Where he’d formerly entertained a thousand thoughts while taking a single step, he now had to take a thousand steps to complete one thought.
His first thousand steps yielded the thought that he was walking only to warm up.
A thousand steps later, he thought that warming up would restore enough manual dexterity to take a proper whiff from his thumb.
Farther down the road, he thought he was in trouble.
Later yet, after reaching a fork and randomly bearing right, he understood that he couldn’t report his money stolen without revealing that he’d taken it from Clem.
Still later, he realized that he was tasting only toilet paper, which he might as well spit out.
The moment he stopped to spit, his chest was gripped with chills. He was getting no warmer, and the flashlight’s batteries had failed to the point where he could see no worse by turning it off.
This was a thought and his last one. His mind went dark with the flashlight, and then there was only a frigid blackness, its only features a slightly less black sky, a matchingly less black passage forward. The passage seemed eternal, but by and by it developed an incline. At the top of the incline, the sky lightened to reveal a boxy shape in the distance, darker than the road, higher than the horizon.
He was still trudging toward this shape after flames had engulfed it.
He still wasn’t there when he’d been there for a while.
Even as he stood clear of the inferno and toasted himself, he was still on his way to it.
A thing that hadn’t happened yet had happened. A large wooden building with a metal roof and wide doors had been broken into. The frozen metal of the tractors it contained, the deep chill of its concrete floor, had made the inside even colder than the outside, but the totality of the darkness had made even a dim flashlight useful, and there had been a box of matches. There had been a tower of wooden pallets. Gasoline. A splash of gasoline, just enough to kindle one pallet for some warmth. And then a blue flame snaking with terrible speed.
A bird blazing yellow, an oriole, was singing in a palm tree. In the background, around the pool at the apartment complex, she could hear the cheeping of smaller birds, the clacking of hedge clippers, the sighing of the megalopolis. Somewhere in the night, her third in Los Angeles, she’d regained an acuity of hearing that she hadn’t noticed losing. A similar thing had happened toward the end of her confinement in Rancho Los Amigos. A return of ordinary presence.
Of the city she remembered, only the mild weather and the palm trees hadn’t changed. East of Santa Monica, where the streetcar had run, there was now a freeway ten lanes wide, an elevated immensity of automotive glare. Driving from the airport, she’d been tailgated, veered in front of, honked at. Formerly orienting mountains had vanished in a claustrophobic smog. The buildings that loomed up in it, mile after mile, were like players in some cancerous game of trying to be the largest. The city no longer invited her mind to be sky-wide. She was just a frazzled tourist from Chicago, an ordinary mother who was lucky that her boy could read a road map.
It wasn’t so bad, being ordinary. It was nice to be present with the birds again. Nice to be unembarrassed in a bathing suit, nearly at her target weight. How nice it would have been to spend the whole day in Pasadena, see Jimmy in the nursing home again, and let Antonio, who’d become quite a chef, make dinner. How unexpectedly unfortunate that she had to get into her rented car and navigate the freeways.
She’d misplaced the urgency of seeing Bradley. For three months, consumed by the urgency, focused on losing weight and getting to Los Angeles, she’d given little concrete thought to what would happen when she got there. It had been enough to imagine a wordless locking of gazes, a delirious reblossoming of passion. When Bradley, in his second letter to her, had offered to come to her in Pasadena, she hadn’t foreseen the terrors of freeway driving. She’d insisted on going to his house, because Antonio’s apartment in Pasadena, with Judson underfoot, was obviously not a place for passion.
“Mom, look at me.”
Judson, on the neighboring recliner, in baggy new swim trunks, was aiming his camera at her. The camera briefly whirred.
“Sweetie, why aren’t you in the water?”
“I’m busy.”
“You have the whole pool to yourself.”
“I don’t feel like getting wet.”
Something moved in her, a flutter of fear or guilt—a memory. The girl she’d been in Rancho Los Amigos had had a phobia of water on her skin.
“I want to see you dive in the water. Can you show me your dive?”