BY JIM PASCOE
Los Angeles River
Change flows swiftly through L.A. like the shallow river that cuts into downtown on its way to the ocean. But in Los Angeles there are pockets, tiny whirlpools eddying in the stream, where change cannot reach. In those places, things even worse than change can find you.
Five till 7. With the taste of second-hand smoke in his mouth, he settles into a dark corner of his favorite bar in Chinatown, early for his date, ready to dope his new girlfriend. He has two beer bottles from the bar. He sets them on the wobbly square table. He looks around the place: The loud bleached-blonde harassing the bartender, the old men drinking Crown near the door, the smoking Chinese couple, all unconcerned with the packet of crushed powder he’s sifting down into the brown longneck. His eyes dart between them and his work, all the while he’s doing the male math in his head: Four dates and still no sex. Tonight makes five.
He was proud to have walked away from the first date without so much as a kiss goodnight. If you can’t get a second date, she’s not worth sleeping with in the first place. It was date three that made him nervous, caused him to question his game. He knew then she wouldn’t be easy. He even wondered if she really liked him.
Now, it’s been ten days since they last saw each other. He was kicking himself for letting an opportunity with someone so beautiful slip by. He had thought it was all over, until she called earlier today.
Why the call? Why the rush to meet? Perhaps in her mind they were just friends, and this is what friends do, how friends behave. Even if so, what does she want from him?
When she arrives, she looks pale. Sweat darkens the hair around her temples. Her hands look dirty.
“Is this for me?” Slumping into the seat next to him, she grabs the full bottle and lets it drain into her mouth. “Have you been waiting long?”
He stares at her. “No, I haven’t been here long. Are you all right?”
“There was a problem.” She finishes her beer. “I think I need your help.”
“Of course. Anything. But you’re scaring me.”
“We’ve grown close in the last month, haven’t we?”
“Sure.”
She reaches her hand out to touch his arm. Her laughter sounds forced as it cracks, turning into something like crying. Hysteria.
He waits for her to compose herself. She looks around the dark room and says, “Not here. I can’t tell you here.”
He leans back, keeping quiet. He’s being baited and wants no part of it. He is familiar with the dynamics of power, the rules of hunting. Give too much and you can’t take. Push forward and your target retreats. Remain silent and she will open up.
He knows all this. He should have slept with her weeks ago.
She gives in, speaks: “It happened in the river.”
“What river?”
“The river, the L.A. River.”
“What happened?”
“I think … I think I just killed somebody.”
He waits for the punch line, which does not come. There’s no reason for her to lie to him. He fingers the empty powder packet in his suit jacket. Slowly, like powder, his plan dissolves.
He straightens up in his chair, reaches for a new plan. “Maybe we should go back to your place. You can tell me everything there.”
“No. There’s no time.” She lowers her voice. “I’ll take you to the body. You’ll know what to do. I’m in over my head. I trust you.”
He stammers out the beginning of an argument. She is already up, heading toward the door.
Trust. If he thinks about it too much, his muscles tense.
He offers to drive, insists upon it, concerned about her staying alert enough with the substance in her system. She won’t have it. They argue. Unable to reveal why he opposes her getting behind the wheel, he concedes.
She drives east out of Chinatown. They cross the river. A dark left takes them down an industrial service road until they hit Riverside Drive. They exchange no words. She speeds and swerves. He clutches the handle above the window.
Elysian Valley. She gets out of the car, locks the door, and heads toward the entrance of a bike path that runs along the crest of cement lining the deep, empty river basin.
“Hey!” he calls after her. “I think we need a plan. You haven’t told me anything. I want to help you, but I need a little more.”
“It was an accident.” Her words slur.
“Accidents happen.”
“We should walk and talk.” She takes his hand. “He knew so much about the river, more than most Angelenos.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, well, that’s it. I think he was stalking me. I think … I was next.”
“An old flame?” He looks over the edge of the bike path. A knee-high barrier of loose chain-link tops an almost perpendicular sheer.
