Hester Styles Vickery: 'LA x'

It is the summer of 2017 and I am in Los Angeles, with the eclipse due at 10:20am, Pacific Standard Time. Four weeks here and I am still living in Greenwich Mean Time, waking in the light pollution dark at 3am, before the sprinklers and the sun go on. My father is dead, and he has been for almost a year, and there is a missile crisis between America and North Korea, playing out in increasingly baroque threats of intercontinental violence, often on twitter.

My mother has come to L.A. to indulge in vitamin D and absence, which has been successful in the sense that she is often absent and quite tanned. I do not tan. If anything, this trip has suggested that I’m allergic to sunlight. When I first arrived I developed a cold sore so big it made me woozy, spreading over my chin like a bruise on fruit. This is apparently a chronic infection triggered by light exposure. I sent a photo to a friend in London and she said it looked like leprosy, which was funny if somewhat hurtful. My father had cold sores, too, though never this bad.

My parents had been very happy in Los Angeles. My father, an Auden scholar, and my mother, a historian, were always jumping after fellowships out here, only ever slightly encumbered by having an only child still at school. I worried about my mother, coming here alone, and when she asked if I could join her for a bit it had felt like a test of daughterly devotion. Neither of us can drive, which was perhaps an oversight on our part.

In London I have a job from which I’ve taken two months leave, so in Los Angeles I’m unemployed. I’ve invented a routine for myself by catching the San Gabriel bus to Downtown, reading Reyner Banham in cafés, watching the morning news, dread. DTLA is an odd sort of place, a municipal afterthought in a city which is all suburbs of suburbs. It just sits there, adrift from necessity, between oil-cloth flatness and the haze on the mountains. But I miss tall buildings, and I can’t sit around in an empty house all day waiting for texts from another timezone and making deals with myself to avoid checking the news online.

In London I was sleeping with a friend of mine, either in spite or because of his extant girlfriend. I didn’t know her, and she existed to

me then more as a moral thought experiment than a real person. When I was with him I often felt like I was observing myself, surprised over and over that I could be acting this way. I’d always assumed I was a good person, and now it seemed like I wasn’t, which was interesting. All our mutual friends knew, and all of them had said that coming here would “do me some good”. I suspected that they had all just gotten sick of me talking about it. In the end, I’d thought that if I was going to be sad anywhere I might as well be sad in California.

One of my father’s favourite anecdotes involved W.H. Auden meeting Philip Larkin and asking if he actually liked living in Hull. My father was born in Leeds and left as soon as he could, which always added a certain frisson to the story. Larkin apparently says that he would be just as unhappy there as anywhere else and Auden says, “Naughty naughty,” and—we are invited to imagine—wags his finger. We used to say this to each other all the time. We even had a voice for it, a wavering twentieth-century poet voice designed to be broadcast on the world service. Naughty naughty.

I don’t think Auden liked L.A. either. He definitely hated Nathaniel West. But it’s not a position for which I have much general evidence, and I am conscious of trying to justify my own bad attitude by appealing to the city’s long tradition of ungrateful European exiles. Men stuck on the West Coast, frequently drunk, without a car. Except that they were resentful because of the wrecking of Europe and I just think the world is going to end.

Extravagant misery is its own entertainment. I’ve been lying on the lawn outside my mother’s rented bungalow in the violet hours of the morning, smoking until I can feel the whites of my eyes and contemplating my skin against the grass. There’s something wrong with the grass here, a waxiness resembling astroturf. It is not comfortable to sit on. My mother pretends not to know that I smoke and the Americans don’t approve of cigarettes so I am dabbling in nocturnality. I hardly ever see people smoking here, but I know they must, somewhere. There’s some version of this place that I’m not getting, and I keep failing to make the connection, like a test pilot bouncing off the atmosphere.

