The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Just a couple left. He blasts two more dark real estate offices in Tustin.

  Only the boxes left, now; he throws them out on the Santa Ana Freeway, watches traffic back up behind him. Back onto the streets in Tustin, his breath catching in his throat, in ragged, hysterical sobs. Redhill Mall mocks all his efforts, even when he gets out and throws stones at its windows. They’re shatterproof and the stones bounce away. He can’t make OC go away, not with his idiot vandalism, not even by going crazy. It’s everywhere, it fills all realities, even the insane ones. Especially those. He can’t escape.

  He drives home, still mindless with rage and disgust. His ap maddens him, he rushes to the bookcase and pulls it over, watches it crunch the CD system under it. He kicks the books around, but they’re too indestructible and he moves on to his computer. A hard left and the screen is cracked, maybe a knuckle too. “Stupid asshole.” He goes and gets a frying pan to complete the job. Crack! Crack! Crack! On to the disks. Each one crunched is a couple thousand pages of his utterly useless writing gone for good—thank God! Drawers of printed copy, not that much of it, and it’s easy to rip in fourths and scatter around like confetti. What else? CDs, he can frypan all his mix-and-match symphonies to plastic smithereens, reassemble the scattered pieces and finally get the random mishmash the method deserves. What else? A sketch of Hana’s, ripped in half. Orange crate labels, smashed and torn apart. The room’s beginning to look pretty good. What else?

  Into the bedroom. First the video system, he can bring those cameras down and smash them to pieces. And the maps! He leaps up, catches the upper edge of one of the big Thomas Brothers maps, rips it down. It tears with a long, dry sound. The other maps come down as well, he ends up sitting in a pile of ripped map sections, tearing them into ever-smaller fragments, blinded by tears.

  Suddenly he hears a car pull up and stop on the street out front. Right in front of his ap. Police? Arthur and his friends? Panic surges into Jim’s mindless rage again, and he wiggles out the little bedroom window, across the yard filled with dumpsters. It occurs to him that Arthur and his friends might want to trash his ap in revenge for his betrayal, and at the thought he doubles over laughing. Won’t they get a surprise? Meanwhile he continues through the applex, staggering, giggling madly, bent over the hard knot of his stomach.…

  No problem losing pursuit in such a warren. The boxes we live in! he thinks. The boxes! Okay, he’s out on Prospect, they’ll never find him. Police cars are cruising, heading down toward Tustin and the scene of his attacks. Busy night, hey Officer? Jim feels an urge to run out into the street and shout “I did it! I did it!” He actually finds his feet on the track when fear jumps him and he hauls ass back into the dark between streetlights, shivering uncontrollably. Are those people on foot, back there? That’s not normal, he has to run again. Can’t go back for his car, no public transport, can’t reach anywhere on foot. He laughs hard, tries hitchhiking. Turn right down Hewes. He gives up hitchhiking, no one ever picks up hitchhikers, and besides where is he going? He jogs down Hewes to 17th, gasping. Over into Tustin, onto Newport, then Redhill. A couple of times he stops to pick up good stones, and then throws them through the windows of real estate offices that he passes. He almost tries a bank but remembers all the alarms. By now he must have tripped off a score of lesser alarms, are the computers tracking his course this very moment, predicting the moves that he is helplessly jerking through?

  People passing in cars stare at him: pedestrians are suspicious. He needs a car. Cut off from his car he is immobilized, helpless. Where can he go? Can he really be here, doing this? Is he really in this situation? He seizes an abandoned hubcap, frisbees it into the window of a Jack-in-the-Box. A beautiful flight, although the window only cracks. But it’s like hitting a beehive; employees and customers pour out and in a second are after him. He takes off running into the applex behind him, threads his way silently through it. He stumbles over a bicycle, picks it up with every intention of stealing it and pedaling off, gives up and drops it when he sees the Mickey Mouse face, staring at him from between the handlebars.

  Back on Redhill, farther south, he sees a bus. Incredible! He jumps on it, pays, and off they go. Only one other passenger, an old woman.

