by Lee Goldberg
There was a first aid kit in his gym bag, but he doubted a squirt of Bactine and an ouch-less Band-Aid were going to make her feel any better.
“Just hold my hand and talk to me,” Molly said, “until help gets here.”
That could be days, if it ever came at all.
Marty couldn’t stay and wait. He was on his way home. If he didn’t get into the valley by nightfall, he could be in real danger. She’d understand that. All he had to do was tell her and she’d let him go.
“Sure,” he said.
“Could I have some water?”
He took one of the bottles out of his pocket, twisted off the cap, and poured a little Evian slowly into her mouth. She was having a hard time swallowing.
After a moment, she said softly: “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“I know what you mean,” he said.
“No, really. It’s wrong. There’s a body shop near my house I could have gone there. But the bastard insurance company said I had to get the car fixed at this place downtown, or they wouldn’t pay for it. That’s not right, is it?”
“What happened?”
“My daughter spilled grape juice on the seat. I reached back to grab the box of Kleenex before it got all over everything and sideswiped a parked car,” Molly squeezed his hand, tentatively, like she was checking if it was still there. “Two accidents in one month. They’re really going to jack up my rates now.”
“No one’s going to blame you for this.”
“You haven’t met my insurance company,” she said. “Has anyone called 911 yet?”
“I tried, but I can’t get a signal.”
“I’m sure someone has called.”
In that instant, he had a sickening realization. Molly had no idea what happened to her, what really caused her accident. And if he told her, she’d know just how little her predicament mattered to anyone right now.
Anyone but him.
He should have gone under the bridge, cracked or not. He should have just said a prayer and run as fast as he could.
“You’re from Texas,” Marty said.
“Thalia,” she replied. “It’s a real small town.”
“What brought you to LA?”
“Another accident,” Molly smiled, her teeth smeared with blood. “Clara’s five years old now.” She let go of his hand and pointed to the sun visor. “Pull that down.”
Marty did. There was a photo pinned to the visor with a rubber band. He slid it out and looked at it.
It was a picture of Molly, a radiant smile on her face, a smaller version of herself in her lap, the two of them on a picnic blanket on a lush lawn somewhere. The kid was maybe five, old enough to know how to pose adorably for a camera.
“My whole life has been a series of accidents,” Molly said, “Clara is the only one that made me happy.”
Clara even made Molly smile now, entwined in metal, holding hands with a stranger. The thought of a child made Molly smile as easily as it made Beth break into tears.
“Do you have children?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “We tried for a while, but it didn’t take.”
For months, Marty snuck away from the network for “power lunches” at a Beverly Hills fertility clinic, masturbating into a cup in their tastefully appointed hospitality rooms. At first, it wasn’t so bad. There were worse ways to spend a lunch hour than jerking off with an X-rated DVD.
But one day he stepped from his hospitality room with his sample cup and bumped into Freddie Koslow, a studio development guy, coming out of the hospitality room next door. The two infertile executives stood there, holding their cups of sperm, casually discussing projects in development as if they’d just bumped into each other at the Bistro Garden.
That was the last time Marty visited the clinic. But he didn’t tell any of this to Molly. It was bad enough half the television industry knew about his shiftless sperm.
“We weren’t trying for anything except some fun,” Molly said. “We did it just once, and that was all it took. Roy disappeared right away, and I couldn’t stay in Thalia, not like that. So I left before she was born. I was heading for San Francisco, but the car broke down as I was passing through LA. So I stayed. See? Another accident.”
Molly’s face suddenly crunched into an agonized wince, her eyes closed tight, squeezing out tears of pain. She reached out and grabbed his wrist, squeezing it hard, digging her fingers into his skin until he had to stifle a cry of his own.
Her grip eased, and when she opened her eyes again, he saw just how scared she was. No amount of talking was going to distract her now.
“She’s at Dandelion Preschool in Tarzana,” Molly said in a rush, “you’ll call the school from the hospital, let them know what happened?”
