Speculative Los Angeles Read online

  SPECULATIVE LOS ANGELES

  EDITED BY DENISE HAMILTON

  This collection consists of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2021 Akashic Books

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61775-864-5

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61775-856-0

  E-ISBN: 978-1-61775-868-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936297

  Los Angeles map by Sohrab Habibion

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  Brooklyn, New York

  Twitter: @AkashicBooks

  Facebook: AkashicBooks

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: www.akashicbooks.com

  For Octavia Butler

  … everybody who really lived in L.A. was linked into the trance.

  —Eve Babitz, L.A. Woman

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I: CHANGELINGS, GHOSTS, AND PARALLEL WORLDS

  LISA MORTON

  Antonia and the Stranger

  Who Came to Rancho Los Feliz

  Los Feliz

  ALEX ESPINOZA

  Detainment

  El Sereno

  BEN H. WINTERS

  Peak TV

  Culver City

  DENISE HAMILTON

  Past the Mission

  Encino

  PART II: STEAMPUNKS, ALCHEMISTS, AND MEMORY ARTISTS

  S. QIOUYI LU

  Where There Are Cities, These Dissolve Too

  La Puente

  LYNELL GEORGE

  If Memory Serves

  Echo Park

  STEPHEN BLACKMOORE

  Love, Rocket Science, and the Mother of Abominations

  Pasadena

  PART III: A TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF REALITY

  FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK

  Purple Panic

  Studio City

  AIMEE BENDER

  Maintenance

  Miracle Mile

  CHARLES YU

  West Torrance 2BR 2BA w/Pool and Black Hole

  West Torrance

  PART IV: COPS AND ROBOTS IN THE FUTURE RUINS OF LA

  DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI

  Walk of Fame

  Hollywood

  LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ

  Jaguar’s Breath

  Angeles National Forest

  A.G. LOMBARDO

  Garbo on the Skids

  Downtown Los Angeles

  KATHLEEN KAUFMAN

  Sailing That Beautiful Sea

  Century City

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  CITY OF ILLUSIONS

  Los Angeles is named after heavenly beings, but here at the continent’s edge, it’s always been the demons that inflame our imaginations and apocalypse that haunts our dreams.

  As I write this, the world grapples with a deadly pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and upended civilization. Los Angeles is only one more data point in this tragedy, but residing in an incubator of the future, Angelenos have long lived with the tropes of dystopian fiction. In addition to plagues, reality for us also means giant forest fires that poison our air and block the sun; powerful earthquakes; extreme droughts; rising seas; Orwellian surveillance; exploding tent cities of the dispossessed; and Hollywood’s dream factory, where the blight of celebrity worship began.

  Indeed, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative.

  From the moment our ancestors founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, we began to conjure up a fictional utopian past that suited us better than the blood-and-genocide-soaked reality of our Western frontier.

  This land was built on ghosts. And over the centuries, each newcomer from Duluth, New Haven, Yerevan, and Tegucigalpa added her own wraiths, devils, and shape-shifters, contributing to an urban fantasy that only ever seems fully realized in our imaginations.

  Los Angeles is like the hologram girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049, flickering in and out of reality. And like a thirsty starlet, LA can be anything you want it to be, plus what your worst nightmares can’t imagine.

  But don’t take my word for it—read these stories. We’ve asked fourteen of the city’s most prophetic voices to reimagine Los Angeles in any way they choose. In these pages, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings; a postapocalyptic landfill where humans piloting giant robots fight for survival; black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deepest suburbia; beachfront property in Century City; walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy; psychic death cults and robot nursemaids; guerrillas resisting fascism from deep in the San Gabriel Mountains; an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization; and lastly, you will visit a world where global pandemics have wreaked the ultimate havoc.

  LA’s speculative possibilities have long mesmerized writers. Nathanael West, Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, and Aldous Huxley all lived and set stories in fragmented, tribal, destroyed, or creepily utopian Los Angeles. Moviemakers too. The visual genius of Blade Runner was transplanting Dick’s novel from Northern California to LA, where a slickly decayed techno world mixed the Pacific Rim glam of Little Tokyo, the fortress architecture of Downtown, and the eerie art deco decayed elegance of the Bradbury Building.

  In Speculative Los Angeles, you too can scramble through the ruins of Hollywood and NASA JPL, the fortified police sectors downtown, the squatter hills of Echo Park, the sacred springs of Los Encinos, the resistance tunnels below the Angeles National Forest, the once golden, now flooded coastline.

  More than just disaster porn, these stories explore the bonds that make us human (or more than). If this genre has exploded in recent years, it’s because it captures the free-floating anxiety in our souls as we grasp for ways to understand the profound, terrifying, and fundamental changes rocking society.

  Writers have always been divining rods, dowsing for the future. So it’s not surprising that some of these authors, writing before the coronavirus descended and Black Lives Matter protests surged following the police murder of George Floyd, were eerily prescient in capturing elements of what lay ahead. They also provide cautionary tales of what awaits if we’re not careful.

