“This is here?” I asked.
Chris smiled. “A long time ago…That’s my dad. He was a studio player for a couple of Neil Young’s albums. They used to jam a bit out here. My twin sister and I would put on plays for them.” He chuckled. “We asked for lots of money after we performed because Dad told us Neil was famous. To us he was just Neil.” Chris turned the frame over and looked me in the eyes nervously. After his initial bold approach in school, he was now timid and didn’t know what to do with himself. He kissed me abruptly. His lips didn’t know when to part and when I didn’t kiss him back, he pulled away and glanced nervously at his wrist to check the time. He offered me a bowl of his famed pot.
“Yes, let’s get some air,” I suggested. I took his sweaty palm and guided him out the door. We climbed up the slope, past the main house toward the top edge of the garden, and curled into a hammock that hung between two trees. We smoked in silence. Eucalyptus trees shot up behind the fence in the neighbor’s yard. Their silvery leaves hovered over us, releasing a minty scent that crawled into our nostrils. I loved that smell. I had begun to associate it with certain good parts of the city, the parts where the natural order of things wasn’t just restored but was a constant, a steady state. A spongy green moss carpeted the bottom edge of a wooden fence. Stoned, I stared at its microcosm, noticing the minuscule strands that composed the whole. Each green crevice looked like a portal that could open into a magic world, funneling beings from the valley into the canyon, out to the sea on the other side.
This was Topanga, still and solemn and unscathed by the city. We had driven through that canyon coming back from the beach when our grandmother went topless and my parents were fined for nude sunbathing. I had felt peaceful inside the canyon’s womb. She was there and had been for a long time. I felt welcomed in a place of rest. I smelled the new air and looked up. No Valley fog, but solid blue colors, rapacious birds soaring in the sky.
“I like being up here,” I said. “The natives were right to call it ‘the place above.’ ”
We swung lazily in the hammock. Chris crawled toward me and put his arm around my sun-warmed shoulders.
“That’s what everyone here likes about it. Feels like you’re on top of the world.”
I nodded. I sensed time slipping off the edges of my body and it felt good.
“It makes sense that you’d like it,” he continued. “Europeans settled here first. It reminded them of home. My sister and I used to sneak into the old celebrity holiday cottages in the mountains. Some have been rebuilt, but you can always tell when something belonged to a star. There’s a different smell.”
He shifted his position, keeping a vigilant eye out for what was happening in the main house below. I hooked onto the sparse roots crawling out of the earth and pulled the hammock back toward the fence. A warm breeze began to blow behind my neck and down my legs, pouring in from many directions at the same time. It breathed on the corners of my eyes, electrifying my hair. I listened to the sounds of the canyon and felt, for the first time, I had been granted access to that magic LA feeling Max had tried to explain to us when we first arrived, that ungraspable, comforting light: the luminous unseen. It was what in Hollywood translated to a sudden stroke of luck, something divine and invisible that could heal you instantly from pain, smog, and rejection. I was so hungry for it that I opened my eyes wider, hoping I could extract its essence and store it inside me, somewhere between the layers of my rubber suit. I pushed the hammock against the fence. With every swing I inspected parts of that luminosity and tried to bask in it. I smelled new air and looked up at the blue sky. But the moment I tried to capture that feeling, the light faded. Objects returned inside their contours and the luminous unseen was gone. “If you look too hard it disappears,” Max had said. And he was right.
I retracted into the earth and considered our positions. The top of the hill pointed west, into the canyon and toward the ocean, while the lower part and front of the main house faced east over the Valley, creating an imaginary line with Woodland Hills and the mall where nine months earlier Arash had been shot. We were swinging between two worlds and Chris’s house was in the middle. The back façade was slanted upward inside the canyon, high above the city, severed from the Valley, levitating toward “the place above,” while the front aimed at the flat roads of the San Fernando basin and the dim parking lot of the Woodland Hills Mall. Echoes of gunshots reverberated in the living room. The smell of butter-infused popcorn stunk up the kitchen. The floor-to-ceiling windows were eyes, the front door a gaping mouth, aghast in front of the spectacle of blood. Inside Chris’s house I heard silence followed by gunshots. Through the windows I saw Arash scramble on the floor, screaming for help.
“You don’t gangbang? Well you do now,” I said out loud, swinging us back out on the hammock.
Chris nuzzled into my neck. “What did you say?”
“You do now,” I repeated.
It hit me then, with my fingers still clasped on the earthy roots, that I had not yet given myself the time to let those words sink in.
“It’s what that guy told Arash before he shot him. I read it in the newspapers,” I said. “You knew him, right? He told you about us?”
Chris shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t think about that shit now,” he said.
But I couldn’t help myself. I turned my head away from the mall and the parking lot back toward the damp earth of Topanga Canyon. No guns, no cars would ever drive across these eucalyptus trees and I knew I wanted to stay here.
