In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  “How do you know?”

  “Can’t get a hold of any of my snitches, or any of my ‘select group of friends’. All MIA. I checked around online, and no one who knows is saying anything, and those wannabes who are keep talking about the masks, about there being a new king in town. Big time OG. Outlawing every gang color other than yellow.” Ganz spotted something — or someone — out the window, and ducked down in his seat. “They know that I know and now they’re watching me. Unblinking eyes burned inside the black....”

  Bum glanced over at Ganz. He was talking fast, paranoid, like he hadn’t seen for years. Getting poetic in that weird way of his when he had burrowed down too deep. This wasn’t good. Ganz was slipping backwards into the tunnel, tumbling toward the bottom of the piss bucket where Bum found him. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

  “Of course not. I got rid of my mattress.”

  “Why the hell’d you do that?”

  Ganz rifled through the glove compartment. “Bugs.”

  “How long’ve you been up?”

  “A couple days, give or take. Hard to tell, inside the compound... But it’s good, because I got things to do, people to contact, the ones I can find, anyway. They’ll come if I close my eyes. They’ll come for my books. I’ve got thousands of them, Bum. Fucking thousands.”

  “Hank, I don’t think anyone—”

  “— And you can hear things at night that don’t happen while the world’s awake. The barks, the whispers. But mostly it’s just quiet, which is scaring the proper fuck out of me.”

  Bum looked closely at him, with that smile he only created for Ganz that was a mixture of genuine affection and a measure of concern bordering on pity.

  “How are you, Hank?” Bum handed him a half full Coffee Bean cup. Ganz took it, popped the top and sniffed the contents, scowling.

  “Fucking parched. Pull over at the corner so I can heat this bitch up.”

  “First meatloaf,” Bum said, driving past the liquor store, ignoring Ganz’s gestures of protest. “Then refreshments. We gotta get some food in you, get you right.”

  “Fuck food. I’m right right now.”

  “I know you are, Hank. You’re always right. At least watch me eat.”

  “You take me around food, I’ll fucking vomit. I swear to Christ, Bum.”

  “That’s fine. Their meatloaf isn’t all that great anyway.”

  ignet

  Bum drove them to Clifton’s Cafeteria, finding a parking spot right up front on Broadway. Very few cars were parked anywhere on the block. It was a Saturday, so most of the commuters were far away from downtown. Still, the lack of weekend shopping traffic was odd.

  “Check us out,” Bum said with a grin. “Rock star parking. Just like the old days.” As he pulled up, a dozen people wearing those same light yellow masks and black featureless outfits crossed the street without stopping for Bum’s car, or any of the other moving vehicles, causing several of them to slam on their brakes. There were a number of other groups of masked people clustered up and down the block.

  “Assholes,” Bum grumbled, honking his horn. None of them acknowledged the car. Bum shook his head as he angled his Mercedes to the curb. “One of those nerd conventions in town?”

  “No,” Ganz said. “These are local. I’ve seen ‘em all over. It’s in the notes. Have you read the notes?”

  Bum ignored his question. “Is this a gang thing?”

  Ganz didn’t respond as they both got out of the car and headed toward Clifton’s.

  “Maybe a bullshit modern art experiment,” Bum said. “You ask me, art in this city is on the wane. It’s all being painted over.”

  “You’ve seen it, too?”

  “How can you miss it? Dollars to donuts this is part of the chief’s secret gang injunction or something. Part of these new numbers.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Ganz mused. “All the street art, all the tags, all the gang leaders, all gone.”

  “The damnest thing.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying. Shit ain’t right, Bum. Something’s happening in this city. Something big and something quiet.”

  “But then look at that.”

  Bum pointed across the street to a heavily fenced parking lot, one of hundreds that utilized every square inch of unused downtown real estate. The brick wall behind it that served as a graffiti canvas for decades was now painted that same pale yellow a dozen feet up, wiping clean all those years of expression. In the center of the wall was a single black symbol that looked like a distorted triskelion, topped by a crude question mark, with a pincer jutting down on the lower left and a grasping tendril on the right. Not a drip of paint leaked from the emblem. As if it was stamped, or branded.

