The trundling suitcase was heavy behind him, and its little wheels were hanging up on larger chunks of plaster along the corridor. Michael quickly gathered he was in that most dreaded of places: an airport. It was empty and, going by the unpainted walls, still under construction. A woman’s voice was breaking up badly on the intercom, but the traveler knew exactly where he was.

He was in Los Angeles, where halved hermaphrodites and Paleolithic tar pits dotted a fearful phobic map in his mind. The sky was known to turn Pompeii red at dusk here, and spilled down from Benedict Canyon in disquieting shades of Sharon Tate’s blood.

The leery dreamer stopped at a large plate glass window to get his bearings on the terminal. Below him, people resembling tiny Guatemalan worry dolls were milling about on the tarmac and pointing up at the sky. A twinge of vertigo nudged his sights up, although something more menacing than the steep drop-off was burrowing down into his reptilian stem. The runway beyond the gawkers was as wide as a football field, and stretched down to a crystal clear horizon. The effect was one of parallax, where, as on the Moon, a lack of atmospheric distortion makes it difficult to judge the size and distance of things. The tops of his feet began to itch and the septum in his nose started to tingle. He could feel tremors of a plane still too far away to hear. Not wanting to confront the enormity of it, he melted away from the window in an escape.

A parking lot was in view through a set of double doors, though only a single rental car was parked on it. The out-of-towner was eager to leave, so dragged his suitcase out over the disobliging blacktop. Halfway across, sunshine turned to shadow on the back of his beading neck. He did not look up to see what was blotting out the light, but his sense was of something winged, colossal, and frozen in place. It was not passing in front of the Sun, but the Sun was passing behind it. On wrestling his piece of luggage into the backseat, the motorist sped away in search of an exit.

His means of transportation on this visit was more thin-skinned toy than automobile, and the scenery through the windshield was similar to the sort of thing he used to see in old movies, where a moving background was rear-projected onto a screen behind a stationary car. He needed to get to the other side of town where the skyscrapers were, but it was impossible to judge the skyline’s precise distance given the briefness of seeing it between concrete parapets. In one glimpse the buildings looked like small models situated very close and cleverly camouflaged to fool the eye; in the next, they were towering stacks of dominoes of such immensity as to hurl shadows up onto the San Gabriel Mountains miles away. Even from the freeway, the dizzy driver could hear their palm-tinted windows pop as they swayed.

Northbound on the Four-O-Five, he presumed the ocean was to the west, though ominously fusing with the sky and threatening to crash down. Giant arching bridges lay in some configuration to its shore and occasionally yo-yoed into view with a territorial display of brightly painted trestles. There was little time to fret over the frightful scenery since other cars, like corpuscles slithering over his fenders, were urging him forward in a stampede. He needed to get to his friend’s hotel, which required a car ride up into the hills. He knew the LA city map well, at least from the Ten to as far north as Mulholland Drive. Unfortunately, each boulevard sign in passing was comprised of randomly arranged characters of the alphabet:

ABCDFEGHJIKLNMOPRQSTUVWXYZ

ABCDEFHGIJLKMONPQSRTVUXWYZ

More disconcerting, the number of trees on both sides of the road was steadily increasing. At first they were as sparse and as intimidating as telephone poles, but shortly they became behemoths packed tightly together. Michael guessed them to have the circumference of a baseball diamond at their base, though their height offered the more daunting view. They jutted up into the blinding blue with large prehistoric ferns and spiny tube-like flowers and were one half Dr. Seuss creation and one half man-eating plant from The Day of the Triffids. They were quickly crowding the wispy clouds, and allowed only a few pencils of light to escape their canopy.

As his climb continued, the road darkened even more—not from trees or night but from a wafting-down haze the violet color of vaporized iodine. The narrow road became nearly vertical at the end, which required getting out and pushing his feeble car up through the thick smoke. Vehicles in the opposite lane were comets of mangled steel dropping from the sky. He heard them before he saw them, and was showered by their tails of black ice and sparks. Initially he thought the cover overhead was from a forest fire raging somewhere up in the hills, but on finally reaching a clearing, the whole city was under the same gritty bluish-brown cloud. The phobic man was grateful to be spared a vista of the metropolis miles below, though peaks of skyscrapers still poked up like razor wire in a thin grey line circling the horizon. He crouched to minimize his vertigo and spotted observation posts on the periphery. He might be at the observatory in Griffith Park, or perhaps further out at Mount Wilson. Drawing courage from his bumper, he scanned the western edge of the cliff in search of the Hollywood sign; large freestanding letters broke through the smoke in a greeting:

HOLLYGHJIKLNMOPRQSTUVWOOD

Something peculiar lay at the base of the H. Michael knew instinctively it was a carefully folded coat weighted with a purse. A piece of paper (presumably her suicide note) looped and fluttered in the updraft, though the queasy visitor had no desire to venture closer to the perimeter and confirm his suspicion about the body of leaper and doomed actress, Peg Entwistle, being lower on the face. He limped inside the Griffith Planetarium seeking relief from his excitable state, but found instead a leaning scaffold-of-a-telescope peering up through a crack in the high dome. He did not need to look through the eyepiece to see on what it was trained. Huge gaseous objects cut a swathe straight down through the visible gap. They were low enough to burn away the miasma, and terrifying enough to nail his quivering body to the floor. The idea he was witnessing falling stars gave way when the pinchers of Scorpio appeared in a clearing, and then the ragged, variegated edge of the Trifid Nebula. Michael was looking up at the nine planets aligned in the Zodiac.

He needed to break his paralysis—needed to call his friend to come rescue him…

The fitful sleeper shot up on the bed; sweat was spread thin like glue under his tee shirt. He clung to the edges of his mattress, still spinning, and was slow to anchor. Something else was sluggish in righting itself. The shadows of his packing boxes were too high on the wall to be put there by the gibbous Moon. Even before squinting out the bright window curtains, Michael knew he was staring into the glare of his headlights. The car was left unlocked, and the ever-opportunistic neighbor had seized on his inattentiveness to turn them on. The fretful man kicked off the covers and charged outside to turn off the lights. He spied his wicked persecutor snickering from a red-stained kitchen window. The miscreant was backlit by a bare bulb, and his dark mouth dipped into the semaphore of the janitor’s dream:

THESUNISALREADYUPSHITHEAD

Half the day was gone by the time Michael pried himself from bed. He staggered to the refrigerator, rough and pasty-tongued from his pills, but forgot about having finished the soda. He crossed back to where he had been rocking in place earlier and gently removed the taped-up photocopy of his coworkers from the wall. The ends of the Scotch tape were folded over and the keepsake was placed in the last of the major boxes to be sealed up: the one containing his magazine clippings of beautiful women. He tore off a length of tape to secure the flap, and admonished himself one last time. “The next time I will ask you out.”

Checking the hallway to make sure the neighbor was not around, the apartment dweller tiptoed down to the bathroom for a shower.

His best friend was in town from LA, and he was to rendezvous with him later for coffee.

Chapter Two/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.