“Where are you going?” Rebecca asked as we drifted down the white and nameless warehouses that line both sides of Alameda Street and house the city’s other industries, whatever they are.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Just figured, between that vest and your mood, home wasn’t an option.”
Rebecca twisted her head around to look at Ash. “Where’s all this out you’ve been going?”
“Meditation classes, for one,” Ash said, effectively choking Rebecca to silence. She’d forgotten about Ash’s professed Zen conversion, or discovery, or whatever it was. He’d told us about it in a particularly cryptic phone call that had struck both of us as dispassionate even for Ash. Yet another 9/11 by-product, we both thought at the time, but now I actually suspected not. Even back in our Berkeley days, Ash’s sense of right and just behavior had been more . . . inward, somehow, than Rebecca’s.
Also less ferocious – he hadn’t actually believed he could affect change, or maybe wasn’t as interested, and was therefore less perpetually disappointed. And now, as we floated between late-night trucks down the dark toward the freeways, a series of quick, sweet feelings lit up inside me like roman candles. I was remembering Friday nights lost in Oakland, gliding through streets emptier and darker than this in Ash’s beat-up green B-210, singing “Shoplifters of the World,” spending no money except on gas and double-doubles from In-N-Out. We always got them animal style even though Rebecca hated the grilled onions, because it never got old knowing the secret menu, declaring it to cashiers like a password.
“I’ve been going to music, too. Lots of clubs. My friends Rubina and Liz—”
“Long Beach,” Rebecca said over him, and I hit the brakes and paused, right on the lip of the onramp to the 10. Whether out of perceptiveness or meditation training or typical Ashy patience, our friend in the back went quiet and waited.
“Rebecca,” I said carefully, after a long breath. She’d been taking us to her sister’s almost every weekend since her mother died. She’d been going during the week, too, of late, and even more than she told me, I suspected. “Don’tyouwantto getAsh a Pink’s? Show him that ant at the Museum of Jurassic Tech? Take him bowling at the Starlight? Show him the Ashy parts of town?”
“Starlight’s gone,” Rebecca said, as though she were talking about her mother.
“Oh, yeah. Forgot.”
Abruptly, she brightened again. “Not my sister’s, El-yut. I have a plan. A place in mind. Somewhere our vested nurse-boy back there would appreciate. You, too.” Then she punched play on the CD-player. Discussion over. Off we went.
All the way down the 110, then the 405, Rebecca alternately shook to the music and prodded Ash with questions, and he answered in his familiar monotone, which always made him sound at ease, not bored, no matter whatjob he’d just left or new woman he’d found and taken meditating or clubbing or drifting and then gotten dumped – gently – by. Ash had been to more weddings of more ex-girlfriends than anyone I’d ever met.
But tonight, he talked about his supervisor at the hospital, whose name apparently really was Ms Paste. “She’s kind of this nurse-artist,” he said. “Amazing. Hard to explain. She slides an I.V. into a vein and steps back, and it’s perfect, every time, patient never even feels it. Wipes butts like she’s arranging flowers.”
Rebecca laughed, while Ash sat in the back with that grin on his face. How can someone so completely adrift in the world seem so satisfied with it?
We hit the 710, and immediately, the big rigs surrounded us. No matter what hour you drive it, there are always big rigs on that stretch of highway, lumbering back and forth between the 405 and the port, their beds saddled with giant wooden crates and steel containers newly gantried off incoming ships or headed for them, as though the whole city of Long Beach were constantly being put up or taken down like a circus at a fairground. As we approached the fork where the freeway splits – the right headed for the Queen Mary, the left for Shoreline Village and the whale watching tour boats and the too-white lighthouse perched on its perfectly mown hilltop like a Disneyland cast-off – I slowed and glanced at my wife. But Rebecca didn’t notice. She had slid down a little in her seat, and was watching the trucks with a blank expression on her pale face.
“Rebecca?” I said. “Where to?”
Stirring, she said, “Oh. The old pier. You know where that is? Downtown, downtown.”
Just in time, I veered left, passing by the aquarium and the rest of the tourist attractions to head for the city center. Not that there was much difference anymore, according to Rebecca. Scaffolding engulfed most of the older buildings, and as we hit downtown, the bright, familiar markings of malls everywhere dropped into place around us like flats on a movie set. There were Gap and TGIF storefronts, sidewalks so clean they seemed to have acquired a varnish, fountains with statues of seals spouting water through their whiskers. Only a few features distinguished Long Beach from the Third Street Promenade or Old Town Pasadena now: a tapas bar; that eighty year-old used bookshop with the bowling alley-sized backroom that seems to exude dust through the wood and windows, even though the windows are painted shut; and, just visible down the last remaining dark blocks, a handful of no-tourist dives with windowless doors and green booths inside for the more traditionally minded sailors.
“Go straight through,” Rebecca said. “Turn right at the light. God, it’s been years.”
Given her tastes and the sheer number of days she’d spent with her mother, then with her sister, ever since we’d moved down to L.A., that seemed unlikely. But Ash’s patience was soothing, infectious, and I waited. And as we edged farther from the downtown lights, through sports cars and S.U.V.’s skimming the streets like incoming seagulls and squawking at each other over parking places, Rebecca shut off the music and turned to us. “My dad used to take us here,” she said.
I hit the brakes harder than I meant to and brought the car to a lurching stop at the road that fronted the ocean. For a few seconds, we hung there, the lights of Long Beach in the rearview mirror, the ocean seeping blackly out of the jumbled, overbuilt coast before us like oil from a listing tanker.
“Your dad,” I said.
“Left, Elliot. Down there. See?”
I turned left, slowly, though there was no traffic. Neither tourists nor sailors had any use for this road anymore, apparently. “It’s been a long time since you mentioned your dad.” In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time. She talked about her school commissioner mother – stable, stubborn, fiercely loyal, nasty Scrabble player. Also her recovered junkie sister. But her father . . .
“I’ve never heard you mention him,” Ash said, detached as ever, just noting.
The frontage road, at least, did not look like new downtown Long Beach or Third Street, or Downtown Disney. To our left, the scaffolded buildings loomed, lightless as pilings for some gigantic pier lost long ago to the tide. To our right lay the ocean, without even a whitecap to brighten its surface. Few other stretches in the LosAnDiego megalopolis were still allowed to get this dark. We’d gone no more than a few hundred yards when Rebecca sat up in her seat and pointed.
“Right here. See?”
I punched the brakes again and brought the car to a stop. Just behind us, a signless, potholed drive snaked between the black iron posts of what must once have been a gate. Beyond that, a parking lot, then the old pier, lit by too-dim streetlights on either side. And beyond those, right at the end of the pier . . .
“What is that?” Ash said.
It seemed to hover above the ocean, a dark, metallic, upside-down funnel, like a giant magician’s hat. Beneath it, dim and scattered lights flickered. If there were ocean rather than pier beneath it, I would have assumed we were looking at biolumi-nescent fish.