But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I could hear blast door bolts slotting home behind me, but there wasn’t any use trying to pretend I’d come through before it closed. The woman standing next to the captain’s chair in the center of the hide—short hair, sand camo, half-drawn sidearm—was looking straight at me, her you gotta be fucking kidding me reaction turning lethal before either of us could blink. Except for the obvious crew at stations to my left—I counted six of them—the hide seemed to be jammed all the way to the back wall with raggedies of every age and condition, probably survivors brought down from the ruins of the Strip.
“How the hell?”
“Grepped by your portal north of the Wynn—what’s left of it anyway. You were after someone else?”
“Wasn’t us.”
“Unfunny either way. Any idea who hates us both?”
“At this point? Damned near everyone. Where’s the rest of you?”
“Name, rank, and serial number, all you get.”
The sidearm was all the way out now, the business end glowing. “Think again.”
The air around me rippled briefly like a stone tossed into a pond, and suddenly my whole crew was formed up between us, the better part of a heavy weapons squad already in full on search and destroy mode. “Hold!” I shouted, and well-trained fingers came off half a dozen triggers. “Make a hole.” Pushing a couple of nasty-looking muzzles aside, I stepped to the front. “This is the rest of us. I don’t know why we’re here. Do you?”
She shook her head slowly, the sidearm already back in its holster. “So now what?”
“I’m thinking what our betters call ‘a frank exchange of views.’”
“Works for me. Let me get these people someplace first.”
I nodded. She unshipped a handheld and tapped at it briefly. Somewhere beyond the huddled masses at the far end of the hide an airlock began to cycle. “Okay everybody, 20 at a time into the lock. Gunnery Sergeant Walker there will monitor. There’s secure shelter at the farside end of the tunnel—beds, food, water, and sanitary facilities including showers. Changes of clothing will be handed out as and when. Anyone needing medical attention or prescription meds see the corpsman on duty. We’ll get you back topside as soon as we can.”
Took a while, but eventually there were just us grunts in the captain’s hide—half hers, half mine. We signaled them to stand down while we were off sorting out our uneasy truce.
Her ready room, built for speed, not for comfort. A table with four chairs, a sitrep holo over the center that blanked as we entered. She gestured. We sat. We talked.
“You are?”
“California. 1st Armored Cav. You?”
“Texas. 415th Force Recon out of Corpus Christi. Also a handful of stray Hoosiers and Jayhawkers from that KC sigint battalion got mauled last month up around Pahrump. Some awful shit went down there. Here too. I used to fly over from home with the sigo for a show, now I hate the fucking place.”
“Not really a place anymore, though, is it? Not much left but latrines, body bags, and rubble. I figure we’re just about done here. Some papers’ll get signed, some razor wire’ll get unrolled, a few mines and flagpoles planted. Then the fuckers in charge’ll declare it a demilitarized zone, and anybody left alive’ll finally get to go back home and start over.”
“Yeah, probably got in mind going all ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ for the coastal stringers. Not this time, though, not with all the broken parts getting shipped back home to the folks.”
“So…wasn’t you grepped us?”
“Wasn’t. I been asking myself who pulled it and why, but I keep coming up with nada. If it wasn’t my people, and it wasn’t yours, who the hell else has the mooch to grep half a fucking infantry squad halfway across a city this size with most of what’s left of it still under fire? You want a beer?”
“You got beer?”
“Liberated a dozen cases of longnecks a week ago from a half-wrecked convenience store behind our perimeter. Been doling them out for good behavior, but I’ve still got a dozen or so left. So yeah, I got beer.”
“Bring it, then, and let’s see can we figure this shit out.”
We never did figure it out. I said maybe some do-gooder NGO put us together on purpose, see if a couple of ground pounders’d make love not war. She said no fucking way, just blind luck we didn’t waste each other on sight. We were still scratching our heads at 1650, when both our handhelds started to flash. Armistice signed, all hostilities to cease at 1700. And that was that.
