CHAPTER 13 – Starry Starry Night

From CSULA, she took the Metro Silver Line to 6th and Main, skirting the old Pacific Electric building, now a series of high-profile lofts.

There, she visited what she hoped was a surviving relic of both worlds, and she wasn’t disappointed.

Cole’s French Dip, built into a classic buffet, looked like a 1900s museum. The French Dip wasn’t actually the dip now associated with biscuit condiments, but a bread dipped into a pan of savoury jus, topped with spicy pickles, salads and more. She ate a turkey on premises, then bagged the boeuf for supper with the jus in a separate container.

Back at Main, she took the Trans-Continental 730 West-bound, standing shoulder to shoulder with tourists and locals watching the glass towers of the CBD fall away to the bright neon of Min-jun’s K-town, Beverly Hills, and finally, Santa Monica.

It was 5 pm when she stepped onto Ocean Avenue.

I really need to buy a car asap… Eppie checked her [Stamina] gauge and confirmed that the buses were indeed as exhausting as they looked.

After a quick check of her belongings, Eppie Fontaine stepped onto the hot pavement.

Wary of the ocean breeze’s effect on the cheap fabric of her Kmart summer dress, she descended the Californian incline with a hand on her hem, wearing the same Adidas runners Eric had scrounged from the costume department, keeping her other hand firmly held against her ill-fitted hat, on loan from Josefina.

Santa Monica in August was heavy, golden, and hot. Thankfully, the Santa Ana winds kissed the coast, bringing a refreshing chill from the Pacific, setting the Mexican Palms to rustle and dance.

From her vantage, the beach was more amber and pink than its usual hue of honey, stretching from horizon to horizon, punctuated by the smell of brine and highlighted by lines of white water rolling along the surf. Thanks to California’s electrification, the smog wasn’t nearly so prominent.

Palisade Park was different, and yet the details were the same.
There were the Tourists with the cameras and their I Heart LA shirts.
The vendors with their overpriced hot dogs.
The beach goers in their neon bathing suits, over-tanned bodies, and big, affable grins.
The surfers that looked like they were living in a coconut oil commerical.

With the pleasant moisture of the wind whipping her hair, she made for the pier. Past the threshold, the traffic faded, and the overwhelming scent of salt, fish, and deep-fried food pervaded the air.

The Lana of the past had only visited the pier as a child once in her life. Her parents disliked the uncurated atmosphere and far preferred the walled garden of the House of Mouse. The only ride she had ever ridden on with her parents was the Ferris wheel, and even then, her father complained the whole way, albeit endearingly.

Had Euphemia come here before? She found a space near the rails to admire the view.
Did Euphemia have a parent who accompanied her here?
Had Euphemia ever ridden on the Ferris Wheel?

They were not questions she had come to answer, though they now weighed heavily on her shoulders as the inheritor of her predecessor’s karma.

In 2007, prior to the area’s gentrification, there were still fishermen at the wharf.
She watched the men fish, admiring their form as they cast perfect parabolic curves into the brimming murk. Below her, the dark green waters of Santa Monica rose and fell against the barnacle-encrusted pier. To one side, the skyline was beginning to glimmer.

She walked a little farther, where the tourists were less dense, and found a spot on the very edge of the pier to sit, her legs dangling over the Pacific. From her canvas tote, she retrieved her water bottle and the boeuf sandwich.

The bread had gotten stale from the crush and the transit, but that was what the jus was for.

In tune with the screaming riders on the coaster, she soaked in the sun and the surf, then nibbled on her supper, taking small, measured bites like the minnow on the wharf, taking the moment to soak it all in.

As a diffusing disk of light, the Californian sun sank into the ocean, distorting the ocean air to create a wavy mirage across the horizon. She was soon joined by locals and the tourists, cameras out, phones ready, trying and failing to capture the grandeur of a scintillating metal sea swallowing a mauve sky.

She left before the pier grew claustrophobic, making for the water below.

At the top of the wooden stairs, she stowed her shoes and socks in her tote and walked down the planks with a steady, rhythmic gait, keeping her body neutral and her spine lengthened, just as Dr Costello had instructed.

Soon, the hot, dry sand kissed her soles. Finally, Antigone had descended upon the sandy battlefield of Archeon. Somewhere in the bean-green sea in front of her was another body, the phantasmal corpse of Lana Zacanissian, lost in an ocean of time.

Eppie hiked up her skirt, exposed her thighs, then stepped past the waterline, one foot after another, into the white foam.

The caress of the water was first warm and ticklish, then quickly cold and biting. This was the boundary, and she was a bride of death, standing at the mouth of a bottomless Pacific, her future as unknowable as its depth.

The coaster’s screams faded, as did the human sounds of the pier above her and the city behind her.

The currents gripped her toes, just as her toes gripped the sand, and the sand girted the shores of Santa Monica, whispering promises of a dream it could not cash. With every retreating pull, she sank deeper, inch by inch, swallowed by the suck of sand. She did not fight shifting sand. Instead, she adjusted her weight, every muscle in her body responding to her [Physicality], keeping her perfectly balanced as she channelled the ocean’s energy.

She frolicked in the ocean’s song, the snare drum of the foam, the double bass of the curling tide as it folded upon itself, the sharp flute of the gulls above, searching for wayward servings of fish and chips.

Should one hold a funeral for themselves?

Lana had no corpse, unlike Polynieces.
But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be a dirge.

A song came to mind. A eulogy and an epitaph for the life of an agonised painter, one appropriate for the occasion. In her old world, in a place of petroleum and light pollution like Los Angeles, there was no starry night to be mourned. There, the smog was her only canvas.

But not so now.

She began to hum—a delicate, rhythmic play on the lips, laying down the first strokes of midnight blue on a blank canvas, with each cascading note came washes of violet and indigo, speckled with flecks of tears in white.

She was sublimating the [Sublime]. Her lips parted, and from between her pearly teeth came a swirling melody of summer hues.

She ignored the notifications.

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She had thought Lana’s life was behind her, but now Eppie understood. There needed to be a send-off, even if she was the only one who understood.

Her second verse, more confident now, was the burnished crimson of the sun-brushed beach, reflected upon the weathered face of an older surfer facing the sea for the final time.

By the third verse, the water lapped above her knees, threatening to swallow her whole. Her melody grew breathless as the shadows of the city grew like long-torsoed cats, blurring the jagged edge of the pier on the sand.

Her final chorus did not arrive because she suddenly lost her footing.

Eppie Fontaine rolled into the surf like a doll, crashing into the white-gold silica swirling in the water. Spluttering, she fought the tendrils of the tide, her body streaming with quicksilver as her soul fought to box its ghost back into its shell.

Then she was out.

A pair of arms, powerful and strong and rough with light brown hair, tore her from the water, lifting her weightless body back to shore.

“I am alright!” she called out, bewildered. “I am alright! I just lost my balance.”

“You didn’t seem alright to me,” a gruff and resonant voice answered from above. “You stood there for like, almost an hour, Eppie!”

On the still warm sand of the beach, catching her breath, Eppie wiped the wet sand from her eyes and tried to discern her rescuer.

She saw olive eyes and an olive complexion on a very familiar face. Unlike when they met in the mornings, he wore overalls, though the man was now half-soaked. Her immediate thought was that the young man must be here to fish, until he helped her up, and she recognised the stains for acrylic and oils.

“Ergh…” the man stomped the hard sand, grimacing. “My poor shoes.”