  He stays on all the way to Fashion Island, trying vainly to catch proper hold of his breathing. The more time he has to think, the angrier he gets at himself. So that I’ll go out and do something even stupider! he thinks. Which will make me angrier, which will make me do something even more stupid!… Hopping out at Fashion Island he goes immediately to a Japanese plastic bonsai garden with some real, and truly fine, rocks in it. Rocks like shot puts. After pulling some of the plastic trees apart he picks up these rocks, and has one big one in each hand as he approaches the Bullock’s and I. Magnin’s. Huge display windows, showing off rooms that could house a hundred poor people for five hundred years. All there to display rack after chrome rack of rainbow-colored clothes. He takes aim and is about to let fly with both of them at once, when there is a grunt of surprise from behind him, and he is grabbed up and lifted into the air.

  He struggles like a berserker, swings the rocks back viciously, where they clack together and fall out of his hands; he kicks, wriggles, hisses—

  “Hey, Jim, lay off! Relax!”

  It’s Tashi.

  75

  Jim relaxes. In fact, when Tashi lets him down and lets go of him, he almost falls. When he recovers from the little blackout he tries to pick up one of the rocks and heave it at the I. Magnin’s, but Tashi stops him. Tash takes the two rocks, underhands them back into the shredded garden. “For Christ’s sake, Jim! What in the world is wrong?”

  Jim sits down and starts to shake. Tash crouches beside him. He can’t seem to breathe right anymore. He’s hurt something inside, every breath spikes pain through him. “I—I—” He can’t talk.

  Tash puts a hand on his shoulder. “Just relax. It’s okay now.”

  “It’s not! It’s not!” The hysteria floods back.… “It’s not!”

  “Okay, okay. Relax. Are you in trouble?”

  Jim nods.

  “Okay. Let’s go up to my place, then, and get you out of sight. Come on.” He helps him up.

  They walk uphill, along the lit sidewalks through the dark of Newport Heights, and reach Tashi’s tower. A police car hums by, and Jim cowers. Tash shakes his head: “What in the hell has happened?”

  Up on Tashi’s roof Jim manages to stutter out part of the story.

  “Your breathing is all fucked up,” Tash observes. “Here, lid some of this.” He gets him to lid some California Mello. Then Tash stands in front of his big tent and thinks it over.

  “Well,” he says, “I was planning on taking a farewell trip anyway. And it sounds like you should get out of town for a while. Here, just sit down, Jim. Sit down! Now, I’m going to stuff another sleeping bag, and get you a pack packed. We’ll have to buy more food in Lone Pine in the morning. You just sit there.”

  Jim sits there. It’s possible he couldn’t do anything else.

  An hour later Tash has them packed. He puts one compact backpack over Jim’s shoulders, picks up another for himself, and they’re off. They descend to Tashi’s little car, get onto the freeway.

  Jim, in the passenger seat, stares at the lightflood of red/white, white/red. Autopia courses by. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, his stomach begins to unknot. His breathing gets better. Somewhere north of L.A. he jerks convulsively, shudders.

  “My God, you won’t believe what I did tonight.”

  “No lie.”

  Jim tries to tell it. Over and over Tashi exclaims “Why? But why?”

  And over and over Jim says, “I don’t know! I don’t know.”

  When he finishes they are on an empty dark road, up on the high desert northeast of L.A. Jim, shivering lightly, jerking upright from time to time, falls into a restless sleep.

  76

  (And meanwhile, out at sea, a small boat is drifting onshore, rising and falling
on a small swell, coming ever closer to the short bluff at Reef Point. Then as it nears the reefs searchlights burst into being, their glare blinds everyone around, the black water sparkles, the heavy boom of a shot blasts the air, reverberates—

  A warning shot only. But the two men obey the voice hammering over the loudspeakers, they stand hands overhead, eyes terrified, looking like the figures in the Goya sketch of insurgents executed by soldiers under a tree—)

  77

  When Jim wakes they are tracking through the Alabama Hills in the Owens Valley. The oldest rocks in North America look strange in this hour before dawn, rounded boulders piled on each other in weird, impossible formations. Beyond them the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada rises like a black wall under the indigo sky. Tashi sits in the driver’s seat listening to Japanese space music, a flute wandering over Oriental harp twanging; he looks awake, but lost in some inner realm.

