City of orange, p.25
City of Orange, page 25
Change the water.
Black feathers, in water.
It is time to leave.
He walks down the street and through a half-built lot to the spot in the plywood wall that bends back easily. He steps through the gap and emerges onto the river channel shoulder and blinks at what he sees.
The river is full.
Must be four feet deep now. He watches the fast-moving brown water gushing from the three drains at the terminus in the far distance, my god. To think how rain can gather into a flood like this. Big enough to hold a boat.
A mattress floats by, followed by a huge Styrofoam crag. All of the flotsam he first found under the bridge must be miles away by now. Hopefully along with it sails the body of the old man, that bastard.
He takes that back. What’s done is done.
Amazingly, his array of clear strings holds up against the torrent. They radiate from the shelter and vanish into the fast-moving flood.
He crosses the channel using the bridge. How about another leap in? he thinks. See where this new river takes you?
He steps down the slope of the opposite bank to the shelter. The blanket, heavy now with moisture, sways in the gusty chill. He closes the umbrella in a shower of droplets, removes his name tag, and enters.
Everything is as he left it. A few of the cardboard sheets with wind data remain. A few cans. The matchbox and camping stove. The cinder block anchoring the clear strings has not moved from its spot, he notes with pride.
He finds the u.s. shelby co. can opener, opens a can with a kiss. He strikes a match, lights the stove, places the spent match next to the line of others.
The discs move up and down and he begins a new chart, using wavy lines to indicate the flowing river. He eats, rinses the can with water, and drinks the remainder. He’ll have to sit out in the pouring rain to fetch faucet water, if he wants water that way. But now he has the umbrella, he thinks slyly.
He has no idea what he is doing right now. Also, he has no idea what to do next.
Is that why he’s come back into the shelter?
He steps outside the shelter to urinate, watching the stream vanish into the wet concrete. He doesn’t have to pour water down. Man, the river has to be five feet deep now. A trip to the gauge at the terminus would confirm that.
So off he goes, umbrella in hand. He counts out the familiar number of paces. It’s a comfort to know how many it takes. As Adam walks, the rain fills the basin with an arena of sound, all the way from the droplets pelting the umbrella right above him to the soft white noise sweeping the far hills.
He reaches the trio of pipes. The gauge is very much in use again now: four feet plus. Incredible. Water pours smoothly out of the giant drains with endless vitality. But this is the desert, and he knows once the rain stops the whole thing will revert back to its hot, dry state in a matter of days. That’d be something to track.
Is that what we’re going to do, then? Find thing after thing to track?
Adam travels back to the model home and goes straight to the bathroom.
He drains the tub and puts the sour dripping carcasses into a garbage bag and clears everything out. He takes Clay’s containers and goes to place them in the trash bins in the side alley of the model house. It’s obvious they haven’t been emptied in years. He imagines Clay’s mom letting her trash pile up in someone else’s yard—no trucks to collect it—while she worked on her escape plan.
Adam then digs a hole in an unfinished backyard some distance away and buries the bag of crows within. He drags mildewy paver stones over the mound and stomps to flatten them.
Back in the model home’s leasing office, he closes all the open browser windows on the computer and scrubs the history. He notices a spreadsheet, opens it, and sees his name there: CHUNG. Next to the name is an address:
7 YUCCA
He closes the spreadsheet and shuts down the computer for good.
“Seven Yucca,” he says with wonder. “Seven Yucca.”
He goes around the house, wiping every surface he can with puffs soaked in alcohol. There can be no evidence of either him or Clay.
The garage contains six identical white bicycles, all bearing the Arroyo Plato logo. Charming machines done in an old-fashioned style, with fenders and streamlined heads and tail lamps. Orange safety pennants flying from their seat tubes. Each has a large wire basket in the front and panniers in the back.
Adam emerges gliding from the silently opening garage, loaded up with creature comforts: a thermos of coffee, a pillow, a towel, breakfast bars, and so on. Once back at the shelter, he rests the bicycle under the bridge to keep it dry.
He still doesn’t have any kind of plan, but he knows one thing for sure: unlike the man in that book trapped among the dunes, he won’t stay here forever.
He remembers things easily now. The way Margot looked in the morning, puffy-eyed and cranky. Seeing June resting on her naked breast. The particular smell of her neck.
He remembers the agony of realizing the world couldn’t be expected to care about their absence—that that was an unreasonable request for one person to make. This is okay. If he’d been asked to care about the fate of every member of humanity he’d turn away, too.
He takes the day of the crash and rewinds it in his mind to the moment he uttered those horrible words to her. Leave me the fuck alone.
“I apologize,” he says to the shelter ceiling. “I wish I’d been better. I should’ve been better.”
Then there is Byron, telling him none of this was his fault. It’s hard to believe him, but Adam knows he has to get there somehow.
The funeral took place on a boat off the coast. The dozen or so mourners struggled to keep their balance on the rocking deck. Two urns plunged into the water, one demi-sized. The busy chop of the ocean bore no scar of their entry. The priest made crooning sounds as Adam’s heart crushed down to nothing.
