While the crew worked on the stage, Erin stayed inside the tour bus with Shannon, Helary, Jobe, Brin, and quiet Toffe. Shannon was wearing their best approximation of her Live in Rio bodysuit costume: with green and red electroluminescent wires sewn into the fabric and three battery packs held between her shoulder blades with duct tape.
Chief, Toby Tyler
The Security radio scanners picked up the chatter among all the teams spread around the city. There were the fire trucks at the Burn barrier, Inventory and Security supervisors along Figueroa. Chief watched from the roof, doubting his plan. He asked for a moment with Toby Tyler.
“Is it too late to put this off for a few days? Look at them.”
Drifters who seemed to come from nowhere filled the sidewalks behind the yellow barricades marked lapd do not cross. The Shamblers in the crowd were pressed backward by the crowd into the storefronts or, if they were lucky, spread into the cross streets.
“We have to burn tonight, Chief. The charges are set. Uncontrolled sparks can set them off. Rain can put them out. I’ll do what you want because you’re the Chief, but Vayler wants to protect our resources. We have to do this now. And night is an hour away.”
Eckmann, Marci, Consuelo
At the hangar, Eckmann started to make a ceremony out of opening the big door. “My friends, when I open this door I’m opening the future.” But Marci shook her head in disapproval, to say that he was undermining his leadership by acting like the leader. He let Consuelo push the button that started the motor that turned the gears and the door complained with creaks and rumbles as it slid open after being shut for over two years.
“Chief is going to piss his pants,” said Spig Wead. “I wish I could see his face after all these years when he sees us. Want to bring this baby over downtown and buzz the fuckers, is what I want to do. Eckmann, don’t you want to fuck with them after all this time?”
“Sun sets in an hour,” said Eckmann.
Hopper, Madeinusa
Madeinusa, naked again, walked into the Los Angeles River to her knees. The water reflected the colorless sky. Three white herons lifted together and settled like a lost argument on the other side. A brown duck bobbed her head underwater, with no concern for the woman standing in the shallow part of the stream.
After Hopper changed into his black pants and shirt, he rested the bicycle upside down on its seat and handlebars, dampened a rag with lubricant, and cranked the pedal to run the chain through the rag, shifting the gears. He knew it wasn’t necessary. The chain was clean and he’d only ridden a hundred miles on it, but he needed to do something while he thought about Madeinusa. Whatever happened after he went to the house and returned with its secret was going to lead him away from her. His Silent Voice said, “You tried.” But this didn’t solve the problem, if it even was a problem. Maybe there are no problems, thought Hopper, hoping for his Silent Voice to either agree or show him where the idea collapsed from the weight of the evidence of the world. Madeinusa took two more steps in the water toward the duck. The duck was sensible enough to glide away.
The river was faster where Madeinusa was standing. She spread her feet for balance and bent to let her fingers slice the surface.
Hopper called her name. She didn’t turn around. There were still a few power bars in his backpack. He left them for her, wrapped in her clothing from American Apparel. He biked away without saying good-bye.
Shannon, Erin, Toffe
Shannon looked through the hole in the stage and pointed to quiet Toffe. “I want her to stand on the stage where I’m going to be. I want to see what I’m going to look like.”
Toffe shook her head no, but Shannon insisted. “Get on the stage. You don’t say or do anything to help, so do this for me now.”
Toffe began to cry, silently, but Shannon had no reserve of sympathy. “Get up there.”
Erin helped Toffe climb through the hole and then Shannon dropped through and left the bus to see Toffe clearly.
Quiet Toffe stood in the middle of the platform.
“Move around the stage and dance,” said Shannon. Toffe either didn’t hear her or pretended not to, and Shannon yelled at her: “Dance!”
She wasn’t going to get Toffe to actually dance no matter how loudly she yelled, but the quiet girl walked the stage from side to side and end to end. Shannon waved to Toffe to come down from the stage. Erin asked her, “Did you see what you needed to see?”
“I don’t know.” She climbed back up to the roof and told Erin to tell everyone else to leave her alone until it was time to dance.
A few high clouds trapped the gold of the setting sun, but on Figueroa, in the shadows of the tall buildings, it was already dusk. And in the fading light, Shannon’s electroluminescent wire had an intensity that was even more vivid, more compelling, than in the dark.
Hopper
Hopper rode south, parallel to the firewall three blocks to his west with his headlamp turned off. Fire trucks were spread out along the wall where it was closest to downtown in case the flames jumped the barrier. When he had passed the last truck, he turned toward the Burn Zone. It was dark enough now so that no one would see him climbing the rubble pile. The carbon fiber bike was light and he kept the wheels from snagging on the wreckage.
He slipped, twisting an ankle in the gap between a polished wood front door and a steel bed frame.
When he reached the top, he could smell the gasoline.
He pulled a mop handle from the rubble and used it to steady himself as he slipped down the ragged slope to the street.
Hopper turned on his headlamp. In the first intersection he came to, there was an assembly of electric cables leading from a junction box linked to a thick cable that ran down the middle of the street toward the north wall. His Silent Voice told him: “Take them apart wherever you see them.”
