Authors: Lippe Simone
Seen from above, the shock wave generated by the impact of a jet plane into the sea is doubtless a thing of scientific and natural beauty, composed of fluent and mathematically precise concentric rings describing a frequency corresponding to the velocity, mass and density of the actors in a uniformly choreographed exhibition of fluid dynamics. Seen from the surface of the water from a distance of a mile it’s an onrushing wall of death.
The wave gathered the yacht to its bosom and ran with it like a wide receiver clutching up a fumble in the dying seconds of a losing game against bitter rivals. If Clint hadn’t been sick before, and he had, then he was now. The sudden gain in altitude was complemented by an impossible angle with the stern facing almost directly down and the bow almost directly up and Clint holding onto the ship’s wheel to keep from falling out the back of the bridge and into open water.
Soon enough though the yacht turned so that it was travelling rapidly through the air sideways near the top of the mountainous wave. Clint could see nothing but sky and the ride was an uncannily comprehensive reproduction of the sensation of falling from a great height.
In fact the boat wasn’t falling at all but holding high on the wave like a piece of driftwood. A piece of driftwood that’s about to be dashed to pieces by the fury of the ocean. When the crash and crush and curtains didn’t come, even after what seemed like an hour but was probably less than 15 seconds, Clint realized that the tiny speck of a yacht was in fact surfing in its own clumsy oversized multi-decked oblong way across the water.
The yacht fell horizontally for several minutes, dandled on the lap of the giant wave as it hollered its deafening din of tons of water folding into yet more tons of water. In time the hoarse shouting dimmed and the violent shaking diminished and Clint, clutching the ship’s wheel and clenching his eyes and teeth, began to allow himself the luxury of hope. And in tiny measures hope was made gradually manifest as the wave carried the yacht far from the site of the crash and then slowly and gently died, depositing its charge safely in calm waters, like a leaf that’s found its way against all odds out of a raging river and into a shallow tributary creek. And Clint, still fused to the ship’s wheel and soaked from head to toe by, mostly, sea-water, opened his eyes and saw land.
To Clint’s untrained and inexperienced eye the mainland was somewhere between two and two hundred miles away. He felt sure that he could get there, assuming there was sufficient fuel, in the next ten minutes or before nightfall, whichever came last. He turned the ignition key and the engines whispered a dutiful response from somewhere deep within the boat. The accelerator accelerated and the wheel still steered the yacht and so Clint pointed toward land and waited and eventually got bored and tied off the wheel and went looking for something to drink.
Clint tried the radio and television and found no service on any channel or frequency. He reasoned that he was too far out or that the airplane crash had somehow interfered with reception or that the television and radio and ship’s radio were all broken. Eventually he contented himself with splitting his time between his duties as captain, returning to the bridge intermittently to verify that the boat was still pointed toward shore, and trying to teach Marmalade and Apricot to bring him a glass of champagne when he rang a bell. Both efforts were not entirely without success but he was more evidently effective as a ship’s captain.
And in this manner the yacht steamed quietly and confidently toward land. Clint was relieved to discover that he recognized the San Gabriel Mountains as soon as he saw them and was able to puzzle out from that piece of data that the flat, ugly, sparse spread of disconnected half-considered high-rises scattered listlessly before the mountain range must be Los Angeles. He started to notice a few other vessels on the water, mostly yachts like his own although considerably smaller. There were also sailboats and trawlers and even a sailboard but none of them were manned nor in motion. There were people on most of the boats but none of them appeared to be contributing to the functioning of the vessels which, consequently, were going nowhere.
The becalmed and drifting shipping grew considerably denser as the yacht approached shore and was joined by all manner of flotsam and jetsam and things which were neither flotsam nor jetsam, such as the floating corpses of swimmers and surfers. Clint had no recollection of ever being on the water off the coast of LA but he felt certain that this was far more than the normal number of dead bodies, even for what must be the height of the tourist season.
Clint decelerated to as slow as he could go and still steer the boat between those in the way, a maneuver which mostly amounted to ramming them and relying on the relative enormity of the yacht to tip the balance. And so it was early evening by the time Clint could begin choosing a viable mooring, in aid of which in a locker on the bridge he found binoculars the size of two coffee tins and of the sort of magnification used by professional sailors to read the mail of people several miles inland. He scanned the coast and found nothing but ideal landing points on which he could run the yacht aground and simply walk the rest of the way, an approach which appealed to his pragmatic sense of seamanship.
