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  Beyond the expansive salon was a galley door and the man who called himself, quite recently, Clint, left his new acquaintances to investigate the deeper recesses of a luxury yacht. The door led to a corridor of modern eclectic excess. The deck was polished oak and the walls brushed aluminum with glass wainscoting and mounted photographs of, presumably, celebrity visitors to the boat. Stateroom doors and stained-glass wall-lamps alternated down the hall and everything from the hand-polished floors and beveled glass moldings to the overly composed pictures of movie stars and mobsters was covered with a coating of congealed blood. What forensic examiners lyrically call the splatter pattern suggested a fast-paced sabre battle between unevenly matched opponents or the lively pursuit of a spirited amputee by mountain lions.

  One after another Clint quickly opened and looked behind each door and found himself taking a rough accounting of the crew. With at least one in each stateroom and the two in the galley — one with his throat artlessly cut and the other shot through the sternum with a spear gun — there was a crew of eight. Of those, the total that had been killed in what appeared to be a fast-paced and impeccably evenly sided battled, was eight.

  The remainder of the main deck was one large stateroom eerily free of blood and bodies and another door with a dark portal window which opened to the stairs down to the even darker lower decks. Clint balanced the evidence so far with the probability that he’d find a friendly and helpful stowaway hiding in the darkness and barred the door with a mop handle. The kitchen had almost no food and in particular the jam supplies were completely exhausted. And to Clint’s immense surprise there remained a great deal to drink. Whatever purpose had brought this boat so mysteriously far out to sea there was strong evidence that it was to allow everyone on board to drink themselves to death.

  Most of them had narrowly averted that fate, but were nevertheless now of very little use to Clint. The boat was becalmed, in fact the ocean was particularly gelatinous under the cloudless skies and ruthless sun, and it normally needed a crew of, apparently, eight to go anywhere. Lord and Lady Marmalade Jam had clearly suffered some sort of preserve-related trauma which put them beyond usefulness and in any case looked like the sort who didn’t usually drive their own vehicles.

  Clint climbed the stairs to the bridge. It was a mostly enclosed high-technology show-room surrounded by vast windows on three sides and open at the back. He inspected the banks of computer screens and GPS units and keyboards and radar displays with the engaged understanding of a Christmas shopper who’s accidentally walked into a New York Gallery to get out of the rain. None of the machinery meant anything to him and in any case none of it was on, which he received as something of a relief.

  But he recognized the moment he saw it the classic shape of a ship’s wheel, the only wooden thing on the deck, with spokes and handles and brass fittings and a salty character that made it look a little intimidated by its state-of-the-art surroundings, like a retired bomber pilot invited to sit in on a moon launch. Next to the wheel was a chrome lever that almost had to be a throttle and next to that was a key in a housing that looked just like a car’s ignition and which Clint concluded was very probably a boat’s ignition. Concentrating on only those three elements and barring disasters it was just possible, Clint thought, that he could make this floating penthouse apartment go where he wanted it to go.

  Which might have been true, but he didn’t know where he wanted it to go. He hadn’t the most distant idea which was the direction home except there was only one of those and an almost limitless number of directions toward desolate and empty sea and an eventual death by alcohol poisoning. Clint felt sure that he could point the boat in the rough direction of shore if he had a compass and watch and at least some idea how it is that people navigate with a compass and a watch.

  Clint allowed his hands to sweep over the arc of the wheel and smooth ergonomics of the throttle hoping in some way to commune with the machinery in the way he imagined that great navigators of the early days of discovery transcended GPS technology. Stationed thusly, he took in the horizon and it all looked for as far as the eye could see and in a perfect circle exactly the same. The was no wind nor wave to decide direction for him. No other vessels to hail. No sound nor cloud nor friendly dolphin to guide him home.

  And then there was something else. Something so indistinctly anything that it had an air of having been there all along but now there was just a bit more of it. It may have been as simple and subtle as a change in the air pressure but whether up or down Clint couldn’t say. It may have been a sound but if it was it shared a frequency with the shy hush of the ocean. And in a moment it was a thing. It was real and solid and big and it was a passenger jet and it was dropping right out of the sky and onto Clint.

  He couldn’t, but Clint imagined that he could see the pilots’ calm and cheerless faces, reconciled to their fate, as they hurtled toward the yacht. It would all be over within seconds and Clint found himself wondering if the plane had been coming from land or going toward it when, by all appearances, it ran out of gas. He had little expectation of surviving what was about to happen but meant to profit from the development if he did.

  The jet passed over head and the immensity and forced perspective and general oddness of such an occurrence created the illusion that if he’d climbed on top of the bridge and jumped he could have touched the bottom. Certainly the jet was for a moment the entire sky and then it was passed and still whole. And then it hit the water.

  The jet had managed to travel possibly another one or two miles in the few seconds between passing over the yacht and becoming one with the ocean in very much the same way that a snowball maintains its identity until colliding with a field of snow. The impact was spectacular and was for a moment the only physical presence of the merging of water and airplane. The ocean was the very concept of impact made physical and the jet was gone altogether. Water rose into the air in the shape and size of a Roman colosseum and then inverted and pursued the plane to the bottom, frozen for a moment in the form of an impossible hole in the sea.