“No, I didn’t know him. I mean, I hadn’t ever met him. He started posting anonymous comments on my blog. Every time I wrote an article on the river, he would add his two cents. Sometimes he’d make corrections, sometimes he’d start an argument by taking a contrary point of view. At first I assumed he was with FoLAR—”
“Friends of the L.A. River?” He remembers this detail from her site.
“Yeah. But it didn’t fit. I know most of the gang over there, and he wasn’t anyone I recognized.” Her breathing has become labored. “Later, we e-mailed back and forth. His username was Pavlov.”
“A strange handle.” His eyes adjust, searching for the body. The only light comes from across the river. She tells him the MTA uses this defunct Southern Pacific structure as a place to store their spare light rail train cars. To him it looks like an abandoned factory.
“Wait, wait a second, please. I gotta stop.” She rubs her eyes. “I didn’t realize I was so out of shape.”
He touches her between her shoulder blades. “He wanted to meet you alone at night in the river? How did it get to that point?”
She walks away from his fingers. “Didn’t you ever want something so bad that, well, it’s not that you’d be willing to do anything, it’s that each step adds up and soon you find that you’re over the line, somewhere you shouldn’t be? You’ve got to help me, Jim.”
He does not say anything. His mind is already made up.
She points to where the body is, although he has a hard time seeing it at first. He must walk several yards farther north to where the embankment is gentle enough to descend. He makes his way down, his feet sideways so he doesn’t slip.
The body lies crumpled on the bone-dry, flat edge of the riverbed, several feet away from the small swash of water tracing the center of the channel. The man is dressed in a gray sports coat and jeans. His neck is twisted. His face is down.
“Hey,” he whispers, nudging the guy in the rump with his shoe. “Hey.” He leans down to find a pulse. The guy’s neck is cold.
She whispers down the embankment. “Is he definitely dead?”
“I wouldn’t think a fall down here would kill a guy.”
“He must have snapped his neck. It was a bad fall. From here it’s almost a straight drop.”
He looks up at her.
She says, “What? What are you thinking?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He hears her breathing heavily through the sobbing. “He … he took her.”
“Who?”
“Before I pushed him, he, he said I could find her … through … through the six cats. Should’ve went right away, but … got scared. Thought you could help.”
“You’re crazy—you’re not making any fucking sense.” He continues to examine the body, looks in the guy’s pockets. No wallet, no ID, a few dollars in cash. “I’ll help, but you need to start filling me in.”
“What … what are you doing?” Her voice rises like helium.
He pulls something from the body’s right suit pocket. A small metal object. A bell. Caked in dried mud.
He walks to the center of the river, to the water.
“Where are you going? What are you doing?” she asks.
He tries to wash the bell. He shakes it under the water, as if ringing it. No sound comes up past the surface. The cold water is surprisingly swift, like a full-force faucet running over his hand.
“I know you want me, Jim. And I know why you think you can’t have me. Doesn’t matter to me anymore. Find her and … I’ll do anything … I’ll let you do anything.”
Something in the water touches him, something that floats around his hand, something that feels like fingers. He flinches. The bell slips from his grasp.
“Shit,” he says.
“What! What’s going on down there?”
He splashes his hand in and out of the shallow water, but he can’t locate the bell.
“Shit. That guy had something in his pocket and when I tried to clean it off in the river, I dropped it. Now I can’t find it.”
“Was it the bell? Was it?”
He turns around to look up at her. She screams, using all her energy. The effort actually deflates her. Her body withers, goes limp. Her knees strain against the short chain-link fence. It buckles. She topples.
The drug. His drug. Now is its time. Its damage, far from expected, doesn’t seem real. Had she stayed a couple feet back, he would be crawling out of the river, gathering her unconscious body, and returning her home.
But she is too close to the edge. The fence cannot hold her body when she loses consciousness. Her upper body folds over the edge, the momentum carrying her head down fast in a dive. Her feet flip over the fence, and she’s falling. He watches her as she goes down with impressive velocity. Her limp condition might have saved a more substantial body, but her delicate frame snaps when her curved neck crashes into the dry gravel at the bottom. He runs to her, stops in front of her twisted, broken form.