Around sundown, I raised one of the last two longnecks, knocked it against hers. “I hope you’re right about this time being different. Sad we have to live in hope—probably what guarantees we stay at the bottom of the foodchain where we are. Hope or no hope, I’m thinking I oughta get my people up top before reporting in. Just in case.”
She upended her bottle, drained it, slammed it down on the table next to mine. “Until the next one, then, Califa. ¡Que te vaya bien!”
What do I think about TikTok? What do I think about X? What do I think about all our 21st century digital anxieties—China’s nefarious designs on democracy, Musk’s knee-jerk racism, Zuckerberg’s peculiar concept of masculinity, Thiel’s equally peculiar attitude toward his own mortality, and by extension our own?
What I think is that once the box is opened, Pandora can no longer help us—or, in more contemporary terms, scale matters. What does that mean? It means, to resort to the original Latin, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Genuine freedom of speech reveals things to us about ourselves that we’d rather not know. Content moderation can’t help us with that. Neither can the clever pretense of algorithm patrolling, nor bans that, for obvious economic reasons, won’t ever actually be enforced except selectively. Not even some real version of the Butlerian Jihad can help us.
The singularity may never come to pass, but governmental interventions in the creations of the digital age, legislative, executive, or judicial, are, like the military career of Josef Švejk, tainted with all the accidental qualities an indifferent universe can conjure. The truth is, we can no longer afford our own immaturity. My advice is simple: don’t go with the tech bros if you want to live. They really have no idea what they’ve wrought.
When the Fearful Symmetry’s shuttle silently terminated its descent, and extended its boarding ramp for him, he’d already been standing quietly at the entrance to the village for nearly an hour, a lumpy canvas duffel at his feet and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses clinging precariously to the end of his nose. As the wave of dust displaced by the shuttle’s shield envelope began rippling around his ankles, he reluctantly gave up on the pocket-sized vademecum of the prophet’s sayings a local elder had pressed on him earlier that morning, and slipping it into an empty side pocket, reached down for straps on his now thoroughly dust-coated duffel.
Squinting a little as his eyes adjusted, he pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and turned toward the ramp. He’d dressed that morning as he always did, in the vest and shalwar kameeze of the locals. Only a brief metallic glint at the end of his sleeve as he hefted the deceptively heavy duffel hinted at the temporamores he was now wearing underneath them.
The villagers, who, despite their uncertainty, had remained at a more or less respectful distance from him throughout the morning, now shuffled even farther back, the men arranging themselves according to age and dignity as custom dictated, and the women, now partly under the shade of the village bus stop’s extended roof, tending to what women always tended to. The mothers and older sisters herded the younger children away from the edge of the road. The grandmothers, abandoning their furiously whispered disapprovals of a morning wasted, raised their kerchiefs against the dust that suddenly threatened to envelop them. Two teenaged boys in the middle of the road, hands resting firmly on their motorbike handlebars, glanced nervously at each other, already poised to thumb their engine starters and speed away.
He pivoted back toward the gathering as he reached the near end of the ramp, giving them a brief wave of acknowledgment, of farewell. Then he turned and walked briskly up the ramp into the waiting transport, which had begun rising even before the ramp had fully closed behind him. It paused briefly a dozen or so meters above the ground, and then, without any warning at all, disappeared with a sound not unlike a pair of very large hands suddenly clapped together.
“They weren’t exactly waiting for a bus, were they?”
“No. They were waiting for the future.”
“And you promised them a sneak peak at it? That won’t go over well.”
“It won’t disrupt the timeline.”
“And you know this how?”
“Research.”
So I find myself netflicking again the other night, looking for something to rest my weary eyes on after another long day spent reading and writing on that radiant little iPad of mine. Ah, here we go then, a new one of those geriatric menaces with Liam Neeson in it. This time he’s to be a hit man (what else) retired in a village full of innocents the producer seems to have borrowed from the Banshees of Inisherin. It does also have Ciarán Hinds and Colm Meaney in it, though, so maybe….