Eckmann, Crew
Eckmann greeted the LAX crew as they walked up the rolling stairs and into their seats on the jet.
There weren’t many smiles for him, but he didn’t expect them to smile, not when death might be only a few hours away. Awful, thought Eckmann, for the plane to crash at night, not to see the sun again. And then, a different idea: better for the plane to crash at night, not to see the ground coming up. So he wasn’t the only one on the plane thinking about the insanity of what they were about to try. No one was talking to anyone else.
Chief, Pippi, Frank Sinatra, Redwings,
June Moulton, Toby Tyler, Erin,
Shannon Squier, Gunny Sea Ray
Siouxsie Banshee—in red high heels and a white dress she knew from a catalog on costumes was meant for a Mexican girl’s fifteenth birthday party—rode the elevator to the roof. She wanted to tell Frank that she hadn’t worn high heels in at least four years but that she could walk in them easily, which meant, or proved—as if she needed any more support for her claims—that she had been a sophisticated woman. When the doors opened to the roof, she saw her grand benefactor, busy with Chief and the others. He glanced at her long enough to let her know he knew she was there and she had his permission, and with that assurance she went to the bar, poured a glass of a champagne, and felt, finally, that she was home.
The observers lined up between the hotel’s swimming pool and the edge of the roof. In a referee’s chair taken from a tennis club, Chief sat eight feet above the command posts. To his right, Sinatra and Redwings stayed in contact with Gunny Sea Ray on the ground. In front of him, Toby Tyler was the busiest, with ten coordinators on the roof talking to the fire crews that were spread around the Burn Zone. To his left, Vayler Monokeefe stayed in contact with the Inventory crew on Figueroa, directing them to hand out the empty bottles and spoons they’d stored in trash cans along the street.
Chief called Pippi. She answered but didn’t say anything. He listened to her breathing. “Don’t be mad at me,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I
don’t have control tonight. I wanted Vayler to take a hundred busloads of Drifters on a big Inventory hunt away from downtown but the Burn Zone took too much time. So now they’re here and all I have to hold them in place is Erin’s singer. It wasn’t my idea. I listened to The Man and The Woman and they said this would work, but Shannon Squier is not going to distract the Drifters when they see the fire. Drifters see a fire and they want to run away. They’ll spread out across the city again like a herd of cattle after lightning.”
“I’ve never seen that.”
“I was in Bakersfield two years ago, getting the farms organized. There’s ranches there. I saw a billion cows panic in a thunderstorm.”
“A billion is a lot.”
“Well, a lot, yes. It’s better to keep them in one place during a storm. Keep them in the barn.”
“What’s a barn?” She knew the answer. There were barns in the Heidi books.
“A house for animals.”
“I’m locked up now. Is this a barn? Am I an animal?”
“No. You’re the woman I love, the woman I don’t want to lose. It may not be safe. I’m protecting you. I’ll be home in the morning.”
“How could you lose me if I was at the hotel with you?”
“A hundred million Drifters are on the street.”
“A hundred million, that’s a lot of Drifters.”
June Moulton, in a red sari trimmed with a gold border, walked out of the elevator, refused an offer of binoculars, and sat on her special throne: a wing-backed rattan chair surrounded by plastic lilies sprayed with a heavy perfume.
“Hello, June,” said Sinatra, cautiously. Having a conversation with June Moulton was like holding a soap bubble on a hot needle.
“Everything is going to change tonight, Frank.”
“We’ve had Burns before.”
“You’ll see. Our way of life can’t go on like this and it won’t, not after tonight. Stories will be written. You’ll see.”
Frank knew that to ask her what she meant would just shut her down, so he waited for her next prediction. The oracle was best approached with subtlety, but Redwings pressed the question. “June Moulton, sister, what are you saying? What do you see?”
Sinatra slapped Redwing’s shoulder. “She said what she’s going to say, Redwings,” and the old biker made an unhappy sound.
June Moulton surprised him. “No, Frank, I’m not finished. Tell me about the Drifter who killed the man from the motor pool. Tell me about Nole Hazard.”
“How do you know about this, June?”
“I keep track of things. I listen. Everything has to be recorded by someone and that’s my job. That’s what the Mythology Committee of one is here to do, record everything and then put it in a package of generalizations that can travel through time. The old myths don’t work for us because we’re not those people anymore. We’re new people. We are missing the old neural dramas that in former times were represented symbolically by the old stories that explained metaphysical properties of human character, and the pace and meaning of life. This is to say that you can’t be a narcissist when you have no Narcissus.”
“Who?”
“Just my point. We may see a stranger in the mirror, but the stranger isn’t what used to be called beautiful. That was the myth, as I understand it. The face in the reflection was beautiful. We fell in love with ourselves. Now, the face in the mirror scares us.”
Redwings pressed his question. “How do you know Nole Hazard is not a real name?”
She held up a hand for him to be quiet. “Look at Chief. He’s getting ready to give the signal.”
Chief called Toby Tyler to his white wooden throne. “Toby, is your crew ready?”
“Ready, Chief.”
Chief called Erin. “Erin, is she ready?”