I turned my back to Chris and closed my eyes, lulled, unafraid to slip into unconsciousness. When I opened them again it was because someone was screaming in the house below. Chris wasn’t in the hammock anymore. Through the back windows I could see into the living room. A long, warm copper ponytail passed by, swinging back and forth. I recognized the motion immediately. I knew who it was: the pale ghost I’d seen move through school doors and hallways, hopping over fences, the girl who taught me to look at the sun and never look back. Seeing her inside a house with nothing to jump over seemed odd. Even now when she stood leaning on the kitchen counter, I felt like some part of her still swayed.
The male voice kept yelling at Chris.
I saw him cower. A slightly hunchbacked man with a long graying beard, a red cap—scrawny ponytail escaping behind it like a rat’s tail—entered the picture, hands in the air waving in discontent.
The girl, I now realized, was the twin sister Chris had been talking about. I scanned his face back in my mind to find similarities. He had no freckles, no striking green eyes. They didn’t have the same life pulse inside them. She leaned in and touched the man’s arm while he screamed. She wore elegant black pants and a tuxedo shirt. She looked different from how she did in school. The man interrupted his screaming to look at her. He pulled her toward him by her white shirt and kissed her cheek, giving her some sort of last-minute instruction I could not hear. She nodded at him and walked out.
I slid off the hammock and snuck back down the hill, following the girl at a safe distance. She darted ahead of me, floating down the driveway and over bushes. She crossed the main canyon road and ventured down a trail that led toward a creek, stooping over a few times to remove the wild thorns that kept clinging to her elegant trousers. When she did this, her swinging ponytail came undone and flopped against her back like a golden bridal veil. She reached the creek, sat on a rock in the middle of the water by a lavender bush, and lit a cigarette. I stayed behind on the trail, careful not to make the leaves crackle under my feet. Ribbons of smoke circled in and out of her auburn locks as the sun hit her face. Her freckles sparkled, part of the canyon’s landscape. Her hair changed hue with every glimmer of light, reflecting the tones of the earth. I stayed there for the duration of her cigarette, so close I could hear every inhalation. I remained silent, immersed in the miraculous feeling of having found a treasure. If I picked a single ruby out of the chest, a pirate would come and snatch it all away. A car passed on the road above
us and the girl turned her face up and saw me.
“Hey…” Her eyes softened. “What are you doing up here?”
I removed the last thorns from my shirt and reached her.
“I guess I was visiting your brother.”
She rolled her eyes like she’d heard that line before.
I sat on the bank of the stream and lit a cigarette. I could not keep my eyes off her face.
“So did you figure it out?” she asked.
“What?”
“How to skip the broken fence?”
“I did. I practiced what you showed me.”
“Good,” she smiled. “I’ve seen you do it a few times, actually. With that guy.”
“Thanks for teaching me the art of skipping,” I said quickly, not wanting to imagine Arash’s climbing feet.
“That’s what I do.” She exhaled in my face. “I skip out.”
She leaned her head against her shoulder and examined me. Her freckled cheeks caught a ray of sun and turned red. She closed her eyes and rubbed her lips with a bay leaf she’d ripped from a wild strand growing by the water.
“If you’re ever in trouble for drinking or smoking, these take the smell away. They are my remedy. What’s yours?” she asked, propping herself up.
“I’m from Italy…Everyone drinks and smokes there.”
“Everybody drinks and smokes here in Topanga also. I guess that’s what my father is worried about.”
“I saw him with your brother earlier, I think.”
“Yes.” She turned quiet. “That’s what happens when we don’t mop the house. Can you believe it? Who mops? Nobody mops. Do you mop?”
“No, I don’t mop.”
We both laughed.
“It’s my dad’s thing.” She sighed. “He’s a single parent so he treats us like housekeepers sometimes. He grew up in Montana. They really teach you to pull your own weight there. Sometimes I hate my mother for leaving just because of all the chores she left us with. Fucking raking leaves.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She moved to Utah with a creep.”
“Sorry.”
“They funded a Christian café in their town. It’s called the Holy Grail.”
I laughed.
“Coffee beans from heaven,” she added sarcastically, blowing out smoke. “She really lost it. I never want to visit her because she forces us to go to church. I hate church. I even got de-baptized last year. My mom doesn’t know. She’d take it super personally.”
“De-baptized?”
“Yes, I even have a certificate. You would have done the same thing if you were me. You probably don’t get it if you’re from Italy.”
“I do come from the cradle of Christianity.”
The girl put her cigarette out on the rock and stood up, blocking the sun, glazing over me with a bright but absent smile. She put a hand in the pocket of her pants and took a roll of cash out.
“I can’t buy smokes in Topanga. My father checks in on me and knows the store’s owner, so could you get me a pack before school?”
“That’s too much for a pack of cigarettes,” I replied.
“I make lots of money as a waitress. Half of it I give to my dad, the other half I never have time to spend. My brother and I are basically not allowed out of the house except for school and work. I’m going to the restaurant now. Hence the ridiculous clothes.”
She pointed to her tuxedo shirt and patted her black pants. I put the shriveled money back in her palm.
“Save it for when you do get out. I’ll be happy to buy you cigarettes.”
