the haze as if she had dreamed her.

She started moving again, dazed, and drove on through the vacant town. If only this
were
the end. How quickly the ivy would take over, snaking up through the concrete, through the pavement, breaking the sidewalks, the streets, and the parking lots into rocks and then into sand. The grass would move back in, along with the hawks and the owls, the foxes and the coyotes. The blue sky.

Up ahead, a building was burning. A corner convenience store. Like Jin's. In front of the store stood an Asian man and woman. He held her in his arms as she shook, her head buried in his shoulder.

Gwen drove around a group of teenage boys running through the smoke, down the center of the street, with backpacks on their backs and in their arms—backpacks overflowing with who knew what stuff. In her rearview mirror she watched them turn into an alley. She drank her stolen water, passed a car going the other way and another burning building. She slowed down, unable to see more than ten feet in front of her.

Through the smoke, Gwen could just make out a figure approaching. Unmistakable. The tricornered hat, the red coat with gold buttons, the knickers. Striding down the sidewalk, his head high, there he was. Revolutionary Man. His face smudged with soot, he was aglow, victorious, walking out of the battle with the British troops, unscathed. Instead of a musket, he held under his arm his shoe box of cassette tapes. And, spanning his chest, there was his
Songs for the Road Home
sign.

She'd found him. Somehow, in the mayhem, here he was—intact, apparently unharmed.

She pulled to the side of the road. He was running toward her and his eyes were teary. He'd been worried, or maybe it was just the smoke. He got in the car. “Tink,” he said, touching her face. “Thank God.”

She put both hands on his head, as if to make sure he was real, and planted a hard kiss on his lips. “You're alive,” she said, amazed at how good it felt to see him.

She hung a U-turn in the middle of the road.

Home. They were going home, she and Leo and—she remembered, again—the baby inside her, the baby he knew nothing about. A baby. How could she even entertain the thought? How did anyone bring a baby into
this
world?

She made a left onto Fairfax and flew down it, past the antique stores and the Jewish delis, past the dry cleaners and the kosher bakeries with wedding cakes in the windows. They flew down the street that was always, at this hour on a weekday, stop and go, but today was deserted. The people had gone home hours ago and were now glued to their televisions, eager to see just how bad things were going to get.

Leo took a joint from his box of cassette tapes and lit it. Right there in broad daylight. “Holy fuck,” he said. He rolled the window down and exhaled, adding a little cannabis smoke to the smoke from the burning buildings. “Have you ever felt so
free
? It's
alive.
The city is finally
alive.
The structure is crumbling, Gwen. Every artifice, every wall. Made to keep us all in line, to keep us marching. We could do anything right now. Anything you want.”

He took the steering wheel in his hand and spun it to the left. Her car veered across the double yellow lines and into the left lane where oncoming traffic would have been if there were any. “See?” Leo said, looking at her and not the road. “You've got to break the chains. If not now, if not
right
now—”

“Leo! Fuck! We're not in England.” Gwen took back the wheel and swerved into the right lane, just missing a car—a pimped-out Cadillac—as it made a right turn toward her.

“Open your mind, babe.” He offered her the joint. She kept her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road.

“What are you,” he said, “going Amish on me?”

“Amish?”

“Mormon, then.” He put out the joint in her ashtray. “Come on! Wake
up.
This is as wide open as it's ever going to get,” he said, and he leaned out the window into the wind and started singing.

She had felt free, had felt the vast wilderness pulsing inside her, until he got in the car and she became the responsible one. Didn't it always happen like this? She'd be at the wheel, making sure they didn't crash, making sure they got where they needed to, while Leo was out the window singing. Were she to call him on it, she knew what his reply would be. I'm a musician, he'd say. As if musicians lived entirely in the ether. As if the title explained everything. And maybe it did. Maybe that's where she'd gone wrong in choosing him. She'd wanted a man who could feel things, who could open himself to her and be vulnerable and present, who'd drop everything and take off with her on grand, impromptu adventures. She'd wanted a playmate—Peter Pan—and that was just what she'd gotten. But two children couldn't survive on their own. One of them had to be the adult.

Chanting, his mouth was wide:

Lilting, lifting, his voice was pure, so fucking pure, it made the smoke lyrical, almost holy.

He pulled a small bamboo pan flute from his shoe box and played and sang and played. Here was another fire. She took her foot off the gas and coasted by it, feeling the heat and watching the flames dance.

He was right to call on Kali. To recognize the riots as her work. Hindu goddess of fertility and birth and destruction, her womb a void, an abyss, Kali was the fierce, fiery mother of all. Black-skinned, red-eyed goddess of the night, she wore only a necklace of skulls and a girdle of men's hands. She danced, holding in one hand a sword, in the other a man's severed head. Try me, she'd say, staring you down, drowning you in her deep laugh. Her breasts, so full of milk, of what could give life, were bloody from her kill. She was the great paradox, the destroyer of illusions. Her tongue extended like a flytrap, she tasted the world's flavors free from discretion. Her blackness, since it was all colors combined, embodied the universe, the totality, and since it was the absence of color, it was also the ultimate reality—that which transcends appearances.

Gwen could feel Kali entering her heart. She was a fire consuming all Gwen had ever thought she needed and loved and was. Daughter, lover, student, stripper, poet—all of it, every possible label, was fuel for the flames.

What remained would be scorched and smell of smoke. What remained would burn her eyes. Her open eyes.

Yes. She would keep them open. She would see it through, this cremation of her selves, this work of Kali. She would see what she was left with when morning came; she would see who she really was.

Leo was singing a new wordless tune, one she hadn't heard before. And in a clear patch of air she could make out the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As they passed its hushed expanse, she wondered if anyone had thought to loot the paintings. There was one she coveted. It was on the third floor, in the American Collection. Granville Redmond, from 1926.
California Poppy Field.
It was so big that if you stood close you could see the dots it was made of, you could lose yourself in pure color, but standing back a little you felt like you were in the field of orange poppies, like you could sit under an oak tree if you wanted to, lie back and watch the clouds move across the far peaks. If she could hang this painting on her wall, look at it when she first woke up and before she went to bed, she was sure all that peace and the sense of quiet distance would change her in ways she couldn't imagine.

She flipped on her blinker to turn right onto Sixth Street, their street. Why on earth was she using her blinker? The habit of courtesy and lawfulness was entrenched. Maybe Leo was right and she should loosen up a little.

Before she could turn, Leo pointed. “Shit,” he said. “Look!” She stopped the car. On the next block, in front of the 99 Cents Only Store, there was shouting, and then gunfire—loud blasts that made Gwen duck behind the steering wheel. People were running, and there was screaming.