He can hear the river churning, flowing fast behind him; its thimble-full of water, a flood.
He hyperventilates, looks for something to hold, to steady himself. His tongue pumps piston-like into the back of his throat.
What is happening?
He doesn’t bother with a pulse this time. He is afraid to know; although he knows he knows.
He speaks out loud, hoping his voice will give truth to the lies: “This is not my fault. This is not my fault. This is not my fault.”
This is a trap, he thinks, his heart still racing. I see it clearly, this quicksand of culpability. If I do nothing, I sink. If I struggle, I go down faster. I must remain calm, go backward up along the path that brought me here, until another path presents itself. A tiny pocket. A window. An escape. If not from responsibility, from guilt.
Her dress has come up above her knees. He glances over to the man’s body. The head is cocked on its broken axis. Jim imagines the body looking back at him, even though only one eye is open. The man would say, You can look. Take a peek. It’s okay. You haven’t gone any farther than the rest of us. Don’t worry about crossing the line. I am the eraser. The line is gone.
He walks away from the bodies, climbs out of the river. He takes her purse, checking for her keys and wallet. He leaves.
It takes him almost an hour to walk back to Chinatown. All the while he repeats to himself: You can find her through the six cats.
Who is she? How can he find her? How can he help her?
He gets to his car, drives to the dead girl’s place, a one-bedroom cottage in Echo Park. With her key, he enters. He goes straight for the bedroom.
The scent of the place is familiar. It smells like her. He has been here a couple times, but never has he come into this room. He allows himself a moment to take it all in.
He opens the closet’s double doors. She has pushed a four-drawer dresser into the closet, clothes hanging on either side. On top of her dresser are two photos in stand-up frames. One is a picture of her with another girl, much younger. They are laughing, standing arm in arm. Sisters. The other is a picture of a young lady, taken at the beach. The sunglasses the woman is wearing, as well as the color and quality of the print, date it. Most likely, her mother.
Starting with the top drawer, he goes through the contents of her dresser. Bras, panties, socks, scarves, sweaters. What would have been a puerile thrill has become numerous slugs to the stomach. Still, he finishes, digging under the piles of folded fabric, knocking the four corners of each drawer, hoping to uncover a hidden relic of some sort.
Secret photos, perhaps. A bundle of old love letters. A diary.
He moves onto the shelves, finds a leather-bound volume of lined paper with less than half of its pages filled. He reads the first entry. As he reads, her voice rings in his ear.
He closes the book, looks around the room. He shakes his head and feels his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s hot.
He must not get distracted by emotions. There is a task at hand, he reminds himself. Whatever she was doing in the river remains unfinished. He owes it to her to see it through, all the way to the end. He remembers the list of clues he’s assembled: a missing girl, Pavlov, six cats, a bell.
He opens the book again. He tries speed-reading the diary to see if any of these things are mentioned. Nothing. The information is either not there or he’s too impatient to find it.
Frustrated, he turns to the last entry. Ten days ago. It’s an inconsequential write-up, but it gets him thinking: Wasn’t that the night of their last get-together?
Flipping through the pages, he searches for his name. He tries to remember the exact day of their first date. He finds it, an entry about that night. He reads her words. Her voice rings louder.
He rips the page from the book, stuffs the paper in his pocket, slams the book shut.
The ticking of a clock fills the quiet that remains. He’s concerned that he’s been in here too long. He expects a knock at the door any moment, but can’t imagine who would come calling at this hour.
He sits at her desk, digs through papers there. A good number of them are printouts of online reports: girls gone missing, kidnap suspects arrested, and alleged abductors still at large.
A picture is developing in his mind.
Her computer is already on. He moves his finger across the trackpad to wake it from sleep. He starts by pulling up her blog. Though it looks like she posted daily entries, the site has not been updated in ten days. Her previous posts were all things he had seen before: conservation issues, environmental impact discussions, and public policy debates concerning the L.A. River.
He clicks off the browser and begins reading through folders and file names on her hard drive.
An electronic ding sounds off. A flashing window appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
Someone is sending an instant message.