  In the roadside town of Independence, which looks like a museum of the previous century, Tashi rouses. “We need more food.” They stop at an all-night place and buy some ramen, cheese, candy. Outside Tash goes to a phone box and closes himself in for a call. It really is like a museum. When he comes out he is nodding thoughtfully, a little smile on his face. “Let’s go.”

  They turn west, up a road that heads straight into the mountains. “Here comes the tricky part,” Tash says. “We only have a wilderness permit for one, so we’ll have to take evasive action on the way in.”

  “You have to get a permit to go into the mountains?”

  “Oh yeah. You can get them at Ticketron.” Tash laughs at Jim’s expression. “It’s not a bad idea, actually. But sometimes it’s not practical.”

  So they track up the immense slope of the range’s eastern face, following a crease made over eons by a lively stream. Tashi’s car slows on the steep road. They leave behind the shrubs and flowers of the Owens Valley, track up among pines. Their ears pop. They follow a series of bends in the road, lose sight of the valley below. The air rushing in Tashi’s window gets cooler.

  They come to a dirt road that forks down to the stream on their left. Tashi stops, drives the car off the track, hums down the dirt road on battery power. “Fishing spot,” he says. “And still outside the park boundary.”

  They put the extra food in the backpacks, put the packs on, and walk up the asphalt road. It’s getting light, the sky is sky blue and soon the sun will rise. The road flattens and Jim sees a parking lot and some buildings, surrounded on three sides by steep mountain slopes. “Where do we go?”

  “That’s the ranger station. We’re supposed to check in there, and real soon a couple of rangers will be out on the trails to make sure we have. There’s another one stationed in Kearsarge Pass, which is the main pass here, right up on top.” He points west. “So we’re going north, and we’ll get over the crest of the range on a cross-country pass I know.”

  “Okay.” It sounds good to Jim; he doesn’t know what a cross-country pass is.

  They hike around the parking lot and into a forest of pines and firs. The ground is layered with fragrant brown needles. The sun is shining on the slopes above them, though they are still in shadow. They reach a fork in the trail and head up a canyon to the north.

  They hike beside a stream that chuckles down drop after drop. “L.A.’s water,” Tashi says with a laugh. Scrub jays and finches flit around the junipers and the little scraps of meadow bordering the stream. Each turn of the trail brings a new prospect, a waterfall garden or jagged granite cliff. The sun rises over a shoulder to the east, and the air warms. Despite the rubbing of his boots against his heels, Jim feels a small trickle of calmness begin to pour into him and pool. The cool air is piney, the stream exquisite, the bare rock above grand.

  They ascend into a small bowl where the stream becomes a little lake. Jim stands admiring it openmouthed. “It’s beautiful. Are we staying here?”

  “It’s seven A.M., Jim!”

  “Oh yeah.”

  They hike on, up a rocky trail that rises steeply to the east. It’s hard work. Eventually they reach the rock-and-moss shore of another surrealistically perfect pond.

  “Golden Trout Lake. Elevation ten thousand eight hundred feet.”

  Suddenly Jim understands that they’re at the end of the trail, at the bottom of a bowl that has only one exit, which is the streambed they have just ascended. “So we’re staying here?”

  “Nope.” Tash points above, to the west, where the crest of the Sierra Nevada looms over them. “Dragon Pass is up there. We go over that.”

  “But where’s the trail?”

  “It’s a cross-country pass.”

  It all comes clear to Jim. “You mean this so-called pass of yours has no trail over it?”

  “Right.”

  “Whoah. Oh, man.…”

  They put on their packs, begin hiking up the slope. In the morning sun it gets hot. Jim suspects the tweaks from each heel indicate blisters. The straps of his pack cut into his shoulders. He follows Tashi up a twisting trough that Tash explains was once a glacier’s bed. They are in the realm of rock now, rock shattered and shattered again, in places almost to gravel. Occasionally they stop to rest and look around. Back to the east they can see the Owens Valley, and the White Mountains beyond.

