francesca spiegel

This is California, too

Up on the highway bridge, a black car tails a dirty old pickup truck. Both barrel into the concrete side wall, where they squash a pedestrian like a bug. Half-torso pushed up, his face grimaces with panic and capitulation, and wind molds a charcoal T-shirt into his sternum. With film-like grace, his body flies upward and over the wall, rotating at 180 degrees, all upside-down mullet and beer belly as he falls through a tree, through the crown, through the branches, down into a dark pit.

I put an office-sneakered foot down on the river path, straining my neck to see more, but he’s vanished. Up on the bridge again, the two cars are standing still. I’m waiting for them to explode, but nothing happens. In this still moment, like a cutout of time, a man’s soul slips out of his mouth and a gasp of disbelief holds mine open. It is mating season for those little flies. I spit. A cock crows to my left, by the ramshackle house with the plastic kiddie playhouse and used car parts. A brisk wind rolls me and my bike forward. It pushes me, impatient and grandmotherly, as if to say: now move along, dear, eyes forward. On your way now, before somebody shoots you.

So vast and sprawling are the distances in Los Angeles that cyclists soon learn to hoist their bike up on the front rack of buses and master that pas-de-deux of lift, clamp, board, tap. When I ride a bike, that means I’m sober. It means I’ve dug myself out of whatever hole I was in last; it means set bedtimes, packed lunches, spare Allen keys, all the good stuff from the opening of Trainspotting: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career.” It means blending in and kinaesthetic at-one-ness with the city, its rhythms and saccades, and acting the part of “a cyclist.” And now, apparently, that’s “the cyclist who witnessed the accident.”

Why did the black car push the truck, push the pedestrian, and how could he fly upward and rotate like that? Two cars on the highway would not just randomly crash into the side of the wall, nor would a sedan push a pickup truck, nor would they both then hit a pedestrian who, by chance, happened to be walking along the highway at that precise moment in that precise place, seconds before taking a non-Newtonian fall. He must have known they were coming for him.

☸︎ 

It is noon. Deep in my work’s gray embrace, I peer down through tinted glass toward a lackluster 1970s building that once used to be white. There’s a lot of Chinese writing I can’t read and a banner on the roof that says “Dogecoin accepted” next to the avatar of a fox-like dog. People who’ve worked here decades longer than I have can still remember the days when a helicopter used to land every night at 11 p.m. on the helipad out front, bringing checks for overnight handling. Channeling memories of early, boxy, loud humming computers forms a bubble in my ears, and I think of all the small and medium-sized marvels of engineering that somehow lay beneath today’s muted office soundscape: voices in conference calls, all speaking in shorthand and acronyms, a few Windows task reminder chimes, and the high-pitched click-click of mice.

I just sit thinking about my lower back pain. I found out that my chronic muscle pain came from the beta-blockers I was taking to prevent migraines. This catch-22 occupies me constantly and yet is perfectly singular to me, so other people’s eyes glaze over when I share it. I was reading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, about pain being its own kingdom that nobody but the sufferer knows. You’re roaming around this personal bubble of aches, pains, auras, nausea, and hallucinations, unsure whether you are still treading the known and common ground or whether you are here alone.

And while my productivity is diminished  on account of what I saw in the morning, that’s nothing to share here. I am unconnected to those workers who are physically here. I work bolted behind what’s called an “information barrier,” a set of regulations designed to protect data. It is too late to take the day off sick, so I just sit and twist and turn the image in my head. I start texting friends. Still partly shaking, even on beta blockers. When you see something like that, so out of the ordinary, should you just keep going where you were going, like the tale of Little Red Riding Hood taught you? Or do you follow the call of the world, that humming strip of the road collaring you softly, aching to be seen by you, and signaling how it’s trying to get through to you, begging you to let yourself be rerouted?