“Sure,” he said.
And then Marty heard it, the unmistakable rumble, like a stomach growling below his feet. Molly’s eyes went wide.
“What is it?” she cried out in that one, hanging instant before the inevitable.
“Aftershock!” he yelled.
“Aftershock?”
Marty realized his mistake too late, and just as he saw the betrayal and confusion registering on her face, the shaking started, the giant, unseen waves rolling under the street.
He gripped Molly’s hand tight, tucked his head down, and closed his eyes to ride it out. The rumbling grew louder, the subterranean thunder mixing with the sounds of concrete cracking, glass breaking, metal grinding. The two wrecked vehicles rocked back and forth, creaking like rusty hinges. The car slid away, jerking her hand from his grasp.
Marty reached out for her again, but was driven back into a fetal curl by falling masonry that shattered on impact, exploding into dusty shrapnel that pierced his skin in tiny pin-pricks.
And then it was over. The rumbling receding like a fleeing stampede.
Marty unfurled slowly, stinging all over, and surveyed the damaged. The Volvo had slid a few feet, and so had the truck, gasoline gushing out of its ruptured tank and surging towards the live wire dancing on the street.
He ran to the car and leaned into it. Molly stared up at him with desperate eyes, one hand reaching out to him, blood gurgling out of her mouth, drowning the words she tried to speak.
She was trapped and so was Marty, confined by a few dwindling seconds, forced to choose between her plight and his own survival.
Marty looked from her to the wire. The fingers of gasoline were only a few inches from contact with the wire. He had seconds.
Molly grabbed him, pulling him down.
He whirled around, and for one horrified moment, thought he’d have to fight Molly off to escape. But she immediately let go, opening her hand to show him the picture she clutched in her palm, offering it to him, her eyes pleading.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and ran.
He heard her yell one, last, desperate time, something that sounded like “Angel,” and then the truck erupted behind him, the force of it lifting him off his feet and hurling him onto Alameda Street, the fireball rolling over his head.
Marty hit the pavement face-first, too hard and too fast to do anything to break his fall, knocking the air out of him, crushing his glasses and smashing one of the tiny water bottles in his jacket pocket. As he lay gasping for breath, a piece of paper fluttered in front of his face, tiny flames beginning to curl the edges. It was the picture of Molly’s kid. He slapped the flames out with his hand.
The edges of the picture were charred, but the smiling faces were intact. The Molly in the photo and the woman he’d left behind, the woman with the pleading eyes and bloody smile, were two different people. Marty would never be able to reconcile the two images, one of which he knew he would never shake.
Angel.
Was she crying out to her daughter, her little angel, with that last breath? Or was she calling out to Marty, mistaking him in her desperation for something he definitely was not? Or was she screaming in horrified recognition at the dark spirit that came to take her
away?
He’d never know, but he’d probably never stop wondering, either.
Marty took the photo and staggered to his feet. Every part of his body seemed to ache. His hair was singed, his face was scratched, one pant-leg was torn at the knee, and his crotch was soaked with Evian, but he’d made it.
He turned slowly towards the narrow street, staring at the sight in disbelief. Both vehicles were engulfed in flames, the fire spreading to the ruins of the nearby buildings.
If he’d hesitated another second, he would have been burned alive. That’s how close he cut it.
Up until today, he managed to live his life without risking it even once. And now, twice in one morning, he’d barely avoided death.
That kind of luck doesn’t last, not for real people. He was almost killed, all because he stopped, all because he let himself be pulled into someone else’s problem. Molly’s certain death nearly became his.
He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Marty turned his back to the fire, crammed the picture deep into his wet pocket, adjusted the straps of the gym bag over his shoulders, and started walking.
