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SKY CITY

In order to advance the proletarian interests of the community, and to counteract the military-industrial propaganda of the oppressor government — which goes so far as to categorically deny the existence of the High Low Radiance Corridor, disregarding cars that disappeared many years ago reappearing nowadays, falling out of the sky to wreak havoc on community members, community gardens, and street traffic—this is pirate radio Ehekatl 99.9 on your dial, broadcasting from various hilltops in Northeast Los Angeles (during our irregular broadcast hours of 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.). Tonight we examine the Mysteries of East L.A., confirm the existence of one of the biggest and most mysterious of them all: the long-rumored but never-before-sighted Sky City. We bring you a live eyewitness investigation by one of our undercover reporters, from her night job as a pilot-trainee at the allegedly phony and/or “clandestine” East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines. Pirate radio Ehekatl 99.9 is ready to provide first-hand evidence that Sky City is real. Our reporter, with her unsuspecting master pilot watching over her shoulder, has assumed the flight controls of a 700-foot-long state-of-the-art postmodern dirigible and has ascended to 11,000 feet in altitude (the signal’s fading in and out due to air-pressure fluctuations, not to mention the engine noise, but we can’t help that). We go live directly to our report in progress:

“Which is it gonna be?”

“Which is what gonna be?”

“Which is it gonna be?”

“What? The heading’s off the compass bearing, altimeter right there in front of you, pitch and yaw, wind direction. Remember there’s two gauges fore and aft, that’s important in a ship this long, both hands on the wheel—”

“Which? Is it gonna be a story or what?”

“You want a story? ‘The ELADATL Agnes Smedley drifts across the misty night above the devastated West,’ too boring for you?”

“You know, your usual, whatever it is, surrealism bullshit. People get tired. That’s not really considered a story, is it?”

“It’s not—”

“Is it?”

“It’s not—”

“Come on!”

“It’s not surrealism!”

“What? That’s not what they call it?”

“No.”

“It’s kind of psychedelic or something, isn’t it? Doesn’t that qualify—”

“Surrealism goes back to World War I. It was French. It’s supposed to be a reaction to the First World War.”

“Thank you, doctor. Doctor Barnswallow.”

“No—thank you! I always like a little European history and iced tea on night flights over the greater L.A. basin.”

“I’d like a little iced tea with my iced tea.”

“Now you can get virtual iced tea with—or in place of—your actual iced tea.”

“Doctor Barnswallow!”

“Mister Doctor Barnswallow to you.”

“So what’s the best love story you know? I mean one that you actually know about. Not—”

“You mean not like Romeo and Juliet or Wuthering Heights or—”

“Exactly. Something that happened to you—”

“Brokeback Mountain, eh? What about, like, The Fly? That’s kind of a love story. There’s a love story in there. The scientist’s wife has to kill him by crushing his fly head to put her husband out of his suffering. I feel like something like that happened to me. Or it could!”

“You know what I’m sayin’. Best thing you can come up with.”

“Something I heard about?”

“All right. Something you heard about. Someone you actually know, though.”

“Personally, eh? Somebody we know personal. Personallike.”

“Who you know. Yeah.”

“The love of a middle-aged Arizona couple for their Chihuahua? The love of a whole people for their land? The love of an old retired dude for a patch of lawn and his lawn chair?”

“For a woman!”

“I thought—”

“Make me spell it out!”

“Thought so. A woman always wants a story about a woman. How about someone you know, someone you and I both know?”

“Let’s see if you know any. You ever know any? Let’s see if you were paying attention.”

“I see. It’s a test. Everything these days is like a test.”

“Let’s go back to the facts, then. You’re a flagrant anarchist, an individualist subject to no party discipline, who can’t even get his partners to show up for work—Jose Lopez-Feliu, Swirling Wheelnuts—so you have to yank me, an innocent communist newspaper girl, off the streets, teach me to drive this thing toward the dawning of a New Something Era—”

“Complaints and whining, that’s the thanks I get for teaching you a saleable skill? You’d rather still be selling that useless cult propaganda sheet?”

“Cult! You anarchists can’t even—”

“All right, all right! The whole yawning proletariat shall one day bust a move in a Bollywood dance number, waving a sea of red flags—”

“You think they won’t? Just like everything else in America, media for the people is winking out in the darkness. My organization happens to be developing real alternative community news outlets! For all you realize, my captain, I could be broadcasting this across the greater Northeast Los Angeles heights and the San Gabriel Valley on a pirate radio station, to arm our communities with the knowledge that you won’t—”

“Pirate radio!”

