Oh my God–
We have to go.
You killed him–
He might make it, he said. She didn’t laugh.
YOU KILLED HIM!
I wasn’t gonna fight him, Marcy. The fucking… Morlocks are coming. The fat guys who rape people–
YOU KILLED HIM!
Call the cops, he said. Was he good to you?
…no
Then let’s take his shit and get out of here.
Birds of the Amazon
By the time they saw the ocean even the dog food was gone. Freeways and surface streets still filled with burnt out cars and corpses. Some fresh. Others just black bones. Every one in a posture of agony. Not one relaxed skeleton.
The old Mercedes took the vegetable oil fine, as Jamie and Adam had confirmed. But sipping it for calories made their hair greasy. Their guts slippery. The car had sat low on the back tires with weight of the water they carried, but not now. Lighter every day.
ISIS had thoughtfully annihilated not just Los Angeles proper but the Greater Metropolitan Area. Everyone and everything was gone. Outside Carpinteria the road broke for good. Chunks of asphalt tossed on their sides and scorched. We can’t get through, she said.
We’ll turn around.
All the roads will be like this. We have to walk–
We should at least try.
This car is loud. People can hear it. We don’t have much left to carry-
It’s a shelter. It can get us to the mountains– he shut off the engine. It kept idling. Guttural cast iron clacking and a smell like a Chinese restaurant on fire. Finally it sputtered out. Silence like a cathedral. She was right.
You’re attached to it, she said.
That’s not it–
You have feelings for your car.
OK I do. I bought this car for 800 dollars. Had her for ten years. I went to the mountains, the desert in this car. Through storms. She kept me safe. I brought my cat home in this car…
Her?
I’m sorry. I know it’s ridiculous.
It’s not.
It’s hard to leave her.
I know.
He turned the key. Waited for the glow plug light to flash. Pushed the gas just as the starter turned over. You had to. It took finesse. The open throttle made the motor whoosh like a leaf blower. He steered to the sand by the roadside. Into the ashy flood ditch between the freeway and the frontage road. There had been a CarMax before the fire tsunamis. One collapsed billboard only half burned. A grinning lawyer could make Mexicans millionaires if only they could get badly maimed. Dial dos dos dos- dos dos dos dos. The old wheel smooth under his palms. Tight turning radius for such a long luxury sedan. Old tires struggling in the sand. He shut it off. Waited while the engine grumbled, for a long time. Saying goodbye. It was his birthday. He was 42.
She helped him pile chaparral branches and tumbleweeds on the roof and the windshield and the blistered black hood. Took the sleeping bag and tent. He took the water, the sport duffle full of guns and bear arrows. Paused to pat the walnut on the dashboard.
We’ll come back for her if we need to, she said. But you can let her go. She kept us safe.
She was right.
The beach looked almost like nothing had happened. Just a few wrecked boats with names from Jimmy Buffett lyrics beached on their sides at the high tide line. Black clouds of flies shimmering around the putrefying seafarers in their cabins. They carried their shoes. Peeled off their damp Hyper Elite Disrupters. The sand felt like a mother blowing cool on the soles of your baby feet. Ocean hissing. 100 yards past the ruins of the state volleyball nets the sand meandered under a cliff. There was chattering in the sky. Green silhouettes racing over them in a loose V formation, crying back and forth. Wings stuttering.
Parrots?
They’re yellow crowned Amazons.
Invasive species–
No, it’s a sign. We’re going to make it. I let one out at Pet Smart. Maybe he’s up there.
You believe in signs?
I saw these birds, these exact birds, at the clay lick at the headwaters of the Amazon river. They congregate at a cliff in the jungle to eat minerals that soothe their stomachs. They got here by a guy trapping them and drugging them. Stuffing them in his pants to fly them to America to sell. Most of them suffocate. And the few that live have to live in a fucking cage. But not these ones. They survived. They got out.
I forgot you went to Peru–
When I went there I wanted to die. I was 40. I was working as a secretary at a fucking branded content consultant and the kids on the jungle tour with me were 25. They were rich and from Switzerland. They’d been traveling their whole lives. They had girlfriends and 8 weeks vacation. I was an old man who lived alone with my cat. And my cat died. And you know what?
What.
I was so glad to be alive to see them. Parrots– yellow crowned, red crowned. Blue crowned macaws, chestnut-fronted–
Wow–
I know– you wouldn’t believe how many species. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful they were. And I was so glad I kept living. I was so glad I was 40 and there were still so many things to see for the first time. And now here they are.
That’s beautiful.
It means something.
OK but the world ended. We need to eat. What do we do–
Whatever the fuck we want. We were slaves. And now we’re not. If you tell me you want it, we’ll go to the marina, we’ll take the nicest boat, and we’ll go to fucking Peru. We’re going to make it.
When the cliffs ended there was a row of beach houses. Sheltered by the mountains that sloped right down into the sea. They weren’t burned.
I told you, he said. Made for the first one. A gray Craftsman with a smiling sperm whale weathervane spinning crazily in the sea breeze. But Marcy said: Oh my God, and he stopped.
I know–
No, look–
A quarter mile ahead, behind a high piling of heaped boulders, a cream colored fortress jutted out on a man made sand peninsula. Crow-step roof ornaments echoed the high jagged ridgeline to the East, now dusted with snow. Mock-crenellated walls accented custom arched front facing windows in a facade carefully angled to optimize sweeping sea views. False minarets poked into brilliant blue sky. Hispano-Moorish arches beckoned to an airy and inviting atrium.
No way.
It is! she said. That’s Ellen and Portia’s Stately Moroccan Hideaway.
Ellen! had provided a video tour of the couple’s $22 million faux Moroccan home. Ellen personally highlighted where her hand-selected housewares could be purchased. Staccato jokes about duvets and tea sets. She authored an accompanying photobook. It’s a bold play, said Larry, Vice President, Global Sales. You think of Ellen! as a CPG/ QSR mom audience. But she’s not only targeting the top 1% of her watch here for furniture buys– I’d say gay and childless 44+ with these 1600 dollar lamps– she’s also elevating herself as an aspirational lifestyle brand. Climbing out of the mom ghetto into Gwyneth money. It’s branding within branding. I don’t know that we even have the tech to measure it– she really is a genius.
The stone door was hanging open. It had belonged to an Algerian madrassah. He was holding the revolver. HELLO, he said. HELLO. Nothing.
They must be on vacation, she said.
The central courtyard had a fountain, now dry, surrounded by authentic tile frescoes and California native herbs. True to the home’s Moorish heritage, the tile designs were geometric so as not to present a graven image. A blue bird alighted on the fountain lip. In its beak a tiny pine cone. It glanced into the empty basin, contemplated, then hopped off and across the bricks to the shrubbery.