CHAPTER THREE
This is the City, Los Angeles, California
11:40 a.m. Tuesday
Marty’s Ray-Bans teetered precariously on the bridge of his nose, held in place by only one arm. A lens was cracked, too, but there was no way he was taking the glasses off. They were part of his disguise as he moved purposefully up the middle of Alameda Street, carefully winding his way through the debris field of fractured pavement, smashed cars, and crumpled buildings.
His dust mask was crushed, but he molded it back into shape and pulled it up over his nose and mouth. He only had three masks left and wasn’t disposing of this one until it absolutely couldn’t be used any more. It also covered his face and helped conceal any sympathy or fear that might inadvertently escape.
Smoke and dust filled the air, shrouding him in a swirling fog of destruction. He welcomed it. The haze further obscured him from others and they from him.
He ignored the crashed cars and the crushed cars and the victims inside them.
He ignored the dazed survivors, most of them elderly Asians, stumbling across his path like drunks, their faces lined and puckered with age.
He ignored the injured and the dead, laid out on the sidewalks like garage sale trinkets on display.
And he ignored the crying, the moaning, and the screaming.
He ignored it all.
There were a thousand Mollys out there, and he didn’t want to meet another one. It was too painful and far too dangerous.
Marty kept his gaze at his feet, following the twisted iron of the long-forgotten railroad track imbedded in the broken asphalt. Or maybe it was an old trolley track. Marty didn’t know and didn’t really care. What little Los Angeles history he knew was gleaned from Dragnet reruns. If Jack Webb didn’t film it, Marty didn’t know it.
He didn’t feel he was missing anything. Los Angeles didn’t have much history anyway and what little it did have was paved over the instant it showed any age, which made sense to him. The only buildings tourists cared about were ones they saw repeatedly on TV or in classic movies, and most of those were facades on studio back-lots. In that regard, he was a learned historian.
Stately Wayne Manor. The Bates Motel. Melrose Place. 77 Sunset Strip. Baywatch headquarters. Jed Clampett’s mansion. The Brady’s house. Gilligan’s lagoon. Cabot Cove. These places were more culturally and emotionally meaningful to LA, and perhaps to most people born after 1950, than the weedy battlefields of Gettysburg, the Liberty Bell, or the White House itself.
Beyond TV and film locations, the most interesting and significant landmarks in the city were as transitory and disposable as the historical record they were printed on-the slim “Maps to the Stars’ Homes” distributed by bored Latinos sitting on folding beach chairs at street corners and freeway off-ramps.
Now they would all have to be replaced by new landmarks.
Marty was passing through Little Tokyo, a fact he wouldn’t have known if the blue sign demarcating the neighborhood wasn’t still standing, canted at a right angle. Now he noticed the Japanese businesses, their signs dangling from crumbling storefronts, or lying broken on the streets. Landwa Food. Mitsuwa Marketplace. Yaohan Plaza. And even through the dust, he could smell the unmistakably salty, greasy, and fishy aroma of Japanese food.
Or perhaps it was just Marty’s imagination, spurred by the pained and perplexed Asian faces, the indecipherable Japanese lettering, the knowledge he was in their tiny, dying corner of a fading urban center.
The railroad track veered off and disappeared into a parking lot on the northwestern corner of 2nd and Alameda. Hundreds of terrified people gathered on the uneven concrete clearing, staring at the buildings they’d escaped from, taking comfort in the arms of their friends and co-workers, the agonized wailing of all those jostled cars drowning out their own.
He moved on, past a pile of sooty brick, rusted iron bars, and corroded metal awnings, all that remained of an abandoned building that had dissolved like a sugar cube hit by a drop of water. A bewildered security guard, presumably there to protect the place from squatters, sat on a stool in his rickety plywood shack, which was barely larger than the man himself. Judging from the look on the guard’s face, Marty guessed he wouldn’t be leaving his tall, narrow shelter any time soon.
The face of the Japanese American Museum had disintegrated, a pile of shattered glass glittering like snow in the wide plaza at Alameda and 1st Street. Marty crossed the intersection and headed west.