Considering the local police station is more or less in front of where this horrible thing happened, I assume they’ve already got it on file. I think I’ll call and offer my eye-witness report. I always see these “hit and run” signs plastered on lamp posts in LA. I’ll help, I think. Maybe this will make a difference to someone’s family.

I have never before interacted with the LAPD, apart from that one time when a sheriff's car followed me on my bike, only to shout through his outside speaker, “Stop signs apply to you.”

When I get them on the phone, they’ve never heard of this morning’s accident at all. I’m perplexed.

“They usually work it out between themselves,” explains the woman. “They don’t call us if there’s no injury.”

“But there was an injury,” I tell her. “There was a pedestrian…” I begin.

I revisit, in my mind, how this morning up above on the bridge, the two men getting out of their cars eventually threw their hands in the air and went through all the motions of two motorists who’d just gotten into an accident. That’s when I finally was able to unstick my gawking face from that scene that happened so quickly and—considering the distance from which I saw it—without a sound. Silently, I saw the two blokes get into a shouting match. I assumed they were going to look over the wall and see what could be done to help the man they hit. It was then that my brain phased back to, oh, so it was an accident. Poor devils. They’ll have to lean over the side wall and consider that splattered creature.

Now I am finding out they didn’t even call an ambulance. She wants the address, so they can “go and look for a body,” but I am fuzzy on that part. It was on the other side of the river. Let me Google maps the name of the road. It looks like it would have been Baldwin Park Road.

“Well did you see it or didn’t you? How come you’re telling me about an accident that you weren’t even at?”

“I ride a bicycle. I was on the river path.”

“Is that where he jumped?” she asks, and I say: “Sure.”

“Well you can’t ‘sure’ me,” she says. “Either that’s where it was, or it’s not.”

It’s the use of the word “jumped” that threw me, actually, not the street name. I never mentioned jumping. A horrible thought crawls through my mind: Are the cops in on it?

“Yes,” I tell her, “it was there, well, actually, just above that, on the bridge.”

“Wait,” she pauses. “Did this take place on the highway?”

“Yes.”

“If it happened on the highway, then that’s for highway patrol. Don’t call us.”

Sounds like a Hollywood agent, I think.

At the cafeteria, they’re serving chicken Alfredo for lunch today. This nostalgic frozen TV dinner offering is the only one that weathered the pandemic here, when all the snazzier, healthier small-business options had to shut down. This is what we’re left with: industrial one-hundred-times-reconstituted meat from chickens that lived God knows when, in cruel cages, now mashed up with oversalty sauce. But since my office building is in a food desert, this is necessary sustenance. The fork I stick in it proclaims to be made from 98% recycled plastic.

I can all but smell the coffee in the hand of the friendly highway patrol officer who picks up. I imagine him resting the cup on his belly. He, too, has not the faintest notion of the accident.

“What exactly were you hoping to accomplish in calling us, ma’am?”

Yeah, what?

☸︎ 

I get on my bike. I want to find that spot, under that bridge, down by the pit where the earth swallowed a man. Let me go and stand between those shrubs. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, there’s this crack in the earth that swallows people. With Los Angeles sitting on the San Andreas fault, maybe that is its own secret Colonus. When he was an old man, blind after gouging his eyes out, Oedipus went to the grove at Colonus, planning to pray for his spiritual cleansing. He goes in alone and, there and then, the earth swallows him.

Did someone else in that area see what happened? And did that someone see me see it, too?

I know I was not alone this morning, for my bike path is another man’s home. An old couch is pulled out halfway from underneath the bridge. Earlier this morning, it was still retracted when I was cycling by, and I’d also noticed three wheelchairs, parked there empty, a flannel flung casually over the back. Never the same river twice! Everything went so eerily quiet this morning, or maybe it was my own ears that drowned out the sound and only kept looping my heart’s racing beat. Very nearly, I’d heard the held breath of these unknown river dwellers, waiting for me to be gone. Perhaps they’d seen me coming from afar—another cyclist, they may have thought—and ducked under a curtain of shade.