  And then came the rebound as the hole filled itself, generating shockwaves that raced away from the point of impact as though the nursemaids of the gods had taken hold of the vast bed sheet on which rested the tiny yacht and given it a sharp snap. A wave like an enraged runt mountain gamboled toward the boat, consuming the horizon and rapidly picking up speed and mass and murderous intent.

  Clint chapter 2

  Seen from above, the shock wave generated by the impact of a jet plane into the sea is doubtless a thing of scientific and natural beauty, composed of fluent and mathematically precise concentric rings describing a frequency corresponding to the velocity, mass and density of the actors in a uniformly choreographed exhibition of fluid dynamics. Seen from the surface of the water from a distance of a mile it’s an onrushing wall of death.

  The wave gathered the yacht to its bosom and ran with it like a wide receiver clutching up a fumble in the dying seconds of a losing game against bitter rivals. If Clint hadn’t been sick before, and he had, then he was now. The sudden gain in altitude was complemented by an impossible angle with the stern facing almost directly down and the bow almost directly up and Clint holding onto the ship’s wheel to keep from falling out the back of the bridge and into open water. Soon enough though the yacht turned so that it was travelling rapidly through the air sideways near the top of the mountainous wave. Clint could see nothing but sky and the ride was an uncannily comprehensive reproduction of the sensation of falling from a great height.

  In fact the boat wasn’t falling at all but holding high on the wave like a piece of driftwood. A piece of driftwood that’s about to be dashed to pieces by the fury of the ocean. When the crash and crush and curtains didn’t come, even after what seemed like an hour but was probably less than 15 seconds, Clint realized that the tiny speck of a yacht was in fact surfing in its own clumsy oversized multi-decked oblong way across the water.

  The yacht fell horiz
ontally for several minutes, dandled on the lap of the giant wave as it hollered its deafening din of tons of water folding into yet more tons of water. In time the hoarse shouting dimmed and the violent shaking diminished and Clint, clutching the ship’s wheel and clenching his eyes and teeth, began to allow himself the luxury of hope. And in tiny measures hope was made gradually manifest as the wave carried the yacht far from the site of the crash and then slowly and gently died, depositing its charge safely in calm waters, like a leaf that’s found its way against all odds out of a raging river and into a shallow tributary creek. And Clint, still fused to the ship’s wheel and soaked from head to toe by, mostly, sea-water, opened his eyes and saw land.

  To Clint’s untrained and inexperienced eye the mainland was somewhere between two and two hundred miles away. He felt sure that he could get there, assuming there was sufficient fuel, in the next ten minutes or before nightfall, whichever came last. He turned the ignition key and the engines whispered a dutiful response from somewhere deep within the boat. The accelerator accelerated and the wheel still steered the yacht and so Clint pointed toward land and waited and eventually got bored and tied off the wheel and went looking for something to drink.

  Clint tried the radio and television and found no service on any channel or frequency. He reasoned that he was too far out or that the airplane crash had somehow interfered with reception or that the television and radio and ship’s radio were all broken. Eventually he contented himself with splitting his time between his duties as captain, returning to the bridge intermittently to verify that the boat was still pointed toward shore, and trying to teach Marmalade and Apricot to bring him a glass of champagne when he rang a bell. Both efforts were not entirely without success but he was more evidently effective as a ship’s captain.

  And in this manner the yacht steamed quietly and confidently toward land. Clint was relieved to discover that he recognized the San Gabriel Mountains as soon as he saw them and was able to puzzle out from that piece of data that the flat, ugly, sparse spread of disconnected half-considered high-rises scattered listlessly before the mountain range must be Los Angeles. He started to notice a few other vessels on the water, mostly yachts like his own although considerably smaller. There were also sailboats and trawlers and even a sailboard but none of them were manned nor in motion. There were people on most of the boats but none of them appeared to be contributing to the functioning of the vessels which, consequently, were going nowhere.

  The becalmed and drifting shipping grew considerably denser as the yacht approached shore and was joined by all manner of flotsam and jetsam and things which were neither flotsam nor jetsam, such as the floating corpses of swimmers and surfers. Clint had no recollection of ever being on the water off the coast of LA but he felt certain that this was far more than the normal number of dead bodies, even for what must be the height of the tourist season.

  Clint decelerated to as slow as he could go and still steer the boat between those in the way, a maneuver which mostly amounted to ramming them and relying on the relative enormity of the yacht to tip the balance. And so it was early evening by the time Clint could begin choosing a viable mooring, in aid of which in a locker on the bridge he found binoculars the size of two coffee tins and of the sort of magnification used by professional sailors to read the mail of people several miles inland. He scanned the coast and found nothing but ideal landing points on which he could run the yacht aground and simply walk the rest of the way, an approach which appealed to his pragmatic sense of seamanship.

