Occasionally he could be persuaded to demonstrate the usefulness of the holes in the sides of his torso. It was shocking, but profitable. Occasionally.
Now, it was Monday, and he awoke. He awoke to all the metaphors that come from the land. He had followed a path across the continent that was crooked, but always heading north. Now he was in Mazatlán. He could hear the waves lapping at the edges of the sand, feel the already-heating breezes flowing from the Sea of Cortez.
He had had a dream. And when he awoke he could still see the dream like a miniature Aleph reflected from his mind to an indefinable point on his visual horizon.
TUESDAY
Diamond Lane
CHAPTER 8:
RideshareDowntown Interchange
Manzanar lifted and dipped his baton, feeling his way carefully through the early morning traffic. It was a red convertible Porsche. The two young men wended their way north toward Hollywood, peeling oranges, bouncing flippant ideas for a storyboard back and forth. It was overcast but so what; the forecast was always sun. Not that Manzanar knew; he was just a conductor. The terrible pain of this moment flashed: the screech of tires, the groaning wail of the monstrous semi pulling forty thousand pounds of liquid propane under pressure in its shiny stainless steel interior—its great twisting second-half tumbling and thundering over itself, and the horror in the face of the driver who knew the consequences of this payload. All this played against the metallic crash and crunch of the unfortunate who shared the same lanes, the snap of delicate necks, the squish of flesh and blood. In both directions of the freeway, spread across ten lanes, hundreds of cars piled one onto the other in an almost endless jam of shrieking notes. Perhaps, perhaps someone had caught it all on video. There was always someone out there catching unsightly things on video. Perhaps not. In any case, Manzanar had fearlessly recorded everything—every horrible, terrifying thing—in music. The sad refrain, not meant to be insipid, was the gentle notes of ridesharing. He had seen the friendship of the two young, and indeed beautiful, men, their brief encounter with happiness, and the possibility of success.
Ridesharing, when it was practiced in greater proportions, alleviated flow, increased rhythm while enhancing and deepening tone. Manzanar, for one, was grateful. The complexity of human adventure over lines of transit fascinated him. The mass of people flowing to work and play, the activity of minds muddling over current affairs, love affairs, the absence of affairs, in automatic, toward destinations beyond streets, parking lots, or driveways: Manzanar followed it all conscientiously.
Long ago, Manzanar had been a skilled surgeon. His work had entailed careful incisions through layers of living tissue, excising tumors, inserting implants, facilitating transplants. At what point the baton replaced the knife, he could no longer remember. Perhaps the skill had never left his fingers, but the will had. He could as easily have translated his talents to that of a sculptor in clay, wood, or even marble—any sort of inanimate substance, but strangely, it was the abstraction of music that engulfed his being. One day, he left a resident to sew up a patient, removed his mask, gloves, and gown, strode through the maze of corridors, down the elevator, through patient waiting, to become a statistic under missing persons.
Manzanar imagined himself a kind of recycler. After all he, like other homeless in the city, was a recycler of the last rung. The homeless were the insects and scavengers of society, feeding on leftovers, living in residue, collecting refuse, carting it this way and that for pennies. In the same manner, who would use the residue of sounds in the city if Manzanar did not? This was perhaps a simplistic interpretation of his work, as simplistic as, for example, the description of his utilizing the sounds of cars whooshing down freeways to imitate the sound of the ocean. Poetic, but false. Everything had its own sound. Genius disguised, as always, with innocent simplicity.
There are maps and there are maps and there are maps. The uncanny thing was that he could see all of them at once, filter some, pick them out like transparent windows and place them even delicately and consecutively in a complex grid of pattern, spatial discernment, body politic. Although one might have thought this capacity to see was different from a musical one, it was really one and the same. For each of the maps was a layer of music, a clef, an instrument, a musical instruction, a change of measure, a coda.