Turns out it’s quite satisfying—serious enough to portray a character who has as hard a time as any of us figuring out if it’s his death or his life catching up with him, and wise enough to cast a superb Kerry Condon as the young harridan with a revolver who helps him with the final bit of calculation. It’s not quite Inisherin, but it doesn’t embarrass itself.
It’s called In the Land of Saints and Sinners, and it’s on Prime. It wouldn‘t kill you to have a look at it.
58 years ago a twenty year-old Mike Davis taught me to love LA. Even then he was a sharply critical lover of that magical place, so I’m not sure how it was that, despite his tutelage, my love for LA came to be so much less critical than his. Like Randy Newman, I loved LA without reservation, and kept loving it even when, roughly 25 years after I last saw Mike, I found myself reading my library’s copy of City of Quartz and nodding along in agreement as I followed his historical analysis of what I’d long since thought of as his city far more legitimately than it had been mine.
These days, I live in Arizona, feeling much more exile than expatriate, even on my good days, for reasons anyone who’s spent any time in Dogtown will understand. I’ve long wanted to thank Mike publicly for his exuberant gift to my younger self, but not having the patience to write memoirs, and being temperamentally unsuited to the writing of eulogies, I never got around to it while he was alive, and couldn’t bring myself to commit to it in the days after he passed, as surfing on his hard-earned fame as a public intellectual seemed a rotten way to honor his memory.
So let me do this instead: For anyone who lives in LA for any length of time, and responds to it as I did, memory becomes a sort of protean creature, one which with or without their consent claims a small but significant share of their consciousness. One can never tell for sure whether what one remembers is something lived in the flesh, experienced vicariously in a darkened movie theater, or simply appears unbidden as an inexplicably alchemical fusing of the two.
This, then, is the introduction to a series of small, but haunted Los Angeles memories that have affected me more deeply over time than I had any reason to expect when they first came to me. They’re personal, of course, not necessarily having any significance for anyone but me, but I offer them here for any others who may find them resonant—you’ll know who you are. Above all, though, they’re my thanks to the Mike I still remember from those long ago days when we were both impossibly young, who long before he had any thought of leaving the life he lived so furiously, gifted me with this oddly Southern California capacity for double vision that I’ve treasured ever since.
Trans people are people. …endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights… and so forth and so on —248 years into our grand collective experiment even you should have learned the fucking drill….
Ten years ago I was privileged to witness the emergence of a dragonfly from its nymph form. A creature that at first glance had seemed like a beetle to my untrained eye had crawled laboriously up from my back yard, attached itself to the side of the concrete step leading to the sliding glass door to my bedroom, and remained there, unmoving, tempting me to believe it had died.
I don’t remember exactly how long it remained there, but it was long enough for me to pass it a number of times on my way back and forth to the alley behind my house. Then, the last time I started to pass it, I discovered to my surprise that the back of its carapace had split open, and the dragonfly it had become was perched atop the empty shell that had sheltered it, had been it, and was now unfolding its wings in the afternoon sun. I watched until the wings, now fully dried, suddenly began to vibrate, then powered a beautiful, iridescent liftoff and arrow-like disappearance into the distance, a movement almost too fast to follow with the naked eye.
Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, my first thought at witnessing this astonishing sequence of events was that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic, my second that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, I didn’t find those two thoughts to be incompatible. Now, ten years later, I still don’t.
It was October, 1955, a week or so before my twelfth birthday. My mother and I, my three year-old sister, and my grandmother—who’d been living with us at that point for several years—found ourselves on final approach to a late-night landing in Paris.
We weren’t supposed to be landing in Paris. We were supposed to be landing in Frankfurt am Main en route to a reunion with my father at his new army posting in southwestern Germany. That, at least, was what was printed in our official travel orders. Now there was to be at least another day added to our schedule. The captain of the government chartered Seaboard and Western Constellation we’d first boarded early that morning in New York had just announced over the cabin intercom that since Rhein Main airport in Frankfurt was completely socked in, he was diverting our flight to Orly, the nearest international airport still clear of fog. So, like it or not and ready or not, we were now headed not to Frankfurt but to Paris, the magical Cité de la Lumiere that so much had been written about. My grandmother had taken me to see an American in Paris when I was eight, but no one had ever so much as hinted to me that Paris was a place that I might one day set foot in myself.