Here come more memories, flowing easier and easier.
The day of the yard sale had been sweltering. After he’d sold everything, he put every framed photo in the house into a steel ammo box he’d bought from an army surplus store. A drop of sweat dripped off his nose and into the box just before he locked it shut. He and Margot and June smiled on and on in the darkness. I knew you. I loved you. Our love mattered. No one could ever deny that.
With the apartment finally emptied, he would move on to emptying his accounts next: email, social networks, everything.
That big heavy ammo box, he knew, would remain unopened forever if he never went back to the apartment. Even if the landlord threw out his things after months of unpaid rent, that box would make its way into a trash truck, tumble into a landfill, and rest there until the end of humankind.
He imagines similar boxes in the four abandoned houses of Arroyo Plato, waiting for their owners to return and open them and have their contents once again be gazed upon under the light of the sun.
He had not put the futuristic brass house key in the ammo box. He kept that single artifact on him for a particular reason, and now he finally knows why.
He’ll go back home soon. He’ll find a new job. Something different and more solitary, because he can’t bear the thought of teaching again and struggling to connect with all those energetic souls. He’ll just fail them.
And speaking of failing people, he’ll find Byron and apologize. God knows what Byron has been doing this whole time.
For now, he marks the movements of the shifting cardboard discs, along with the date and the word final.
Sixty-Three
Morning. Adam stretches—stiff from the cold of the storm—and pins the curtain open to reveal a world already bathing in the brilliant orange glow of morning. The sky an unbroken bolt of blue. The rain just another memory to eventually forget.
Beneath him, a brand-new river laps at the banks as it travels. The water has pushed away all the dirt and debris and flows clear. He could bathe in it if he wants, before it recedes back into the nothing it really was.
For now, breakfast: canned chicken soup and a breakfast bar. He eats and watches the transparent wavelets dance and sparkle.
“Ahoy,” cries someone.
Adam looks up. A bearded White man in a large, sophisticated-looking canoe floats toward him in the distance. He wears a wide hat and keeps the canoe on course by dipping long paddles in the water now and then.
Adam knows doodly-squid about seafaring protocol, so he just kind of waves back.
The man edges his canoe up to the bank and rests it there, half in and half out of the water.
“You live here?” It’s a jovial question.
“Not really,” says Adam.
“You Chinese?”
“Sure,” says Adam with a shrug. “What are you?”
“I’m just standard-issue White,” he laughs. “I’m supposed to be Scottish French, but you know.” He makes a farting sound and laughs some more. “Ni hao.”
“Bonjour,” says Adam.
“You got a good setup here,” says the canoe man. “Clear views to the east where the fire came through. I don’t think anyone lives over on that side if I’m not mistaken.”
“It’s abandoned.”
“Although I thought I saw another building or something burning just a few days back.”
“Probably abandoned, too,” says Adam.
“Well, with this administration it’s no wonder. Kinda stuff’s happening all over ’cause of the Fed tinkering with things that never needed tinkering to begin with.”
“Sure,” says Adam.
“You got the right idea to sit tight here. No one ever goes through this neck of the woods.” He grows paternal and even kind. “You got all your supplies ready? Got your guns and gold?”
“Yes?”
“Fiat money ain’t worth the paper without a government. Plus we got global warming now. I’ll give them that one.” He glances at the river, perhaps at his long journey ahead. “You’re in good shape.”
“Can I ask where you’re going?”
“Absolutely,” he hollers. “I shot the tunnels back there. Scariest thing I ever did, but man was it a ride. This is a custom sea kayak of my very own. I have in here with me seventy-two thousand calories of durable rations in waterproof containers, plus a water purifier below deck. I am also equipped with a digital camera and solar chargers. Nice little loadout of weaponry, too. I’m taking this to Hawaii, my friend. They got uninhabited islands there. That’s gonna be my setup.”
You are comprehensively insane, thinks Adam. “Cool.”
The man pushes off with his paddle and begins to drift away. “Stay sharp.”
Adam watches him drift away. Within moments he becomes entangled in the clear lines in the water. He swears with disgust, as if caught in a sticky spider’s web. He unfolds a knife, slashes about, and continues down the river.
The unmoored lines sink away and the cardboard discs, now connected to nothing, stop. Adam can only laugh. The true purpose of his apparatus has finally been fulfilled. The true purpose was to irritate the living shit out of that old guy, and they’d performed beautifully.
Sixty-Four
Sea kayak to Hawaii. Dang. Although Adam guesses crazier things’ve been done by those with enough delusion to match their will. There was that sixteen-year-old kid who sailed around the world, what’s-his-name. Or that old guy who lives on that deserted Australian island, with only a dog as his company. Dog Friday? Adam laughs at these mini-memories that are not really memories, but rather optional trivia that never quite sticks and requires constant lookups in order to be fully recalled. Maybe before computers people had the ability to retain that kind of bullhonky. Maybe there was simply less bullhonky to keep track of back then.
Well, that world is long gone.
