Manzanar let his arms drop. There was no need to conduct the music any longer. The entire city had sprouted grassroots conductors of every sort. He peered through the din and smoke of the battle and saw a tall man coming toward him carrying the body of a woman wrapped in a beach towel. It was the man whose calling card read Angel of Mercy. It was the woman who had been sunning herself on the TV van. Buzzworm stood beneath the overpass and raised Emi’s body like a gift.
Manzanar nodded. A well of silly tunes filled his old throat. Folk songs. Jazz bits. Rock tunes. Lullabies. Are you sad today? I have a new song for you. How about that? The words and the songs wandered around his head. He hadn’t meant to leave her, or anyone else.
It was a curious thing. Manzanar had followed an ancient tortoise out into a deep place in his brain and stayed there year after year. Now it seemed he had surfaced. The infant heart had triggered the full range of memories. Slowly his head rose above the foam and floating kelp. He walked from the rim and looked back at the waves of natural and human garbage thrown back again and again. Everything would churn itself into tiny bits of sand, crumble there at the rim—the descending sun one gigantic blazing orange dipping behind, boiling the sea into steamy shades of blood. He had seen enough. And he had heard everything.
The deafening thudder of helicopter rotors dipped above him. Buzzworm was there struggling to place the woman’s body on the hanging gurney. “Go with her!” Buzzworm’s voice could not be heard, but Manzanar saw the words formed clearly on his lips and obeyed, climbing onto the gurney with his granddaughter.
“Hang on!” The words formed on Buzzworm’s lips again.
Manzanar held on. He took her hand in his like old times.
The thing lifted, spun away from the freeway melee and around the Panasonic/Chrysler Coliseum sign. It was 78 degrees, but the time had long been dysfunctional. Manzanar looked up; it was the NewsNow copter requisitioned to save its own. Now, it dipped along the concrete sections of the L.A. River, skirting the Hollywood sign, flitting over the hills.
And Manzanar, peering cautiously from his higher perch, saw bird’s-eye the inflation of thousands upon thousands of automotive airbags, bursting simultaneously everywhere from their pouches in steering wheels and glove compartments like white poppies in sudden bloom. All the airbags in L.A. ruptured forth, unfurled their white powdered wings against the barrage of bullets, and stunned the war to a dead stop.
But Manzanar heard nothing.