I galloped in a headlong descent toward the bottom of the canyon. Green patches shot across the corners of my eyes, out of focus. Suspended sycamores and rotten branches smashed against my mouth, filling it with bitter leaves. I scratched my arms with thorns, tumbling over brambles and branches, gathering momentum. I fell down and picked myself up again while the twigs sprung against my thighs. I ran through the apple orchards, the split-open oak tree trunks, past the commune’s stream and the bathtub, past the red rocks. A giant hand was slapping me downhill, hitting me behind the rib cage, urging me to hurry on. I tripped and kept running down the woods toward the dark Pacific waters in the distance. I ran without looking back. I had seen my father run this way when we were kids—like a crazy spirit with flailing arms. I kept one hand on my aching spleen. On every beat, a shudder of pain shot across my back, reminding me that as fast as I could run away, it was still going to hurt in the end.
I stumbled into a gorge at the bottom of the canyon and onto a cement patch invaded by stinging needles. I crawled through a hole in a fence and suddenly I was in the lush garden of an uninhabited home in the Pacific Palisades. There was a stagnant green pond, perhaps once a private artificial lake filled with swans. A small flight of swallows flew down to sip on the water and dashed back up. Banana trees surrounded the pond and tropical plants curved their thick leaves toward the ground. On the other side of the lake, farther into the garden, I noticed the path to an S-shaped swimming pool. I walked over. A blow-up mattress covered in leaves drifted, half deflated, over blue and aquamarine tiles. The water wasn’t too dirty. The home had been abandoned only recently. The pool house behind the diving board was infested with white bougainvillea trapping the roof tiles. Climbing plants made their way toward the sky, battling for space, gripping drainpipes with furry, thirsty roots. Two pots with overgrown flower stems drooped from the roof.
On the other side of the garden the dark ocean shimmered through the trees, pulsating gently. I stopped. The leaves swayed in the evening wind. The garden, overgrown and abandoned, made me feel that time was still again. My heart settled, adrenaline dwindled. I was safe.
A faded FOR SALE sign was posted on the lawn of the boarded-up three-story mansion. Under the front porch was a glass-topped wicker table covered in the typical last-minute debris left behind in the final stretch of a move: open cardboard boxes with old toys, buckets of dried-out wood paint and solvent, tumbled bedsheets, dirty towels. A heap of clothes spilled from a flung-open suitcase.
I dug my fingers into the musty fabric. I felt something soft and pulled it out. Thanks to my time at Henry’s store, my second nature now was to seek and protect any abandoned thing coming out of a suitcase. It was a leopard coat, a real one from the thirties at least. It was wrinkled and smelled like mold, but the fur hadn’t aged. Once I patted the dust off, it returned to life with the slippery viscosity of an untamable animal. How could the owners of that mansion have left something like that behind, I wondered. The sleeves and collar had come unstitched, but they could easily be fixed. It was cut for a size smaller than me. I imagined it belonged to one of those silent-movie stars who vacationed in Topanga Canyon in the twenties. It had been part of the mansion for decades and now that the place was being sold, the owners, like all LA owners, had not gotten sentimental about it. I slid into the leopard fur, walked back to the pool, and stretched out on a torn deck chair.
A chilling wind began to blow. After a few minutes it was suddenly cold. The leaves still trembled, but with less electricity running through them.
I sank deeper into the coat and asked the leopard to give me paws with padding strong enough to bounce off any collision. Supreme hunter, fueled by nocturnal energies, let me be brave, I asked. I didn’t know what to do or how to get home. I was afraid of something terrible happening to me if I went back into the canyon. The magnified shadow of a eucalyptus branch reflected under a dim surveillance light that was running out of batteries and a cool darkness began to cloak the rest of the garden. A fierce leopard, I thought. And with a shiver I fell asleep.
—
I woke up in the night to the sky crashing to pieces above my head, the roaring sound of a train tunneling through me, smashing against the pool house. My eyes flashed open and I saw Deva’s father standing there, shaking me inside out, screaming. I rose in a jolt. There was nobody there. It wasn’t the sky that was breaking apart but the earth. The train was being regurgitated from underground. I felt it under my feet. The soil moved in waves. Water splashed out of the pool. A part of the roof smashed to the ground bringing potted plants with it. Coyotes howled in the canyon recesses as the earth kept shaking, then everything went back to darkness and quiet. I knew what it was. We did the drills in school. They’d told us about how the land in Los Angeles rattled, but I could have never expected something like that.
I went out through the hole in the fence and walked around the periphery of the house until I emerged on a small hilltop street. There were no lights below the slope, only shimmering bits of crumpled tar. I walked down and it was like sinking into a dark gorge, guided by the sound of human screams on both sides. I couldn’t understand where the drawn-out cries came from, if they were above me in the canyon or below me in the darkness, but they were reassuring. It was like having company. The earth began to shake under my feet again. This time I started to run, but couldn’t steer my legs in any direction. They moved in a wobbly motion over the ribbed asphalt and I couldn’t feel what I was running toward. The second rumble was shorter than the first, but when it stopped my feet kept swaying, trying to anticipate the earth’s next roll. The screaming in the mountains intensified and I kept running in that awkward stumble until I realized I had landed on Sunset Boulevard. It was terra incognita, a part of the road with no houses or human signs, just trees and dirty foliage. I’d never noticed that rural pass of the boulevard from the car. We’d driven down the road countless times with the Cadillac’s top down—Serena doing her best Gloria Swanson impersonation. But now it didn’t look anything like that place.
Emergency vehicles and police cars lined the boulevard. Broken glass was everywhere, the smell of saltwater and cracked-open booze bottles in front of a busted-in liquor store. Sirens blared and the quiet but desperate chatter arose of people beginning to group. I walked along the highway until I found a parked police car and flailed my arms to a cop getting inside. I stuttered something about being lost and scared and needing to get back home. He frowned at my leopard fur and I suddenly realized what I looked like. It wasn’t until I’d heard my own voice that I understood I was completely in shock.
“You should have stayed where you were safe,” the policeman said as he let me inside his car. But nowhere was safe anymore. We pulled away from the dark ocean. In the car, alarmed voices spoke over the static on his radio. They said the Northridge Fashion Center in the Valley had collapsed and hazardous material was spilling on Winnetka, right by my high school. A building was burning in Sherman Oaks, a few blocks from our house. Ruptured gas and water mains were causing fires and flooding all over the Valley. The cop shook his head.