A Flower in the Desert Read Online Free PDF Page B

city, and the bustle of its passengers had me immediately nostalgic for the austere silences of New Mexico. Los Angeles is the sort of place that produces instant nostalgia for somewhere else. For almost anywhere else.
    At the Hertz counter I traded my signature and a peek at my credit card for a ’91 Geo and a bored smile from the redheaded woman behind the counter, who could have been, who probably had been, a Miss Citrus or a Miss Diesel Fuel back in Clearwater or Omaha. They flock here from all over the country, these astonishingly beautiful young women, and sometimes for years they beat their wings against the screen door, hoping desperately that it will open and let them flutter into that bright white beckoning light. Not many of them make it.
    The Hertz bus trundled me to the parking lot where my car awaited. Above a grim flat commercial wasteland of discount furniture stores and auto repair shops, the sky was dullish chrome yellow. At its edges it had darkened to a sooty brown, like an old newspaper about to burst into flame. The air was warm and tasted like it had passed through too many lungs and too many machines.
    It’s become a cliché that the city of Los Angeles is a prefigurement of the end of the world, but clichés are clichés for a reason. Once upon a future time, after all the trees had burned and all the animals had died, we humanoids would be standing in line beneath a smoky yellow sky, and we would learn that today we wouldn’t be receiving our ration of coal tar derivatives, because the coal tar had run out.
    Thinking such sanguine thoughts, I took the San Diego Freeway north in sixty-mile-an-hour bumper car traffic until I got off at Sunset. I drove past UCLA and through Beverly Hills, cool complacent estates hidden up there behind the trees, gardens slung with bougainvillea, jasmine, rose. Then I was in Hollywood, amid the drugstores and the burger stands and the sleaze shops, each building looking as though it had been designed by a different mad architect. I passed Moorish castles and Venetian palaces and Mediterranean villas, an eerie landscape spangled with limp palm trees and bright gaudy billboards. Only the billboards seemed real.
    Ed Norman had moved his offices since I had last been in Los Angeles. His new operation was on Gower, and it occupied the entire top floor of a twelve-story building. I rode the elevator up to twelve and stepped out into the lobby. Was greeted by silver linen wallpaper, silver shag rugs. Behind a black lacquered desk, a beautiful blond receptionist with a spectacular tan—a former Miss Blue Grass, from her Kentucky accent—took my name. After silently noting that it belonged to nobody in The Industry, she spoke it into a telephone, then told me with a bored smile to take the hallway down to the door at the end. I thanked her. She gave me another bored smile and went back to working on her screenplay.
    I walked down the hallway. Maybe, behind the doors I passed, investigators were busy interrogating witnesses and poring over clues, but if they were, they were doing it silently. The only sound was a very faint background drone, barely audible, like the hum sometimes made by neon lights.
    At the end of the hallway there was a door with a brass plaque set about three quarters up. EDWARD W. NORMAN, it said. PRESIDENT, it said. I knocked on the door and it buzzed and I pushed it open. I stepped into a small anteroom, more silver linen walls, more silver shag carpeting, to the left a gray sofa and a black lacquered coffee table that held copies of Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. To the right, behind another black lacquered desk, sat a brunette in a gray skirt and a white blouse. She was a tanned and extremely well-endowed young woman who, from my vantage point, seemed to consist entirely of profiles. The smile she presented was a definite improvement on the smiles I’d received so far today. It was bright and open and it contained no