Slow Apocalypse (17 page)

Now there was the George C. Page Museum, which displayed the bones of mammoth, mastodon, giant ground sloth, saber-toothed tiger, and American lion—all the big animals that had thrived in the area.

The Page Museum was like an earthen bunker, partially underground, with sloping grass-covered sides. In front of it was the largest tar pit, looking deceptively calm and inviting beneath a few inches of water. You could easily see how animals would be lured there, to bog down hopelessly in the sticky goo beneath. There was a sad life-size tableau on one edge of the pit: a family of Columbian mammoths, the male half-buried and struggling to escape, while the mother and baby cried out to him from the shore. In the middle of the pond, swamp gas bubbled constantly to the surface.

Something looked out of kilter.

He got his telescope and brought it to bear on the buildings of the art museum. The one farthest to the east was an irregular shape, and housed the collections of Japanese art, including a fine selection of tiny netsuke that he loved. To the west of that was the Hammer Building and the Ahmanson Building, and across the entrance plaza was the Broad Contemporary Art Museum,
and LACMA West, housed in the old May Company building at Wilshire and Fairfax.

The Ahmanson Building was leaning. The west side looked to be a lot higher than the east side. There was a big gap between it and the Broad, and it looked like part of the ceilings of both buildings had collapsed. On the other side of the plaza, the Broad was leaning in the other direction. It was as if something big was trying to force its way to the surface right beneath the plaza.

He moved the scope and zeroed in on the big tar pool just off Wilshire Boulevard. He couldn’t find it. Where it had been a black cone, like a volcano, had formed and spilled over into the street and covered much of the lawn between the Japanese pavilion and the Page Museum. The life-size mammoth sculptures had vanished. As he watched, the huge heap of tar heaved, heaved again, and spit out a thick black goo that ran down the sides of the new formation in all directions.

He became aware that Addison was standing beside him.

“Can I see?” she asked, quietly.

He moved aside and let her look through the telescope.

He didn’t know why the destruction of LACMA should shake him so, but it did. It couldn’t compare to the tragedy of people killed and left homeless by the explosions and fires from the Doheny field. But there was something about the accumulated treasures of the human imagination being engulfed by a substance that looked like primordial ooze that was profoundly disturbing. It was something he had never seen. It struck him as something new and unprecedented, like watching the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Cultures from all over the world were represented in those big buildings down there, and it looked as if it were all being swallowed up.

He found some television coverage.

“The police are trying to prevent people from entering the damaged buildings,” a reporter on the ground was saying, “but there are not enough of them, they’re spread too thin, and most of them are exhausted from endless double shifts, and the whole force is depleted from resignations and inability to get to work, as I revealed here in a special report two days ago. And, frankly, I get the impression that they just don’t care that much. One cop told me he had more important things to do than to protect works of art, and—his words—‘idiots who run into a collapsing building.’

“Museum staff are risking their lives, carrying priceless works of art out
to waiting trucks. There are also quite a number of volunteers. Frankly, it’s hard to say if all of them are…well, there is some suspicion that looting is going on, right under our noses. I spoke to a curator a few moments ago, and she was in tears. She said they were only able to save a part of the paintings collection. Most everything else—statues, pottery, furniture, things like that—has already been destroyed or is too heavy to move without special equipment, which they don’t have and wouldn’t be able to move into these precarious buildings anyway.”

He went on like that for a while. Then Addison shouted.

“Daddy, it’s falling down!”

He could see it on the television, probably better than she could. The reporter was running and the camera was jolting, but he could see another wall of the Ahmanson collapsing, right into the street. Everything was enveloped by a dust cloud for a moment, and then the shattered building loomed out of the dust.

“It’s really happening, isn’t it?”

Karen had caught him off guard. She was standing off to one side and a little behind him. Her arms were crossed in front of her as if she were cold.

“Really happening?”

“What you said. That crazy story about the man who wanted revenge, and made something that would destroy all the oil in the world.”

“We’ll never know if that story was literally true,” he said. “But real? It’s happening right in our backyard.”

They watched in silence for a while. When she spoke she still didn’t look at him.

“I volunteered down there at LACMA. Remember?”

“I think so.” The truth was she had worked for so many causes over the last few years that he hadn’t been able to keep them all straight.

No, that was not fair. He hadn’t really been paying attention to her projects. The fact was that for a long time he had been a workaholic, largely absent from her life. He had been coming to the reluctant and painful realization over the last months, thinking about how their relationship had fallen apart, that he was at least as responsible for that as she was.

“I’ve been very depressed,” she said.

“No. Really?” The dry understatement was the sort of thing the old Karen would have caught, and probably even appreciated. But she gave no sign she had noticed.

“I haven’t really been here,” she went on. “Not for you, not for Addison. The last few weeks have been sort of a blur. I think I slept a lot.”

“That’s what I do when I’m depressed. I guess everybody does.” Once more, it was as if he hadn’t spoken. He decided just to listen.

“And then, looking out the window just now. The museum is falling into the earth. Just like those mammoths so many years ago. All their dreams and aspirations, swallowed up in blackness.” He didn’t point out that the museum was being raised up from below. He understood her analogy. “I remember once looking at that tableau of the mammoths at the Page. I almost cried. Silly, I guess. But that mammoth, slowly sinking into the tar. Do you think he had dreams?”