Exposed to the toxins of car exhaust, industrial trash, and wastewater condensation, a hammock dangles, empty, between two hooks that someone’s put in the fence. Some 70,000 people in Los Angeles are forced to live this way, life in pre-modern fashion: a T-shirt, hand-washed in the river, is drying there on its dirty hanger. A loaf of bread in a plastic bag sits on the floor next to a half-full bottle of Jack and a cigarette, still smoking in an ashtray that was once a beer can. A dull, thin film rolls over my eyes: the face of a friend I used to have. Oh, I realize, ten years today since he died. He, too, had an ashtray that was made from a beer can.

Why then, on this hot afternoon, am I riding deep into the sizzling industry lots of El Monte, over bumpy potholes, to look for a body? What am I doing? It’s not like I came here right after the fall to help the victim. I am here several hours later. I wish I had responded quickly, instantly—but I did not rise to that occasion. How average I am. How deadly. Little more than a blister or a tumor on this scorched earth that we all share. What I’m doing now is also just dead wrong. I know that, too. But I don’t know what would be right, either, and so I am doing this.

The earth is hard if you fall on it and your living body could just sputter to its end, boil, wither, and rot in the heat, eaten by rats, at home in this sun-bleached necropolis. Already, because I always bike here, I’ve learned the contours of this path, its concrete pillars, dry palm trees with drooping fronds, the discarded suitcase quietly molding by a patched-up fence. The physicality of abandonment, not just the idea of it, rules over everything here. What world is this? I mull over Judith Butler’s nomenclature of a “vulnerable undercommons of abandonment.” In this chemically compromised, blurry and ailing world, I don’t know how or what to be, on or in or for or to it. I just know that, in this hollow moment of trying to think it through, in my indecision and vagueness, it’s got me and I’m of it.

Someone approaches me with a rolling gait, a man in his thirties.

“Excuse me, but I just got out of rehab. The van let me out here. Do you know what town this is?”

He stands there lost and insecure with a fabric wallet around his neck, like a little boy who can’t find his mom.

“This is El Monte.”

“I’m scared. I don’t want to get mashed up. I’ve been sober today, except for coffee.”

He asks again where we are, and I realize his brain has holes, drug and alcohol holes.

“You’re in El Monte,” I repeat. “That’s East L.A.”

“Oh, L.A., where they have the LAX airport. I’d like to take a plane to see my mom.”

“That makes sense. Do you want to use my phone?”

A sad snort, and he shakes his head. “She won’t talk to me.”

I don’t know what to say.

“It’s okay,” he says, walks three steps backwards, and bolts headlong into that vague and trashed-up terrain behind the fence. Through person-shaped holes beside the incline of burnt grass with the wiry tree skeleton, he disappears in the shade of the underpass. I can only imagine what will happen to him there. No-one is going to help this man. Just like nobody helped that man this morning. Nothing can save us now.

☸︎ 

I was alone, and I was thinking this is crazy. Really, am I here to look for a body as proof of how truly awful the world is? Or to look for the absence of a body, for evidence that it didn’t even happen? See? No dead person. No accident. No cars. Spiegel, you’re nuts. Why did I come?

No reason. I just had to come. It puts in mind Amy Liptrot’s memoir, The Outrun, with its hard uphill hikes in stormy weather, its relentless heroine pushing through cold, rain, and darkness, out of a vague hope that the rough weather of Orkney, north of Scotland, will cleanse her soul of alcohol, addiction, and the city. That same confluence now cascaded through my inner life, its dry rivers, broken tents, and abandoned bridges imprinted in my view of the outside.

Stocky men in white muscle shirts stood chatting by their tuned-up cars, not a care in the world. After all, it was a Friday and a barbecue weekend was ahead. On their brows, I only read the passing thought, Why is this white office-woman on a bicycle going into a cul-de-sac in a street where nobody lives?