But as the powerful dual astronomical telescopes rushed the city into sharp focus Clint saw that just to the south, happily the direction in which the boat appeared to be currently drifting of its own accord, was a marina or docks or port or just a place where a lot of other boats felt comfortable among their own kind. He decided to allow the boat to continue pursuing its homing instincts while he did a little sight-seeing.
Sweeping the city again with no more pressing goals Clint noticed this time something amiss, something that looked too much like a postcard of Los Angeles As Seen From The Ocean. And it was just that, a picture. Clint felt sure that an early evening view of a city the size of Los Angeles should feature more traffic and sirens and people frolicking on the beach. There was nothing of the short, with a particular emphasis on the absence of frolicking. There was traffic — a great deal of traffic in fact — but it was all stopped and silent. There were no sirens although there seemed to be ample fires from which they could draw inspiration.
For as far as the powerful binoculars could reveal, which was actually slightly farther than was of any interest, there appeared to be no movement. The cars weren’t going anywhere nor honking any interest in doing so. The boats down in boatville just bobbed according to the whims of the ocean. There were no traffic helicopters or airplanes or kites. The city was clearly not as Clint had left it, although he couldn’t say for certain what it was like when he left it or if indeed it was even from Los Angeles that he’d started his day on the water.
The distance to the canal which lead to the marina was approaching a make-or-break point after which the yacht would have drifted far enough to the south to compel Clint to navigate, so he restarted the engines and very slowly engaged them and pointed toward the approximate middle of the threshold of the community of boats. The closer it was the more defined and intimidating the marina became and the slowest Clint could approach was still a breakneck two miles per hour. Though he saw no movement at all from the other vessels he rang the warning bell several times and Marmalade appeared behind him with an empty glass on a tray and a look of sincere pride of accomplishment.
The yacht slipped neatly into the mouth of the harbor, bouncing off one side of the wide river alley and then the other before swirling into Marina Del Rey. Good fortune reserved a vacant boat slip, opening its wide wooden arms directly before the yacht. Clint carefully adjusted for drift and wind, accelerated only enough to catch the rudder so that he could align the nose perfectly with the moorings, and then he crashed directly into the dock. In spite of the reduced speed the yacht continued shoreward for a good ten feet before dock and boat negotiated a standoff and the yacht was wedged securely into an evenly split boardwalk. Mission accomplished.
From the bridge Clint could see only the famous marina, a geometric and charmless parking lot of bobbing and lifeless middle class angst with names like “Serendipitous” and “Got It Maid”, bounded on three sides by weedy palm trees and stoic glass boxes pretending to be hotels and timeshares and homes for people who couldn’t bear to be too far from their boats. The water reflected the evening sunlight like a tanning mirror up into the face of the buildings and trees and neighboring boats, giving them a distinctly judgmental demeanor which Clint felt was pretty narrow-minded for a marina. None of the other boats appeared to be occupied.
Clint climbed to the front of the boat, now at about a 15° incline from the back, and took in the city from the comfort of a secure mooring. The binoculars were no longer necessary. In fact there was no need to look any further than the remaining length of dock to see that what had appeared to be a quietly comatose city hosting the world’s largest and most placid traffic jam was in fact seething with activity. And by and large it was the same activity, repeated with only variations in the participants and choice of weapons, it was street-fighting of a peculiarly factional nature.
Marina workers in their blue shirts were swinging nets and ropes in defense against an assault by deckhands dressed all in white and armed with mooring pikes and broken bottles and both sides looked equally at risk of breaking into song. Beyond that on Washington Boulevard middle-class neighbors were sacking middle-class houses and dragging one another’s wives across hedges as though lawn boundaries and topiary had lost all meaning. Clint’s guarded relationship with reality, already badly soured by events since this morning, was knocked completely from its foundations by this starkly surreal interpretation of a Los Angeles which was steeped in unfettered violence while no one was using a gun nor giving any thought to their cars. It was like a world gone mad.
