12
Noontime
On
Rorqual
Street
______
For some reason, the camera lady wanted his attention.
Luis and Alice edged around a rusting vehicular hulk and crunched through rubble in the street, footsteps echoing like pistol shots through blocks bleached and barren in the overhead sun.
“Excuse me, young man,” the lady said. “Would you mind if I asked a few questions?”
He stood. She aimed, fumbled hand mike in range, we’re set.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Thirteen.”
“Where do you live?”
He waved to rows of burnedout Victorian houses tilting like a skeleton’s grimace up the steep hill.
She squinted, furrowing madeup brow. “Is anything up there?”
“What you see.” The boy’s dark eyes skirted her gaze as he answered her obvious questions.
“Where are your parents?”
He shrugged again.
She looked at him gently.
“Gone.”
“Was it the...”
“Gone,” he said, staring at broken glass under his feet. He put his arm around the pale girl, who leaned against him. “Mama SI-D’d”—
“Se murió del SIDA,” the lady murmured for a later audience, suddenly realized twothirds wouldn’t understand: “Died—”
The boy nodded vigorously. “Long time ago.”
“So... who’s here? Who takes care of you?”
He waved again to blocks of fallingdown buildings, empty dwellings, debrislittered streets, burned lots stretching away from valley to hill and back down and back up in the bright sun.
She was reportorially shocked. “How do you live?”
“You don’t want to know.”
No, the medialapping public doesn’t. She gave the signoff:
“In these desolate, abandoned miles, you can only wonder what will happen to the thousands of children who live amid this devastation, abandoned by adults dead from drugs, AIDS, violence, who left them out of poverty, were jailed, who didn’t care—“
Sycophantic sappiness, lousy grammar, right tremor. Perfect. She rerecorded the close in Spanish (“...los quienes se murieron del SIDA, de las drogas, de la violencia...”) for the radio feed. The camera panned, catching a skyline of gleaming thousandfoot towers to the east, the flat noonday glare hiding their hollowness as it exposed the miles of vacant ruin between.
She packed the camera, lingered. She awkwardly took his hand; the emaciated girl stood silent, politely submitted to embrace. Then the camera lady leapt in the black subcompact, banked around rusting cars, roared down the grade. The churning rebounded off harsh surfaces in crescendo and was abruptly swallowed in silence.
Luis inched through the charred portico and dropped into the basement of the gutted Victorian bungalow, where a fire already burned. Most everyone was back at dusk, more a few extras, less a few regulars.
“‘Liss.” In ritual sequence he palmed the pale girl. She delicately arranged a bag of cheapo hot dogs and white bread on the cement floor, scattering a wad of bills from the night before. “Die while you kill, killer ho’.”
“Already am dead,” she said, gazing up with huge shining eyes: “Child star.”
On impulse, he hugged her close. “Love ya right to the end.” She punched him lightly, gratefully put her head against his chest.
He’d never made it with Alice for two reasons, though she slept night after night in a dirty bedroll next to him in the eerie silence punctuated by bursts of distant cracks and crashes and screeches filtering to their cellar. They never would. “But... I take as many of them with me as I can.” A vision that made her smile, suddenly radiant in darkness. The married, the valued, the virtuoused, the otherwise from whence unearthed who ranged Van Ness prospecting latterday service by custom limo-van, never suspecting Generation Z’s own song and dance by fingernail-ripped latex: Murder By Fuck.
“The rorquals,” she said aloud, gazing at the white metal sign with its familiar raised black lettering hammered diagonally over cracked slats.
“‘N the fall, ‘Liss,” he murmured sleepily in the flickering firelight, her name from a dead gone druggie girl named for a dead song from an ancient time. Their ritual of extinction in a block named for yet another half-extinct creature. He nestled closer to her on the concrete foundation like a brother, like a sister. Maybe, he thought, she’ll make it to fall. And if fall...?