Shepherd_79: god i’m so sick of guys
Shepherd_79: he didn’t call again tonight
He is tempted to shut the program down, make it seem like a glitch. Her friend would never think twice about it. But he doesn’t do anything, thinking it is far less suspicious to do so.
His heart is racing, and he can feel his neck and chest flushing with color. Finding it hard to concentrate on reading her folder structure, he opts to open an image viewer and browse through her digital photos.
Shepherd_79: i should just get over him, right?
The photos are grouped into categories, mostly events: parties and a couple weddings. The largest group of pictures contains shots of the river. He opens them in thumbnail view and scrubs through them, trying to differentiate one from another. They all look the same. Graffiti-covered cement. A hint of water. Chain link, barbed wire, corrugated steel.
He clicks on a couple of images, enlarging them, hoping to read the graffiti. But it’s all senseless tagging in an indecipherable alphabet.
Next are a bunch of shots of storm-drain covers spraypainted in bright, bold metallic colors. The paint looks layered on, the iterations of multiple artists on many different occasions.
There’s something familiar about the shape of these drain covers, the way the upper hinges taper off to points on either side of the large circle.
Shepherd_79: hello?
Shepherd_79: are you ignoring me too bitch!
The messages are getting to him. Someone is closing in on him, has him under a microscope.
He clicks the IM window and types, hitting the keys hard.
CAN’T TALK NOW.
A mistake? Just by typing a few words he has brought her back. A ghost in the machine. Although this ghost is thinner than smoke.
The next image of the drain covers reveals it all. The spray-painted eyes, nose, whiskers. Cats. They are graffitied to look like cats.
Another message comes through IM.
Shepherd_79: sorry … you okay? is there news about your sister?
He jumps up to her bookshelf and starts tearing through books.
Captions under key images begin to point him to a general location. Hopping back onto her computer, he starts opening documents and searching for keywords. Frogtown. Atwater Village. County Flood Control. Mural Registry. He starts sketching on the back of a piece of paper.
After much work, he has a map, a goal. He is about to leave when he notices the IM window is blinking again. He knows he will have to close the program before he leaves. Keeping it open will make for a suspicious scene, even though the books and papers he has pulled out make the ransacked place suspicious enough.
He reads the last communication.
Shepherd_79: what’s the matter?
Shepherd_79: hey! HELLO!
Shepherd_79: Who are you?
(Shepherd_79 has signed off.)
He exits the program. He imagines that Shepherd is heading here, to this house, to investigate. It hardly matters now. He won’t be here. He is heading back to the river.
He knows who she is. He knows how to find her. The rest is fate.
In the dim light of the riverbed, he has trouble seeing the graffiti on the drain covers, but he knows he’s at the right place. Six cats, six drains. The large painted faces hang perpendicular to the ground. During heavy rains they will swing up, releasing torrents of run-off into the violent river come to life. Now they are silent, each recessed into an individual hollow in the channel’s cement wall. He takes a moment for a deep, shaky breath. He twists his wrist to look at his watch, but the time doesn’t even register. His mind is on what happens next.
Really, what is he doing here?
Thoughts crowd his head. He should go to the police, he should go get help, he should just walk away and pray for this day to end. He shakes his head, pulls the paper he ripped from her diary out of his pocket. With a faint click he turns his flashlight on and reads:
In real life, stories never actually end; they simply change. If you are in a loveless marriage, you can’t just type “THE END” and move on to the next story. No, you make choices and you change, your story changes. A main character is swept to the side. A supporting character rises to take on more importance. New characters are introduced.
Nothing ever stops, not for a single moment.
Six cats in front of him. He chooses one. Kicks at the cover. Solid. He touches it hesitantly, thinking that it’s probably dirty. The slightly moist surface is cold from the night air. It says to him, Choose again.
The next cat he selects reacts differently. It gives when he touches it, making a squeaking sound not unlike a low meow. One of the top hinges is broken. The cover opens easily. Beyond is a cement tunnel, almost six feet in diameter.