That’s when my bike’s handlebar started to come loose. It swiveled downward and my bike basket started to droop onto my front tire, scraping on it noisily. I had to stop and tighten it, but it turned out I’d forgotten the spare Allen key, so I held it up manually. Pedaling locked into an involuntary bicep curl, I started to wonder if this whole thing even happened. (I always end up wondering about that.) Maybe it was ghosts or, at least, daemons. Maybe it was just that my mind was “playing tricks on me.”

Not today, I told myself. That is only a saying and a pretty nonsensical one, too, although it’s based on a rather beautiful strand of Greek mythology. It’s the tale of the trickster god—Descartes’ genium malignum—or Athena tricking Ajax, physically inserting herself into his head so that he sees something other than what really is, or Euripides’ Agave, beheading her own son in the belief that she is dismembering a dangerous lion.

But I got there. To the spot where that man had fallen, right underneath a big “Western Exterminator” sign—an old cartoon of a man with a top hat and wielding a massive hammer, blindfolded, over a mouse in a cute little hoplite costume. There’s something very Cyclops-and-Odysseus about it. I laid my bike in the dust, waded into the grass, which was almost as tall as me.

Bone-dry thistle flowers touched my hair and, from this side of the river, the drop from the bridge was so much shallower. The grass was so high and so long untended, it was tangly and hay-like, forming a soft cushion to land on. And of all the courtyards that lined this industrial road—a granite cabinet maker, cement factory, iron recycling, and a jail—the yard nearest to where he’d fallen happened to be an ambulance dispatch center. He must have had a guardian angel, I thought. How was I supposed to know that?

Overhead, the 10 throbbed and whirred and, as I looked up, an old Googie neon sign advertising a shopping plaza paradise tried weakly to snap its light tubes on, off, on, off. It flickered, like a twinkling star chuckling, Bless, was she really that worried? Behind it all, the mountain––El Monte––breathed like a sleeping giant, Rip van Winkle of the West, unmoving, eternal. It hears us, sees us, swallows our echoes, and it glistens; it blinks and it glows––and it knows.

☸︎ 

Credits roll, and I haven’t helped anyone today. I cannot change the world, not even see past the bends of its crooked workings, its trick mirrors, its jumpscares. But must I accept it? Just because I can’t help it is no reason to stay out of it. I’ll keep cycling, rolling, like a shiny penny through a pinball machine getting flippy, and picking up speed.

By the bus stop, I spot a familiar bicycle, which belongs to a man I simply know as “that other cyclist” because I see him almost every day and we’re the only two bike commuters on this particular line. He doesn’t speak English, but we talk anyway because, as the only two cyclists, there is much to discuss. He makes a scrunched-up face, pointing at the elevator. Translation: that elevator over there is not working; it stinks of piss, so we have to carry our bikes downstairs today.

The first time he saw me, he laughed at me, and I hated him. I was trying to pay my bus fare through my iPhone, and it wasn’t working. He got on behind me and held his plastic tap card under my nose, full of superior glee, as if to say: tee-hee to you and your stupid fancy phone. But now, that is all behind us. As we carry our bikes down over our shoulders, he keeps turning over to check if I’m okay. When we’re done, he gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up, then mounts his two-wheel mule and buzzes off.

As for me, my next errand has to be the bicycle repair shop downtown, to get my handlebar fixed. It’s recognizable from afar by the leathery old men in head bandanas out front, who stand chatting to young eco-warriors in their black cycling shorts. They gallantly offer me a seat on the shop-window bench (I don’t remember ever seeing another female cyclist in L.A., besides myself), so I can admire the goods, shiny frames, colorful spokes and lights, fresh saddles, and the red glitter finish on a playful deluxe road bike. L.A. bike shops are so alive with kooks, quirks, and bells, all La La Land self-expression. It’s the violet hour, and we all glance curiously, approvingly, at each other’s bicycles for a brief moment that we’re all thrown together here and united. We’re all just sitting around, waiting for the man with the tool belt.