  Speculative Los Angeles is a new project for us at Akashic, an acknowledgment that in these real-life dystopian times, we crave the fortifying truth of stories that ask What if? then take us there in visions designed to warn, scare, tempt, laugh, and predict. Speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other LA worlds, but it also resonates with universal themes of good vs. evil and with how we live (and die) in this one.

  Consider Lisa Morton’s alternate history pastoral. As her story opens, an agricultural realm called Rancho Los Feliz thrives and prospers, thanks to the oversight of its managers, a Latina and a Native American woman. But their Garden of Eden changes forever when a horribly burned man carrying a high-tech weapon staggers out of an oak grove.

  In “Detainment,” Alex Espinoza creates a twenty-first-century changeling myth ripped from the headlines but rooted in ancient folklore when an immigrant toddler detained for months in ICE custody is returned to his grief-stricken mother in El Sereno. The mute, withdrawn child looks exactly like her son, but the mother swears he’s a replicant.

  S. Qiouyi Lu creates a dystopian love story bristling with junkyard steel in which a young engineer driven underground
by the resurrection of the Chinese Exclusion Act spends her days scavenging tech scrap at the sprawling Puente Hills landfill. At night she becomes a warrior, battling to the death in her robot “chomper” before cheering, gambling crowds. This propulsive, incandescent tale might be the first San Gabriel Valley steampunk story ever written, but it won’t be the last.

  Stephen Blackmoore dives into demonology as real-life aerospace engineer, Jet Propulsion Labs cofounder, and Aleister Crowley occultist Jack Parsons summons a supernatural being in a 1940s Pasadena ritual. Aimee Bender examines a child’s obsession with the La Brea Tar Pits, that bubbling prehistoric lake of fenced-off black ooze that we drive past each day but barely register because it no longer fits into our worldview.

  Luis J. Rodriguez imagines guerrilla fighters hiding out in San Gabriel Mountain caves making a last stand for freedom against a totalitarian America First government. In Duane Swierczynski’s pulpy horror and pop culture mash-up “Walk of Fame,” a father and daughter infiltrate the ruins of Hollywood, where psychic anarchists have declared war on celebrity, leaving the famous scrambling for that most precious of new commodities—anonymity. The showrunner of a runaway hit about teen suicide gets his otherworldly comeuppance in Ben H. Winters’s “Peak TV,” set on a Culver City studio lot.

  In his futuristic noir story, “Garbo on the Skids,” A.G. Lombardo plunges us into a desolate police state featuring a tech-savvy cop and a desperate femme fatale. In Lynell George’s “If Memory Serves,” dystopia erodes the fabric of life in slow, incremental, and devastating ways for a young woman quixotically saving fragments of the past as she navigates a harrowing future in Echo Park.

  Speculative fiction thrives in suburbia too, where Francesca Lia Block weaves a dark fairy tale about high school friends from Studio City who reunite as adults and realize the past was stranger than they ever knew. Charles Yu topples us into alternate universes lurking in a suburban backyard in his poignant family tale “West Torrance 2BR 2BA w/Pool and Black Hole.” In both these stories, normality is stealthily overtaken by a creeping sense that our safe homes and families are only fronts for something more strange.

  And what about the robo-apocalypse, the artificial intelligence that we fear could soon decide that humanity is redundant? Kathleen Kaufman’s story, which closes the book, turns this premise on its head as she imagines a very different coda to the human race.

  As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. But their boundaries are limited only by their authors’ imaginations. We hope these stories will inspire, terrify, thrill, and inhabit these familiar locales in entirely new, um, dimensions. What you hold in your hand is a portal, just waiting to be activated. Now it’s time to pass through the doors of perception and enter a strange new world, a city caught between shadow and light, past, future, and the uncanny present. You’ve just crossed over. Prepare to disembark into Speculative Los Angeles. We hope you enjoy your journey.

  Denise Hamilton

  Los Angeles, CA

  October 2020

  ¤ ¤

  PART I

  CHANGELINGS, GHOSTS, AND PARALLEL WORLDS

  ¤ ¤

  ANTONIA AND THE STRANGER WHO CAME TO RANCHO LOS FELIZ

  BY LISA MORTON

  Los Feliz

  At 9:31 a.m. on April 30, 1955, Antonia Feliz discovered a strange man on her land.

  She was riding her favorite horse, Balada, along the edge of the river, checking in with her vaqueros and vaqueras, and enjoying the fine spring Alta California morning. The sky overhead was a flawless sapphire, so blue that looking into it was like falling upward into a still sea. The air was scented with sage and lemon blossoms from her orchards, the willows furry with new growth, her cattle grazing contentedly. When she encountered her forewoman, Loo-soo, the dark, muscled Kizh grinned and said, “I think our profits will be very good this year.”

  Antonia nodded. “I think they will.” Loo-soo had ridden off then in her electric truck. Antonia preferred horses herself, but the trucks allowed her workers to cover more ground and remove any fallen trees or other large debris.