On 88th floor of the New Barbary Millennium Plaza, vacant, coffee shops, elevators, virtual fantasy bars quiet, solitude heavy on deep carpet like the rolling fog, Rhona roused hysterical statistics on the newsroom’s godless green screen:
San Francisco City/County:
Resident central city population by median age
USBOC census/intercensal estimate
Population Median age
1960 740,103 31.5
1970 715,698 27.7
1980 678,974 28.1
1990 723,959 34.8
2000 (adj) 649,099 31.1
2004 (est 4/1) 334,006 22.1
2010 (proj) 198,789 16.7
“So arranged,” she whispered at columns in greenglow: “So we die young.” She lit a oneanight cigarette, excavated the dusty bottle of Cuervo and swished into coffee cup, gazed from the leaded windows over the dark sector stretching to the oceanic horizon to the west, a sweep of suburban lights ringing black like a hologram, highrise condos at the periphery vague dimlylit spires. She didn’t think U.S. Bureau of the Senselessintercensal-estimators had caught up with the likes of Luis and ‘Liss, subject of tonight’s filmat whenever.
“Who—” she thought, maguey gaining first foothold, “could live out there?”
She glanced at the figures on her screen, drained, refilled. Grasping infrared binoculars, she could make out flickering glows in abandoned row houses (which once brought a quartermil per) and the few oases she recognized as widelyspaced corner shopfronts lighted behind barred doors. Trains crackled on evening runs out of here (where else?). She thought of home two floors up and around the shadowy east corridor, her encampment and battery lamp planted on dense carpet by the sparkling circoramic Bay tableau to which she said every goodnight in a small corner of a permavacant rent-free luxury office penthouse non-serviced by maintenance-unfettered executive bath and power-devoid security interlock. The shroud of quiet lay tight and smothering high in this modern professional daywarren. In the 90story tower (998 offices, 190 occupied, 1,288 feet tall, sixth highest structure in the hemisphere, No. 1 tax writeoff in the Milky Way), she suspected hers might be the only heartbeat this resonating p.m.
And what... is left? Who is building their fires, finding a way to sleep tonight, reason to get up tomorrow—why do they go on?
She knew, just as she’d been terrified at her sociallyconscious independentreporter’s expedition this afternoon, stayed close to her car and (never-loaded) gun in glovebox. But the boy had been polite. She had a good take. Shake out a few donations, cuisinarts tres passé from Marin and Sonoma.
“How do they live?” knowing she knew the answer. The girls along blackened sidewalks. Boys one step removed from the box of seedless hash in the newsroom file cabinet, hostile supply meets heinous demand.
A dying City. A ruined age.
She sloshed tawny liquid, buried the thought. Yet more furious numerals irridesced on the screen:
City/county homicides last year: 872, up 19%; deaths from drugs, medicaments, and biologicals, 1,011, up 51%; AIDS mortality, 7,003 (*see subtabulations by viral strains coded ICD 10011036, age, sex, race, residents of Hispanic origin, central populations assessed by 10% sample, incomplete after 10/1)... Thank you for accessing CALMORT!
Funny what passes for tourohumor (no one here gets out alive) in this Age of Rage, Gunny Killafornia! State animal: Urbanus Humanus Horribilis! State flower: Field Baton Poppy (blooms in favorite massa’-media colors: bruising blueonblack)! State motto (Sutter’s Mill to Bunker Hill): Eur historeka! State bird: Wop wop wop. Consider this itinerary for your next idyllic getaway! Starstudded ShellA (¡Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles Instantes!) Picturesque Assassin Frisco! Romantic San Dagger. Blackened Chokeland. Our capital, Hackramento. Do you know the way to San Uzi? Quaint Orangutan County, unspoiled fortress natives crowning Checkers, glorifying Gates, virulently insolvent! Take my state... please. All the finest gangbang communalities, unregulated free killerprise, citizens with a firm ethic of wrong and riot, immigrants banishing immigrants, twinkiemurdered gays, Creepycrawly debs, maniac Zodiacers, strangled cañanitas, Hillsiders, candlelighters, homeless haters, expedited driveby justice, people always always in season. If you can’t do Beirut, Sarajevo, Belfast, Calcutta, this year...
Just think! ...right here in Baghdad by the Bay, 137 murders in 1970; 290 in 1995; 872 last year (tabulations incomplete after 10/1...) —
Sure, import Granny from Hayward for that nostalgic trip. Snap her picture backdropped in edifices dispatched by indigents observing Traditional Incendiary Ritual or coveted Spontaneous Combustion Rites! Blocks of charred hulks adorning a Sunlit Hillside High Above the Bay. Streets crash in barricades of rusted chassis, urban jetsam baked in blinding sun, shrouded in sunset fog. Five twelve four eighteen nineteen six, earth upturned sky burned Ferry to Van Ness a godforsaken mess, we never learned! (no, indeed: “If as they say God spanked the town/For being overfrisky/Why did He shake His churches down/And spare Hotaling’s Whisky?”). We loved Haight equals Summer of Love. Jefferson Joan Janis Jimi Jim Jerry Jello, Fillmore down, Alcatraz on the rebound. Another one off the Bridge every twelve days. So high ice cream cone Swenson’s at the top, Presidios of doom, Moratoria gloria, Ava, Tony, suicide On The Beach, spilt Milk mayoral gore, Sunset AIDS, concretecrushed commuters, Nobsnob shishkabob, cable car to hell.