“You laugh, my captain! But the workers are the ones who deserve collective ownership of the skies. If your fleet of solar-powered dirigibles proves to be—”

“If! If? You mean when!”

“That is exactly what these flights may prove, Captain, sir! But come on, tell us—say—for the sake of our listenership (even if you don’t believe our listenership exists, like the authorities don’t believe this dirigible exists, like they deny the existence of Sky City), tell me the story behind it all, a personal story, give ’em a sense of your personal motivation for heisting abandoned materials, welding titanium-frame airships in collapsible folding sections, creating solar technology capable of eluding the forces of the downpressor government (I know, you said you can’t afford the insurance, but you can afford our listeners the true story)!”

“Comandante Che said the real revolutionary was guided by feelings of love. At the risk of appearing ridiculous.”

“Let us not go gently down the slippery slope of sarcasm, Captain. How’s that square with the one about that girl you used and abused, she was so young and sweet, what was she? Just a baby—eighteen, nineteen, baby sister of your best friend, she looked up to you both, threw herself at you like only a kid could, but there was something sinister going on between you and your compa so you took it out on her, kept her on the line, strung her along until you were in such a state you couldn’t recognize her as something fully human—in the end, what? Left her all in a mess? Gave her a dread disease? Wrecked her car? What were you planning next, kill yourself? Double-suicide, Japanese-style? Is that where love gets you?”

“Sounds like you heard that one before. The whole story in a nutshell, eh? I’m not sure that has anything to do with me.”

“So they say. In the twentieth century, you know, they thought the world was going to end with an apocalypse—death and destruction raining down on all nations through nuclear war, viral agents, genetic engineering, ecological disaster. There wasn’t even going to be enough left of us to make fossils out of—that’s what they were having nightmares about. They had no idea, not the vaguest, about what would happen via global warming, the obliteration of the auto industry, the end of aerospace, the bankruptcies and complete economic collapse, death of the oceans, the landscape erased and replaced by a scene of utter devastation, the past not even the vaguest dimness, not even nostalgic, not even a memory evoked by I Love Lucy reruns—”

“But what?”

“What?”

“So what about it?”

“I was just going to say that I agreed to train for this position because besides needing a real job (I’m tired of selling revolutionary newspapers up and down Figueroa Boulevard) and liking you personally, as a person I mean, and respecting your loco plan to build clandestine (because uninsured) dirigibles in abandoned warehouses and foreclosed office parks, to be launched at the perfect moment—”

“There is no perfect moment.”

“You said it, Captain. But this is my idea, hear me out. They have denied the existence of Sky City, the downpressor government, till their political credibility (such as it is, strained even among their most vocal supporters, probably about ready to combust like the so-called evangelical vote) depends on this lame fabric of lies. We prove the existence of Sky City, Captain, and it will bring the downpressor government to its knees.”

“Then the people will rise up, eh? I think that’s a fantasy. Legend from the mists of time.”

“I don’t make these things up. That’s too much of a whole lot of extra work.”

“John Brown said the slaves would rise up across the South when he took Harper’s Ferry. Che went down saying he only needed fifty more men in Yuro ravine.”

“Sure. But what they didn’t have was a radio audience of potential millions; you got the perfect broadcasting platform up here floating over the entire city. They’d be on the edge of their seats, I bet. Even if all they could hear was the droning of propellers (three on each side driven by electric engines powered by the dirigible’s self-charging titanium frame) and the occasional weird John Cage–like structural noises that the great airship makes while nosing its way through the wild empty darkness. It’s kind of spooky up here, just me and you. You marked our location?”

“Just northeast of the Burbank airport, acres and acres of lots, old abandoned hangars and warehouses and service facilities that used to—”

“Boys’ hangout. Playground for youth—”

“Yeah, well, when they planned for the expansion of the airport they didn’t plan on the airlines going out of business. All these empires coming to an end, leaving junk landscapes in their wake—socialism imploded, Sea of Azov dried up, capitalism exploded, toxic waste everywhere, dead forests like old ideologies on fire, public entitlement programs gutted, billboards for shit that people can’t recognize let alone hanker after, malt liquor and “Gentlemen’s Clubs,” cell phones and household cleaners, ads peeling off to reveal the coruscating undersurface, a face somebody might’ve seen on TV decades ago, dimly recognizable except that now nobody cares. What’s left that’s worth risking your life for?”

“Isn’t that Mount Washington or Glassell Park over there? San Fernando Road doglegging away from the river?”

“Our hometown.”

“Scene of the crime.”

