I am walking around a burning building hoping to interview people, yet can find no content. It’s just a burning building. I walk through halls filled so thickly with smoke it is like walking through hair, poking my head around doorframes to see flames lick and dance across the walls that had been somebody’s apartment an hour ago. Against one wall are a pile of burned Funko Pops, hundreds of the square headed figures now black, molten, sat amongst ashes. As I walk towards them I fall through the floor to the room below, a burning timber ripping itself from the ceiling and crashing down beside me. Standing amongst the sparks and flaming furniture, I try to find the exit and wonder to myself why no animal had evolved to live among the flames, as birds do to air and fish do to water. Could there be life that has evolved to live beneath the Earth’s crust, some sort of magma worm that didn’t get its energy from sunlight or food but the temperature of its environment? If not, maybe that was something worth looking into.
I leave the building through a charred hallway, the inferno had created a black and gray skeleton of what had been before. All the cities fire trucks had been seized by the military in order to prioritise Bel Air, Malibu, the Palisades, leaving places like Skid Row to burn themselves to dust. The wildfires surrounding L.A. continued to blaze unchallenged, the yellow lines of fires joining together on the hillside and creating a firestorm that edged closer to the city itself.
All this smoke had coloured the sky orange, you could look at the sun with your bare eye as the pale disc moved behind the smoked sky and another night began. I shed my fireproof suit, rub the Vaseline away from my face and get into the Hyundai Sonata. Its Cherry Red paint was now covered in a layer of ash like delicate snow. The windshield wipers smeared the ash across the glass, giving the disaster view an extra grottiness and I start coughing. Maybe I needed to quit vaping. Maybe I needed a delicious, cold glass of beer. But maybe most of all maybe I shouldn’t translate a minor inconvenience into a full-blown medical disaster that required radical lifestyle changes. Coughing is a good sign if anything, shows that the lungs are cleaning themselves. For the person who doesn’t cough regularly, it does beg the question – what have you got lurking in there? Are your bronchial tubes submerged in such a thick layer of mucus that your lungs are unable to cough? I cough again for good measure before driving down the street in the hopes of finding a bar, or at least a burger joint. I had forgotten to eat again. As I puzzled over when I last had a burger, I almost crashed into an ICE agent spooling barbed wire across the road.
“What the fuck you doing, asshole?” he yells at me, going for his gun. As he lets go of the barbed wire it bounces back like a spring, wrapping up two of his colleagues in the slinky-like coils of wire, catching and pulling them together.
“Help.” One says. The way he says it reminds me of a sheep and I start giggling, trying to control myself, to take the situation seriously. The ICE agent I nearly hit runs over towards them, hopping from one foot to the other asking them what he should do.
“You should get some wire cutters.” I shout at him from my car.
“Nobody asked you, baldy.” He’s right. I was bald, though only temporarily. Yet it seemed as if being bald made people more likely to hate you, just as children hate other children who wear glasses. As I considered the stigma of bald men who have glasses, the ICE agent tried to help pull one of his colleagues out also started pulling the barbed wire tighter to the other agent, who was screaming at him to stop. Very soon the man helping them also became trapped in the barbed wire, leaving the three of them to shout at me to get help from the bloodied nest they found themselves in. I flipped them off instead, laughing as I drove away. How foolish to ask for help in America in the year 2025. Did they think I was a communist?
I’m sat in a bar with a broken window, giving a perfect view of the orange sky reflecting on the rolling Pacific.
“I gotta say…L.A. is one hell of a city.”
“It sure is bub. Want another?” says the bartender. I catch the bottle she sent skidding along the bar, taking a deep drink of the cold beer, feeling it land in my stomach. Nothing like drinking eight or so beers to help make you appreciate the little things in life.
“Mind if I smoke?” I say.
“Only if I can have one.” She says. I flick over the pack and we smoke cigarettes and look out from the broken glass, across the street and out to the ocean.
“Do you like moral dilemmas?” I ask.
“Sure! Hit me.”
“Would you rather save one good person or a hundred evil people?”
“The one good one.” She says.
“Yeah…ain’t that a shame for the hundred though? How evil we talking? Who defines what evil is, you know?”
“I thought for it to be a dilemma that they would be evil, otherwise you’d just pick the hundred regular people.” She says, tapping ash into an empty glass.
“Do you think evil people can change?”
“I don’t know. Some people don’t want to change. But I guess that’s why we have prison rather than just killing people that do wrong. Time changes people.”
“It does.”
“What would you pick? The hundred evil people?” she asks. I laugh, embarrassed.
“No, no, I’d also save the one good person. I know how evil people can be.” I say. The sky begins to red as night begins to arrive and I drive back to my motel, hoping to get inside in time. On the way there I pass a family walking barefoot, carrying their belongings in Walmart bags, seeming as if they moved like stop motion, not making sense. Overhead a helicopter flies by and a siren wails from beneath, warning that the curfew was in effect. It looked like there were no stars in the sky and I was alone.