  Then it’s up again. Jim steps in Tashi’s elongated footprints and avoids sliding back as far as Tash does. He concentrates on the work. How obvious that this endless upward struggle is the perfect analogy for life. Two steps up, one step back. Finding a best path, up through loose broken granite, stained in places by lichen of many colors, light green, yellow, red, black. The goal above seems close but never gets closer. Yes, it is a very pure, very stripped-down model of life—life reduced to stark, expansive significance. Higher and higher. The sky overhead is dark blue, the sun a blinding chip in it.

  They keep climbing. The repetition of steps up, each with its small tweak from the heels, reduces Jim’s mind to a little point, receiving only visual input and the kinetics of feeling. His thighs feel like rubber bands. Once it occurs to him that for the last half hour he has thought of nothing at all, except the rock under him. He grins; then he has to concentrate on a slippery section. Sweat gets in his eye. There’s no wind, no sound except their shoes on the rock, their breaths in their throats.

  “We’re almost there,” Tashi says. Jim looks up, surprised, and sees they are on the last slope below the ridge, the edge of the range with all its towers extending left to right above them, for as far as they can see. They’re headed for a flat section between towers. “How do you feel?”

  “Great,” says Jim.

  “Good man. The altitude bothers some people.”

  “I love it.”

  On they climb. Jim gets summit fever and hurries after Tashi until his breaths rasp in his throat. Tashi must have it too. Then they’re on top of the ridge, on a very rough, broad saddle, made of big shards of pinkish granite. The ridge is a kind of road running north–south, punctuated frequently by big towers, serrated knife-edge sections, spur ridges running down to east, out to west.… To the west it’s mountains for as far as they can see.

  “My God,” Jim says.

  “Let’s have lunch here.” Tashi drops his pack, pulls off his shirt to dry the sweaty back of it in the sun. There is still no wind, not a cloud in the sky. “Perfect Sierra day.”

  They sit and eat. Under them the world turns. Sun warms them like lizards on rock. Jim cuts his thumb trying to slice cheese, and sucks the cut till it stops bleeding.

  When they’re done they put on the packs and start down the western side of the ridge. This side is steeper, but Tashi finds a steep chute of broken rock—talus, he teaches Jim to call it—and very slowly they descend, holding on to the rock wall on the side of the chute, stepping on chunks that threaten to slide out from under them. In fact Jim sends one past the disgusted Tashi and sits down hard, bruising his butt. His toes blister in the descent. The chute opens up and the talus fans down a l
essened slope to a small glacial pond, entirely rockbound: aquamarine around its perimeter, cobalt in its center.

  They drink deeply from this lake when they finally reach it. It’s mid- or late afternoon already. “Next lake down is a beauty,” says Tash. “Bigger than this one, and surrounded by rock walls, except there’s a couple of little lawns tucked right on the water. Great campsite.”

  “Good.” Jim’s tired.

  The west side of the range has a great magic to it. On the east side they looked down into Owens Valley, and so back to the world Jim knows. Now that link is gone and he’s in a new world, without connection to the one Tashi yanked him from. He can’t characterize this landscape yet, it’s too new, but there’s something in its complexity, the anarchic profusion of forms, that is mesmerizing to watch. Nothing has been planned. Nevertheless it is all very complex. No two things are the same. And yet everything has an intense coherence.

  Clouds loft over the great eastern range. They descend, crossing a very rough field of lichen-splotched boulders. Mosses fill cracks, mosses and then tiny shrubs. Cloud shadows rush over them. Jim wanders off parallel to Tashi so he can find his own route. For a long time they navigate the immensity of broken granite, each in his own world of thought and movement. Already it seems like they have been doing this for a long time. Nothing but this, for as long as the rock has rested here.

  Late in the afternoon they come to the next lake, already deep in the shadow of the spur ridge circling it. Its smooth surface reflects the rock like a blue mirror.

  “Whoah. Beautiful.”

  Tashi’s eyes are narrowed.

  “Uh-oh. We can’t camp here—there’s people over there!”

  “Where?”

  Tashi points. Jim sees two tiny red dots, all the way on the other side of the lake. Slightly larger dot of an orange tent. “So what? We’ll never hear them, they won’t bother us.”