“It’s all conspiracy and no crime, Cadet—just trying to survive, fanning insignificant dreams and desires like a tiny campfire on the stormy side of some immense mountain, maybe squatting in some empty building, making unpermitted renovations … calling it the headquarters of East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines! Taking calls at all hours. Attempting to broker deals for the production of great new fleets of revolutionary airships. Where other people looked at the huge old empty hangar and saw a derelict building with smashed-out windows and orange fiberglass insulation furling in the breeze, we saw opportunity. Vast opportunity, I might add.”

“Wow, can I work in telemarketing? Hello, Mister Investor, this is the East L.A. Dirigible Company. We are headquartered in Burbank. Yes. That’s right, for a loose ten thousand pesetas you got hanging in that sack there—”

“Scoff and mock! Scoff and mock at will. Professionals have made careers of it. But where are those professional mockers and scoffers when you truly need ’em? Where are the Marx Brothers now? In Hollywood Resurrection Cemetery where all the smart-asses end up, watching the movies from the solid side of the wall, listening to punk bands on Día de los Muertos.”

“Sorry, sir. Sarcasm isn’t maybe my best side. I apologize. But why the big secret? Why operate clandestinely?”

“Why do you broadcast on pirate radio? Why don’t you publish your own newspaper, resurrect the L.A. Times and call it the Post-Everything Herald? Next you’ll be asking me why do we bother to resist in the first place, commie girl. What, do you expect the same government that was behind Wounded Knee and AIG and every war that bankrupted the whole world system to show up in our driveway with a suitcase of cash and papers to sign? You think they’d overlook our lack of friends in government, no investors, no credit, no permits, insurance, licensing? Don’t you even read your own newspaper?”

“Okay, okay—”

“No, no, follow me on this now. When it made it here, Western Civilization brought the equivalent of the Black Death to the Tongva. But from this angle, we’re watching the whole show in decline. Industry came to Los Angeles like Steve McQueen heading to the Tijuana cancer clinic, like Janice Joplin in room 105, fixing in the Landmark Hotel, like Sam Cooke shot with his pants down at the Hacienda Motel, like JFK in the Ambassador Hotel—”

“RFK. Ambassador Hotel Wilshire Boulevard was Robert Kennedy—”

“You know what I’m getting at. Look down, two o’clock, south by southeast.”

“At the cops? That looks like one of those, what do they call it? Pursuits where they go slow?”

“But look at the streets—what I’m saying is that they got streets and buildings named after those ‘people,’ but it’s all just like black-and-white shadows, soundless flickering in the collective memory of some windy abandoned hangar—”

“Did your ears pop just now, too? Mine just did.”

“Tupac and Biggie Smalls, heroes of the crack wars, where are they now? Che T-shirts, brown berets, and the grape boycott, where are they now? Purple Hearts, field jackets, the Doors at the Troubadour on Sunset, all those rock stars living in Laurel Canyon, Topanga and Malibu, where are they now? Sam Yorty calling Tom Bradley a communist? Freeway Ricky Ross’s conduit for CIA crack cocaine, the prison post-industrial system! The San Fernando Valley porn industry boom and bust? All those unemployed porn stars trying to find work as strippers? The Desert Acres real estate bubble? L.A. riots of ’65 and ’92 and 2021, etc? Crystal meth, Earth Day, public education, rap music, U.S. Steel, the Merchant Marine? What happened to all of it? It didn’t just blow away on a Santa Ana …”

“That was then.”

“This is now! Hey, you can see water in the arroyo! It’s gone now, but I swear I saw it shining.”

“So what if there’s no aerospace industry? Fifty thousand gangbangers and 100,000 cops, they’re still there. Maybe if you sift out suicidal Christian cults, the movie business, the real estate shuck-and-jive, $1.37-per-gallon gasoline, ‘physical culture’ and food fads—that was what was real, finally …”

“Cops?”

“Or gangbangers. Did you see? The cops had ’em lined up on the sidewalk back there. In the spotlight.”

“Well, we aim to love it anyhow, as is. So what if the twentieth century was a wash? We aim to love it by floating our boat. We aim to change the whole look of this landscape. This solar-powered dirigible will rise from the El Sereno hills, ferried across the San Andreas Fault at night, in the early hours before dawn, to some secret mooring location. An underground movement to develop pollution-free air transport, to revolutionize and revitalize the Southern California grid. Job creation for the masses, turning around the bankrupt culture of despair, the Cults of Eating Shit and Liking It. We will use the current state of total neglect, disrepair, and the entropy of urban centers to launch an inversion. An electro-titanium dirigible on the scale of the Graf Zeppelin will appear like the rising sun over the San Gabriel Valley, and, when the people see what can be done, they will rise up, across the nation, in every dead city and wasteland suburb, the will to live and the desire to prevail, the prevailing of desire—”

“What do I get if I invest my life savings in this imaginary scheme? A pound of queso fresco, a clay statue Colima dog?”

