City of Angels THE CITY was hers for a single hour, just the one magic hour, only hers. The morning of the accident, between three and four A. M. when the streets were empty and the angels watched, she flew east on Wilshire Boulevard at eighty miles per hour, never once slowing for the red lights along that stretch called the Miracle Mile, red after red, blowing through lights without even slowing; glittering blue streaks of mascara on her cheeks.
Accounting for her time before the accident, she would later tell police she was at a club on Yucca in Hollywood, one of those clubs du jour with paparazzi clotted by the door. She had spent an hour avoiding an aging action star while seeing her friends (trust-fund West-siders and A-list young Hollywood; actors, agents, and musicians she had no problem naming for the police), all taking cell-phone pictures of each other, blowing air-kisses and posing with rainbow drinks. The police sergeant who interviewed her would raise his eyebrows when she told him she had not been drinking, but the Breathalyzer confirmed her story. One Virgin Cosmo which she did not finish.
Three was her witching hour. She dropped a hundred on the valet for her Aston Martin, and red-lined away. Five blocks later-alone-she stopped in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, shut the engine, and enjoyed a cashmere breeze. The scents of jasmine and rosemary came from the hills. The engine ticked, but she listened to find the silence. The stillness of the city at this hour was breathtaking.
She gazed up at the buildings and imagined angels perched on the edge of the roofs; tall slender angels with drooping wings; standing in perfect silence, watching her without expectation as if in an eternal dream: We give you the city. No one is watching. Set yourself free.
Her name was Larkin Conner Barkley. She was twenty-two years old. She lived in a hip loft downtown in an area catering to emerging painters and bicoastal musicians, not far from the Los Angeles River. Her family owned the building.
Larkin pushed the accelerator and felt the wind lift her hair. She bore south on Vine, then east on Wilshire, laughing as her eyes grew wet. Light poles flicked past; red or green, it didn’t matter and she didn’t care. Honking horns were lost in the rush. Her long hair, the color of pennies, whipped and lashed. She closed her eyes, held them closed, kept them shut even longer, then popped them wide and laughed that she still flew straight and true-85-90-101-a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Tuxedo Black convertible blur, smudged by alabaster skin and Medusa copper hair, running wild and free across the city. She flashed over the arch at MacArthur Park, then saw the freeway coming up fast, the Pasadena; a wall guarding downtown. She slowed, but only enough, just barely enough, as cars appeared and streets narrowed, flying over the freeway into the tangle of one-way downtown streets-Sixth, Seventh, Fourth, Ninth; Grand, Hill, and Main. She turned where she wanted, went the wrong way, ran hard for the river; slowing more, finally, inevitably, as everything rippled and blurred-She told herself it was the dry night wind and lashing hair, the way her eyes filled when her lonely race finished, but it was always the same whether the air was dry or not, whether her hair was down or up, so she knew. For those few minutes running across the city, she could be and was herself, purely and truly herself, finding herself in those moments only to lose herself once more when she slowed, falling behind as her true self ran free somewhere ahead in the empty night-She lurched across Alameda, her speed draining like a wound.
