of it matters and in a way there’s nothing that matters more, and am I still
part paved and part mud. They keep the windows rolled up due to the black clouds of mosquitoes that descend suddenly from swampier parts of the city. From the backseat Angie can see the permanent watermark on warped buildings that haven’t been demolished yet, like the permanent shadows of mid-Twentieth Century Hiroshima: How long since this part has been submerged? she asks halfway across the lake bottom, and is stunned when the driver answers almost twenty years, as much by how quickly her own life is passing; it doesn’t seem so long ago she was hearing the stories about the “new L.A.” being built — as the civic phrasemakers had it—“from out of the shale,” when the lake was finally declared officially dead. “Recovery’s been slow,” she notes.
“Yes,” the driver, not wanting to venture too far into politics, answers carefully, “well … some never saw the point.” Then, becoming bolder, “After all, it’s not like there ever was supposed to be a city here in the first place. Even back before the lake,” the driver goes on, “everyone knew it was doomed.”
It’s two hours before they reach the site. As it looms into view she’s astonished at the size of it; her sixty-six-year-old heart beats harder and faster than it has in a long time. The car stops and the driver helps Angie unload from the car a large case of instruments and equipment. She’s greeted by two members of the excavation team, one of them the director of the project, a man in his early thirties with tired watery gray eyes who fairly exudes skepticism. He asks if she would like some lunch first. They’re not in a rush about this, she thinks — a battle of bureaucrats: the government wants me here, these guys don’t. She says she would like to take a look at what she’s come for but the director insists on lunch and, given how her heart is racing, she relents. Over tacos she heads off
sinking? am I still drowning? am I still descending? am I still falling down
his questions with her own, and studies in the near distance the outside scaffolding that props up part of the recovered structure. At this point, he explains, we’ve cleared almost everything but the western wall that was the most deeply embedded when that part of the hills collapsed from the water.
On a long path of planks that disappear under the complex of scaffolding, Angie, the project director and the driver with Angie’s instruments head into the site. Workers stop to watch. When she emerges into what appears to have been once a grand,now decayed lobby, the workers inside stop as well. Across the atrium, two wide stone stairways spiral up one side and the other, as well as long corridors that glint with a dead blue residue; above, much of what was the roof has been washed away. Almost immediately she hears it. It’s very faint and high, almost beyond human hearing; her ears, once extremely attuned to such sounds, aren’t as sharp as they once were. “A hotel?” she says.
“That’s what we figure,” the director answers, “hard to think it could have been anything else.” They climb the stairs and continue down one of the corridors, cutting through a small, comparatively barren room and then what might have been a sitting room beyond that, with a large window. Sodden overstuffed sofas and high-armed chairs lie overturned against the walls. In every room through which they pass, workers stop what they’re doing: She’s here, she hears them whisper, that’s her. “There are a couple of things,” the director says, “that make this site more interesting than some of the other structures we’ve excavated in the area.” As they make their way down a long corridor into a room overwhelmed by both a massive fireplace
down down? or am I rising? up up up, and how did I get turned around then?
and a melancholy Angie feels almost immediately, the music she’s heard since they entered the unearthed hotel grows. “First,” he says, “there’s no record of a hotel being here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we go back into old references to try to find some sort of entry, old travel books, old hotel guides, we go back into the city archives and pull out old geological surveys, zoning ordinances … and find no record of a hotel here at all.” He stops and gazes around them. “Look at this. This wasn’t a truck stop. This wasn’t a motel on some back road to nowhere. There are plenty of records of another hotel about half a mile southwest of here, but not this.”
“Maybe this is that other hotel. Maybe the records aren’t exact.”
He shakes his head, “We found that other one. It never went all the way under and actually was pretty famous, the Chateau Something with rock musicians and movie stars back in the last century, and then in the ’10s and ’20s some sort of religious-mystic fortune-telling bondage … uh … hey,” he shrugs when he sees the way she’s looking at him, “it was L.A., even if it was under water. But this,” he sighs, sweeping his arm at the floor beneath them, “was just the middle of a road leading into an old canyon that led to a valley beyond that. Records show homes, a neighborhood, a corner gas station … no hotel though, and nothing like this.”
“What’s the other thing?” Angie says. They come into what appears to have been a huge ballroom, or several ballrooms
or have I really gotten turned around at all? and now I feel my first real panic,
conjoined; a few patches of wall still have shards of old mirror, and from the ceiling sway the stems of chandeliers plucked by the lake long ago. “The other thing?” says the project director.
“You said there are a couple of things that make this site interesting.”
“The other thing,” he answers, “is that … what our records do show is that … well, this was it.”
“This was what?”
“This was where it came from.”
“This was where what came from?”
“The lake.”
“The lake?”
“Yes.”
“The lake came from here?”
“Yes.”
“The lake came out of this hotel.”
“Well of course we don’t have any official indication there was a hotel.”
“Well there was, obviously, officially or not.”
that I’ve gotten turned around, that maybe I’m returning up up and up to the
The director takes a deep breath. “I can’t explain the hotel,” he says, “but the whole reason for digging here in the first place was a pretty formidable amount of evidence, ranging from the anecdotal to the geological, that the source of the lake was somewhere right under here. Look,” he takes another deep breath, “I don’t know … and the stories surrounding all this you wouldn’t believe….” They cross the plundered ballrooms into two small transitional rooms that appear to provide the only passage to the rest of the building. In one stands the remnants of what may have been a large pillar; if there was such a pillar in the other, it’s gone now. Out of these rooms Angie and the director exit into the hotel’s mezzanine, once obviously spectacular and lavish. Now the music, still high and vague, is close; once again, at the sight of Angie the workers stop. There’s a buzz in the mezzanine as they turn from their work.
By itself, in the middle of the mezzanine that dwarfs it, under lights that have been set up around it, stands a rough wooden table, with high legs and a small surface-top; the table has been roped off. On top is a closed metal box.
“That’s where we first found it,” the director says, “crawling across the floor where the table is now.”