(—Shut up.)
That had never really worked, either. Maybe those apartments had all been vacant, with the lights left on. She folded the magazine and put it back.
A few moments later she jumped, and looked toward the front of the bus just before the first returning passenger stepped aboard, rocking the bus on the shocks. Elizalde sighed. No, she couldn’t go back to Oklahoma.
For about twelve hours now she had been doing this, reacting to noises and jolts just before they happened. She’d been in bed when it started, and she’d awakened in her darkened apartment just before the clock radio had blared on. At first she had thought some mental clock had been keeping track of the time while she’d slept—she’d found herself remembering her grandmother’s saying, Es como los brujos, duerme con los ojos abiertos: He is like the witches, and sleeps with his eyes open—but the effect had continued as she’d proceeded to get ready for work, so that she’d flinched before water had come out of the shower head, and nearly dropped her hair dryer because it had seemed to quiver animately in her hand just as she was about to push the On button.
Then she had begun blinking her eyes even before the tears welled up in them. She’d sat down on her bathroom floor and just sobbed with fright, for in the same way that she’d seemed to be anticipating physical events, she had now been afraid that an idea was about to surface in her mind, an idea that she had been strenuously avoiding for two years. Before she’d been able to distract herself, the idea had hit her: maybe she had not, after all, had a psychotic schizophrenic episode in her Los Angeles clinic in 1990.
And, bleakly, she had known that she would have to go back there and find out. Find out if
One of them had finally been for real.
Everybody was getting back on the bus now, and the driver had the engine idling. Elizalde let her head sink back against the high, padded seat, and she thought she might at last be able to get some sleep, during the twelve hours it would take the bus to plow on through Flagstaff and Kingman and Barstow to, finally. Los Angeles.
After all, it seemed that nothing could sneak up on her.
Soy como las brujas, duermo con mis ojos abiertos.
PETE SULLIVAN clanked the gearshift into neutral and gunned the engine to keep it from stalling. He was stopped in what was supposed to be the fast lane of the 101, a mile or so short of the tunnel where the northbound Santa Ana Freeway would merge in. God only knew when he would get to Hollywood.
Though it was a non-holiday Friday morning, even on the westbound 60 the traffic had been jammed up—fully stopped much of the time, and occasionally speeding up and opening out in front of him for just enough moments to let him imagine that the congestion was behind him, before the red brake lights would all start glaring again ahead of him.
In the driver’s seat of his van he was above most of the other drivers, and during the course of an hour, while his foot had moved back and forth from the brake to the gas pedal, he had watched the towers of Los Angeles rise ahead of him in the brassy light. The towers had been scrimmed to dim silhouettes by the smog, as if they were faded shapes in a photograph that’s been left out too long in the sun—or, he had thought, as if the city has had its picture taken so many times that the cumulative loss of images had begun to visibly diminish it.
Like deLarava’s ghosts, he had thought. Maybe the whole city has died, but is too distracted to have realized it yet.
The towers were clearer now, and it was disorienting to see big buildings that he didn’t recognize—one of the new ones was a tall tan-stone cylinder, like a stylized sculpture of a rocket ship, and he wondered uneasily if he would still be able to find his way around the city’s streets.
His window was open to the diesel-reeking air, and he looked down over his elbow at the center divider, which in the old days had generally just been a featureless blur rushing past. Flowering weeds, and even a couple of midget palm trees, were pushing up out of cracks in the concrete, and curled around them and the many Budweiser cans was an apparently constant web of brown tape from broken stereo cassettes; there were even a lot of peaches for some reason, bruised but unbitten, as if some citizen of this no-man’s-land had left them there like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.
Sullivan wondered what cassettes these were that drivers had so prodigally pitched out their windows, and he grinned nervously at the temptation to open the door and salvage some of the tape. It would be a cinch to clean it and wind it onto a fresh cassette-half. Would it all be the same kind of music, perhaps even all copies of the same tape? It occurred to him that the center divider looked like a miles-long shrine to primitive-but-urban gods; and he shivered and turned his attention back to the pickup truck in front of him, in the bed of which two Mexican girls were listlessly brushing their long black hair.
About an hour ago he had stopped peering ahead to see what wreck or freeway construction would be causing the traffic jam—apparently the freeways just snarled up without any definable cause these days, like the turbulence that would sometimes inexplicably shake a sump pipe at a power station even when all the air had been bled out of it.
In Los Angeles space is time, he thought—you don’t say I’m thirty miles from downtown, you say I’m half an hour from it. If unpredictable turbulence has become a real, constant factor in traffic, then all the maps and clocks are broken (like the Mad Hatter’s butter-clogged watch!) and you can only make a hazy guess about how far it might be from one point to another.
I’m a hundred years from Venice Beach, he thought, and a thousand miles from Christmas Eve of 1986. Better draw up a chart.
He pushed the thought away and concentrated on the traffic.
THE BREW 102 brewery proved to be gone. 102 had been the only beer Sullivan had ever encountered that had sediment in it, but he found that he missed the old black-and-yellow sign, and he was further disoriented to see half a dozen helicopters parked on the wide roof of a building on the other side of the freeway. With the glittering rocket still ahead of him, the whole place was looking like a poster for some 1930s science-fiction movie.
When he eventually gunned the van up the off-ramp at Hollywood Boulevard, though, there were beat-up old couches under the palm trees in the freeway border area, and a dispirited-looking group of ragged black men, their hair in ropy dreadlocks, were slouching there in the shade. He half expected to see chickens running around their skinny ankles, and a fire in a split oil drum behind them.
The clocks and maps are smashed and ripped to bits, he thought. Even though it was the best butter.
He drove west on Hollywood Boulevard, cautiously pleased to see that though the names of many businesses had changed—there was no Howard Johnson’s restaurant at Hollywood and Vine anymore—most of the actual buildings he remembered had survived.
It seemed to him that it had always been like this, in the area from Franklin south to Melrose and beyond. Every building looked as if it had originally been used for something else. Even here on Hollywood Boulevard, the odd top corners of the storefronts were frequently broken or bent, showing old brick underneath, and between buildings he could see brick alcoves, way up and far back, dating from God knew when. Tiny ironwork balconies still stuck out on second and third floors; with probably nothing behind them anymore but empty offices.