Undead L.A. 1

by Sagliani, Devan

  Los Angeles was also considered a global city,

  with strengths in business, international trade, technology,

  entertainment, media, sports, science, medicine and research.

  The city grossed around $831,000,000,000 yearly,

  making it the 12th largest economy in the world,

  and putting it on par with other nation states.

  In its last days the sprawling metropolis was home to many

  types of eclectic personalities – including

  bikers, hippies, billionaires, gang bangers, lawyers,

  drug dealers, celebrities, athletes, politicians, actors, junkies,

  vatos, reality television stars, chefs, cops, surfers, and other thrill seekers...

  – each adding in their distinct flavor

  to the already vibrant blend of unique cultures.

  ***

  To Live and Die in LA

  “What would you do if you had only one year to live?”

  The words hung in the air as she stared at the mirror in her hotel bathroom, makeup smeared like a clown, fake hair disheveled and slipping off, a full bottle of Oxycontin in her trembling right hand.

  How did I get here? She thought about all the possibilities her life once held. In her mind’s eye she pictured each of the possibilities as tiny pearls strung together like a necklace. She thought about her dreams as a young girl, the achievements she'd accomplished through hard work, and the milestones she'd lived to see. She thought about all the dreams she'd had over the years. She'd once dreamed of being a career woman…then of being a wife, and maybe even a mother. She tried to picture the faces of her unborn nameless children, but everything was just fuzzy. Each of those dreams had their time; each had failed to come to fruition, leaving the bitter taste of dissatisfaction like a permanent stain in her memory. Each had once really mattered to her, but now there was nothing left of them. They were hollowed out now, leaving just their spent husk behind. They'd done what they were meant to do – given her false hope, enough to move her to the next period of her life where the new dream was waiting to leave her unfulfilled. Each had been it's own perfect catastrophe and now there were none left. She'd finally reached the end of the line, where no more dreams existed, where hope quivered like a guttering flame in the frigid and absolute whirlwind of the gaping abyss. She imagined putting the string of her life's pearls around her neck as she went to meet Death. She pictured him as a large skeletal figure in a thick, scratchy, hooded robe. She daydreamed about slipping her tiny, quivering pink fingers into his oversized, cold, bony hand.

  What is life but a series of moments strung together?

  She heard the contents of the bottle she was holding shifting around, chemicals measured and pressed into shapes by machines and coated and baked and sorted. Pills weren't much different than pearls, were they? Or dreams for that matter?

  They serve a similar purpose, she noted. They exist to get you through...until there isn't anything left to get through…until the darkness reaches up and robs you of everything and everyone you've ever loved and cared about.

  Using both hands to steady the bottle she managed to get the top off at last, then stared down into the container. These pills could fix all her problems. Quick and easy, they remained the perfect solution; a clean answer to a messy and unsolvable problem staring back at her from the mirror, dressed in flesh and blood, walking around like the zombie corpses out there in the burning streets.

  Even the dead don't find me interesting, she mused, now that I'm so close to being one of them. They moved right past me like it was already done, like I had already died and come back as one of them.

  Perhaps it was the fact that she'd never indulged in bouts of self-pity, not once during the whole ordeal, but she began to feel her strong resolve slipping away as doubts crept in.

  How did it all go so wrong so very fast? Is this really how it ends? An overdose? Like some Hollywood celebrity; only they never mean to commit suicide, do they? Oh and no one will care that you died...or ever find you. But still!

  “It's not like I really have another choice now is it?!”

  The sound of her own shrill voice screaming at her reflection momentarily terrified her. She stared at the glass, willing her image to answer back, hoping and praying it would give her another way out. She imagined for a moment that it might split off from her – like Peter Pan unstitching his shadow – and offer her solace. The idea was so ridiculous it almost made her laugh.

  It's not much worse than most of the garbage this city puts out into the world every year, she thought darkly. At least I'm not expecting a happy ending. Not anymore.