We walked up the river as the afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees. She hopped from rock to rock and I followed in her footsteps until we reached the foundations of a brightly lit restaurant overlooking the creek. She took out a small mirror and put lipstick on.
“Good for tips.” She winked and straightened out her elegant trousers. We climbed up to the side of the restaurant. The humid terrain slipped under our feet, but she was agile and fast. Those minutes with her in that stream felt like shapes fitting into slots, like a giant game of Tetris placing us perfectly in each other’s company.
New Age harp music played from loudspeakers on the restaurant’s terrace, strings of round lightbulbs hung from tree branches creating a warm glow—a quiet, health-food atmosphere. The restaurant was being made ready for the evening.
The girl turned to me and extended her hand. Her name was Deva.
“Do you party?” she asked with a liquid sparkle in her eyes.
“What do you mean?”
She took a flyer for a rave from her pocket and handed it to me: a neon-yellow sun setting over a desert landscape. Fluorescent lettering announced what must have been the party of the century—or so it seemed from the looks of the crowds in the flyer’s background.
“It’s the moon tribe party in January. I really want to go.”
“Well…we have time then.” I winked at her.
“You can dance for three days in the middle of the desert. Nobody knows where you are and you don’t either. It’s so much fun.” She sighed longingly.
It sounded like an agoraphobic nightmare to me.
“I can’t wait,” I said.
It was impossible to tell what it was that ailed her, but it was all right there in the way she looked through me, engaging only my contours, avoiding my eyes and trying to get close at the same time. I wanted to talk more, but she pulled her hair back up into a ponytail and trailed off through the restaurant’s back door. She ran into the kitchen and jumped on a sous-chef who was assembling sprouts and tofu inside a bowl.
“What’s up, José! Let’s have a shot of tequila before we get to work!”
The door swung shut and I was left alone on the quiet terrace. Frogs croaked in the brook below. Shadows were setting in the canyon and the wooden cottages lit up.
—
The main house at Deva and Chris’s place looked dark. Everything was silent now. I took a few steps on the birch in the yard. Chris’s cabin door was cracked open, but when I tried to creep in, a hand tapped my shoulder. His father was behind me. A red, plump nose erupted out of his puffy beard. His cap was off now, revealing his thinning ponytail and receding hairline. He told me his children were not allowed to have friends over during the week. He had Deva’s eyes, except hers were hypnotic and otherworldly, his beady and exact. They peered inside you and made their mind up fast.
Chris was inside the room on his mattress, drawing. He looked up at his father and straightened his back.
“I just came to get my backpack,” I said.
His father waited in the doorway for me to get my bag and leave. While I gathered my things, he disappeared into Deva’s cottage. She had locked the door, but he unscrewed the handle with a tool and pried it open, screaming about how she would get in trouble for locking her room and how rules were rules and he was sick of this shit.
I glanced down at Chris.
“I thought you were gone,” he said in a whisper.
“I saw you fighting with him. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
He looked away, worried. “He wasn’t supposed to be back so early. We’ll do it some other time, okay?” His eyes were gloomy with defeat.
“Yeah, for sure,” I answered, but I didn’t really believe that we would.
We heard the shuffling sound of plastic from Deva’s cabin, things getting slammed to the floor. Chris’s father rushed out with two full trash bags on his shoulders and marched to the bins at the end of the driveway.
“I told her I’d throw her shit out if she keeps this mess up! And I am. I’m throwing it all out,” he proclaimed.
“Dad, come on,” Chris tried to call after him, but the man didn’t listen. He threw the bags in the bins and headed back up without looking at him.
“You gonna go or what?” he asked, realizing I was still in his way.
I grabbed my backpack and ran down the driveway without saying goodbye. I waited a
round the corner a few minutes, then returned to the bins. I picked up the trash bags with Deva’s stuff and headed down the canyon toward the Valley.
The air was light and warm. The rocks on the side of the road turned gold in the afterglow of the day’s end. Wind chimes tinkled. In a distant pasture I could hear the bells of a flock of sheep heading home for the night. What was this place where sheep grazed and time stopped, this canyon brimming with luminous corners and oak trees that looked like they’d been airlifted from Tuscan hilltops? How was it possible that all this could exist above the Valley’s sirens and boulevards and strip malls? My fingers buzzed with the same electricity that moved leaves in the wind. I was welcomed to the place above. I knew it would be my haven from the place below.
At home I dumped Deva’s trash bags on my bed and examined my loot: fairy-princess dresses, silk tops, velvet bell-bottoms, and turquoise shirts woven with golden threads. I slept in them and what I couldn’t wear I spread out on the bed to keep close to me. They smelled of incense and patchouli and essential oils I’d never encountered before. I wanted those new smells inside me so much that I tried not to let them end after each inhale. I trapped them in my nostrils and then inhaled some more. Every sniff was a trip to another place that didn’t look like lava lamps and didn’t smell like Max’s cigars.
14
“What the fuck are you wearing?” Henry sneered at me, turning on his swivel chair, plastic wheels screeching against the floor.
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake Page 15