But what were these mapping layers? For Manzanar they began within the very geology of the land, the artesian rivers running beneath the surface, connected and divergent, shifting and swelling. There was the complex and normally silent web of faults—cracking like mud flats baking under a desert sun, like the crevices in aging hands and faces. Yet, below the surface, there was the man-made grid of civil utilities: Southern California pipelines of natural gas; the unnatural waterways of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the great dank tunnels of sewage; the cascades of poisonous effluents surging from rain-washed streets into the Santa Monica Bay; electric currents racing voltage into the open watts of millions of hungry energy-efficient appliances; telephone cables, cable TV, fiber optics, computer networks.
On the surface, the complexity of layers should drown an ordinary person, but ordinary persons never bother to notice, never bother to notice the prehistoric grid of plant and fauna and human behavior, nor the historic grid of land usage and property, the great overlays of transport—sidewalks, bicycle paths, roads, freeways, systems of transit both ground and air, a thousand natural and man-made divisions, variations both dynamic and stagnant, patterns and connections by every conceivable definition from the distribution of wealth to race, from patterns of climate to the curious blueprint of the skies.
As far as Manzanar was concerned, it was all there. A great theory of maps, musical maps, spread in visible and audible layers—each selected sometimes purposefully, sometimes at whim, to create the great mind of music. To the outside observer, it was a lonely business; it would seem that he was at once orchestra and audience. Or was he indeed? Unknown to anyone, a man walking across the overpass at that very hour innocently hummed the recurrent melody of the adagio.
CHAPTER 9:
NewsNowHollywood South
“Where are you?”
“Doing the Joan Didion freeway thang. You know, slouching around L.A. Sorry, babe, but it’s hard to feel exhilarated going five miles an hour.”
“Be serious.”
“All right.” Emi sucked her nostrils together and intoned, “Do you read me Mothergoose? Come in Mothergoose. I’m on the Hollywood South, following the NewsNow van to a site.”
“Where on the Hollywood?”
“Just passing Silverlake.”
“Shit!”
“What?”
“My car! Didn’t you see it? Stalled on the right shoulder!”
“Gabe, we’re looking for a major SigAlert, not your stalled car. Besides, they’re saying it’s a red convertible Porsche Carrera Four or what’s left of it, not a decrepit faded orange BMW with no bumpers and no muffler. I told you to buy a new car.”
“The transmission blew up. Shit. It took forever to get this far anyway. It’s like the freeway is longer or something.”
“Well, it is pretty stacked up.” Emi looked out all her mirrors. “Red convertible Porsche. Imagine, no L.A. native would buy such a thing. What are the chances? Breathe freeway air and get cancer. Lose your hair. Get jacked easy. Or just get shot straight on. Must be an ex-pat from the East. Came to L.A. to die.”
Gabriel groaned. “Listen, get off at the next exit and pick me up.”
“At this point, it would easier for the NewsNow copter to pick you up.”
“Emi, this is important. I’ve got to meet a plane in the next half-hour. I’ve got a lead to follow. In fact, it’s stuff you like. Might involve some genuine espionage.”
“Ouuu. Where are you?”
“At a gas station phone booth. Two blocks north on Silver Lake off the Hollywood.”
“If you’d get a decent car, you could keep a car phone. Cell-u-lar. Get i
t? We could do cell-u-lar to cell-u-lar.” She said it like it was sex.
“Emi, I don’t have time for this. Beam me out of here, okay?”
“Ay ay, Cap—” The line went silent. Emi followed the NewsNow van under the overpass and then to a standstill. The major SigAlert couldn’t be too far away now, or then again, it might be really far away, and this was the residual result of stopped-up traffic. In any case, it was impossible to talk to Gabriel from a tunnel of concrete. But it also looked like it would be impossible to save him from his predicament. It was wall-to-wall cars. Emi pulled on the hand brake and got out of her car. She walked up to the NewsNow van and tapped on the window. “Guys, I gotta go save a friend. Did you see that old stalled orange BMW back there?”
The guys shook their heads.
“Well, that was him.”
“You gonna walk?”
“I know what you mean.” Emi surveyed the line-up of cars.
“Air shots from the NewsNow copter look good, but we can’t even get up on the shoulder to drive through. It’s the next overpass over. See?” the NewsNow driver pointed. “Porsche ran into a semi. Semi jackknifed. Thing’s sprawled out across five lanes. Porsche looks like a Classic Coke can. Squashed for recycling.
