Max ran to the window and surveyed the fire escape. So high up.
Another shout behind him, outside his studio.
Get out now. Christ get out now.
Glass shattered and there was a roaring rushing sound, heated and elemental and Max knew, at some intuitive level, the scourge now unleashed just outside his door.
He hurried onto the fire escape, which swayed and squealed. The streets swooned beneath him. He noticed fine particles of ash sprinkling over the city. Several miles away, the pillar of smoke had grown thicker, darker.
He reached the ground, but the relief did not last. He was vulnerable again, dropped from his little cabin into the hard, choppy sea.
Dwayne’s coming.
He made his way to the other side of the street. Turning back, he watched his apartment building as smoke curled from its pores, spreading, gathering. People on lower levels spilled from the main entrance. Others climbed onto the fire escape as he had. He watched in particular the smoke, like effluvial eyelashes on the dark-eyed windows. The hints of blazing color beyond. His window too? Yes, his. That was his window. Where he’d just come from. God. Oh God. Snorting and coughing flames.
The sidewalk now pulsed with people. Fire trucks wailed closer and closer.
He waited. Shuddering, terrified and powered by an energy larger than he, Max waited.
***
“There’s definitely shit happening downtown,” Dwayne said, repeating the radio newsman’s words as if Karen weren’t two feet away.
She didn’t say anything, only fidgeted and rubbed her clammy hands together.
You’re leaving, Karen thought. You’re leaving again. Smoked out.
For a short while, they hurtled down the I-10 freeway until running into a slowdown just past West Los Angeles.
“You know where you’re going, right?” Karen asked.
“Think I do.”
She looked at him. Wind from the broken, unfixed driver’s side window lashed at his hair and clothes. Her window was open to catch the smoke.
“Don’t worry, I do,” he said more assuredly.
“Hundreds of people are taking to the streets,” came the low drone of the radio. “The presence of law enforcement is having minimal to no effect on the crowds.... We’re looking here at the intersection of Normandie and Florence where a truck driver has just been pulled from his truck—it appears he’s being attacked oh God this is awful just awful...should things grow worse Mayor Bradley might declare a State of Emergency...”
Karen reached over, turned it off.
In twenty, three-hour minutes, they reached Max’s building, now surrounded by fire engines and police cars. Twice they circled the block, navigating the flashing lights, the people, the remnant smoke from the fading fire that had left its charred teeth marks all over the complex.
“Holy shit,” Dwayne said. “That’s his building.”
Karen breathed, hard. They drove, drove.
“There he is,” she said, pointing.
They spotted one another at the same time. Max huddled by a payphone, secluded at the mouth of a small alley one block from the burning site.
***
Once, he had heard there were eleven dimensions composing the universe, existing astride one another, sometimes overlapping, intersecting. A playful orgy of worlds. And, as with any such congress, there sometimes emerged what were called “baby universes,” cosmic fetal-bubbles that, while bearing markers of the parent worlds, nonetheless individuated to grow and develop however they might.
Max had little mental agency for physics but these theories, tattered as they were in his memory and his understanding, comforted him now because inside Dwayne’s van he was encased in a new baby universe, a universe arisen from the inexplicable chaos of the older, more domineering one. An embryonic glimpse of new realms. This new universe-on-wheels did not provide answers but at least it asked them, at least it was a world of searching and of possibilities.
“Glad we could get to you in time, Maximo,” Dwayne said quietly, as if embarrassed to inject words into a situation currently so defiant of comprehension.
Max was quiet as the van climbed the on-ramp to the I-10 freeway and chugged and sped, sped.
“We’re leaving,” Karen said.
Max leaned forward. “What?”
“We’re leaving town,” Dwayne said. “Actually not because of what’s happening now. We want to get her out”—Dwayne thumbed toward Karen—”until things cool down.”
Questions rose in Max’s throat but were cut off by the sudden realization of what, who, they were talking about.
“James,” he said. “It’s James, isn’t?”
Silent, prickly acknowledgment.
“What’s he done?” said Max. “What’s he done to you?”
“It’s okay,” Karen said. “He didn’t do anything, not to me, not yet. But...I’m taking precautions, you could say.”
Max glimpsed in her short pause an unspoken transgression. He looked back and forth between her and Dwayne.
“What happened?”
“You wonder why I can’t roll up my window?” Dwayne said. “Because it isn’t there. Crazy fucker caught on to me and smashed my window.”
Max put his face in his hands, rubbed his brow. “Oh man.” Rubbed his eyes, which stung. “Can’t we go to the cops?”
“It would be too complicated,” Dwayne said with unexpected finality.
“I’m only twenty,” Karen muttered. “Already running again.”
Max began, “Would you have even told me about this, if, y’know....”
“There hadn’t been the riots?”
“Yeah...I mean—”
“Max,” Karen said in her shut-up tone. “Of course we would have.”
He sat back, his body simmering, cooling once more. Thoughts emerging from hidden places like survivors after a raging storm. Within him a bedraggled and wrecked place but still upholding, still him, body and mind and soul intact though now hollowed out as somewhere, miles back, his remaining pieces, those baby universes sprung from him, now shriveled and blackened. Ablaze in their ashen return to the elements.
Don’t think about that. There are others elsewhere in the world, hung in galleries, on people’s walls, in bathrooms. The tiny copies in your wallet.
“Where are we going?” Max said.
“Not exactly sure yet,” Dwayne said. “I was thinking we’d just drive for now. But we could stop in Barstow to get our bearings, figure out some kind of plan, maybe.”
Karen’s eyes closed.
Max stared hazy-eyed out
