for herself.
Lunchtime was over. Elizabeth opened her door. She restarted the timer on her screen and immersed herself once more in the work at hand.
RICHARD SQUINTED THROUGH the windshield of his used Toyota Corolla, notorious among his crew for being the only car they knew that still had manual locks and roll-up windows. His best friend Mike said it was like entering a time capsule whose contents no one wanted to remember. It was a little past 2 p.m., and still overcast: typical for an afternoon in L.A. in the beginning of June. Most other times of the year, the âmarine layerâ of clouds that blew in overnight from the coast would have burned off by now, if it existed at all, but anywhere from May to July, when the rest of the Northern Hemisphere was bursting intothe full bloom of summer, L.A. was often shrouded in âJune gloomâ until the late afternoon. Like many transplants, Richard still obsessed over the weather, disappointed every time it failed to match the stereotypical perfection of sunny warmth and azure heavens. If they were headed toward a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max âian hellscape in a few years anyway (sporadic El Niño effect notwithstanding), it could at least be sunny all the time.
Turning onto Santa Monica Boulevard, he became mired suddenly in lunchtime traffic: a single false step sinking him helplessly, like quicksand. Rather than railing uselessly against the traffic, Richard forced himself to focus on his upcoming appointment, even though it was just a general, with a lawyer he couldnât even remember meeting. The guy had called him yesterday and asked for a face-to-face, something of a âpersonal nature,â which meant he had a nephew, or a neighbor, or a nephewâs neighbor, or a neighborâs nephew whoâd written a script. If he were busier, Richard would have insisted the lawyer spell it out over the phone and simply e-mail him whatever it was he wanted him to read. But what else did he have to do? Besides, you never knew where the next great script might come from. Heartened by this thought, he snagged a CD from among the debris on his passenger floor and slid it in the player (he had a tape deck too, not that he had any cassettes). It was a homemade mix and he skipped ahead to the eighth track, âEye of the Tiger,â the vestiges of his Rocky montage still lingering inside his head, a happy dream half-remembered. He began shouting along:
âRising up! Back on the street . . .â
The light ahead of him turned green and he lurched forward with the rest of the traffic, bleating the whole time. The light was faster than expected, however, and turned yellow while there was still one car ahead of him. Richard glanced at the intersection; it was clear, and he allowed his car to drift, head nodding along to the beat, assuming they would both keep moving forward:
âAnd heâs watching us all with the eeeeeeeeeeeeyeââ
The car ahead of him stopped suddenly. Richard had to jam on his brakes, causing the CD to skip and leaving him to shout on his own:
âOF THE TIGER!â
He shook off this humiliation by honking a rebuke to the slowpoke in front of him, whose shiny bumper heâd missed by an inch, maybe two. Richard eyed the car; it was immaculate, probably brand-new. That was all he neededâto shell out an ungodly sum for some minuscule dent or scratch, or, worse, risk jacking up his insurance.
ELIZABETH SHRUGGED AT the filthy car behind her. It was true; she couldâve made the light. But the rule was to slow down at a yellow light, not speed up, and the fact that no one else seemed to remember this made her all the more eager to remember it herself.
A dreadlocked man who had been standing at the side of the road began shambling drunkenly between lanes, begging for change. When she lowered her window, his head swerved toward her, and he stopped so abruptly the top half of his body had to compensate in a liquid