He pulls the blanket down from its pegs, leaving the shelter exposed. He folds it in half four times.
The seat cushion comes next, along with the bubble wrap. He sets those in a corner.
The cans, camping stove, clear string, and matches he lines up next to the other stuff. He sweeps the line of spent matches into his hand and casts those into the river. The vinyl banner, with its smiling faces hawking Arroyo Plato, stays in the dark where it is. Let the next guy unroll it if he wants.
He jogs the remaining sheets of cardboard and sets them back. When he does, he notices the last one is covered with dot games. The one where player one draws a line on a dot grid, then player two draws a line, and so on, with the goal being to complete more squares than the other. Dot game? Pigs in a box?
He can’t recall the name, and is fine with it.
Each completed square has been labeled by the players. There is CLAY. There is also a BEN. And a NAIA, and a DAMON, too. A little cluster of cartoon faces saying things like chicken sticks and miss flower loves pizza, each drawn by different kids. There is a moonscape with tiny spaceships taking off and landing in the midst of a space war thick with dot-dot-dot laser fire. A giant rabbit stands casting spells; a fleet of hot dogs scream WAH HA HA.
Adam imagines Clay’s little friends swimming far away from their underwater homes one by one, and decides to keep the cardboard sheet in the basket for posterity along with the rest of his supplies there. Travel supplies, he calls them, because he’ll be traveling today.
He unties the clear strings from the cinder block and lets them slink into the river. Then he heaves the cinder block to the side of the shoulder road. He leaves the metal bucket.
He sits at the faucet refilling his water containers. He could fill them with purified water from the model home’s refrigerator, sure. But the ritual is quite nice. When they are topped off he closes the spigot with his wine tool, not too tight. He gives the faucet a little kick.
“Hateful creature,” he says.
He brings the wine tool back up to the shelter, tells it thanks, and leaves it for the next guy.
But come on. There won’t be a next guy.
And if there is, doesn’t that mean something bad will have to happen to bring them to this place?
Sure. But still: doesn’t all this stuff sitting here look so nice? It looks cozy, even. Like the next guy is already here inhabiting the space.
Let’s leave them be.
Adam walks away from the shelter. The rooftops of the empty houses peek above the cinder-block wall across the river. A crow lands on one.
“Caw,” says the crow.
Adam gets on the bike and begins pedaling. Only one last thing left to do.
* * *
—
It feels good to move.
Adam glides down empty streets washed by rain and wind and now dried to black by the sun. The mint-condition bike silent and clean beneath him as he takes a turn with eyes locked onto a street sign thrust into raw earth where a sidewalk will never be.
“Seven Yucca,” he says.
Around him are houses that can barely be called houses. Just frames of wood gone gray over the months. He imagines them back on day one. How fresh and bright yellow they must have been. Bursting with that lumbery smell—the fragrance of resin and burn as they were trimmed with the short screams of flashing circular saws.
But now, a stack of sheet plywood all warped beyond repair, edges flaky as baklava squares scaled up to gargantuan proportions. A nearby pile of concrete bags has melted together into one solid mass.
There it is: yucca st.
“One,” says Adam, pedaling steadily. “Two, three, four, five, six.”
He comes to a stop, dismounts. Kicks the kickstand.
“Seven.”
The house is nothing but a slab. Lumber hadn’t even reached their plot. All there is are little metal mounting points still filled with yesterday’s rainwater. Wires grow out of each, creating leafless, lifeless plants of your most basic artificial colors, white and red and green and black.
He climbs the porch steps. He’s seen ruins where all that’s left are steps leading up to an empty platform. This is like that, but in miniature.
He takes off his shoes and lines them up where the front door would have been. He removes the brass key, holds it forth. Then he steps into the home and walks, passing right through its invisible walls. Through its plumbing and wiring. All its veins and nerves and bowels.
This might’ve been her room, perhaps. That might have been ours. Short concrete beams rise a few inches from the surface, but even they can’t adequately describe the kind of life that could have been lived there.
The beams draw themselves into the rough shape of a plus symbol near the center of the foundation, and so he chooses that as the spot. He kneels, lays down the brass key, lays a tear on top of that. He feels his mouth tighten down flat. To think, one day the money ran out and the builders had no choice but to abandon everything where it stood. It would always be better in Margot’s imagination. Always be beautiful and just right.
Already his tear is evaporating under the desert sun.
“What are we gonna do,” he says, “with this much goddamn house?”
PART VI
THE OCEAN
Sixty-Five
The cross breeze hooting low in his ears, the tires happily crunching up the dirt road, the crisp tic tic tic of the hub as it pauses when he stops pedaling to coast—what had once been a tedious foot slog passes in mere minutes. Before he knows it, Adam is at the cairns far from the houses.
He stops, dismounts, and sits to drink some water from his Arroyo Plato bottle. Dozens of the rock piles still stand among the spilled remains of those that had tumbled into what now is a clear and deep river. The cairns are crafted with intent, each with a base stone shaped like a wedge to let it sit solidly upon the canted surface.