“I can’t speak for mammoths,” he said. He cautiously took her hand. He realized he was treating her like a recovering mental patient, treading carefully. “I’ve heard that elephants try to tend to their sick or wounded. Maybe mammoths did, too. And many animals care for their young, will fight for them against great odds if they have to. I guess that qualifies as a dream.”

“He didn’t know it, that mammoth,” she went on, “but his whole race was doomed. Before long there would be no more mammoths. And I wondered, was it some consolation to him that his mate and his child would go on? Even if the race of mammoths was soon to die out?”

He didn’t like where this was going. He gently turned her to face him.

“Karen, this is a great tragedy, but it is not the end of the world.”

“It isn’t? It sure looks like it.”

“I know it does, but there’s hope. We will not die out, the human race will get through this. The big question for me lately has been, will
we
get through it? Me, and you, and our child. Our family.”

“I haven’t really been a part of the family lately.”

“No. You haven’t. But that was then. All it takes now is for you to…I know this isn’t as easy as it sounds, you can’t just turn off depression, but…honey, we
need
you. Addison and me. We need you to buckle down like I know you can. If we work at it, we can survive this. I know we can. But we have to have your help.”

When she finally looked at him there were tears in her eyes.

“I’ll try.”

“That’s all I ask.”

“I guess there are two things I need to do then,” Karen sighed.

“I’m eager to hear what they are.”

“First…do you think it’s still possible for us to drive to Oregon?”

“I think it would be difficult, but I wouldn’t say impossible. Not quite like crossing the Donner Pass in a covered wagon in the winter.”

She looked at him to see if he was kidding. The truth was, of course, he didn’t know if it was possible.

“I’ve heard some communities have been setting up roadblocks on Interstate 5,” Dave said. “A lot of towns feel like they’ve already taken in all the extra people they can handle. But they might not be hostile if we could convince them we’d just be passing through.”

“Do you still think going to Oregon is a good idea?”

“It’s hard to say. It’s the trip that worries me. I don’t think there’s any question that being in Oregon right now would be better than being here. They’ve got plenty of water and they should have plenty of electricity. They’ve got more arable farmland, and the farmland is closer to the population centers.”

She sighed.

“The time we should have left was back when you first suggested it, wasn’t it?”

“No question.”

“My fault.”

“Well, Karen, I could say yes and beat you up about it, I guess. But I’ve thought about that a lot, and I can’t say that if the situation had been reversed, if
you
had come to
me
with such a crazy story and no real evidence to back it up, I might not have believed you, either. It’s as if I’d told you we were about to be invaded by Martians. So, I think it’s best if we just pass over all that and deal with the situation we have now.”

“I will if you will.”

He wanted to hug her, but she was still keeping a physical distance from him and he wasn’t sure she was ready for that.

Karen called her brother in Oregon to ask if they would be welcome, assuming it was possible to get there at all.

It took her a while to get through. Phone service had been getting spotty, especially the landlines. But cell service was a bit more reliable, and after several attempts she got her brother Martin on the line. She put him on the speakerphone.

Martin and Karen were not close. He was eleven years older than her; she was an unplanned baby. Martin had been a high-school and college basketball star, almost made the NBA, and had worked as an assistant college coach and then as head coach at a Portland high school. He lived with his wife of twenty-seven years in a large home on two or three acres about twenty miles east of the city. The area was semirural, with some larger spreads where actual farming was done.

Martin and his wife, Brenda, were deeply religious, born-again Baptists. Three of their five children had scattered to distant colleges in the East, while their youngest daughter continued to live at home. Their contact with Karen and Dave was largely limited to exchanging Christmas cards.

Dave was counting on Martin’s sense of Christian charity to allow them to squat in one of their spare rooms until he could work out a way to make a living. He was hoping that Karen could sell that proposition.

Martin and Brenda were sick with worry about three of their children. The eldest, who had been working for her master’s degree in Seattle, had made it home just before the gas rationing began.

The other three were undergraduates in New York, Atlanta, and Columbus. The situation in Georgia and Ohio was not good—it wasn’t good anywhere in the country—but things were still more or less under control. Both those children, a boy and a girl, had been in contact in the last few days.

Jenny, the daughter in Ohio, wanted to come home and was trying to get a ride on one of the buses the Ohio State engineering department had been
adapting to burn biodiesel, ethanol, or coal. These refugee vehicles had been setting out regularly during the last few weeks on circuitous routes aimed at getting students back to their homes, but there were not enough of them yet.

Herbert, who was a junior at Georgia Tech, was electing to tough it out in Atlanta. It seemed he had a local girlfriend whose family had taken him in, and he still believed that education could go on at some level during the crisis, though most people were dubious that classes would begin in the fall in most places in the U.S.

They were worried about both of them, but nothing like they worried about their son Ben, twenty-five years old, who had just completed his first year of postgraduate study at Columbia University in New York. They hadn’t heard from him in over a week.

“Phone service is out all over Manhattan,” Martin said. “I’ve been trying to get news from New York City. Have you heard anything?”

“Nothing at all.”

“We’ve heard that the bridges and tunnels to New Jersey are blocked, either by the National Guard or local people. Same thing with the roads to upstate.”

“We’ve heard the same thing about the communities to the north of us. They say the locals have blocked the interstate. It’s easy to isolate Los Angeles from the north, because there’s very few roads through the mountains.”