Clint snapped the high-powered binoculars from doorway to alley to rooftop to balcony and each was playing out the same scene of feral and furious fighting, as though he was channel-surfing in a mid-range hotel in the Ozarks. And where there were groups there were sides, characterized by something and usually something conspicuous and petty. A softball team was making short work of a group of vendors for control of an organic fruit and vegetable store while a hard-hatted construction crew beat senseless the aproned baristas of a coffee shop for no apparent reason at all. Policemen with batons and the lids of garbage cans chased panicked Hare Krishnas with broken tambourines while something that looked very much like a platoon of confederate soldiers was bayoneting the male members of a tour group armed with only reflex cameras and sensitive skin.
The battle for food and women and terrain was played out all across the flat and faceless landscape of Los Angeles. Clint traced the binoculars along the straight roads in all directions and saw them blocked with abandoned cars and otherwise entirely deserted, with the exception of the small portion of the Pacific Coast Highway that he could see, which staged the stalking of a family of giraffes by a female lion. Clint felt compelled at this point to ring for another drink.
Which is why Clint had looked away from the magnetic spectacle of a city and its people and giraffes and lions turned against one another to acknowledge Marmalade’s presentation of straight rum in a champagne flute, which was so far the closest he’d come to getting it right. So when he returned his attention to the city Clint was caught off-guard by what appeared to be the very sudden appearance of a tank trundling over the uneven surface offered by the roofs of the cars stalled on Venice Boulevard. It turned onto Lincoln, parallel to the water, and then into the courtyard of the marina. With no more obstacles and a smooth terrain the tank immediately picked up speed before driving directly off the dock and into the water.
Honor was delighted with what turned out to be a natural facility for driving tanks. It was in every way that
mattered the same as driving a car and if anything it was easier than driving a car, because with cars one so often had to concern oneself with avoiding obstacles and braking. This was not the case with the tank, which offered a very forgiving scope of alternatives to steering and stopping. The vast majority of objects which for, say, a Ferrari 458, would represent impassable obstructions are for a tank more a variation of surface textures offering subtly differing degrees of traction. The brake pedal seemed to be largely ornamental because stopping was a simple matter of decelerating and allowing the tank to wedge its wheels into the hood of a car or bed of a pickup.
Enclosed and protected and safe and bouncy, the trip down Venice Boulevard was a leisurely one for Honor and her tank and she was able to observe the early evening military machinations of a lapsed civilization like a tourist in a glass-bottomed boat on the surface of a particularly savage South American swamp. So when she found herself entering the clearing in the jungle of cars on the four sides of the intersection of Venice and Centinela she was almost entirely unprepared to have to swerve into a campervan to avoid hitting a man who was standing directly in her path and trying to sell her a newspaper.
Honor had been driving over the cars in the middle of the boulevard partially, in fact mostly, because it was tremendously amusing but also because it avoided the morally dubious exigency of driving over people, savage or not. But now here was a man presenting the dual challenge of being both a person and, apparently, sane. Or at least he appeared to be a different kind of insane to the universal delirium of the masses tearing one another to bits across Los Angeles. This one was, instead and in the middle of it all, selling newspapers and looking like he’d been in a lengthy and brutal fight to the death, which he lost. He stood in the intersection holding a tabloid over his head with both hands, as though the headline itself might mean something to Honor. And then she realized that of course it did. It meant “Memory Panic”.
In a single motion and looking not unlike a clockwork cuckoo, Honor flung open the manhole sized door on the roof of the riot car and rose from it and pointed her gun at the lunatic paperboy.
“You don’t do maps, do you?” asked Honor from just beyond a police pistol that she had no intention of firing again if it could possibly be avoided.
“Maps?” replied the crazy man with the tabloid newspaper over his head. Then he looked up and took her meaning and smiled a weak smile and said “No. No maps. Just this newspaper. Final edition, I suspect.”
“I suspect you’re right. Who are you, newsie?”
“Ray, er, Tom.”
“Rare Tom? Is that because you, yourself, are rare, or because of the epidemic shortage of Toms? Because both are probably solid explanations. I’m Honor.”
“Hi Honor.” Ray’er Tom lowered his newspaper. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to meet you and I’m looking forward to trying but first can I get in your tank? I’m feeling a little exposed out here.”
“Climb aboard Rare Tom.” said Honor, and dropped down into the tank.