They call it the City of Angels, he said, but the name actually just means The Angels. And, like, what angels?
All of them, I said. I guess.
It’s really exciting, he said. We’re making something out of nothing.
I thought he was talking about us. I wanted to say, that’s what all relationships are, but then he said, well, not nothing. Marian was real, obviously, but people’s lives don’t get preserved like fossils. The best you can hope for is that time will have hardened around someone’s memory, preserving a void in their shape.
Or he said something like that, and I realized he was talking about the movie, not us.
You might find out some things, he said, but it’ll never be enough, never be anything like the Whole Truth. You’re better off just deciding what kind of story you want to tell and telling it.
I think that’s sort of what he said.
I said, But where do we begin? Where’s the beginning?
* * *
—
He forgot to answer, or maybe I’d only asked inside my head, and for some unmeasurable period of time we sat there looking at the view, thinking about whatever, and then he was like, what is this place?
It’s The Angels, I told him.
I know, he said, but what is it?
I could hear wind chimes coming from a neighbor’s house, so I was like, it’s wind chimes.
What else?
A helicopter went blinking by.
It’s helicopters.
What else?
It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it’s muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone’s bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It’s coyotes yipping like delinquents who’ve just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox, and it’s mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. It’s the thrum of hummingbird wings and the silent gliding gyres of vultures and the long-legged stepping of white egrets through shallow green water in the concrete channel that’s the river. It’s dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere. It’s gongs and oms and whale songs soothing in the dim inner sancta of spas. It’s a Norte?o song bouncing out of a passing El Camino and schoolkids singing o beautiful for spacious skies in a classroom with the windows open and the rasp of a beat from somebody’s earbuds you pass on the sidewalk. It’s pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles snoozing on terra-cotta tiles. It’s blenders and grinders and juicers and hissing steel espresso machines the size of submarines and waiters who talk too much—Any special plans for the weekend? Do anything special over the weekend?—and water, so precious, splashing into fountains and pools and hot tubs and tall glasses on shaded patios, burbling from hoses and geysering from broken pipes. And underneath, there’s the hum of traffic, always there, like the ocean that lives in seashells, like the cosmic whoosh of the expanding universe.
At least that’s what I tried to tell him. I don’t know what I actually said.
Then he said something about how L.A. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it’s towering clouds of smoke, and it’s sunshine that won’t let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It’s a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It’s the Big One that’s coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars.
At least that’s what I heard him saying.
And I was like, you know what? It’s mostly just houses. And when you think about houses, really think, aren’t they so weird? They’re boxes where we keep ourselves and our stuff, boxes shaped like Tudor manors and chic cement warlord bunkers like this one and glassy mod spaceships and geodesic domes and sleek vitrines. L.A. is mysterious crumbling old hilltop piles, and it’s haciendas wrapped in bougainvillea and Craftsman bungalows neat as a pin and little flat-roofed adobe things with bars on the windows, and it’s surf shacks and drug shacks and grumpy-old-man-no-solicitors shacks and patchouli shacks strung with prayer flags, windows glowing red through printed Indian cotton as though inside is the beating heart of everything. It’s the tents of the homeless crowded under an overpass; it’s the spherical mud nests of swallows high up under an overpass; it’s vines hanging from an overpass like a beaded curtain. It’s trash blowing around in the hot, dry wind, nesting in ice plant by the freeway. It’s the teasing, skipping, arcing fan dance of lawn sprinklers. It’s the snip snip of pruning shears and the plunk of lemons falling from laden branches to split open and rot on the sidewalk under hovering bees, and it’s the placid blue gliding pool net maneuvered by a gardener in a broad straw hat, graceful as a gondolier.