“Such a deal! Where else can you find an offer like that?”

“So why wait? What better time for them to rise up than right now?”

“What, why—If it weren’t for the lack of a handful of investors—”

“What, you’re gonna pretend cash is all that’s holding you back?”

“We can’t operate forever out of abandoned buildings, always moving storage and assembly sites one step ahead of the bulldozers. We don’t have outlay for lithium batteries, critical materiel; everything is borrowed against up to our eyeballs. Every time I need a new part, I find Vice President of Sales Swirling Wheelnuts out back sitting on a woodpile in the weeds drinking up the profits, clinking beers with passersby—”

“I think you’re holding back the real reason.”

“I assure you, it’s all a house of cards improvised on the head of a pin, balancing on tiptoe, walking through fire—”

“You got the look of motion sickness on you. But I don’t think it’s from vertigo, from any fear of actual heights.”

“You think it’s not daunting, piloting pirate dirigibles across the night skies of Southern California, conversing in code on the radio so as to fool air traffic controllers into thinking that you’re either some aircraft heading away from them on a standard corridor at lawful altitude, or an emergency craft making an unscheduled rescue? To give at least a radio appearance of being legit while avoiding all visual recognition, collisions, and charted air corridors?”

“I know you can spin it for the customers—huge, hovering airships droning across the south-facing slopes of the San Gabriels in the dark, hiding behind black clouds, pretending to be the slowest helicopter that never was, maneuvering through air pockets, isotherms, and cold fronts, carrying forth into the New Era forgotten alternative technologies, salvaged through derring-do. But a while ago you had something like this same green look on your face when you told me you were waiting in your car in the alley outside The Smell to pick someone up—”

“No, Isaura had to drop off something for the band—”

“Whatever—you saw her come out of the club, smashed. The guy she was with had to carry her out. They fall against the side of your car (I see you sitting stone cold in the dark and not even twitching at this point) and slide off the hood (very slowly off the wheel well, as you described it) and stumble down the alley.”

“Yeah, I told you about that. That was the guy she married.”

“Her enabler, I know.”

“You said that.”

“Not true?”

“I wouldn’t begin to know.”

“No?”

“I don’t pretend—”

“No? Come on—she was calling you. I know you were taking her calls.”

“Once or twice a year. Yeah, I might get a call.”

“Maybe more than that. She’s drunk or wasted and always starts crying. She’s gone from L.A. to El Paso, Austin to San Jose, San Jose to Chicago, Albuquerque to San Diego, burning her bridges everywhere. The constellation of mutual friends is winking out one by one. Even you stopped lending her money when she told you it was for her mom, and then you found out it wasn’t. Her mom has one in jail, one out on parole at home, and this one—”

“I knew her when she was better than that. Everybody just sees the latest mess. She used to be somebody else. Some other person entirely.”

“You got that color in your face again.”

“I heard she broke up with that guy, anyway.”

“Of course! Within six months of the wedding she and the guy are fighting all the time. Eventually she calls the cops, apparently there’s visible bruising and redness, so they arrest the dude. She changes the locks and gets a court order barring the guy from getting back inside his own house for three months! When he does, he finds she backed up a moving van to the place and cleaned him out. She was off to Texas or Chicago or wherever when the guy walks in and finds it clean as a whistle—”

“Sniggling and giggling. Here, let me assume the controls. Go use the restroom, even if only to check it out—upstairs, down the hall to the left. Check out the workmanship—wall-to-wall tile, full-length mirrors, brass fittings—better than anything Boeing or McDonnell-Douglas ever produced. No second-class Third World train with a hole in the floor where you can see the ground going by. Go. I’ll play music for you on the PA.”

[Musical interlude: “Little Train of the Caipira,” by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Toccata, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2 for Orchestra]

“You were right! This thing does have great bathrooms! What a blast of gleaming brass—no wonder you don’t have money to pay your bookkeeper. Give me those controls back, would you? I’m feeling much better now, more relaxed. You know, this ship is mighty spacious. It’s like we’re in the belly of the whale, but once you get the hang of it, with your hands on the wheel —”

“It’s not a hummingbird. It’s not a helicopter.”

“It’s not an eighteen-wheeler. It’s not an oil tanker or ship of state.”

“You do seem to be getting a feel for it.”

“I think I am! Does this mean I have a job?”

“Looks like it.”

“Outstanding! Congratulations to me, new girl pilot! No cop choppers or—”

“No surveillance or hostile interference visible at this time. All screens are clear. Steady as she goes.”