He steps up. Inside. The beam of his flashlight melts into black. The entire inner surface is covered in graffiti tags of multiple colors. Catching the writing out of his peripheral vision gives the illusion that the tube is slowly rotating. He tries to concentrate on the sloppy seams of the poured concrete, concentric rings that disappear into darkness. He walks slowly at first, then with determination.
The path in front of him does not appear to end. He stops and looks back. He can’t see the entrance anymore. If he spun around he wouldn’t be able to tell which way was out, which way was in.
He keeps walking until he reaches a hole in the curved bottom of the tube. The hole is slightly smaller, maybe four feet wide. Attached to the side is a ladder. He aims the flash-light below. He cannot see bottom.
He climbs down the ladder.
The length of the descent surprises him. When he reaches the bottom rung, he extends his leg down, swinging it to feel for some ground. His shoe scrapes against something and he decides to let go of the ladder.
He lands awkwardly, almost twisting his ankle. He shines the flashlight around. Another tube, this one perpendicular to the one he came in. His choice is left or right.
There is a scratching, scurrying sound. He thinks it’s most likely a rat.
Then it sounds different. A whimper. A cry.
He looks in the direction he thinks the sound is coming from. His flashlight only goes a small distance before the beam diffuses into an off-white haze. He thinks he sees movement, but it’s up high, eye-level, not crawling across the floor.
He flinches and throws some light above him. Nothing but gray cement.
His light still pointed above him, he looks forward and sees something more clearly. He turns out his flashlight and lets his eyes adjust. Again he sees it. A flickering.
A light ahead.
He runs toward it. As he gets closer, he can’t quite grasp what it is. The first thing he sees is the reflection of his own flashlight.
Then he sees her.
He holds up his free hand, trying to wave the image away as he fights back the nausea. Looking around, he sees he’s in what appears to be a large circular room. Off to one side hangs a camp lantern that barely illuminates the scene.
In the center of the room are two large pieces of sheet glass, hung vertically. They are sealed together at the four corners with over-sized metal bolts. Between the glass is pinned a young girl, wearing only a white T-shirt, a white pair of underwear.
The glass holds her up off the ground. She is pressed together so tightly that her face is distorted, her cheek blotchy and spread wide, her lips puckered like a fish. Her eyes are closed.
“No more.” Her voice, a dry whisper. “Please, no more.”
He catches himself staring with incomprehension before he snaps out of it and rushes to her, examining the glass for some type of latch or opening. Finding none, he fights with the bolts. His hands burn at the friction of the unmovable metal.
“Please … I’ll do anything … I’ll let you do anything,” she says.
The bolts appear to have been tightened by some massive wrench. He looks around the room for it, but finds only a metal pipe.
“Just whatever you do … Don’t ring the bell anymore.”
He stops, looks at her, really looks at her. “What?”
She opens her eyelids, and her eyes searchlight the room. “Who … who are you? Where is he?” Her voice gets more and more excited, and her eyes go crazy. Except for this flurry, she is unable to move. “Get me out, get me out, get me out!”
“I’m trying. Just calm down. Everything is going to be all right.”
He tries to pry the two panes apart, first with his hands, then with his shoe. Her cries are getting louder; his blood pressure, rising.
The glass does not budge. Now a scream: “Get me out! He’s coming! He’s coming back with the bell! No no no no …”
He tries to quiet her, tell her that he’s here to help. He does not tell her that her kidnapper is dead, in the river, unable to hurt her anymore. The idea of what he did to her burns him, keeps him quiet.
Her screaming shows no sign of stopping. She screams dry, hollow, hyperventilated screams—she can’t get enough air to properly bellow out. It would be better, he thinks, if she could really let it all out. But she is so constricted. Her wheeze crawls up his spine and pools into tension.
He grabs the metal pipe.
“Look. The only way I’m getting you out is to break the glass.” He weighs the pipe in his hand. “But I think it’s too dangerous. You could really get hurt. I’m … I’m going to go for help.”
“No! He’ll come back! You have to do something!”
“He’s not coming back!”