Erin said, “We won’t know until she starts.”
Chief summoned Frank with a discreet nod.
“So we should be ready to start. Frank?”
Sinatra walked slowly to Chief. “Sir?”
“Let’s take a look at the crowd.”
He climbed down from his chair. Toby Tyler joined them without asking permission. They went to the rail of the deck.
“Vayler, are your people ready?”
“Strictly speaking, Drifters aren’t anyone’s people, Chief. They’re ours to share.”
“They’re yours tonight, Vayler. Hand out the bottles.”
Shannon, Erin, Helary, Jobe, Toffe
Shannon lay back on the platform and looked up at the office towers. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to do whatever it was that they were expecting of her. All of the preparation to get the stage built so quickly and to give her a costume—it was for something large. She knew that. She knew that they needed her for something, the way she needed her chisel.
Chief called Erin.
“Is the Burn starting?” she asked.
“Not yet. I want to give Shannon Squier the crowd’s attention first.”
“I think this is a bad idea, Chief. She’s not who you want her to be.”
“Should I talk to her? If there’s any chance that talking to me would get in her way, tell me.” He knew that Erin would know he was scared but he had no choice.
“I don’t know what we’re doing. Neither does she. Wait until the show is over.”
Chief wanted to encourage Erin. “That’s good thinking, Erin. Your father would be proud of you.”
“Thank you, Chief. I hope that would be a good thing.”
“It would be. So start now.”
“I want to say this again: I don’t think we’re ready, Chief.” She felt herself losing her argument.
“Start now. Right now, not in ten minutes, but now. This second, go! I want to hear the music!”
Chief did not finish the order with a threat to kill her or banish her if she didn’t meet the challenge. He needed her. She dropped down from the stage into the bus and told Helary to hit Play and AutoZone to start rolling even before telling Shannon. AutoZone, thankful to finally have something to do, let the bus go without thinking about the girl on the stage. And Shannon, not braced for movement, fell and rolled to the edge of the platform, scraping her hands. Erin yelled at AutoZone to slow down as Erin rose again to tell Shannon that it was time. “Right now. Dance.” As the bus made its left turn down Figueroa, meeting the crowd, the sound of the cheering fans in Brazil blasted from the sides and rear of the bus, bounced off the buildings around them, and returned to Shannon blended and muddy, provoking no associations, no memories of movement connected to the rhythms of Carnival. The crowds of Drifters had no central beat to draw them into banging.
Erin told her: “Stand up. You just have to stand up. And move to the music.”
From the roof of the Ritz-Carlton, Chief could see the bus, followed by the crowd.
“We shouldn’t wait anymore,” said Toby.
Chief gave a little wave of his hand, all the order that Toby needed.
Tyler made the call and in thirty seconds the Burn Zone exploded.
Shannon moved to the disorganized echoes of her old song.
Go Bruins, Royce Hall
In Chief’s house, Go Bruins called Gunny Sea Ray for an update. “When does the Burn begin, Gunny?”
Gunny Sea Ray answered, “I don’t know. They’re taking the Drifters out for a parade.”
“I’m going to the observation terrace,” said Go Bruins to Royce Hall.
“We were told to stay inside with Pippi.”
“You can’t do things just the way Chief says. You have to do what he means even if he doesn’t know that what he says isn’t what he should mean.”
Royce Hall closed his eyes to concentrate. “Say that again.”
Go Bruins said it again, and Royce Hall kept his eyes shut to figure things out. Go Bruins k
new he was smarter than Royce Hall but suspected that Hall was better looking. In the present circumstances, Go Bruins’s intelligence gave him the advantage if there was anything worth using it for and he could see Royce Hall’s mind slow down as he thought about the consequences of challenging an order from Chief. Go Bruins wanted to see the fire and hear the music if it traveled this far. He didn’t like staying up on the hill when everyone worth knowing was downtown.
He saw the Burn Zone light up.
Hopper, Silent Voice
Hopper knew he was lost. Even with the headlamp, everything looked different in the dark and nothing looked right. The houses, the palm trees, the dead cars, the cracks in the pavement—only the smell of gasoline gave any shape to this abandoned neighborhood.
Standing in the middle of an intersection with four stop signs and another tangle of cables that led to the houses at each corner, he thought about what the Teacher might say to him when he came back alone to Palm Springs. Would the Teacher tell him: “What matters is that you did your best”? Or would the Teacher say: “You had the chance and you weren’t paying attention”?
Three of the four houses on the corner exploded, and at other intersections beyond them other houses blew up, as flame ran on paraffin fuses down the sidewalk, linking to other fuses leading to the other houses, grids of fire on the block as the neighborhood itself was a grid of fire. The already-dry wood of the houses, the dead palm trees, the remaining fumes in the tanks of cars left on the sidewalk or in garages: everything that had been potential only was now released and expanding to fulfillment.
Even his Silent Voice could only say, “What is this?”
In the light of the fire, Hopper could tell his Silent Voice: “I know where we are now.” His Silent Voice was scared, wanted to give Hopper directions back to the firewall, but they were six blocks from the house, through the fire.
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