“Good! Look at all those people sleeping down there. America’s dreamless sleepers. Tired out, tossing and turning—I can see them all in their beds. Dreaming of a blank future! I wonder what they’d think if they could see this ship in the clouds?”

“You got a real imagination on you.”

“I can see them. I can see everyone.”

“I can’t see anything down there but streetlights, houses, big shadows of trees on the avenues. It’s a dark landscape, dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night. I can’t see any people at all.”

“I can see everything from up here—their individual lives flickering like candles. What a feeling.”

“It’s all just a blobby blackness sprinkled with a few random lights to me.”

“Wow, what happened to you?”

“I don’t know. I think I got burned out working on all these secret plans, underground utopias, machines to transport our future. I think they were killing too many people while I was working hard on something else. Time went by, stuff happens.”

“Really? You look down there across the whole city at night, you don’t see those souls burning and scattered like stars against the dark?”

“I don’t even see the stars any more. I think you might be talking about the streetlamps.”

“No, I am definitely not talking about the streetlamps. I am talking about the people.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re embarrassed about that, I see.”

“It is a little embarrassing.”

“Is it?”

“Sometimes I feel like my feelings for people went out with the last century. I’m looking down on the eviscerated cities of America day and night from my floating vantage like a squinty-eyed Captain Nemo, and I feel like I lost most of my soul somewhere along the way. Or maybe it just dried out completely and stuck on me like a scabbed-over herpes sore on the corner of my mouth.”

“Yeah, that could be kind of embarrassing. What’re you gonna do about that?”

“Thanks for the sympathy. I appreciate that.”

“Welcome.”

“Really.”

“Hee hee.”

“I have bared my scars and here you are snickering.”

“Sorry. Habit.”

“See those yellow gauges off to your left. That means that bank of batteries are reduced; switch over to Bank Three. Bank Two off, Bank Three on.”

“Roger that.”

“That’s the professional air transport lingo I like to hear.”

“I feel like I’m really flying this thing.”

“We’re flying!”

“We’re flying?”

“We’re zooming.”

“So gimme the rest of the story. And not just some cheap allegory either, like we’re the all-seeing Eye of Surmise, of the Flying Id above the dreaming mind of America, asleep in its bed of ideological rubble, its subconsciousness submerged in the ruins of everything it has consumed and discarded like the Indian nations and the Civil War dead and the slaves and the Chinese who built the railroads and the Mexicans in the fields. Dead-dreaming America except for cops and gangsters running around shooting at each other. That’s not a story.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“So just say it. You’re taking me to Sky City aren’t you? If not now, then.… But wait a minute. This all has something to do with her, doesn’t it?”

“I didn’t tell you I saw Isaura last month.”

“Really?”

“We had lunch. She wanted to talk.”

“Uh-oh!”

“She looked good. Looked great, as a matter of fact.”

“I’ve seen pictures.”

“Better than the pictures.”

“Pictures may lie. What did she want to talk about?”

“She’s turned her life around. She’s taking care of herself now.”

“That’s what she told you? Did you laugh? Did she ask you to lend her a down payment?”

“She looked like she’s got a handle on it. She might have been coloring her hair, but she looked like she put down some demons. Maybe they went down hard, but they went down.”

“Her? After what everyone’s told you, in the face of your own experience, you’re going for that? After everything she’s done? No wonder she keeps calling.”

“She didn’t mention money once, except to say she could pay me back.”

“Really. I don’t know whether to believe you. Is there any actual verifiable fact associated with her at all?”

“I’m relating it exactly as I have been told. I heard she’s been working in South Central, gang intervention for at-risk kids, getting them off the street, into school, changing some lives. I did some checking up.”

“News to me! Secondhand, too. I can’t say as I am believing it yet.”

“I relate it just as I was told. She said she got into it after the riots of 2021. She had to drive through an intersection where the TV choppers were circling. She was on her way to work that morning, and she saw cars mobbed, people dragged from their vehicles and beaten. One car on fire. They smashed out the windows and—”

“Yeah, I saw it on TV.”

“For Isaura it wasn’t on TV. She’d almost made it through—people were on the ground—when a guy smashed out her window and hit her in the head with a piece of concrete. He grabbed the steering wheel and was jerking it away. She said she hit the gas and dragged him along till he fell off. Blood pouring down her head, glass all over.”

“She didn’t, like, pause at that point, light a cigarette and look at you from the corner of her eye and ask for a favor?”

