The next few weeks I set about navigating the move. I had finished college by working at a full-time job and paying my own way, with some help from the college, but I stalled afterwards. I had no concrete plan, and I had taken up seasonal work while I worked as an independent journalist on the side. I could perceive a distant future where I wrote novels, and an immediate future where I graduated school, but I had no clear vision for the island of life in the interim. I knew I would need a job, but it seemed foolish to invest my efforts in a temporary corporate gig (save me! I was only going to abandon it for writing, eventually), and so I stumbled along, ran out of money, and took whatever odd job came my way. Hunger was a powerful motivator. But I wrote a lot, considering it practice, and when I half-heartedly sent articles to a publisher (mostly for the sake of practice) and I found some modest success. I got my first check in the mail the month of graduation. so I kept it up and soon I was making a meager but real income. That set a natural fire in my pen. But I needed to move somewhere cheaper. My savings dwindled at an alarming rate, just paying rent in Boston. So when I got the offer from Tammy Faye, I was tempted. I was heavily tempted. But I stuck to my guns, and I looked for a place in LA. It wasn’t much cheaper than Boston, but I tried not to let it phase me. I put ut offers, and even incorporated one into my opinion piece in a local LA newspaper, asking landlords to call me if they had any listings below $700/month. Somehow it worked, but not in the way I expected.

How did I get to the apartment under the train-tracks, which was just rebuilt after the earthquake, rebuilt by an opportunistic realtor with a background in experimental architecture that he never got to use normally?

At last I had found a publisher who would take my writing, and all I needed was a place to stay in California. That was her one requirement, and while the publisher herself was a brief and impactful node on the journey as a writer, this new place, the pay was much better, and the work was fulfilling, but I needed to save money so I looked for the cheapest apartment there was… I found it, but it was located on an island.

The real history of the summer began when I moved to Corsair. The landlord had answered my posting in the LA Times, where I posted in a kind of desperate hope to slip past the concrete inboxes and answering machines of the California landlord, and it worked.

I took her offer right away because $500 a month meant I could live off my writing for the next six months, without a part-time job; I had a few projects already under way.

When I looked up the property later, I discovered what the lady had been trying to tell me over the poor signal and past the thunder of a train passing directly overhead the very apartment I would be renting. I would be living on an island, accessible by one long train-bridge.

The place was gorgeous but for that one major flaw, which was the noise of the trains, but since I was somewhat hard of hearing, easily distracted, and accustomed to city life anyway, I found the noise a comfort. People don’t move here for the silence, the landlord said. I was a perfect fit. But there was something else. From the moment I met the landlord, she conveyed a sort of heightened sense of reality. She was observing the world through a different lens than I was, and I got the perpetual sense that I was missing something.

As it happened, I was one of the first people to move there since the traintracks were installed, and so was my singular neighbor.

Much later, I would realize how close I was to missing her. Ships pass in the night. Every gesture she made was not strange enough or unusual enough to make me know anything for sure regarding the way she felt about me. I might easily have overlooked her signals entirely, if I had not see our lives reflected in the strange occurrences that began at this time to enter my life. I saw our lives reflected in the mossmen, and Tombstone, how we were both like pioneer species, surviving where nothing else could, and growing to depend on one another in small, innocuous ways until our own ecosystem evolved out of thin air.

For some reason, after the first month, even though I hadn’t met her, I felt as if we were the only people ever going to live there, unless some fundamental change occurred in the apartment complex and the surrounding city, the kind of change that happens only once a generation or so.

What’s more, I did not even see my neighbor for a month. Even so I felt a sort of comradery or respect of a shared but obscure passion, interest, or experience. We were both pioneer species; we alone seemed the only two people capable of thriving in such a place. It was lonely because of this, not that I minded solitude; it was lonely and spacious, and the space afforded me all the freedom I desired.

I had what amounted to a private courtyard, filled with empty balconies that led to empty apartments, save one, where the yellow (really, soft-white) lamps of my yet unnamed neighbor turned on in the evening, and stayed on until well after midnight, when the temperature dropped to a cool sixty-five as the sea-breeze swept over the train tracks, and the apartments underneath them.

The place wasn’t bad. It had a bedroom without windows, but with a connected bathroom, a den, and a long kitchen. Because of the lack of sunlight, I pulled the mattress into the den, which on one side overlooked a beautiful view of the sea far below, down a long hill of dark rocks, and in the deep blue water, rocks like blunted teeth, and a sunrise, which cast the long shadow of those rocks over the roiling surf, and on the other, opened out onto a small but intricate balcony of wrought iron, over an overgrown courtyard far below, almost directly under the train tracks. Warm air coiled in the courtyard, and some chemical in the tracks gave a scent of spices to the air, faint but oddly stirring, and often vibrating with the distant then thunderous passage of trains.