  “That’s new,” Bum said.

  “Yes it is.”

  lushing Gators

  Bum filled two heavy plastic trays with an assortment of gravy soaked entrées and sugary sides, anything to suck up the toxins swirling in his friend’s lower GI tract. He handed a tray to Ganz and they ambled to the back corner of the nearly empty yet still claustrophobic dining hall decorated to look like a forest glade uprooted from the Sierra Madres. They passed under the gaze of a mounted moose head and sat under the shadow of a fake Sequoia that made up the overwrought naturalist décor that was a bizarre cross between a Ranger Rick amusement park ride and a polite 1920’s dinner theatre. Bum always brought Ganz to joints like this, that mixed low economy with high camp. He was a specialist in eating cheap, even though he wasn’t necessarily a stingy person, and was in fact quite well off. He was just nostalgic, and loved these old school Americana joints like Clifton’s, where you could pick up a white bowl of canned corn, tapioca pudding, and grade school green jello with pears embedded inside with your Salisbury steak. In a complicated world, a man tires of caviar and hungers for the simplicity of the grade school cafeteria where everything was still elementary.

  “So you read my notes from the Park Plaza?”

  “I did, but they didn’t make much sense.”

  “They didn’t make much sense when I wrote them, but they’re starting to.”

  “Well, I can’t figure any of it out. Lots of gibberish.”

  “You’re not concentrating. It’s all in there. It’s all taking shape. Order out of chaos.”

  “You wrote something about organized book burnings, about lizards under the city. Fucking lizards, Hank.”

  “The Lizard People haven’t ever been disproven.”

  “Neither has the Loch Ness monster.”

  “Because you can’t disprove an avatar, a metaphor that is more real than the truth. You know the Central Library was the tip of the tail, right?”

  “What tail?”

  “The map of the catacombs crawling under this city. It’s shaped like a lizard. They’re clever fuckers. Dressing up. Hiding in plain sight. Leaving maps. The head starts in Elysian Park. They’re burning away the body in reverse.”

  “The Lizard People.”

  “Goddamnit, Bum!” Ganz slammed his fist on the table, spilling his untouched food onto the formica. “The Lizard People are bullshit. Misdirection! A magician’s trick! I’m talking about something real. Something OLDER.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down.”

  “You think I’m fucking nuts, but I’m not. There’s something happening out there. All around us. A shift, that’s been in the planning stage for years. Hundreds, thousands, maybe. I read reports on the ‘net, all of them coming from writers living in neighborhoods orbiting downtown. Reporting the same thing. People disappearing. LOTS of people. They’re taking down this city, remaking it. Burning the outposts of the orthodoxy.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  Ganz was staring out the plate glass windows, at the trio of masked people taping a flier to a lamppost outside. Dozens of others trailed behind, all holding stacks of flie
rs. “Them.”

  Bum decided to humor Ganz, just long enough to get him home, and then call up the best psychiatrist he knew to cash in a favor. “So, Elysian Park... The Police Academy’s over there. Chinatown.”

  “Chavez Ravine.”

  “You think they’re targets?”

  “I think all of us are...” Ganz burrowed down into his thoughts. “The play’s the thing,” he muttered.

  A fire truck escorted by two lit up police cruisers screamed up the street outside. The triad of sound was nearly deafening, even muffled as it was amid all of the tacky woodland trappings. After a few seconds, instead of slowing fading away, the sound ended abruptly.

  “The what?” Bum said.

  Ganz blinked back to attention, having to remember what he just said. “The play’s the thing.”

  Bum nodded. “To expose the consciousness of the king,” he said absently, forking a greasy hillock of meatloaf into his mouth.

  Ganz looked at Bum, astonished. “Did you read that on the wall?”

  “Hm?... What wall?”

  “You read any Shakespeare lately?”

  Bum snorted. “Yeah right... My kid said that to me two nights ago, before he left for his camping trip.”