“She wasn’t sure how badly she was hurt. She felt wet, she knew she was hurt but not how bad, and she wanted to live. The guy was trying to grab the wheel from her and push his way into her car, and she was thinking, ‘I am not going to die like this! I am not going to die today!’ She had decided, then and there, when she hit the gas pedal and got herself through the intersection, dodging groups of people and other cars, the whole neighborhood in chaos, that she was determined to live. She was out of the intersection but not anywhere she could get out and make sure she was okay. So she leaned over and drove as far as she could—her windshield was smashed and she couldn’t really see through it— without looking where she was going, peeking around every once in a while. Then she got dizzy and had to pull over to the side of the street and stop. But a woman had seen her. The woman told her to move over and stay down, and drove her out of there. She looked ten years younger when I saw her. She’d lost weight. She was taking care of herself. She looked like the sister of the Isaura I knew. That was the promise she’d made to herself the day it looked like—”

“You believed her?”

“Whatever she said to herself when she got through that intersection, it carried down through the years. She changed her life.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Some of this shit is real. Exact words. Verbatim.”

“Was she happy?”

“She seemed very happy, yeah.”

“There’s hope for us all?”

“There is, yes.”

“If she can do it, we can do it?”

“We can do it.”

“Maybe I can do it. Not sure. What about you?”

“Maybe, eh?”

“Is that a dead reservoir there, by those white buildings?”

“Hahamongna. Most of the big shore places are closed now, there’s hardly any lights … And as the moon rises, over there that’s JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratories. You may not believe this, but at one time they had hundreds or thousands of people working on a Mars mission. There’s plywood on the windows now. Check your altimeter, we’re catching a rising draft off the San Gabriels. Time we start the climb.”

“Where is she now? Why aren’t you hooked up with her? Is that all over? She burned even you one too many times? End of story?”

“You know, I looked for her.”

“She disappeared again? Where to now? Maybe she’s over in Ethiopia somewhere.”

“I always knew where she was, before. I could always call somebody who knew.”

“What now? Now what?”

“I checked my people. New York, no, eastern seaboard, nada, I even checked Miami. Texas was out, Chicago was a blank. St. Louis, somebody there pointed back to L.A., San Diego pointed back to L.A. The same thing with the Bay Area.”

“Montana?”

“Overseas! London, Lisbon, Brazil, nothing. Capetown, nothing, Melbourne, the same. Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, some of it by Internet, but still. Not even a whisper, no trace at all, and, anyhow, it all pointed back to L.A. as last residence. L.A. is like the black hole you can’t escape from.”

“Except apparently she escaped. Maybe you missed something.”

“Could have, but we found her last apartment, talked to the landlord. Her family boxed up her stuff and cleaned out the place after she’d been gone for a couple months. I talked to her sister. Her sister was worried about her for the first time ever. I promised I’d keep looking. But she was the one who realized where Isaura must be.”

“Where?”

“That’s where we’re going.”

“El Monte?”

“We’re underway already.”

“Coachella Valley? Victorville? I thought we were on a run to rescue illegals from dehydration or transport sneaky drugs expressed from cochineal beetles or something. Or to conduct mysterious scientific research over a crater in the desert.”

“I admit I mentioned some of those possibilities.”

“That was a cover story.”

“I had to say something halfway plausible. It’s not like we don’t find ourselves engaged in practical pursuits to pay the bills. We can’t all be like you—spend our days selling revolutionary newspapers on street corners along Figueroa Boulevard and then spending all night in The Echo or The Airliner or dives like that.”

“Oh, low blow!”

“Deny it.”

“I stopped going to The Echo last year. But, wait—where to now, then?”

“Exactly about the time Isaura disappeared, the National Oceanic and Atmospherics Administration published its data on atmospheric anomalies caused by global warming. Hurricanes along the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard chronically engorged, Florida swept under the sea surge, gone like Bangladesh. Tornadoes hopping from Oklahoma to Colorado, touching down in Pittsburgh. Africa turning into a hellish baking continent of Saharas to the north and Namib deserts to the south. Australia and southern Europe burning off, desertifying. Vast areas of the earth depopulating, turning into heat-blasted wastes.”

“Didn’t Al Gore win the Academy Award for that?”

“The earth is turning into Venus. We’re churning out thick stratospheres of smoke, debris, waste gases that have a measurable cooling effect. Making a dark planet of blasted ideologies, bloated sick passions, corrupted by viral pandemic apathies—”

“Tell me something I don’t know. That’s why the working class has to subscribe to the Daily Red Revolutionist. Then the revolution—”

“We’re going up to check out that ring of litter, particulates, and trash that rains down on the globe now. That’s why you brought the radio transmitter aboard in your cute Guatemalan bag, right?”