  She straightened up and fixed the sliding wig before rubbing away the mascara she'd cried down her face during her moment of weakness. These were going to be her final moments. She wanted to make them count. She didn't know if anyone would be alive in the morning to find her, but if there was even the slightest chance she owed it to herself, and her mother, to be found a presentable corpse. She began washing up in the sink, enjoying the feeling of hot water on her cold, shaking hands. She talked to herself to keep her mind off of what she was doing…off of where this was all heading.

  Thinking aloud, she asked herself, “So would you say that you did what you wanted in the last year of your life? Did you make the most of it? Did you knock off enough stuff on your bucket list, Kat? That's the real question, isn't it? Can you die in peace and go to meet your Maker without feeling resentment at never having lived any of your dreams?”

  She shut the water off and stared hard into the mirror, a realization hitting her, causing goose pimples to race up and down her arms.

  “What would you do if you only had one year to live?”

  For most people that sentence was just the start of a fun game they played, coming up with the most extravagant ideas imaginable on how they would spend their perfect year. The list usually started out the same, then became intensely personal. Invariably it quickly jumped from wanting to spend time with family and friends, to wanting to travel and see the world, to wanting to do something outrageous before they died – like naked skydiving or running with the bulls in Pamplona.

  Kathleen could remember playing the game once when she was a college freshman still living with a group of girls in the dorms at UCLA. All the answers had been predictably safe, with a few admissions of wanting to have sex with a hot celebrity producing a titter of giggles in the small, insecure group.

  We were just kids back then, she laughed. We were so narcissistic and self absorbed and socially awkward. It was all about us, our intrepid journey out into the big bad world – like we were going to save it or something – like we could make a difference one day. What a load of crap!

  She seemed to remember everyone being in a big hurry to hook up with Ryan Gosling because he was in The Notebook. She was the only one who held out for Neil Patrick Harris. I am still holding out for Neil Patrick Harris, she realized with a smile.

  “There is no Neil Patrick Harris anymore,” she said out loud, just to hear the words being said. They didn't seem real, but then none of it did. Thinking back to her halcyon days of carefree youth as a young coed now didn't seem real either. It was as if she'd inherited all the freedom in the world without any of the responsibility it required. By the time she was a senior, she was living off campus in Westwood with a very different set of friends who shared a drug history in common instead of a class schedule. Her new friends had much better answers to the 'if you only had a year left to live' game, but they all felt practiced. They'd played it one night at her friend Will's apartment on Kelton.

  Fishing on a remote lake. Climbing to the top of Mount Everest and dropping acid. Doing blow on a party yacht off the coast of an island somewhere tropical, eating lobster and drinking champagne while fucking celebrity lingerie models.

  Some of the answers, on the other hand, were much better than when she'd played the game as a pimple-faced freshman. Will's answer was unsurpa
ssed.

  “I'd take out a huge loan and then spend every dime traveling the world. Then I'd take out even more money and give it away. Then I'd spend my last few weeks robbing banks and driving through poor neighborhoods throwing the money out of the windows. I'd go out a hero, like Robin Hood.”

  She had known Will for years as a casual acquaintance and always assumed he was a student who worked part time at Noah's Bagels down in the Village, selling hallucinogenics on the side. She even helped him move into his cheap apartment and did her best to talk to his crazy landlord: a Middle Eastern woman with frizzy hair who had an accent and lacked hygiene and personal boundaries. Will had so many problems that he only lasted a few months in that place. Later he told her there was an entire page on Yelp dedicated to trash-talking those apartments and the manager. They were standing in the long line at Diddy Riese, a bakery just off campus famous for its amazingly good and cheap cookies. People drove from all over the city to get a handmade ice cream sandwich for a buck and three quarters or half a dozen cookies for two dollars.

  “If I would have taken five minutes to look it up I could have saved myself a world of horrors,” Will admitted, shaking his head for emphasis.