“Anybody hurt?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
Emi thought about this. Every now and then, she and usually some other sensation seeker at the station would get the word and go chasing after the NewsNow van, just to be there on the scene. It was one of those days when she just felt like a little adrenaline high for real-life horror. Maybe because it was disaster movie week. So far she had been to a fire, to the scene of a robbery, and had chased the NewsNow van chasing cops involved in a two-hour car chase that started in Burbank and ended up in Whittier. But the thought of seeing mangled bodies in a car wreck suddenly churned about in her stomach. She could always see it on TV. “Hey, if I can maneuver my car out of here, I’ll see you back at the station.”
Emi spotted Gabriel on the corner near the gas pumps. He was looking in the other direction, his dark features a striking profile, black hair slicked back into a ponytail, Ray-Bans focused across the street at nothing in particular. He was wearing a black shirt, black suspenders, and the purple tie she had given him, looking rumpled as usual and probably sweating like a horse in this heat. “Hey you,” she yelled through her tinted power window as it slid down, “Prince of the Aztecs! Are we too late?”
Gabriel nodded a cool recognition at the sight of Emi’s sleek black twin-turbo Supra. As Emi liked to say, everything about her vehicular possession purred, Detail me. Detail me. She gunned the motor to let anyone watching know she was picking him up.
“Plane could be late. Then there’s customs. It’s worth a try.”
“Bradley International?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s with this mobster look? Aren’t you hot?”
“Don’t remind me. It was—”
“Overcast in the morning,” she finished the sentence. The light turned. “Hold on,” she warned. “We gotta cut through the red tape.” No one maneuvered a car like Emi. She wasn’t afraid to merge. She slipped in a CD. Piazzolla for Gabriel. Merging music, she called it. As she had explained to Gabriel long ago, “I was brought up next to the Ascot in Gardena. My brother and my cousin used to race. I learned to drive from them. No wimpy driving here, baby.” Emi gunned the Supra around the corner, jammed into first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, dancing up and down each gear to the vehicle’s purring acceleration. “I love to shift gears,” she gripped the stick and confessed over the wailing tango.
Gabriel feigned nonchalance. He usually let her drive. Like the house in Mazatlán, his old BMW 2002 was another aspiration of his—to take a classic with character and make it run like a panther. He never had time. Usually it ran.
“Something’s wrong today,” Gabriel observed. “Yesterday too. Haven’t you noticed it?”
“If you mean that the garage door opener broke, there’s no paper in the fax machine, and my car alarm went off for no good reason, you’re right.”
“I mean the length of the day. The weather. The light for godssake. Time. It’s got something to do with time. Place. Damn!” Gabriel squinted. “Every which way you turn, the sun is in your windshield.
“I’ve got an earthquake kit in the back with bottled water and aspirin. Maybe we should break it out. You don’t sound so good.”
“Buzz mentioned the same thing yesterday. He was talking about the rain, how it flooded, how the sun was out right after like it never happened. Something about it being like Alaska. The sun never going away.”
Emi shifted gears and changed the subject. “I talked to your mom today.”
“So what’s new?”
“She wanted to know why we missed your grandma’s birthday party. From the sound of it, all two hundred and thirty-three members of your family were there except you. Even your cousin Joe got out of jail for it.”
“Do you know how old my grandmother is? One hundred and eight. Ever since she turned a hundred, we gotta have a party like it’s the last one. So I’ve been to seven out of eight.”
“She’s the one who knew Pancho Villa?”
“Yeah. She’s full of stories. She started the East L.A. Ladies Garment Workers Union. Hey, I’ve got it all down on tape and notes. And that’s what counts. Nobody understands.” Gabriel fumed.
Emi gunned the Supra down surface streets and two freeways, then swerved the Supra to the curb. “Twenty-eight minutes flat with two to go. Get out and be a reporter.” She pointed at Bradley International. “I’ll circle once. That enough time?”
“You may have to stall.”
“No problema.”
Gabriel burst from the car. Emi had put the punch back into his always grim resolve. No matter what was wrong with today, Emi could ignore it or use it to her purposes. She was right. There was work to do. There was a story to follow. “You saved my ass,” he admitted, and ran from the car but not far enough before she called him back, Piazzolla chasing notes in minor.