After about a month at the new place, around the time my he first month’s rent was due, I found a letter at my door signed Tamara Menser. How she found me I could not imagine. But the letter went like this.

Welcome to LA. I assume this means you’ve decided to take my offer. Take your time settling. I shall be in touch.

Tammy

Tamara Menser

On the day of the meeting, I got up early and walked around the apartment, restless. I took breakfast in sweatpants and a tee-shirt—a bowl of cheerios and soy milk, and scrambled eggs with a diced avocado and the last shredded cheese. Then I threw on a sundress and a pair of slides, and wide, thick sunglasses. I did my hair in a bun and stuck a brass needle through it, to match the dress. With a few minutes to spare, I sat on the couch, the AC rumbling, and I looked across the room into the mirror.

A sound shattered the anxious stability of that moment when a car pulled up outside the apartment. I rushed down the stairwell, purse swinging wildly in the hook of my elbow. It was Gunther again, the same weatherbeaten cowboy. It struck me how someone could look so old and young at the same time. His rosy cheek, the jaded stare.

He drove me by mostly the same route as when i stayed in the hotel. Up the same boulevard, lined with beach houses, still screened with evenly spaced bushes, palm trees, and deep evergreens for shade. Time moved slowly here, changed nothing. I mentioned this offhandedly to GUnther, and he smiled.

“Nothing except we who live here. Time changes us same as anywhere.”

On the car radio was a program about the world changing. It was November 2016. The whole country is in an uproar about the presidential election, but obviously not everyone was. I was 33 years old. The driver is a middle-aged greek man (with a cowboy hat) who leaned over the wheel with a gaze that called to mind a grecian hero, hanging off the rail of a ship and peering into godforsaken waters. His neck was thick and tanned. For most of the ride he spoke little, only to inquire about my comfort. He offered a bottle of water which I accepted but did not drink, with the AC halfway blasting. Outside, the curious landscape of the island fluttered past. Islands of luscious green amid the rolling barren rocky coastland. But sometime during the radio program he shut the radio off.

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In a moment of quiet, I realized how silent the interior was. As a semi-truck passed us on the island’s micro-highway, I realized how intensely the interior must have been soundproofed.

“You don’t like that stuff?” I gestured to the radio.

Gunther shot a glance into the rear-view mirror. “I try to keep up. I take a professional interest in the outcome of the election, you might say. It concerns me deeply. But for now I’d prefer to focus on driving. You have to pay attention these days.” He spoke those last words with an unwarranted intensity.

I nodded and he went on, unprompted.

“When the world changes,” he went on, unprompted, “New possibilities and opportunities are created, and others are lost by the same matter of the same course. When the world changes, it is important to look into things you might have gave up on a long time ago, because they were no longer possible, or didn’t make sense, or outside circumstances prevented you from considering them as a potential part of your future, and consider carefully which of them become possible. That was her station, you know? She had a show.”

I was unsettled by the driver’s comments—all I could think to say was, “Oh, interesting.”

He shrugged, and I didn’t have time to think it over because just then we rolled into Tammy’s driveway.

She met us in the foyer, and took us to the yard again. The smooth grass seemed entirely unchanged from my last visit, unless it were a faint yellow tint.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.

Tamara held up a hand for silence. “Listen to me, dear. I have spent my whole life preaching on a mystery. In order to persuade God’s flock, I had to turn that sucker right up to eleven. Button my shirt up all the way but make sure it was tight. Got my hair just right, lipstick. You know I used to put on this accent? Now it's automatic. So much show business got me tired of that mystery. I still believe in God. I just don’t care. Mom was disappointed to find out I was hosting a talk show. She said dad would be proud of me for pursuing a career in the performing arts. He said he went to the war and fought so his kids could be engineers, so our kids could be artists. But my mother disagreed. But it didn’t turn out that way. I mean, you’re staring down the barrel of catastrophe. Your generation might be the first one in a hundred years who actually have it harder than the ones who came before. So I still believe in God, yes. But I do not care.”

I nodded, not quite understanding. I didn’t believe in God, but I wouldn’t say unless she asked. She did ask, right away, but I shrugged and before I could elaborate she gave me a look as if to say, You see?

