In the town car on the way back to the hotel Thales feels a lucidity bordering on euphoria and his mind is like a searchlight moving over the surface of the city. A gap between buildings frames a rectangle of the dull lunar gold of the dry mountains and the wildfires’ swathes of black ash and he remembers their flight into Los Angeles, how the plane had banked over the golden mountains and then the shock of his first sight of the city, the dull glare of the vast plain of concrete and glass, which seemed to have no limit, its far boundary lost in the enveloping smog, and he’d remembered that someone had said God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference doesn’t exist.
The car shudders over concentric rings of fissured concrete characteristic of an exploded IED—placed by whom, he wonders, and what, here, had they expected political violence to accomplish?—and now there’s a row of dying, dessicated palms that must once have been meant to evoke a Polynesian tropicality, though Los Angeles has always been a desert, and never more than now.
It’s not at all like Rio, he thinks, because Rio is like … what? He tries to remember but can only come up with a handful of images—his school, their home, a beach—though he’s lived most of his life there.
Another car follows his on the turn off from the freeway onto the surface streets of Venice Beach, and he realizes that it’s been behind him for miles, and in fact is the same model as his own, though filthy, like it hasn’t been washed in weeks.
The other car pulls alongside. Seconds pass and nothing happens. Heart racing, he’s ready to give the command that would put the car on full alert and elicit its focused aggression, but if this other party were really determined to hurt him they could already have started shooting, and he wants to know if they’re really following him, and if so why, so even though it’s almost certainly a mistake he lowers his window.
His reflection in the black glass of the other car’s window and the hot sunlight on his face but as the road turns the light’s angle changes and the other car’s window becomes translucent enough for him to see that it’s probably a woman, on the other side, and then his car makes the sharp turn onto the shielded ramp leading down into the St. Mark’s garage which makes the other car vanish.