  “Joseph?” Ganz asked, assuming the more bookish of Bum’s two boys.

  “Christian,” Bum said. Christian was a wrestler in junior high, leaving behind athletics and authoritarian coaches as he worked his way through several private high schools. Had a few scrapes with the law, all of them smoothed over by daddy. Christian liked to escape Brentwood and slum it with the low rent thugs in Culver City, Echo Park. Downtown.

  “He check in since then?”

  “Haven’t heard a peep. I figured he was just unplugging for a while, but he took his phone.”

  Ganz’s face blanched. “Vic, I think you need to—”

  It was then that the power cut, drowning Clifton’s in darkness. The fake trees sliced weird shadows in the fading light leaking in from the windows.

  “Damn,” Bum breathed. “Brown out.”

  Ganz peered outside. The masked figures were gone, leaving every lamppost on the block decorated with a poster. Bold letters adorned each one, making an identical announcement.

  “Let’s go outside,” Ganz said.

  laybill

  Outside on the sidewalk, Ganz pulled down one of the fliers, the fading rays of sun peeking over the western horizon, giving last light to those who paid the most for it.

  Bum was behind him, looking up and down the street, which was totally deserted. He looked at his watch. It was just a little past 8:00. “Where the fuck is everyone?”

  Ganz held up the flier. Hundreds of them in front of and behind him created a repeating pattern of rectangles getting smaller and smaller as they disappeared into the city. The paper was sturdy, like a manila folder. But yellow. The font was fancy, baroque.

  Bum grabbed it, squinted in the dying light. “A play at Dodger Stadium? During playoffs? Is this some kind of fucking joke?”

  “Dodger Stadium is in Chavez Ravine.” Ganz started walking.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Go home, Vic. Get far away from here. Out of the city. Maybe further. I don’t know...”

  “Vic? Since when did you start calling me Vic?”

  “I wanted you to know that I remember.”

  Bum looked around at the darkened city. “Something’s happening, isn’t it?”

  “Something’s happening,” Ganz said.

  “A cleansing.”

  Ganz nodded slowly, half turned. “Vic?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Christian isn’t coming back.”

  Before Bum could respond, Ganz was already running up the street, heading north, as the last rays of sun snuffed out above, leaving skyscraper-sized shadows as the only remembrance of the day.

  he 111 Steps

  Ganz ran up Broadway, not recognizing the street. It was dark now in a way that Los Angeles had never been before. The brown out became black. Landmarks blurred, melted together. Only fires – in alleyways, on street corners, the guts of buildings – gave light to a city cloaked in quiet chaos. Yellow light, tinged on the outside with red. Screams and the pop pop of gunshots pierced the hush, but mostly it was quiet in that bloated way that fills up the space right before the perp rushes from the closet, knives out, reaching for your face.

  The mask people were everywhere. They stood in groups, lined the sidewalks. They busied themselves pulling people from buildings and stringing up police officers and fire fighters from anything that jutted away from a vertical structure. Ganz gripped the play flier in his useless hands, and it seemed to grant him passage. He soon saw other people like him, faces bared to the world, clamoring up the street as fast as jellied legs would take them, all watched by a thousand sets of eyes hidden under those pallid masks. Some were yanked from the asphalt and dragged away screaming. Some went quietly, as if they knew, or maybe came to an understanding. There were kids amongst them. Little ones. Good Christ...

  Still Ganz ran, stumbled, crawled on the stained asphalt like a crab. Had to keep moving, sliding through the funnel that was rapidly forming out of the melted plastic of downtown. Move, MOVE, you son of a bitch... Can’t fight them all. Too many. Just too goddamn many, all of them armed to the fucking teeth. Clubs, long knives, SWAT issue assault rifles... What was this? How did this—? The Thirst was shriveling him underneath his labored breathing. Should have stopped with Bum... Baumgartner... Wait, who?