What’s next that one fine day cerebral careening zips past the final off-ramp? Lost Angel Rhona (S Aracial F, 26, seeks something else...) swished another golden capful of tawny consultant, banked the neurons. Disaster hanging ten on the alpha wave—personal, social, natural; tremor, fire, scourge, carnage, the poor still with us, is that locusts swarming the southland sky?—she flipped through the volume her selfadopted father sent. Stories of the Atomic Aftermath. His obsession, framed in the picture that loomed large on his wall from a universe removed: another epochal, annihilated city, its skeletal Industrial Exhibition Hall, gutted Shima Hospital rising from the hypocenter... As we sprout our own variety, why, Daddy, the only one I know, did you think of them so much?
Because, darling anarquísta, he allowed many times after their chance meeting in Eagle Rock Park that juniorhigh runaway day: hibakusha are all of us, this is madness at its core, the official nexus, our powertoadying psychology tinkering with the rational insanity of the mundane victim as it upholds the monstrous lunacy of the echelon... But worse, she knew why this tale, today’s excursion, stirred such disintegrating fear, even hysteria. One more drink and she would have the word...
Marginality
Yes. No. Alpha. Omega. Not this not that. Neither light nor blank. Dawn city blown to dust, ten thousand notdead notalive in a silent bamboo park, hibakusha, children of mushroom savoir-faire, invited to the starstudded reception, the gawking, the prodding, the official concern, the assessment, and of course, the Doktor. Don’t sweat the good Defense Chief’s swan dive out Bethesda thirteen: when some rarified button-fingerman atop the fission pinnacle glimpses the truth, no mortal Shrink can repair the Grand Delusion. So cheer up, Doc, and fix this instead: They... dropped... a bomb... on... ME! Yes! Yes!! I have a problem with that!—
Chin resting on glass, Rhona circumnavigated a darkened horizon sprouting fogbank to the west. My fleshly patrioprogenitor, Puerto Rican, Costa Rican, some kinda rican (Iguanístas, good old Eagle Rock High Schoolers called us, thanks peers!), maybe East Indian, decidedly in absentia. Drunk ScotchIrish Mom, arch-worshipper of the classical asshole, failed to burn down the house in her own version of multigenerational dispatch. Mom adored the guys who flipped a mean fifth and scaled the stairs to sample the kid. One of the perks of my little house on a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Old Petey the Human Prune and his funny ideas about ten yearolds, too drunk to get it up even when terrified me couldn’t get away. Rick-the-dick, Mom’s live-in lover from hell, blank knife blanker eyes, the immediate little reason I happened to run away maturing as I was in ninthgrade angst, quinceañera ‘92 celebrated with a riot just for me, that window I personally smashed for whatwasthatabout?
An’ here it gets interesting, but it’s a good kinda interesting. Because, you see, we’re living in the material world and I am the marginal girl. I don’t look like anyone, I don’t act like a grownup, I don’t belong anywhere, least of all this Night City Bureau. I’m supposed to tell them the way it is? Sorry for the late newsbreak, but—
But I want to know.
So why did the old guy take me in? Bit of a marginal dude himself. Hated adults, both sexes, all races, multicultures beyond number. Some selfhatred obvious in that. But he had his head on straight about this girl—listening, hugging, oceans of privacy, two million miles of leash to a human species we both evaded, those lingering cravings for numbers and raving. Stat-ranting. The UCLA cinema cohorts who followed us around for their “Faces of the 90s Non-Family” PBS series so long ago thought we were proto, for once the media hit it smack on the diode.
And just like him to remind me of the marginal imperative, this raped aracial child, that hibakusha he always wanted me to meet. As if I didn’t have enough to think about. Look: the little girl who put her parents’ ashened bones into a can and took them to what was left of her school. Girl get real, at least you have parents to mourn...