The Caryatids

Mary. Mary. Mary Montalban. Her baby was so far away from her now. The baby's father, too. John was so much like his brother Lionel. Except that Lionel was fine, or at least okay, while John was doomed to be her husband.

John was the smartest Montgomery-Montalban, the cleverest one. Nowadays, John understood a lot of things. He understood things much too well.

A pang of guilty love for her nearest and dearest rose within Radmila. Her fit of passion was strong enough to taste, like a taste of bloody iron. Her love for her family was a very blood-and-flesh kind of love. It was large and tragic and liquid and squishy.

Ever since the pain and terror of fleeing that nasty little island in the Adriatic, Radmila had known, with a heart-crushing clarity, that no human being could ever love a monster like herself. Still: The only thing of any value in life was to love and be loved. Knowing she would never find any love, she had despaired of love and tried hard to hide from love.

So love had arrived to find her, instead. The love of her Californian family was like a Californian tidal wave. It was large, and rich, and Pacific, and powerful, and muddy, oily, salty, and slightly polluted. It swept all before it and it surrounded everything it touched.

"This is such an awful night," she said aloud. "I hope your grandma isn't so totally dead now that...Oh, I can't even say it."

"You know what?" he said. "I need to cry."

"You can cry. I'm here for you. I'll listen."

A child of a disaster-stricken world, Lionel had to work his way up to his tears. He kept at the effort, though, and presently began to sob.

Taillights blossomed redly across the freeway. Radmila realized, through her own watering eyes, that this surge of brakes was the sign of another aftershock. The new little quake hadn't slowed the traffic much. Nature had convulsed beneath the highway pillars, and the freeways just soaked that right up.

What a beautiful city this was: this huge, dense, endless place. So many cities in the world had been wrecked by the climate crisis. "Extinction 6.0," the Californians called it. Californians were always making up new words that the rest of the world found themselves forced to use.

The Angelenos were thriving, although a city built like theirs, clearly, should never have survived.

Los Angeles was a crowded, polyglot mess of a place, trapped between a killer desert and a rising ocean. The city of Los Angeles had blown more climate-wrecking fumes out of its tailpipes than most nations. If there were any justice in the global mayhem of "Extinction 6.0," Los Angeles should have been the first place to die: the first city in the world to drown, convulse, starve, riot, black out, and burn right to the ground.

Yet there was no justice in the climate crisis. Not one bit of justice. The climate crisis was not concerned with justice: it was about poverty, stench, hunger, floods, fires, thirst, plague, and riot. So, although Los Angeles did burn in many places-Los Angeles had always burned, in many places-Los Angeles grew much faster than it burned.

If this tormented world had a world capital, this city was it. Sprawling Los Angeles was checkered across its bulk with "little" regions: Little Chinas, Little Indias, Little Thailands, Little Russias. Clusters of busy refugees from disordered places that were no longer nations.

Los Angeles was a refugee-harnessing machine. Modern refugees thrived in this city as in no other city on Earth. Some of them, like herself, even got rich.

The prospect of catastrophe had never cowed Angelenos. Because Angelenos had never believed in any myth of solid ground. Instead, they survived through selling dreams and illusions. The turmoil beneath their jostling hills had created Tinseltown.

Los Angeles existed to be almost chaotic and yet to survive chaos, to thrive on chaos. The endless weave and roll of LA's automated traffic. The pixelated windows in the scalloped walls of a thousand skyscrapers. The night sky was alive with mighty beams of light: police searchlights leaping down from helicopters, signal lasers up from dense knots of street trouble. This city had the fastest, most efficient emergency responses in the world.

When the earth heaved under your feet, you had to run so fast, just to stand firm.

Lionel's sobs faded quickly. Teens were like that. Teens were strange people, even stranger in some ways than the very old. In their delicacy and temporariness, teens had an ageless quality. Teens were kids, and yet teenage kids were fearless and brave: they didn't much mind dying. Teens were both Peter Pan and Dracula.

"Mila?"

"Que pasa, hermano?"

"Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light, or just another Lost Angel?"