Native Angelenos are always complaining about Europeans and New Yorkers coming out here to write hatchet jobs loaded with stereotypes. Stuff about post-modernity and poor infrastructure. Green juice. What they never seem to mention, and I can’t get over, is the heat. Walking out to the nearest bus stop, early, I can already see the air wobbling. And the nearest bus stop isn’t even all that near. My cold sore has healed, but it’s left me conspicuously pale and liable to burn. I can feel my face starting to cook like pork crackling. There’s heat on the sidewalks coming up through my disintegrating trainers and heat glittering on the cars. I’m beginning to consider coming out with an umbrella, to make myself even more ridiculous.

It occurs to me that I’m not entering into the spirit of things.

This heat in London would have a festival atmosphere, the laundrettes with their doors open, and young men shirtless and girls in thin-strapped dresses. Everyone going barefoot through the climate- change summers of my young adulthood. In London they’d be spilling out onto the pavements, and in this way the eclipse fever feels weirdly familiar. Every couple of blocks there are people standing around in the dead space between the buildings or out in their front gardens, even though nobody does that here.

All morning the weather has been strange. The light has a faded quality, like the sun through tinted windows. The night my plane flew into LAX there was a satellite launch and strange lights were seen hanging in the sky above Pasadena. It’s like that today: uncanny, tinged with conspiracy.

It’s later than I think, and it becomes clear, when I reach the stop, that I’ve missed the bus. There won’t be another for 45 minutes.

I consider walking, which would be fine if this city weren’t actively hostile to pedestrians, with all its distances woozily extended, and all the signs and signals designed to be seen through a windshield at some speed. Every time I load up Google Maps I misinterpret the scale of it. Sometimes I end up walking for hours with the dust coating my ankles and my blisters bleeding through my socks. The Metro’s not so bad, just very far from wherever I need to be. On the Gold Line there are a rake of stations wedged between ten lanes of traffic on the Foothill Freeway. A few days ago I was waiting for the train at Allen and I thought I couldn’t breathe, huffing up car exhaust and heat into my lungs until I was sure I was going to faint and I had to sit down on the concrete with my head between my knees.

I order an Uber.

It doesn’t take long, and my driver finds me easily on a barren plot of suburban road with no shade and nowhere to sit but the curb. She rolls down the window and says “Hi”. She’s pretty, maybe a little older than me, though not by much. She’s wearing sunglasses, which worries me a little, but then who am I to judge. Of the two of us she’s the only one with the necessary skillset to get around this city. I say “Hello” and “Thank you” and I tell her my name, holding up my phone to prove that I’m myself as I slither into the back of her car. The air con’s blasting and I am very aware of the sweat cooling on my t-shirt. There’s a local station playing music on the radio. The beginnings of a heat rash are prickling up my neck.

“I love your accent,” she says, and her voice has the pleasant bounce of exclamation points.

“Ah, thank you.”

“Are you visiting?” “Yep,” I say. “My mum’s living here right now” and then “I used to live here too. When I was small.”

I had been at the Jet Propulsion Lab nursery with the NASA babies. I think my parents had hoped that this would rub off on me, but if so they had been disappointed. I turned out to be a deeply unscientific person, and had since banjaxed a degree in literature into an arts admin job, like everybody else.

“Oh wow,” says my driver. Those open valley vowels.

“Actually my parents met here. They love L.A.” Tenses, tenses. “Maybe it’s the weather.” “Yeah yeah yeah. You must get sick of all that rain.”

“Yeah. Yes.”

“It’s always nice here. We don’t really get seasons.” Everyone says this as if it’s a good thing. Someone else told me that historically “California girls don’t sweat,” but that the summers are hotter now. My mother got an Uber to the Huntington before I arrived and the driver told her that the roots of the trees here are all too shallow, unused to rainfall and raised on sprinklers. When it rains, they said, and it can rain hard in January, some of the trees just topple over, drowned. I’d related this story to several of my friends via text. “Is this anything??” The same message every time. I’m hoarding details, bits of useless information that I can parcel out and send home to make sure nobody forgets me. If the world does end, I keep thinking, I will never see them again.

Along the intersections the bougainvillea is all spectacular purple turning brown. “You excited for the eclipse?”