“You knew about that? I didn’t mean—”

“My police scanner picks up all frequencies. For this airship to remain invisible, I’ve got to monitor all currents. These multicolored gauges and flashing lights aren’t Christmas decorations.”

“Where to, then? What’s the course adjustment?”

“You’re the one driving.”

“We’re on a heading 130 degrees, 80 knots, 60-mile-an-hour wind speed from the northwest, resulting in heading correction of about five degrees.”

“Perfecto!”

“But where?”

“You just said—”

“You know what I mean. On this heading, we won’t see much out this way except vast freeway interchanges, concrete flood plains and flood control channels, gravel pits, the Budweiser brewery and the Rose Hills Cemetery, Fry’s electronics, massive warehouse districts, and truck distribution facilities. Chino Hills.”

“See, even you—”

“When the moon comes out, they’ll be able to see the dirigible’s shadow sliding across all that cement. It’s all parking lots and gravel down there.”

“We’ll be climbing.”

“We’re already at 13,000 feet. How much higher can we safely ascend?”

“We’re going to the Sky City, rookie. That’s why you’re flying this ship. You aced the interviews, and I collated a whole file on your skills.”

“But then you must’ve, I mean—you knew? You knew about my membership in the Punk Faction of the Red Underground Party, affiliated with I.T.S.C. point one?”

“I knew about all of that except for the I.T.S.C. point one part—I don’t give a damn about that! I’ve seen you around the neighborhood since you were carried around in diapers by your mom when she was looking for your MIA dad. Basically, I see that you got heart; who else would sell those damned newspapers on the street corner and even get me to subscribe to that fishwrap?”

“It’s true, then? It’s really there?”

“Sky City? I want you to adjust the ailerons for maximum climb (maximum torque) and drop the last of our water ballast, because we’re entering the isotherm. My studies on Sky City’s origins and existence have provided me with reasonable information that Isaura and her yellow Volkswagen bug were likely swept up in the most recent series of tornadoes and other atmospheric disturbances that maintain the conglomeration of debris in the stratospheric rings—agglutinated by force—careening through the upper atmosphere, encircling the planet. If my information is correct (and I’ve every reason to believe it is, since we’ve gotten this far based on my calculations), Isaura’s only one of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people trapped in their vehicles and other bubbles of shelter within that swarm of packing sheds and pipelines, condo construction materials, cars and planes, entire trains, and a couple small towns torn out of East Texas and Oklahoma—ripped off the face of the earth by windspouts, all slammed together in the blood-brown rings swirling around our planet. I expect the diversity and variety of the debris to include enough plant and animal life and atmospheric water to have sustained a totally marginalized and invisible population, in spite of the occasional 1979 Pontiac El Caminos, delivery vans, old tires and broken water heaters that fall out of the sky at approximately 145 miles an hour terminal velocity, landing in school yards and shopping mall parking lots, which the government blames on Muslims and maintains is yet another thing soon to be fixed by tax cuts.”

“14,000 feet. Fourteen thousand four hundred.”

“Steady on this course.”

“15,000 feet. Fifteen four hundred.”

“Oh yeah, we’ll be there in just a few damned minutes. Just like an entire distorted aquatic ecosystem and weird society has developed around floating villages on stilts in the midst of the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, I expect we’ll find the marginalized poor are the inhabitants, forgotten and stranded in Sky City, fending for themselves. They’ve reconstructed a semblance of lives and livelihoods in the wind, dust, and trash storms of the sky—”

“If we get there—”

“When we get there. You’re going to come about, so the gale-force currents don’t crush the lateral bulkheads against the swirling edges and jagged parts of the debris rings. In fact, it’s almost time you turn about and reverse course, transfer the remaining ballast into the nose—”

“But—”

“If you don’t do it quickly the winds will crush the power-generating titanium frame against the trash in the vortex. Before we get to the edge, the rift in the stratospheric isotherms, I’ll leave the ship strapped into a paraglider, and I expect I’ll instantly get sucked up into the vortex, straight into Sky City. The hard part won’t be getting in—the hard part will be not ending up ripped to pieces by a tangled mess of radio antennae and radar dishes strung up in high tension power lines, flatcars and water tanks, oil tankers, and remains of Amazonian rain forests. But if I can drop anchor on a stable structure of some kind, I should be able to pull myself in on the ropes or rappel into shelter.”

“What about getting back on the ground? What about getting home?”

“I’ll be in radio contact if I make it. First I want you to drop down a thousand feet and circle clockwise at fifty knots against the south-by-southwest wind. If I find survivors, I’ll bring them out via paraglider. One at a time, as many as I can.”

