Sing Her Down, page 13
She is neither Florida nor Florence. Her head throbs. Her thoughts are not her own. She’s floating somewhere inside her own body, which allows her to ignore the nagging in her mind, relegate it to paranoia and irritation, make it the thinking of some other person who’s bugging her. Another self inside herself. A stranger.
Shut up.
Florida glances at the steps that lead to the terminal where a transit cop is patrolling the platform.
Home. She has to get home, get her car, then choices will open up.
She can get back to Arizona quickly, without the threat of exposure on the train or on a bus. She can install herself in the motel as if she’d never left at all.
In the car she can go anywhere.
The car means freedom. The car means options. The car also means equity.
* * *
The city is muffled and muzzled. A marine layer blankets the sky with a heavy, uniform gray.
The only signs of life are a few pedestrians scurrying away like they’ve been caught out in an apocalyptic aftermath.
Florida knows downtown from loft parties, after-parties, and illegal warehouse parties. She knows it from late nights and pricey apartments of friends who’d figured their lives out better than she had. She knows it from tasting menus, artisanal bakeries, bespoke cocktails, and dealers who stay up late.
She knows it from Carter’s friends, connections, suppliers, and debt collectors. She knows it from those months with Renny and Ronna.
She doesn’t know it on foot or in daylight.
She cuts south toward the numbered streets to get her bearings.
There are tents everywhere. Skid Row exploding out of downtown into the Historic Core—its metropolitan charm now charmless in abandonment.
Tents everywhere. On the sidewalks, in doorways, on the medians, in and around the few pocket parks. She jags south, then crosses the 110 at Sixth Street. She pauses on the overpass, looking first south then north on the nearly empty freeway. Tents everywhere. Clustered under the 110’s bridges. Lining the embankments. Hidden in the overgrowth of scrubby plants, camouflaged by soot-stained flowers.
Florida has never felt more conspicuous as the only person on the move in a stagnant city. And she is the last person who should be out at all.
She’s a driver, not a walker. She prefers the city to speed by outside the car window at a remove, an indistinct blur that she can control with her acceleration.
She prefers the freeways to the streets.
She prefers the city when it’s least like a city at all, when it’s four lanes, on-ramps, and overpasses. When it’s a sprawl of lights below the 134 or a fortress of smog and high-rises as the 101 hits the 5.
But here she is, in the trenches of metropolitan Los Angeles, powered only by her footsteps.
* * *
MacArthur Park is overrun with tents—nearly every square foot of grass made into a campsite. The lake is invisible behind a fortress of ripstop nylon.
Florida takes Wilshire through the park and walks down the middle of the street. Koreatown is shuttered.
There are tents on the slim median that divides Wilshire—a fingernail of land transformed into a place to live. There are tents in front of the deco doorways of the old Bullocks. There are tents in front of the Korean consulate, the Filipino consulate, the Peruvian consulate. There are tents blanketing the steps of Robert F. Kennedy Park, where the Ambassador Hotel once stood. There are tents in front of the Oasis Church, St. Basil’s Catholic Church, and the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.
At Serrano, Florida turns north. Her feet ache. She’s dizzy and dehydrated. Her stomach is hunger-hollow.
Serrano is lined with evenly spaced shanties, each a seven-by-seven-foot square with a peaked roof. The only difference between them is their materials. One all plywood, another cardboard and mattresses, a third plywood and metal sheeting. A pre-apocalyptic subdivision, a no-income housing development.
Florida finds a convenience store and buys water, a sandwich, hand sanitizer, and breath mints. The shopkeeper doesn’t meet her gaze, as if eye contact too is contagious. Outside she takes off her grimy surgical mask and dabs her face with the water, then drinks the rest. She devours the sandwich—her first meal since pizza at the motel.
Sixth Street’s Korean strip malls are stripped bare of life. Stripped of the most basic civic exchanges. Their signs are dimmed. Their windows dark.
This is the city people from the future will find when they come to excavate.
A modern Pompeii. The city frozen in its final rictus of activities before time stood still. On the plywood that covers half of the businesses is the sheet music of a forgotten culture.
Concert posters. Tour dates for an April and May that didn’t happen.
Comedy festivals.
Album releases.
Plays, musicals, summer series. Lineups and coming-soons, all a eulogy for a world gone ghost.
Florida crosses Western.
Here is a shuttered bar wrapping the corner—a megalith lounge that used to peddle late-adapted craft cocktails to a hip Korean crowd. Now its windows are boarded over.
Florida pauses. There’s graffiti on the wooden panels but not like anything she’s seen before—not the braggartly boasts or the gang tags she’s passed on her journey west.
The mural starts on the windows on Western and flows around Sixth. It’s a painting of tents just like the ones on the street. But unlike those Florida’s walked past, the painted ones aren’t dirty or tattered. They are vibrant, dynamic, lively. On the mural, the tents look as if they belong to the city, as if they are the city. As if a tent city is a true city in its own right. The tents swarm up the hill to the Hollywood sign. They run past the PCH to the Pacific. They tackle Sunset and devour the La Brea Tar Pits.