  Ganz slowed, becoming dizzy. It was too much. He was less than an hour from all of his past lives, an entire world that had slipped into the howling abyss that spiraled down endlessly, sucking up the realness of memories as a black hole inhales physics. An immense blaze burned on the front steps of the justice building as well-dressed bodies were lashed to thick pillars on each side, some without heads or limbs, some with several additional protrusions stuck into their torsos like a child experimenting with Play-Do. A fire engine lay on its side, spinning red lights strobing up the side of a building like a repeating laser site. It was clear what they had done. The masks had moved on the FBI building and police stations, then the fire stations, then the consular offices and the newspaper. Then the Twin Towers Correctional and LA County Jail on the edge of downtown. Any authority figure, anyone associated with the city, state, country, or wider world was taken down, dragged out into the street and hung up on anything high. Ganz faltered, and was shoved out of the way by a woman running past him, howling like a gut-kicked canine. This was the French Revolution on peyote, Bosch painting the apocalypse in smears of human blood. He knew the history. Read about it, dreamed about it. This was the rise of the savage death cults waiting just below the boot print of civilized man. Ganz quickened his pace, determined to finish this marathon of madness. There was no other way.

  He descended the hill toward Olvera Street and Avila Adobe. The entire area, boxed up years ago into a tidy historical site and touristy shopping square was teeming with the masked. They climbed on building tops like a hive of angry insects, tossing boxes and furniture and bits of dismembered humanity into their air, stuffing pieces under their masks. Each side of the street was hemmed in by either violence or the complete stoicism of those who wore the masks, with all the side streets blocked by people and things stacked on top of each other. This created a destabilizing effect on the brain, as chaos and rigid order lined up side by side, both serving the same master. Ganz reeled, sweated. He threw up as he moved, spitting slimy foam...

  Passing under dragons. Chinatown now. The sidewalks were cleared of product bins, and all the trinket shops boarded up, painted over in yellow. Several had been burned down. A few still smoldered. They must have hit Chinatown early in this insane insurrection. How long had this been going on? How many knew it was coming? At every block, a few local residents s
huffled from doorways and hiding spots and joined the hunched procession scuttling up Broadway like a parade route of the damned, each holding a flier for the show to come. Tonight only. Bring the family.

  The pagoda architecture finally gave way to the open space of Elysian Park. The walkers moved off Broadway and down onto the parade grounds, surrounded by warehouses and the formerly smoking machinery of industrial LA. Then one by one headed down into the basin of the Los Angeles River.

  alk the River Dreaming

  He walked down the gentle incline to the cemented riverbed, where only a trickle of water flowed, sludged with algae and the sticky sheen of industry. All the trash and discarded appliances had been cleared away and the patchwork graffiti painted over, leaving the LA River clean and uncluttered for the first time since it was paved back in ‘38. More people were crowded in here, of various ages and races and ease of mobility, joined by others dropping down into the river in every direction. This was the destination chute for all of the living cattle left in the city. Ganz and the rest of the citizens around him were being herded toward the bowl built on top of the hill.

  On either side, before him and behind, hundreds of masked figures worked with spray paint on a continuous mural that depicted breathtaking pastoral scenes of 19th century high society and rustic peasant frolicking in bucolic settings. Several crews teamed up on an enormous pronouncement topping the far river wall, painting the letters C-A-R-C-O, continuing on with the rounds and slopes of the next letter.

  They passed under Suicide Bridge, where strange fruit hung down from the girders and exposed metalwork at the end of thick truck chains, creating a dripping curtain of barely clothed flesh, softening on the outside as the insides stiffened like drying tree branches. They would have rocked in the breeze, but there was none.

  Northward the river pointed, and the walkers moved against the rumor of a current, coming to the Arroyo Seco Confluence, where the two enslaved rivers, tamed by cement, crossed paths in shame and continued on their way, dreaming of water and muddy riverbanks tousled with grass. Ganz vaguely remembered an old man with young eyes hiding behind thick glass, who told him about this place. Told him that Ganz had stolen his life, and now he’d see him again in hell. No, not in hell. On the other side. Here. CARCO...