NATHAN WAS PEDALING along on Third Street at a robust twenty-five miles per hour when he spotted her, a feminine mirage in black that forced him to stop. Even before his brakes had finished squealing he began to laugh and shout. “Hey, what are you doing up there?” The woman was stuck to the top of a chainlink fence, trying to reach the sidewalk on a stretch of Third Street where Nathan never saw anyone on foot. It’s a cliché about Los Angeles that no one walks, but on that shortcut to the Westside it’s actually true. There are no pedestrians on Third Street and thus no crosswalks. The resulting fast and free flow of traffic feels like a memory of the city’s unencumbered past, and Nathan biked that stretch like a guy driving a Porsche: he was in a hurry, he cut people off, and he didn’t stop to take in the sights, except in this special case when a lithe woman in need appeared before him, attached to the top of a fence.
The barrier in question sealed off the street and the public from the undulating, artificial pastures of a private golf course. A broken strand of the fence had hooked into the woman’s jeans: like a steel finger, it seemed to be pulling her down as she tried to free herself.
“You’re fleeing the golf course,” Nathan said.
She was about thirty years old, with lips glossed burnt umber, and the flat soles of her ankle-high black boots were caked in mud. On the other side of the fence two men in shorts were standing on the seventh green with clubs in hand, studying the geometry of their putts and squinting up at the noon sky. A thin layer of high clouds had drifted over the city, weakening the sun into a yellow stain, and all the shadows had been erased from the world below, confusing the golfers as they tried to read the dips in the grass beneath their shoes. They were therefore oblivious to the fence climber nearby.
“It’s actually a country club,” she said.
“And you’re not a member.”
“I’m trapped.”
In the moment it took Nathan to get off his bike so that he could help her, she freed herself and leaped off. Her hair rose in a cloud of raven strands and fell with a splash as she bounded onto the sidewalk. With a few quick swipes of her hands, she brushed some blades of grass and dried mud splashes from her jeans.
“Well, that was embarrassing,” she said.
She took a small nylon bag from her back and removed a notebook and pencil from it, and Nathan suddenly ceased to exist for her as she sat on the sidewalk, her back against the fence. Nathan watched her begin to draw and wondered which of the city’s arty tribes she belonged to.
“Hi,” Nathan said, insisting, because she was dark-skinned and pretty and he felt the need to know why she was trespassing on a golf course. “Excuse me, but . . . what are you doing?”
“I’m following the water.”
As soon as she said “water” Nathan heard it and felt it: the sound of liquid flowing, dripping, moving through the air, causing oxygen molecules to shift and cool. Looking behind her, on the other side of the fence, he saw a stream. About three feet wide and four inches deep, it curved around some bunkers near the seventh green, and then fell sharply, broadcasting a steady, metallic sound as it disappeared into a concrete orifice beneath Nathan’s feet.
“Fucking country club,” Nathan said. “They shouldn’t be wasting water like that.” It was the middle of August, after all. In the middle of drought-parched LA.
“No,” the woman said. She stopped drawing and looked at the water again. “It’s not theirs. So they can’t be wasting it.”
“Well, who does it belong to, then?”
The woman paused for a second and answered with an amused smile. “The underworld, I guess.”
Sofia was her name and she described herself as a “river geek.” She said she was mapping the creek that ran through the golf course. And also its “tributaries.” It was an ancient stream, she told him, born from a spring at the base of the Hollywood Hills, “bubbling up from the underworld.” She showed Nathan her map, a series of blue pencil lines over a street grid she had pasted into her notebook. “It’s groundwater,” she said. Before reaching the golf course, the stream flowed into downtrodden Hollywood proper, around assorted industrial buildings and parking lots, and also through a junior-high campus and the television studios of KTLA. Sofia described all these things with a reverence that Nathan found disturbing: he sensed that she’d been doing this mapping expedition of hers alone, for weeks, and had never talked to anyone else about it until this moment.
Nathan returned the map to Sofia. He saw that the water in the culvert moved quickly, and was crystalline, as if it were some sylvan stream. This can’t be, Nathan wanted to say. This supposedly natural body of water was trickling under his feet on Third Street, in a wealthy neighborhood called Hancock Park that was surrounded by low-slung, less-wealthy Korean, Filipino, and Salvadoran neighborhoods that were themselves near the geographic center of approximately five hundred square miles of asphalt and concrete.
“The flow never stops. Not even in the summer,” Sofia said. “This creek was here before the country club. Before everything around you.”
Sofia spoke these words and turned quiet, as if to allow the sound of the stream to make the truth of its presence clear to him. She was shy and a loner, like him, he thought. Nathan considered himself a loner, though none of his friends did, especially his women friends, all of whom were fervent cyclists: they thought he was charismatic and often very funny (when he was riding a bike), though clueless when it came to women. Clueless Nathan now concluded that Sofia’s lonesomeness was deeper and more interesting than his own, more attuned to the mysterious and the sublime. She wore a silver scarab clip in her hair, a jeweled stud in her nose, and looking at her made Nathan feel unkempt and underdressed, which is a ridiculous thing for a man on a bicycle to feel.
Nathan told her he was mapping something too. He was scouting routes for a club of his that met at night and cycled to the most obscure LA landmarks they could think of. If she was a river geek, he was a bicycle geek, a map geek, a history geek.
“Our last one was the Tour de Smells. We went to a meat-packing plant in Vernon, a garbage dump in the Valley. Our group is called The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time. We meet every two weeks.” Sofia wrinkled her brow in confusion as he explained this, as if he was describing some exotic cult. He removed a piece of paper from the bag on his back and gave it to her: it was a hand-drawn map of the route he was currently working on, marked with labels such as Abandoned Synagogue and SDS Hangout.
