Lippe Simone - Blank

Ray’s experience advantage was fading as the junkies organized themselves to surround him against the edge of the roof. Any hope he had of an end run back to the stairs was gone as Ray was herded between the aluminum pulley casings which the junkies mounted, freeing themselves from the ooze and affording a decided speed advantage. They were preparing to charge and now they could.

Ray stepped up onto the metal flashing bordering certain death and certain death. “Go fuck yourselves” he said and as the junkies rushed Ray stepped off the roof.

From the safety of the window washer’s platform Ray counted the junkies as they passed rapidly and soundlessly until making a narrow variety of short and diabolical snaps as they hit the cars and concrete of the parking lot four stories below.

The window washer was still dutifully in position but he had passed out from the heat. Ray knew that he was in grave danger of doing the same if he didn’t climb back out of the fire and into the relative comfort of the frying pan. As a point of order he tried the platform controls but of course without power they didn’t work and he prepared to climb the cables when he realized that he was uniquely positioned to do a short reconnoiter of the mental ward.

Pressing his face against the glass and blocking the reflection of the ball of death in the sky, he could see most of the common area. The Dodgers fans hadn’t changed position appreciably but they’d evolved considerably. The three massive orderlies still held sway in the middle but now the lesser members of the tribe were moving about them, some doing guard duty and others making sneaky, obsequious little grabs for food only to be rebuffed with a swat from an open hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.

A wiry kid with a number 22 jersey loped warily into the circle and proffered his Dodgers pennant. One of the giants appraised it skeptically before taking and holding it without waving or looking at it or doing anything at all, which number 22 took as tacit permission. He reached a modest fistful of peanuts and scampered away to a tight cove between a couch and the wall, pursued by enthusiastic new friends. Ray was watching primitive society remake itself on a tiny scale on a worn carpet in the common area of a mental ward. It looked peaceful and doubtless would remain so as long as there were peanuts and popcorn and potato chips.

Or until the junkies got involved. Those that remained, about ten of them, were returning from their failed murder attempt, possibly feeling it was a raging success upon which they were anxious to build. They spotted the snacks and it must have blinded them to the impossible odds because they began positioning themselves around the Dodgers fans like jackals who’ve found themselves quite unexpectedly in a meadow full of bunny rabbits. The Dodgers fans ignored them entirely.

The boldest of the scrawny jackals crept toward the center of the circle looking exactly as if he thought he was invisible. There was no reaction from the inner circle but a few members of the civilian class were clearly getting skittish. The invisible man reached for the peanuts and remained invisible until a moment before his goal when the giant with the pennant leapt to his full height. His ascent was slowed in no way by the acquisition of the junky’s neck which he shook, Ray thought, not unlike a pennant. The giant rattled his prize for the moment that it took to snap the life out of it and then he rattled it some more before throwing it to the floor with an effect similar to that of falling four floors to a concrete parking lot.

This should have been a sign for the junkies to scatter and hide and rethink their loyalties so naturally they attacked in a disorganized and hopelessly under-manned frenzy. The one-sided battle was short and bloody and for the most part indiscriminate but the Dodgers fans were merely brutal with the women while the men were killed with a terrifying ferocity. The lesser classes ganged up on the men and gouged at their eyes and tore at their throats while the orderlies observed no such battlefield niceties, preferring to address the enemy as just a head that needed to be smashed against the floor or wall or cement column.

And then it was over and as soon as it was life returned to normal in the tribe. Parliament resumed in the center of the floor and remaining society cowered around them, but now there were women among them and they instinctively took positions of privilege behind the leaders. All was peaceful again, but the snacks had been scattered and trampled and now there were more mouths to feed.

Overall, Ray thought, a satisfactory result. The immediate threat had been dispatched and he knew exactly what part of the ward to avoid in his search for the keys. He only needed to get back inside before bursting into flame.

The roof was only three feet out of reach but it might as well have been three hundred for all the strength Ray had remaining. He placed a foot on the guardrail next to the window washer who had by then, it seemed, stopped breathing. The effect was to put the platform into a gentle swing that felt to Ray like the dangerous part of the sort of carnival ride that’s forbidden to children or pregnant women or people with sense. He moved to the other side of the platform and tried again. There was less motion and he was able to grasp a cable which turned out to be a sort of chain with a rubber jacket. Ideal for climbing under normal circumstances but in the clammy heat it felt like trying to shimmy up a raw bacon rind.

Ray pulled until he had both feet on the guardrail and his heart in his mouth. In this position he was mostly outside of the safety of the platform and hovering over the parking lot. He knew he shouldn’t look down so he did and saw the broken body and exposed bones of a junky draped over an ambulance about a thousand stories below. But he was within reach of the top now and he could put his hand on the searing branding iron that had become of the roof’s metal flashing. In a single movement he released the cable and put both hands on the flashing and held himself in that position long enough for his life until that moment to flash before his eyes, which wasn’t very long at all.

His hands were burning and the flesh melting into the metal may have helped his grip enough that he was able to pull his center of gravity over the flashing and roll over into the stinking and sticky and entirely welcome pitch of the rooftop.

Ray scrambled instinctively away from the edge and took a moment to appreciate solid ground and try to figure out where he was. Beyond what he took to be the back of the building was open water. That would be the Pacific Ocean, of course, because the rest of the landscape was recognizable as the sprawling, low-density urban blight that is Los Angeles. He could see the walled gardens and flat-topped mansionettes growing more successfully ugly as they climbed Beverly Hills almost directly to the East and the bobbing ambitions moored in Marina Del Rey to the south, placing the hospital and Ray somewhere in Santa Monica, although he still had no idea how he knew all that.

Never-the-less Ray recognized the cookie-cutter subdivisions and ersatz downtown of Culver City with its half-realized office buildings determinedly reflecting the sun back on itself. Beyond that the elusive motif of downtown LA clustered together like buildings bullied and eventually kicked out of better skylines and still too shy to face each other. And then the hills and houses and apartment blocks and parks of the world’s largest failure to plan stretching to the horizon and beyond. And none of it was moving.

There were cars everywhere as there always is in LA but none of them were going anywhere. Santa Monica Blvd and the freeway were crammed with vehicles but they’d all run into guardrails or buildings or each other or just stopped. Some people were milling about but most were still in their cars, unable to get out or unaware that they could. Fires were burning here and there, some of them quite large and all of them out of control but there were no sirens and no fire trucks and no one seemed to notice. The only sound was the ocean, gently delivering the bodies of a few scattered swimmers and surfers who’d of an instant forgotten how to do either.