  But as the powerful dual astronomical telescopes rushed the city into sharp focus Clint saw that just to the south, happily the direction in which the boat appeared to be currently drifting of its own accord, was a marina or docks or port or just a place where a lot of other boats felt comfortable among their own kind. He decided to allow the boat to continue pursuing its homing instincts while he did a little sight-seeing.

  Sweeping the city again with no more pressing goals Clint noticed this time something amiss, something that looked too much like a postcard of Los Angeles As Seen From The Ocean. And it was just that, a picture. Clint felt sure that an early evening view of a city the size of Los Angeles should feature more traffic and sirens and people frolicking on the beach. There was nothing of the short, with a particular emphasis on the absence of frolicking. There was traffic — a great deal of traffic in fact — but it was all stopped and silent. There were no sirens although there seemed to be ample fires from which they could draw inspiration.

  For as far as the powerful binoculars could reveal, which was actually slightly farther than was of any interest, there appeared to be no movement. The cars weren’t going anywhere nor honking any interest in doing so. The boats down in boatville just bobbed according to the whims of the ocean. There were no traffic helicopters or airplanes or kites. The city was clearly not as Clint had left it, although he couldn’t say for certain what it was like when he left it or if indeed it was even from Los Angeles that he’d started his day on the water.

  The distance to the canal which lead to the marina was approaching a make-or-break point after which the yacht would have drifted far enough to the south to compel Clint to navigate, so he restarted the engines and very slowly engaged them and pointed toward the approximate middle of the threshold of the community of boats. The closer it was the more defined and intimidating the marina became and the slowest Clint could approach was still a breakneck two miles per hour. Though he saw no movement at all from the other vessels he rang the warning bell several times and Marmalade appeared behind him with an empty glass on a tray and a look of sincere pride of accomplishment.

  The yacht slipped neatly into the mouth of the harbor, bouncing off one side of the wide river alley and then the other before swirling into Marina Del Rey. Good fortune reserved a vacant boat slip, opening its wide wooden arms directly before the yacht. Clint carefully adjusted for drift and wind, accelerated only enough to catch the rudder so that he could align the nose perfectly with the moorings, and then he crashed directly into the dock. In spite of the reduced speed the yacht continued shoreward for a good ten feet before dock and boat negotiated a standoff and the yacht was wedged securely into an evenly split boardwalk. Mission accomplished.

  From the bridge Clint could see only the famous marina, a geometric and charmless parking lot of bobbing and lifeless middle class angst with names like “Serendipitous” and “Got It Maid”, bounded on three sides by weedy palm trees and stoic glass boxes pretending to be hotels and timeshares and homes for people who couldn’t bear to be too far from their boats. The water reflected the evening sunlight like a tanning mirror up into the face of the buildings and trees and neighboring boats, giving them a distinctly judgmental demeanor which Clint felt was pretty narrow-minded for a marina. None of the other boats appeared to be occupied.

  Clint climbed to the front of the boat, now at about a 15° incline from the back, and took in the city from the comfort of a secure mooring. The binoculars were no longer necessary. In fact there was no need to look any further than the remaining length of dock to see that what had appeared to be a quietly comatose city hosting the world’s largest and most placid traffic jam was in fact seething with activity. And by and large it was the same activity, repeated with only variations in the participants and choice of weapons, it was street-fighting of a peculiarly factional nature.

  Marina workers in their blue shirts were swinging nets and ropes in defense against an assault by deckhands dressed all in white and armed with mooring pikes and broken bottles and both sides looked equally at risk of breaking into song. Beyond that on Washington Boulevard middle-class neighbors were sacking middle-class houses and dragging one another’s wives across hedges as though lawn boundaries and topiary had lost all meaning. Clint’s guarded relationship with reality, already badly soured by events since this morning, was knocked completely from its foundations by this starkly surreal interpretation of a Los Angeles which was steeped in un
fettered violence while no one was using a gun nor giving any thought to their cars. It was like a world gone mad.

  Clint snapped the high-powered binoculars from doorway to alley to rooftop to balcony and each was playing out the same scene of feral and furious fighting, as though he was channel-surfing in a mid-range hotel in the Ozarks. And where there were groups there were sides, characterized by something and usually something conspicuous and petty. A softball team was making short work of a group of vendors for control of an organic fruit and vegetable store while a hard-hatted construction crew beat senseless the aproned baristas of a coffee shop for no apparent reason at all. Policemen with batons and the lids of garbage cans chased panicked Hare Krishnas with broken tambourines while something that looked very much like a platoon of confederate soldiers was bayoneting the male members of a tour group armed with only reflex cameras and sensitive skin.

  The battle for food and women and terrain was played out all across the flat and faceless landscape of Los Angeles. Clint traced the binoculars along the straight roads in all directions and saw them blocked with abandoned cars and otherwise entirely deserted, with the exception of the small portion of the Pacific Coast Highway that he could see, which staged the stalking of a family of giraffes by a female lion. Clint felt compelled at this point to ring for another drink.