  The apartment was unbelievably dirty, with stains on the carpet and walls, not to mention a host of other unresolved issues. People kept breaking into the parking lot and vandalizing the cars. The building was old, the pipes were always breaking, the elevator smelled like trash, and worst of all they had roaches.

  “I still see those disgusting things out of the corner of my eye. If the wind blows a receipt on the counter, I'm convinced there is a bug underneath. I'll never get over it. I should sue her for PTRD: Post Traumatic Roach Disorder.”

  When Will complained, his landlady responded by letting herself in at eight in the morning with a can of Raid, yelling at the top of her lungs, “SURPRISE!”

  “You get what you pay for,” Kathleen had chided him. She loved giving him a hard time about his casual approach to important life choices, but underneath it all there was a spark between them with feelings that went unexplored. She always felt like she was too uptight for him; that she was just a white girl from the suburbs who wouldn't understand his lifestyle. She made every excuse, but underneath it all the yearning grew until it became painful. She told herself back then that all he had to do was ask – but he never did.

  He was the one great regret of my life, Kathleen thought. I wonder where he is now at this very moment? Is he watching the chaos on television? Maybe he saw me on the red carpet, before the shit hit the fan.

  After school ended, she'd gone home to Seattle and taken a job as a fifth grade teacher. The work was exhausting and the pay was bad, but she kept making excuses for not moving on. The truth was, she enjoyed the security and just wanted to feel like she was needed somewhere. One night while she was out at the Augustus over on Fremont listening to indie rock bands from L.A., she met David. He was from San Francisco and had attended law school at Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley. They dated for over a year, then got married in Hawaii on the beach in Maui. David's family was short on welcoming their new daughter, both because she was a powdery shade of white and because she didn't come from money. They made no effort to hide their feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction, peppering her with snide remarks and condescending stares at just the right moments, and encouraging their friends to do the same. For a woman on the verge of living her childhood dream of walking down the aisle, it was all too much.

  “Don't worry about it,” David told her when he found her curled up in a ball weeping on their honeymoon bed. “They'll get over it.”

  “I don't understand what I could have done to them. I've never been anything less than kind.”

  “It's not you, okay? I mean it's not because you're a bad person, it's because...”

  “Because I'm white? How ironic is that? We grew up thinking that was a good thing, that it somehow gave you an advantage. I never dreamed my lily white skin and perfect diction would work against me!”

  “Calm down.”

  “Don't tell me to calm down, David. Your mother refused to offer a wedding toast. None of your guests mingled with my family or friends. They acted like they might catch something if they crossed the aisle. We haven't been hitched more than a few hours and already your parents are trying to poison our marriage.”

  “They're very old fashioned. They grew up being told it was wrong to marry outside your own race. It's a cultural thing.”

  “That's so racist and sad, David. Tell me you see that. You do see it, right?”

  “Look, some Japanese people used to believe that we descended from a God and that other humans, including other Asian races, evolved from monkeys. People used to look down on interracial marriages…like we were polluting the blood line…but it's not like that anymore.”

  “So your mother thinks I'm a monkey? Great. Is that why she's always asking about my shaving habits? You know she actually asked me at our engagement party how many times a day I shave my legs. Now it's starting to make more sense. She thinks I'm going to flood the world with our half-monkey offspring and forever destroy her pure family line.”

  “She does not think that,” David said softly, kissing her check.

  “I think that's exactly what she thinks.”

  “Well, too bad for her. She can go back to the Bay area and gossip with the rest of the Joy Luck Club about what her hairy grandchildren will be named. None of that matters now.”

  “It doesn't?”

  “No,” he said, kissing her again. “All that matters is that we are together and happy.”

  She thought she was happy, despite his long hours, shitty friends, and lack of support. His father got sick and David began spending more time in San Francisco than he did at home in Seattle. Kathleen found to her surprise that she didn't mind all that much. She had grown to prefer the company of Socks, his Siamese cat, to him.