“Hm?”

“The eclipse!”

“Oh, yes, I’m excited.”

She says that “someone on the TV this morning was showing how to look at it with a colander” and then she reaches down across the passenger seat and produces one, with the antic enthusiasm of a talkshow host. “Cool,” I say.

I keep looking out the window, trying to track our progress down the freeway and gauge the state of the sun. It reminds me of chasing the moon up the M1 when I was very small, driving North to my grandparents in Leeds. Myself at five, grumpy and under-slept and my father’s recommendation, that though it seems a long time now, four hours, just think, you’ll remember it tomorrow and it’ll be like nothing. Like no time at all. I’d taken his advice, maybe taken it too far, exerting all the effort in my little fists to hold the moment down, so that I could look back on it later. I’d turned it over smugly from a warm bed in the spare room of the terrace in Roundhay that night. Twenty years later and I haven’t let it go and never managed to do it again. I think the problem is that I can’t imagine a future in which I’d like to be remembering anymore. I think there’s something in this.

Auden wrote a poem in 1939 about the invasion of Poland and the apparently unstoppable rise of fascism. In it he says that “We must love one another or die”. As a teenager I’d found this line unspeakably romantic, but it was also a surefire way of getting a lecture out of my father. It was one of his Topics, as we called them, that Lyndon B. Johnson had quoted it in his campaign ads in the 60s. It was meant to reassure everyone that he wasn’t itching for the nuclear codes, a commitment to diplomacy that didn’t get him out of Vietnam. Around the same time Auden allowed the poem to be republished, among others, on the proviso that they included a note to say that “Mr W.H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.” A proportional response, then, from Wystan. He had edited the line, too, so in 1959 it read, “we must love one another and die”. I’ve always liked this, that the poem can be read two ways at once, from two moments in time. It is the double occupancy of a single phrase. We must love one another and/or die. The inevitable and the possible jostling for space.

It was the sort of thing I’d offer up to the boy I was sleeping with, elliptical nudges delivered on iMessage like a cat dropping a bird on the kitchen floor. He’s not very interested in poetry. I called him yesterday, from a street corner in Downtown. I planned to say “Do you think the world is ending” to hear him say “What?” to counter “I heard it on the news,” but I hung up before the phone could start ringing. This is a dance I have done before, desperate not to seem too desperate. I had loved him since I was nineteen and he had known it. There was something oddly satisfactory about this situation, because it was always easier to be sad about that than anything else. And he was handsome, and simple, and I liked his elbows. I liked the way he touched my stomach. I could never account for the change that had occurred in the dynamic between us, how I’d suddenly become a viable sexual prospect. Either it was pity, or he had recognised in me something that I was only just starting to realise. For a while now it’s been as if I’m lit up inside, irradiated, by a sense of things to come. Sometimes I can feel my edges fizzing like neon signage above a freeway.

The world is ending, or parts of it are. In a few months the hills will be on fire again, pillars of smoke appearing like misplaced skyscrapers in the low-rise neighbourhoods along the coast. There’ll be flakes of ash falling aptly down on the Getty Villa. Death from above. I wonder if the buildings remember what it was like to be the Villa dei Papiri.

It’s 10:15am and the radio has stopped playing music, telling us instead to prepare ourselves for something. “Look up,” it says, “Any moment now.”

My driver says, “Hey, you wanna get out and see it?” My eyes meet her sunglasses in the rearview mirror, and she smiles with all her nice teeth.

“Sure,” I say, and she pulls the car over. We get out together, into the smell of heat, though she does it more gracefully than me.

The light is fading fast and it feels tender in the air, less likely to burn. The girl beside me holds the colander above our heads. In its shadow there are dozens of tiny suns, each with a bite taken out of them, like a modernist lace.

I am waiting for the bombs to fall, here in my nuclear summer. I am one of a great number of people, drifting, in a city otherwise emptied of pedestrians. Eyes to the sky.

Hester Styles Vickery sells books in London.