It’s strange but Florida swears the painted tents are rippling as she passes, like there’s a hidden breeze that blows for them alone. She walks the length of the mural twice. Each time it seems to move. If there’s a secret on these boards, it’s lost on Florida.
She takes a last look at the mural, wondering if this movement is a trick of the light or her addled mind.
Past Western the businesses recede. There are more apartment buildings, a few dog walkers who cross on the diagonal when they see another pedestrian.
There’s more green. Less trash. More craftsman homes. More tree canopy.
And then Koreatown is behind her.
And then she’s in her own neighborhood.
Florida is exhausted, bone-soul tired. Her feet are rubbed raw in her institutional boots. Her throat is parched again. Her brain is treading water. At least she recognizes her surroundings. At least they anchor her in a world that’s spinning away.
Here’s the big slate-blue craftsman Cary Grant supposedly owned. Here’s the Tudor mansion where the mayor lives. Here’s the 1920 Italianate house of the girl Florence dragged to a concert in Inglewood who never spoke to her again.
Here’s that famous director’s house—the one who made all those TV shows Florence never heard of. There’s that aged rock star’s house, the guy with drug-related brain damage. There’s the house of the female TV mogul. There’s the house that people whispered belonged to a Saudi warlord.
There’s Ronna’s house. Ronna’s old house—her parents left after their daughter’s death from an overdose, and not an allergic reaction, as they claimed. There’s the elevated back garden where they had the engagement party. There’s the gazebo where they had the bridal shower. There’s the pool house where Ronna’s father slipped his hand in Florence’s shirt. There’s the two-story garage where he put a hand down her pants. There’s the backhouse where the rest of it happened. Here’s the new garden out front, pricey plantings, towering cypress shrubbery and full-growth olive trees so you can no longer see in without craning and spying.
Florida stops. Behind those shrubs she and Ronna planned different futures. They were so bad, bold, and beautiful that they believed they were harnessing the world’s dangers and turning them into strengths. They were invincible, adolescent Amazons moving too quickly for life to slow them down. They were outrunning the scars left by boys and men and strangers. They imagined that nothing stuck, nothing mattered, nothing would leave its mark.
How badly was Florence cut? How deeply? Was it a thousand cuts or just one that opened up the gash where Florida began to crawl out? When had she begun to change? When was she unreachable—irretrievable?
Was it before Ronna?
Was it before Renny?
Was it always?
All those hands, those years of hands groping, probing, grabbing, had they eventually ripped her open and pulled her new self out? Or had she done that herself?
And Ronna? She’d tried to plaster over the damage with a husband, a color-coordinated wedding, a forced reentry into the tasteful world she’d scorned.
At least Florida’s alive.
In Ronna’s old driveway are a kid’s bike and a scooter.
Florida moves on.
A block from home she pauses to count backward. Time is proving unreliable. When did she leave Arizona? When was she last in her motel room? When had she last tried calling home?
How many messages had she left for her mother?
Will her mother be home? Will she open the door? Or will she keep Florida at arm’s length as always, as if distance and time are all the help Florida ever needed?
Her mother knew. She knew about Ronna’s dad. She knew about Florence’s father’s friend, who’d taken Florence and Ronna to Mexico. She knew about the men from the bars and clubs, the ones who wined and dined Florence when she was too young to drive but drove anyway. And her mother decided that none of it mattered. Maybe she thought her money made Florence invincible. Maybe she thought Florence was tough enough to withstand. Chances were, she didn’t think at all.
Or maybe she knew Florence was already Florida and there was nothing she could do about it.
Her mother’s house is a massive Tudor on a giant corner lot—a gaudy spread with a tennis house, a pool house, and a guesthouse, as well as a six-car garage that, taken together, looks like a Hollywood delusion of a quaint English village. A whole mess of Ye Olde and New Age. But it’s home and Florida loves and hates it in equal measure.
The house has been in Florida’s family for two generations. Her grandparents believed in showing off, not hiding out. There’s no gate. No security deterrent. Her mother has continued the tradition, claiming hers is a house for all and she has no reason to hide from the world. Inside a red flashing light tells a different story.
Florida wonders if the private security force residents of the neighborhood use is still on standby—and if so whether the password to summon them or to call them off is the same. She cups her hands over her eyes and stares into the window to the left of the door.
The house is the house—tidy, serene, lonely, and sprawling. So many rooms and outbuildings that if she could access one, she would be able to hide out undetected. She knocks and hears the echo of her fist travel down the hall, then vanish.
She knocks again.
A door. A window. A crack. Some way to access the interior. Florida looks up. Her old room is on the second story in a narrow wing that stretches north, overlooking the pool. There in the closet, just forty or so feet from where she is standing, is the box where she stashed what she needs to restart her life—her old phone, a debit card, and her car keys.
Florida knocks again.
There are landscaped pathways that lead around back to the garden with the pool and tennis courts and several outbuildings. Florida tries the door to the tennis house, the guesthouse, the pool house. All locked.
But the handles rattle with age. With a little effort she could work them loose.
She holds off on the garage, suddenly unwilling to know what has happened to her car. If it’s not there, this is a different game, a different story. No freedom. No equity. Nothing.