The noise she’s making reminds him of her sister’s last sound, that final emptying scream. Could he have done more to help her? Should he have done less?
He can’t concentrate with her crying. The opportunity is slipping by. What would he be willing to do to free her? Anything? A moral lapse? No. To lapse is to fall. This is a leap. This is worth the price.
He swings at the glass with the pipe, aiming near her upper leg. The impact makes a loud reverberating bounce that echoes through the underground tunnels. The glass does not break.
“No! Stop! That hurts! Get me out of here!”
“I’m trying—”
“Get me out!”
“I’m trying!” He swings. “I’m trying!”
Again and again, until the glass shatters. She falls forward onto the shards.
He throws the pipe away and goes to lift her up. Blood has already soaked her thin shirt. She presses herself onto him, holding him, crying deeply, allowing big gulps of air to enter her lungs.
“I’ll take you somewhere safe,” he tells her, but all she can do is moan.
In his car. He drives her to the nearest hospital. She hasn’t said anything since he carried her up through the tunnels and out of the river. He continues to glance over at her, hoping she will say something, anything. When she doesn’t, he speaks just to break the still air.
“He can’t hurt you anymore.”
She looks out the window. “When I woke up in that thing, he began telling me stories. He would tell me about the horrible things he was going to do to my sister. Only, every time he would describe something really bad, he would ring a bell. At some point the stories stopped. He would just come and sit next to me and ring the bell.”
He grips the steering wheel tightly. “You know, I had it in my hands. I had the bell, and it slipped away from me.” He looks at her, her confused expression. “It’s gone now. It’s all gone.”
She puts her hand on the door handle, turns to him. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of your sister.” He sees a tear roll down her cheek, a tear she does not wipe away.
She says, “I think you should just let me out here.”
He turns onto San Fernando Road. “The emergency room is right there. Just let me—”
She throws the door open; he slams on the brakes. She uses the recoil of being thrown back to push herself out of the car. She gets to her feet and runs toward the hospital, flailing her arms as she goes.
There is nothing more he can do. He reengages his stalled engine. He leaves.
He puts his window down, even though the late-night air is cool. He wants to drive forever, wants the car never to run out of gas, never to stop. No acceleration, no deceleration. A constant, smooth, uninterrupted drive.
This fantasy cannot hold. He knows he needs to go home. He looks down and remembers her blood all over his clothes. He can’t go home like this. He’s too tired to want to figure things out, though he knows he needs to. But then, as ideas do, something comes to him.
For the last time tonight he heads to the river.
He finds their bodies, largely unchanged since he left them hours ago. He examines the man, stiff and cold, roughly his same build. First he takes off the man’s jacket. Then his shirt, his pants.
They fit him well enough. At least they are clean.
He dresses the man in his clothing. Now the kidnapper is wearing the blood of the sister of the dead woman next to him. For him and for now, this is enough.
As he reclaims his personal belongings from his exchanged clothing, he finds the empty powder packet in the suit jacket. He leaves it in the possession of the corpse.
“You,” he says to the dead man. “This is your fault.”
Home. He tries to be quiet as he opens the door. He closes it softly. He crosses the front room, slinks into his office and into his chair. He breathes in and out, trying to calm down. His skin is clammy from the lack of sleep.
He goes into the bedroom. His wife is sleeping. He sits down on his side of the bed, trying not to wake her. He doesn’t bother to undress.
She turns to him, still asleep. She manages to mutter, “Poor baby, always working late. You get a lot done?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great. Mmm, I got to get up soon. Wake me up at 7, ’kay?”
“Sure.”
He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket, sets it on the nightstand next to his pillow. Does the same with his keys, his change. He reaches into the suit jacket. The right pocket. He finds it there.
The bell, washed clean by the river, traveled on its journey, has arrived here.
Maybe it’s the fatigue, but he’s not so concerned with how as he is with why. The bell demands a story, a confession.
He holds it in his hand, examines the detail.
He does not move. He stays this way for a long time, as long as he can.
His concentration broken, he looks at the clock.
Five till 7.
Everything seems to change.
He rings the bell.