  Kathleen suspected he was having an affair long before she got him to admit it. She began asking him to describe his time away in greater and greater detail, but he never slipped up. He was very well organized, a trait she'd admired when they first met but later, as the years went by, she grew to despise. Along with a sociopath's lack of remorse, it made him an exceedingly convincing liar.

  That's what you get for marrying a lawyer, she thought. You thought you'd have money and stability, but he didn't stick around nearly long enough to see the big payday. The whole time we were together he was broke. If it hadn't been for his parents, we'd have been crushed to death under his student loan debt.

  When the time was right for him, David announced that he would be accepting a job offer to work with a major firm in San Francisco. It was his best shot at making partner he explained in a soft, reasonable tone. It also meant he'd be closer to his mother when his father passed away. The cancer had nearly run its course in just under a year. Kathleen argued that once again his impulsiveness was going to make life difficult for her. She explained that in addition to needing to look for a new position in San Francisco as a teacher, she'd have to explain to her principal exactly why she was leaving right in the middle of the school year.

  “It's great that you got this opportunity, David, but I can't just up and leave without giving notice,” Kathleen argued, doing her best to hide the full power of her indignation at not being consulted on such a major life decision. “I'm going to need time. It's not like I work as a barista at Starbucks or some other McJob.”

  David stopped her before she even had a chance to wind all the way up, holding his hand up and telling her that she wouldn't be coming with him. He told her that he'd met a woman while he was gone, one of his father's nurses. What had started as a shoulder to cry on quickly escalated into a raging affair.

  “She's the only person I've ever met who truly understands me,” David said, unflinchingly staring into Kathleen's blue eyes. “This is my chance for once in my life to be truly happy, not just faking it.”

&n
bsp; “Let me guess. She's Japanese.”

  She was. Kathleen wondered if David's mother had somehow managed the casual introduction in the first place. She pictured the gloating look on her cruel mother-in-law's face at the news that her bloodline would be secured from mongrel Caucasians. They were divorced three months later. He even took the cat with him.

  For a while I couldn't tell if my heartbreak was more about him or that cat.

  Kathleen moved back in with her mom and kept working. She didn't bother ever trying to date again. At one point she looked up Will on Facebook, but discovered that he was married and already had two kids.

  Where does the time go? she wondered. I should have done something back when I still had the chance. I should have told Will how I really felt. Maybe things would be different now if I had.

  Then again she knew they might not be. Men were a mystery she never could master. It seemed that the few available good ones were all gay or taken. The rest were nothing short of horrible.

  The demands of the job began to take their toll on her health as time went by. Each new year brought bigger class sizes with even more demanding parents. She had kids with special needs and no one-on-one aid to help out. There were kids with ADHD, kids with learning disabilities, and kids with single parent households who seemed to be raised entirely by reality television. When she was in school the parents were united with the teachers against the kids, but things had changed a lot since then. Now the parents worked hard to make the teachers wrong in nearly every situation, coddling their children over even little missteps and making excuses for them.

  If Kathleen dared to reprimand a student for behavior problems in class, it meant an email to her principal attacking her personally and accusing her of bullying the child. What made things worse was that the principal, Mr. Jacoby, was wholly unsuited to run a school. A boorish tyrant when it came to addressing his teachers, Jacoby transformed into a spineless coward when it came to dealing with the parents. He vacillated all day long: first pensive, then overbearing, and finally obsequious. Teachers routinely came into work sick rather than endure being on his bad side. Just the previous year the schools Spanish teacher, Mrs. Diaz, had passed out in class from a fever and was rushed to the hospital emergency room by ambulance because she was so afraid of him. That same week he'd let one of Kathleen's pupils parents call her 'a black-hearted shrew with no compassion' because she'd given her son a B on his essay, keeping him off that trimesters honor roll.