  Loo-soo was right—it would be a good year. Rainfall had been plentiful in the winter, the grazing lands of Rancho Los Feliz were thick and cattle prices were high, and the beehives were already filling up. Her country, Alta California, was at peace with the neighboring United States to the east and Mexico to the south, and her family’s business had prospered under her management. Antonia was thirty-six and had never married, but life had brought her so many other satisfactions that she didn’t miss what she’d never had.

  She paused on the hillside, looking down at the river that her Kizh workers called Paayme Paxaayt. She’d heard stories of how it had flooded the Pueblo de Los Ángeles forty years ago, but gazing at its beauty now, at the rippling blue-green expanse crowded with long-necked herons and paddling ducks, it was hard to believe it could ever have been a force of destruction.

  As she sat there atop her horse, looking across the river toward Providencia and the low hills beyond, she heard a rustling to her left. A grove of oaks stood there, a stand of mighty survivors several centuries old.

  A man staggered out from behind one of the trunks.

  He wasn’t like any man Antonia had ever seen: he wore some sort of silvery suit that covered him from foot to neck, with a glass-fronted helmet over his head. At his waist hung a belt studded with instruments—one of which looked like a gun.

  Balada neighed and shuffled nervously. “Easy, easy,” Antonia said, patting the horse’s neck.

  The man saw her, and although she couldn’t be sure, she thought he tried to talk. He held up his hands, a universal gesture of peace (or surrender), and then reached to latches on either side of the helmet. Undoing the latches, he pulled the helmet free.

  Antonia had to restrain a gasp when she saw his face: it was covered in ugly, rippled scars, red and white, and his hair was patchy, burned away. One eye was completely sealed shut; the other fixed on her. “Do you speak English?” he asked, his voice a weathered rasp.

  “Who are you? And what are you doing on my land?”

  The man looked around. “Your land? I thought … Griffith Park …” He finished the sentence with a groan and then pitched forward.

  For a second she was too stunned to move; then she leaped off her mount and ran to where the stranger lay unconscious.

  She stood over him for a few seconds, surveying the metallic jumpsuit. Her eyes settled on the belt, on the tool that looked like a gun. She kneeled, used two fingers to gingerly pull it forth from a pocket; she instinctively knew it was a weapon, although she’d never seen its like before.

  Running back to Balada, she tucked the gun into a saddlebag, climbed onto her horse, and rode after Loo-soo. She quickly found her tending to a steer that had gotten one leg stuck in a small crevice. Antonia told her forewoman what had happened, and together they returned to the unconscious intruder.

  “Chingichnish,” muttered Loo-soo, before asking, “What do we do with him?”

  Antonia answered, “He’s a human being, and an injured one. We offer him the same hospitality we would any other visitor.”

  Loo-soo used her portable radio to call for help. Two vaqueros rode up, and she directed them to heft the man onto the bed of her truck.

  Antonia silently prayed that she hadn’t just made a terrible mistake.

  At the hacienda, the vaqueros hauled the man into a ground-floor bedroom while Antonia’s younger brother Abel came over to watch. Antonia telephoned her physician, Dr. Alvarez, and then joined Abel and Loo-soo as they stood over the man.

  “What do you think he was doing on our land?” Abel asked.

  Antonia felt the subtle assertion of power there—“our land.” Abel always thought he should have been the one placed in charge of Rancho Los Feliz, but he lacked the management skills Antonia had demonstrated since ch
ildhood. Abel was handsome, with his gleaming black hair and perfectly trimmed mustache, good at playing the guitar and wooing the pueblo women, but he could barely add two numbers or carry on a civil conversation with an unhappy worker.

  Loo-soo asked, “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

  “Well,” Antonia said, picking up the saddlebag she’d brought in and opening it to retrieve the gun, “I took this off of him.”

  Abel grabbed the weapon, felt its weight, held it up to one eye. “It looks like a gun, but … where is it loaded? I can’t see anywhere for bullets.” After another second, he turned to leave the room. “I’m going to take it outside and try firing it.”

  “Abel, no!” Too late; he was gone.

  Antonia and Loo-soo exchanged a look as the forewoman struggled to find the words. “Abel is …”

  Antonia finished the sentence when Loo-soo couldn’t: “Too often stupid and impulsive.”

  Loo-soo continued, “You didn’t answer the question: do you think this man is dangerous? Should we … restrain him?”

  “He’s very sick. Even if he wanted to, I don’t think he could do much. I frankly doubt he’ll even survive. Just look at him.” The stranger’s breathing was low but ragged around the edges; he twitched slightly in his unconscious state, Antonia guessed from pain.

  “You’re probably right,” Loo-soo agreed.

  A huge blast sounded from outside.

  Antonia and Loo-soo ran from the house, through the landscaped and tiled courtyard, past the tiered fountain and the intricate wrought-iron gate, to the citrus trees around the front of the house. Abel stood there, staring in wonder at the stranger’s weapon; a hundred feet away, a plate-sized, smoking hole punctuated the trunk of a Valencia orange tree.

  Abel looked up from the gun to the tree to his sister. “One shot did that.” He uttered a sharp, shrill laugh that made Antonia’s hair stand on end.