She glances over her shoulder at the pool. It’s skimmed and clean. The flaps on the cabanas are pulled back. The deck chairs are in their places. The cushions are out. The towels rolled in their racks.
She takes two towels from one of the cabanas, then kneels by the pool and dunks her head, opening her eyes and letting the chlorine sting. She scrubs her face and runs her fingers through her hair.
Florida stares from the edge of the pool into the house. What has she missed since she’s been gone? More of the same cocktail parties where her mother hoped her grown daughter wouldn’t make a scene? Cocktail parties where she was dressed up and trotted out for the aging bachelors? Cocktail parties where she felt the stony gaze of her mother’s married friends? Cocktail parties where she was expected to be good and bad, prim and wild, anything and everything?
The sun is overhead. She can see clear through the conservatory. The light shifts. A shadow falls across the window on the far side.
Florida squints as a shape darkens the panes.
The light shifts again.
A woman is looking back the other way.
Florida’s breath snags. She freezes, staring back despite herself. Then she ducks out of sight, hitting the pool deck hard.
She holds her breath. Her heart races in her ears. One minute. Then another.
If the woman saw her, she hasn’t come running.
Florida crawls round the pool toward the house. She rises up just enough to be able to look through the window.
The woman is still on the far side. She’s got her hands cupped around her eyes. Her nose is pressed to the glass of the first window in the conservatory, fogging it. Florida watches the pattern her breath leaves on the pane—a suck and blow of hot air. She’s squinting, frowning, like there’s something she can’t quite figure out.
The woman moves to another window. Florida ducks and crawls, mirroring the stranger. Then she peeks over the sill to peep the spy before the spy peeps her.
The woman is short. She’s wearing a blazer and holding something in her hand that catches the light.
She moves on to the next window. Florida moves with her.
Florida watches her tap the glass. Watches her mouth the word “Hello?” She watches the woman squint into the conservatory.
Hello.
There are two more windows before the house ends. And then Florida and the woman will be face-to-face.
Hello.
In, out—a blossom of breath appearing and disappearing on the windows as the woman probes the empty conservatory.
Hello.
The woman knocks on the windowpane and holds up a flashing object to the glass as if she still expects a response from an empty house.
It’s a badge. But Florida already knew that.
Hello?
She can feel the woman through the wall. She can feel the intake of her breath against the glass and the reverb of her voice.
Florida is trapped. The only way out is around front. Her only chance is to hide in the garden.
Hello.
She hears footsteps round the end of the house. She lies flat, pressing herself into the wall, waiting for a chance to dash for safety behind the pool house or the guesthouse. The footsteps stop.
Florida crawls to one of the cabanas. Then she slinks behind the pool house.
She closes her eyes.
Dios. Dios did this to her—made her into someone hunted in her own home.
She waits. Ten minutes and no one comes into the pool area. She slips back to the front of the house. She sneaks through the fussy English shrubs, tearing her clothing. She skirts the driveway. When the street is in view, she bursts out of the foliage. Her feet hit the pavement. Each step sounds like thunder as she barrels away.
When she is halfway down the next block, she looks back.
A woman is standing in front of her house. One hand is on her hip, the other shading her eyes as she watches Florida go.
Here is a moment. A decision. A choice between possible equilibrium and near-certain catastrophe.
Here is a moment that Florida will be able to look back on, turn over in her hand until it’s worn and shiny like a sea-smoothed rock.
Here is a moment that feels featherlight but over time or perhaps in a minute will have the heft of a millstone.
Here it is. One more second charged with possibility before you make your choice—one more second to imagine there are different outcomes before you toss this moment back or embrace it, grasp it forever and yoke it to you. One more second to choose.
Florida feels the woman’s—the cop’s—eyes on her.
She should go to her.
She should be Florence.
She should explain and confess her minor transgression to escape the consequences of Dios’s major one.
Instead she runs.
* * *
South. Through Hancock Park. Past Wilshire. Into the no-man’s-land of tidy houses and less tidy streets that leads from her neighborhood to the Mid-City enclaves—Oxford Square, Country Club Park, Dockyard down to the southwestern outskirts of Koreatown.
Florida crosses Crenshaw.
The streets are root-torn, trash-strewn. They ring hollow with the slap-bang of her solitary footfalls.
Sirens wail. Florida stops, trying to figure where the sound is coming from. The sound is closer now—churning, spinning the air with noise, pressure, and panic. No time to waste.
South. Farther south. And then she hits a wall—a literal wall blocking the embankment that leads down to the gully of the 10 freeway.
The sirens are behind her—their noise amplified in the silent city.
There’s an overpass crossing the freeway, one of the few pedestrian bridges in Los Angeles—a narrow, caged walkway overgrown with morning glory and pipe vine. It’s locked—barred by a gate that’s chained and chained again.
Florida looks north and south. There are crossings on either side. But the siren is screaming behind her and there’s no time. She scrambles up over the wall and down into a concrete trench—a dump of cans and containers, matted pieces of clothing, shoes, busted strollers, and furniture parts.