“I got it!” she yelled from her driver’s seat. “Angel Beach!” She waved the videotape in its Blockbuster container. “They say it’s a goddamn classic!”
Piazzolla’s bandoneón moaned. The black Supra moaned. Emi moaned. “For godssake,” she bit her lip, “You make me feel so horny.”
Gabriel turned on his heels, impassioned anguish embodied in his dark figure, disappearing into Bradley International.
CHAPTER 10:
MorningEn México
In the mornings, Rodriguez worked on the fencing and the brick work in the garden. By afternoon, when the rains inevitably fell, however, he was safely inside the house, placing tile, stuccoing the chimney, or painting the bedroom. On Tuesday, he seemed particularly unsettled for some reason. He was usually a very industrious man who, despite the heat, always insisted on finishing a particular task before going on to something else or before taking a snack or even a drink of water. Rafaela noticed him several times in the afternoon, standing on the veranda, looking past the garden through the drizzling rain—his old eyes cloudy but concentrated, shaking his head.
“What is the matter, Señor Rodriguez?” she asked. “Are you worried about something?”
“I do not know how to tell you this,” he paused. “But you will notice it sooner or later, and I fear you will be very angry with me. I cannot afford to lose this job, but I know you to be a very fair person. I am a very skilled worker. I cannot understand what has happened. Perhaps—” His voice broke off. He looked as if he were about to cry.
“Señor?”
“I am not such an old man. I have done this work all my life. I have made some mistakes, but you see my work all over these parts. I come recommended.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“I cannot receive my pension so soon. Do you understand?”
“No, I really don’t.” Rafaela tried not to sound exasperate
d.
“Do you know the ways of the curandero?” He asked suddenly, almost darkly, accusingly. “Maybe it is not me. Maybe it is this place.” Rodriguez had worked himself around his own conversation and now stared accusingly at Rafaela as if the source of his confusion were no longer a vision he had been observing through the drizzling rain.
Rafaela stepped away from the man’s stare. Perhaps he was referring to her palm reading, but it was nothing really; something she had always done for fun. Yet, she wondered if the man sensed her own fear, a fear of intuitions too keenly felt. Lately she read fearful things in the palms of others, things she dared not speak. And for example this morning, sweeping the house as usual of its entourage of insects and animals, she remembered feeling her body twist as the snake curled first to the right, then to the left. She spoke quickly, “Perhaps you are tired. This has been enough work today.”
“Yes. Yes, maybe that is it.” He shook his head and began to gather his tools. “Nothing has been right today. First it was the crabs. Then the eggs.”
“Crabs? Eggs?”
“Two crabs. Can you imagine? Two crabs in the house this morning. And then the eggs. Two yolks. All the eggs this morning had two yolks.”
“Crabs are not normal?”
“Of course not. Who ever heard of such at thing? It would take a man many hours to walk to the beach. But a crab!”
Rafaela watched Rodriguez hurry off, a small sack of his belongings on his back. She saw him pause near the brick foundation of the fence he had been working on in the morning and then run off in agitation. She smiled to herself. Rodriguez reminded her of Bobby in that he was so conscientious, so proud about his work. She remembered that Bobby loved his work no matter what it was. To want a better kind of work didn’t make sense to Bobby. No work was better than another. She had been thinking about Bobby and his good points lately. She was beginning to miss him.
By now the rain had subsided, and Rafaela could see Doña Maria closing her umbrella and nodding to Rodriguez as she hurried along the brick path toward the house. “Oregano and tarragon,” she pressed a plastic bag filled with dirt and plants on Rafaela. “Lupe sends them,” she added. “I would have been here sooner,” she said out of breath as if she had anything else better to do. Of course, she could have sent Lupe, but she came herself. “But you can’t imagine the amount of traffic on the highway. Cars and trucks, one after another. I was afraid to cross.” She looked back toward the highway. “Where is that Rodriguez going so early? You are much too easy on the man. And with all this work to do,” she said looking around at the unfinished projects around the house.
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