“The first eyewitnesses! Everything will change when they start telling what they’ve been through. Ambassadors of the New Era! You, Captain, will be a hero! Our Party has always maintained the existence of this phenomenon and some others, recognition of which by the masses would provide us with the credibility that would be the first step to power. I’d almost believe I was shaking and trembling if I didn’t know it’s the steering wheel vibrating like crazy. How can the ailerons take it? Won’t there be structural damage?”

“Titanium. Steady as she goes. You realize, don’t you, that these people might not tell a story that serves the interests of your Party? From the Plan de Ayalá to the Plan de Aztlán, from the Soviet Five-Year Plans to Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, none of these ideas ever look the same in the daylight. On the ground. Oh now—are you crying? Don’t cry, kid!”

“Sorry!”

“Come on, I’m relying on you. I’m gonna release my paraglider into the slipstream, and it’s gonna be hell getting back against those gale-force winds. Meanwhile it’s all on you, whether any of us lives or not.”

“I know. Sorry! It’s just a little … I struggle my whole life in the streets with the blown-out industries of civilization collapsing all around us, and survive to be here, to be able to see this day—”

“I’ll take the wheel a second. Dry your eyes; you’ve gotta see clearly to make the maneuver, turn about, and descend into a calmer air column.”

“I’m all right. Just … I know everything might not go the way they say. I don’t really think it will. Nothing ever goes like anyone plans. I’m grateful we even get the ghost of a chance. Even if I find out later it was all some fairy tale, sci-fi fantasy daydream, I won’t even care at that point. Because we took the chance. That’s all I’ve wanted. I’m so grateful, at this moment, that’s all. Whatever happens.”

“I am too! I thank you for your heedless skill and reckless youth, new pilot! Let me shake your hand. A comradely embrace. Take the wheel. You’ve given me a chance at the happiness of a lifetime, and for the masses it’s a glimmer of a new day. Here on, it’s up to you.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll turn about and make the descent; I’ll get the berths ready for our first survivors while I stand by. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, would you look at that?!! That looks like some terrible thunderhead—you can see the debris sticking out of it like torn-out tree roots, stuff swirling inside of it like flocks of birds—”

“That’s just the leading edge of the tumorous fulminating debris cloud. According to my charts, the densest interrelated conglomeration is a few miles south of us—”

“Augusto César Sandino, what is that? What just hit us?”

“That’s the lead edge of the wind I was telling you about. I estimate that thousands or millions of plastic bags, whipped by a hurricane-force gale, are layering like warm slush on the fins, rudder, and engines—”

“Already? Sounds like the ocean smashing against us.”

“Just the beginning!”

“Very hairy and scary, señor!”

“Just the beginning!”

“Oh!”

“Yeah, it’s going to test the tensile strength of the titanium frame for all it’s worth! To think that for years I disguised the frame as the outer housing of the Zep Diner on Main Street, people stepping inside as if it were an ordinary restaurant. I’d hate to lose the income from that business. I built my whole life on carnitas and pozole. Are we almost about?”

“110 degrees. 135.”

“I’d better go suit up.”

“Good luck, sir! 160. Two more minutes!”

“How do the engines feel? How’s the ballast?”

“Ballast set, 125 degrees, nose tending to drop 5-10. I can barely hold it up.”

“But it’s holding?”

“Holding. Holding for now. Feels like four to five minutes at the most. The position is already degrading.”

“I’m going, then. Remember, you drop a thousand on my signal.”

“Terrible wind shear—”

“Yeah. Good luck, kid! Radio headset channel on—I’ll be talking to you.”

“Roger that. Let me know if—”

“What?”

“Good luck!”

“You won’t be able to see the paraglider. I’ll communicate over the headset.”

“I’ll be listening for you.”

{“I’m out! [continuous hiss of static, sometimes rising to a sound like tropical rain on a sheet-metal roof, electro-static slapping and snarling] … Paraglider wings whipping like a banana peel … I will buy a subscription [percussive clanging resounding through titanium struts, weird twanging like a Nels Cline guitar solo] … It’s really blasting … no control of glider … visibility lim … [hissing of static slashed by sudden silence] … in range … outskirts of Sky City above me, looming towers of wrecked cranes festooned with jagged sheet metal, trailing cables, plastic sheeting … Just a few … to hook the ropes … [loud popping, percussive clanging] Yes! Now if I can secure the glider! [grating metallic shrieks] Cables … swirling like octopus tentacles in the cloud—}

“ELADATL Agnes Smedley descending to three miles. Waiting for your call.”

{[electric crackling, popping] [insistent hiss of static, then silence]}

[Cue: “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido” by Quilapayun]

“This is Ehekatl 99.9 on your dial. Stay tuned.”