Even without a sign, he would’ve known he was in Little Tokyo now. On the south side of the street, a recreation of a wooden watchtower marked the entrance to a mini-mall designed to resemble an authentic Japanese village, at least as it would have been if built by a Winchell’s Donuts franchisee.
The center, or what was left of it, faced a block of historic buildings dating back to the 1880s and the first Japanese settlers, something Marty wouldn’t have known if he wasn’t watching where he stepped. The previous occupants of the buildings, from the 1800s up until World War II, were inscribed in brass letters in the broken, buckled sidewalk as part of some urban art project.
Marty stopped in front of one of the buildings and read the listing: 1890, Queen Hotel. 1910, Nihon Hotel. 1914, T. Kato, Midwife. 1926, Dr. W. Tsukifuji, Dentist. 1935, Ushikawa Hospital. Now it was a video store.
A few steps farther down was Fugetsu Do, the Japanese bakery where the first fortune cookie was created. Marty looked through the shattered window. No one was inside. Perhaps the baker got advance warning from one of his cookies.
Marty continued on, Little Tokyo abruptly giving way to the Civic Center. A sign outside of City Hall announced that the 28-story edifice, familiar to anyone who ever looked at an LA policeman’s badge, was undergoing an extensive seismic retrofitting that obviously came too late. The imposing, phallic tower, thrusting a faux-Greek temple into the heavens, was the official symbol of the city and it was even more so now, snapped in half, lying across the park like a fallen soldier.
But across the street, the ramshackle “World Famous Home of the Authentic Kosher Mexican Burrito” withstood the quake unscathed and was open for business. Steam escaped from the tiny, open kitchen, where the perspiring chef, seemingly oblivious to the disaster, was busily serving meals to the equally oblivious customers at the sidewalk counter.
If Marty limited his view to just the burrito stand, it looked like just another lunch hour, the counter crowded with hungry paralegals, secretaries, and civil servants, munching over-stuffed burritos and chugging huge sodas. The only thing wrong with the picture was that everyone was bleeding from somewhere, their clothes ripped, their bodies covered with dust. But there was no panic here, no moaning, no sobbing. The customers seemed to take great comfort in their familiar burritos, keeping their gaze on the kitchen and away from the shaken world around them.
Without t
hinking, Marty abruptly turned and headed for the burrito stand. Even though he hated Mexican food, he suddenly had an overpowering urge for a burrito; he didn’t know why. Perhaps it was astonishment that drew him, the discovery of an oasis in the disaster. Then again, he’d never tried a Kosher burrito before, and this was certainly the day for new experiences.
Marty shouldered his way to the counter, pulled down his dust mask, and filled his nostrils with the smell of sizzling fat. Faded, water-stained photos of direct-to-video movie stars and TV character actors hung on the walls, their sun-bleached autographs retraced with a ball-point pen by a shaky hand. Lee Horsley ate here. A place couldn’t have a stronger recommendation than that.
The chef worked frantically, taking orders, serving food, and running the cash register.
“What would you like?” The chef asked with a heavy, Mexican accent.
Marty glanced up at the menu. Besides the Kosher Burrito, and a dozen variations on it, they offered Teriyaki Chicken Burritos for their Japanese neighbors, hamburgers for the bland bureaucrat, and Shrimp Cocktails for the discerning gourmet. What would Lee Horsley have chosen?
“What’s a Kosher Burrito?” Marty asked.
“Pastrami, Hebrew National salami, corned beef, chili sauce, onions, mustard, pickles and peppers wrapped in a home-made tortilla,” the chef replied. “Is very very good.”
All that was missing was a matzo ball and gefilte fish to really make it work.
“I’ll take it,” Marty put four dollars on the counter. “And a coke.”
The chef swept the money into his hand, dumped it in the open register, and returned to his cooking, digging a handful of chopped meat out of a bucket and tossing it onto the hissing grill. Marty watched him.
“You know there was an earthquake, right?” Marty asked.