It was nearly midnight when we finally touched down on the runway at Orly. After the ceremony of deplaning, the guided trudge through the terminal, and half an hour or so of rummaging in purses, fumbling for passports and travel documents, and whispered negotiations incomprehensible to my not quite twelve year old self, we were bundled onto a dilapidated bus and ferried to our hotel through a mist-shrouded, and by this late hour largely extinguished City of Light.
Our hotel turned out to be the Hôtel le Littré, a modest establishment situated on the Rue Littré, less than a mile from the heart of Montparnasse, not that any of us had a clue at the time exactly where we were, or how improbable it was that any of us should have fetched up there at all, let alone by accident, let alone in the middle of the night. Standing in the lobby, with my ears still throbbing from the noise and vibration of the engines during our long flight, my first impression was of a somewhat muffled, somewhat claustrophobic lounge, with brocaded furnishings reminiscent of pictures from one of my grandmother’s old photograph albums.
While my mother was simultaneously engaged in juggling my sister and signing the register, a tiny, ancient-looking woman at the equally tiny front desk handed my grandmother a pair of the largest keys I’d ever seen. They were formidable, these keys, as though originally tasked with unlocking some ancient fortress, an impression enhanced by the fact that each was attached to a half-pound oval of brass with a number engraved on it. Looks more like a cell number than a room number, I remember thinking.
Mais non, my grandmother explained to me as we were being led upstairs to our rooms, such keys were not at all weird. Because it was customary in France to leave your key at the front desk when you were away from your room, and to pick it up when you returned, there was no need for it to fit into a pocket or purse. Besides, she said, the bigger and heavier a key was, the less likely it would be to wander off by itself. How she came up with this, I had no idea, but it sounded plausible, and my grandmother, who had been a world traveler with her father as a young girl, had never been the sort of person to make stuff up.
Okay, then. Maybe French keys weren’t actually so weird after all, but they weren’t the only things French that seemed weird to me that evening, and I was far from done pestering people for explanations. Why was it so warm in our room, I demanded, why were there half a dozen pillows and almost that many rolled-up (rolled up?) quilts piled on the beds when it was already so warm, and what was that thing in the closet off the bathroom that looked like a toilet, but wasn’t? (My utterly exhausted grandmother sighed and rolled her eyes at that last question, and then, with a perfunctory nod to her daughter, got up and padded silently, shoes and overnight bag in hand, to her own adjacent room.)
The next morning—very early the next morning—we boarded the same dilapidated bus that had delivered us the night before, and set off again, still somewhat bleary-eyed, for the airport and the final leg of our journey to Frankfurt. As we crept through the slowly awakening city, there was still little to see, but I marked the cobblestones, the improbably broad streets, and the middle-aged men with rolled-up sleeves and calf-length white aprons cranking out awnings and arranging chairs and tables on the sidewalks. Sidewalk cafés, I suddenly realized, sidewalk cafés just like in the movies.
Then, as we turned a corner, there it was in the middle distance, floating above the rooftops and autumn foliage of the city, the upper two-thirds of la tour Eiffel. This, somehow, was not just like in the movies, this was more like the word made flesh of religious hyperbole, and I was motoring away from it like a soul being banished from paradise.
The moment didn’t last. I was a little more romantic, a little more literary at twelve than the average American kid, I suppose, but I was still a kid, and I liked airplanes and adventures too. I was really looking forward to trying out my ten words of German when we finally got where we were, after all, supposed to be going.
I’ve never returned to the City of Light, not once in the 65 years since I saw it for the first and only time just as the first rays of dawn were beginning to filter through the autumnal branches of the trees lining its famous boulevards. Even so, I suspect that I’m as glad as any Parisian is that it’s still there, and that it’s still Paris. Some places, Grâce à Dieu, are eternal. Paris is one of them.