“You have beautiful penmanship,” she said.
“Maybe I can help you,” Nathan said. He was a teacher, and classes were out for summer. His days were free and he could follow the stream with her and take notes, he said. Awkwardly, he asked for her number.
“I don’t have a phone,” she said, and Nathan knew instantly that this was true, because she paused and her dark eyes shifted nervously when she was forced to reveal this private thing about herself.
“Let’s meet again at this same place tomorrow,” he said. “At this same time.”
“Okay, but without your bike,” she said. “Because we need to go places a bike can’t reach.”
When they met at the culvert the next day, Sofia was dressed in black again. Her fingernails were also painted black. She led him south, down a gently curving street of assertive mansions, her black boots gliding over the sidewalk with steps that felt like flowing water to Nathan. Sofia was carrying a new map covered with topographical lines, and she studied it as they turned west and passed a buffet of overdone tributes to assorted architectural styles: a mini Monticello here, a bloated Tudor cottage there. “This street follows the old streambed,” Sofia said. “The city buried it, like, a hundred years ago. But the water’s still flowing down there. In a big drainpipe.”
A block later they reached another fence, and stood above another culvert from which the stream emerged, moving slower, wider and shallower, flowing into a tangle of branches and bushes.
Without a word Sofia climbed the fence and landed with a splash in about an inch of water. “Technically, I’m pretty sure this is trespassing,” Nathan said as he followed her. Sofia marched along the water, pulling back branches for him. Where is this woman taking me? he wondered, and after a few paces he got his answer, as they entered an open space where the suddenly dry air seemed to vibrate under a liberated, ferocious sun. The space was a kind of meadow, framed by two mansions, each so abundant with backyard paraphernalia, Nathan felt as if he’d entered the prop closet of a studio dedicated to making movies about suburban American excess. He saw competing steel barbecue machines with gauges and propane-tank attachments; one stood before a tiled-roofed Spanish-style mansion, the other at the base of a turret-topped Moorish castle, as if ready to prepare steaks and burgers for a medieval army. Next to the Spanish mansion a pathway of flat stones led to a child’s climbing structure made of fiery redwood. The Moorish castle’s domain included a marble dining table and a tennis court of emerald cement.
Sofia’s stream snaked through this gaudy landscape, making two gentle turns inside a channel sunken in crabgrass. “I just want to look at it for a while, if you don’t mind,” Sofia said, and she sat down on the grass with her sleeved arms wrapped around her knees. The water flowed in a smooth, flat current, like a bonsai-shrunken version of the Mississippi.
Nathan looked up at the windows of the multistoried mansions around them and wondered if the people inside would call the cops.
“Really, you just want to sit here?” Nathan said.
Sofia nodded with a gentle, wordless insistence. He joined her for a second, sitting on the grass. The water was silent here, and the houses were silent too, though the birds in the trees around them were engaged in a jazz improv of tweets and hoots and cackles.
After five minutes Nathan mumbled, “I’m going to keep on exploring. I’ll meet you, uh, downstream, I guess.”
Sofia didn’t look up to acknowledge Nathan as he walked away. He was disturbed by the aching weirdness of what he was doing, trespassing amid fake backyard ecologies, the creek leading him on a midday sleepwalk past olive trees, a rosebush, assorted cacti, grapevines, and four cypress trees that loomed over him like monstrous green sentinels. He stepped over a low wooden fence and heard high-pitched yelling. Peering through a patch of ferns, he saw a swimming pool and two boys in bathing suits. One of the boys stopped at the edge of a diving board and stared at Nathan when he stepped out into the full sunlight. Nathan waved. The boy waved back and jumped into the pool with a percussive splash.
Nathan followed the stream into more backyards until he reached another culvert and climbed over it to the safety of a public street. As he waited for Sofia to appear, he looked back at the stream, admiring the way it trickled and whistled in the wind. The city tried to tame the water, but it still followed some prehistoric course through the subdivided and built-up land. The stream had a lifespan measured in geological time, and looking at it, Nathan felt at one with the centuries, the millennia, and the epochs. Maybe that was why Sofia followed it, why she was back there in someone’s yard staring at it. When she looked into the stream, she was looking at timelessness.
Nathan waited forty minutes before Sofia finally appeared, her feet splashing in the water. She caught his eye and raised the corners of her lips in what might have been a smirk. Or maybe just a smile. He reached out to help her climb up to the street, and she allowed him to keep his hand clasped to hers a moment longer than necessary.
“Thank you for waiting for me,” she said.
On the bus ride back home that afternoon Nathan thought about how smart and beautiful Sofia was, and how their private obsessions with public spaces matched, and he wondered if he’d finally found the ideal loner with whom to share his solitude. He wondered what he might say or do the next time they met, now that he’d clasped her hand.
When they met the following day, Sofia led him toward the southwest. “I’m glad you came back,” she said. “I thought I’d scared you off yesterday.” She gave him a playful look that caused a warm electricity to pass through his spine.
“Yeah, trespassing isn’t usually my thing,” he said. “But following a secret stream is pretty wild, pretty audacious, I must say.”
Sofia led him away from Hancock Park and the houses began to shrink, and the streets widened and filled with more cars, which were driving faster, and the people inside these vehicles had darker skin tones that more closely matched hers.
“I think I know where this stream hits daylight again,” she said.
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
(to be continued)