Then she paused for a long time.

“I want to tell you something unpleasant. My brother went missing when he was five. That was after he strangled my stepdad in his sleep somehow. I want to know what happened to him.”

I took a breath. “How old were you?”

“Six.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“After he strangled my father in law, he went away. That is, he was taken away. Mom said he had to go before he strangled the rest of us. I believe he was autistic and became aggressive because he couldn’t understand the way our stepdad handled us.”

“What was his name?”

“Alexander. An old friend of hers called Larry took him on a trip. Larry was going to hike a mountain. So my brother was taken up the mountain with him, and never came down. I want to know what happened.”

I asked for their last names and she told me.

“So, how did he strangle a grown man? He was five.”

Tamara pursed her lips. “Our stepdad was sick. I think it’s because he didn’t take the vaccines when he was growing up. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, just, it got him real sick that time. When Alexander found him, he was likely deep in a coma. If Alexander had thrown a few blankets over his face, the man might have died anyway. That’s how weak he was. But for some reason Alexander found it necessary to wrap his forearm around dad’s throat and squeeze. Dad woke up—Alexander’s cheek was bleeding, and he had a black eye, and bruises where dad’s fingers went around his arm.”

The way I felt next was like a black cloud has settled over me. I gave no consent, and I signed no contract. I was silent for a long time, but I knew in my heart of hearts that I had to go, and Tamara seemed satisfied herself, as if she knew it too.

“Who took Alexander up the mountain? His name.”

She told me, and I memorized the name by repeating it to myself mentally. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Does this mean you’ll take my offer?" “Look, if you won’t leave me alone, then fine. But I refuse to let you pay me. I make my money as an investigative journalist, and if you were to pay me once cent for this job, it would put my loyalties into question.”

“Loyalties to whom?”

“If I had a dime for every time I’ve explained this, I wouldn’t need a job.”

“Tell me in brief then. I can fill in the blanks. What’s all this about loyalty? I thought were were unemployed.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way. It isn’t a high horse for me, but I was talking about loyalty to the truth, and to the best practices of journalism.”

“Is the integrity of journalism under close scrutiny?”

“Frankly, no. But I believe quite strongly—”

“High horse?”

“The integrity of journalism should be under scrutiny. Same as democracy. About six corporations own all the major media companies in the US. If we don’t watch them closely, and we don’t, they’ll slip, and they are slipping right now.”

“Well, you learn something new everyday.”

“But why worry, then? You deserve to be paid for your work.”

“But not by double dipping. I want to get paid for the story, and research is part of the story.”

“Shouldn’t you be paid for the research too? When you can get someone to pay you? I’m not used to folks refusing money.”

“I’m a journalist. It’s my job to think about these things. And I have the luxury of working independently. I don’t have to meet a quota for… for anybody. Long as I can pay the bills.”

“Well… Now I really want you to work for me.”

I shrugged. “Look, I’ll do the job. But I can’t have you on my payroll”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you wouldn't leave me alone. I just moved into a new apartment. How did you know I was living there?”

“How did I knew you were living there. That’s an intriguing coincidence. I used to own that aprtment.”

“Well then I can’t accept it either,” I began to feel myself getting hot with frustration. It’s at times like these when I feel the world is conspiring to ensure that I cannot follow my principles even a little bit, so what is the point of having them?

Tamara held up a hand. “Take a drink. All is well. I said I used to own it. I sold it to the California government six months ago. It’s public housing, at a rate based on income But I knew it wasn’t taken, because I only sold it recently.”

“How did you find out I was staying there?”

“The state sent me a notice that someone had moved in. It was a thank you card for having sold my property to the state. They didn’t include a name, but they did include a picture of you… Your license photo I believe.”

“First of all, that’s weird. But also, if my rent goes to the state, where do those funds go?”

“Social programs, ultimately.”

“How’d you manage that?”

She smiled. “You don’t believe me? In many ways California is like a small independent country. Don’t go homeless on principle. People might accuse you of privilege. Anyway, it was nice to meet you.”

We were silent for awhile after than. Finished out drinks and she was about to say a pleasant farewell when I interrupted.

“Why me?”

“You mean, why did I look for you specifically?”

Gunther drove me back to my apartment, without anymore cryptic words, I was left in silence to think. I found myself disoriented at first. Tammy Faye looked like a former televangelist, or she would do if she put on the usual makeup I’d seen in photos of her. But she didn’t act like one. Her southern accent aside, she seemed to blend in fine with everything I knew about California.