Tarzana, California slept in and so did she, coddled in a crimson motel room.
Dreams rattled through crevices wedged between myths and memories. The cast was familiar, her cautious but accomplished attorney in Houston, then her old boss, who was the very portrait of tawdry arrogance and dismissed her quarterly reserves report as flawed.
She sat with silent strangers in a fluorescent conference room. The long table’s surface was coated in a sticky yellow wax. A presentation on the screen displayed corporate fictions which took the place of facts.
Nothing on the conference room screen rang true. Not a single number reporting the company’s oil and gas reserves in the Cuyama River Basin was accurate.
As dreams do, she suddenly found herself jettisoned to her mother’s patio in Palm Springs. Then she was boarding a plane, scanning the overhead compartments for an opening to shove in her luggage.
She slept right through the middle of the morning, dreaming through the stretch when the sun sliced through the remnants of a light marine layer.
And then a deafening crash, a thousand layers of metallic violence, woke her up.
The bed shook, the walls trembled and the building rolled. At first, she thought it was an earthquake. Then she heard the low groan of what sounded like a diesel engine.
Something was being torn up, the sound of wood cracking and splintering.
She rolled over, looked out the window and saw nothing. She got out of bed, slipped on her purple robe and went outside.
A few doors down, the rear end of a cement mixer stuck out of the building.
The big drum on the ready-mix truck was still turning, rotating and shredding the motel like a chunk of cheese.
She listened for sirens racing toward the motel but the streets of Tarzana, California were quiet.
Such an odd moment, one she hadn’t felt before. Getting dressed on the edge of chaos, only a few yards away from annihilation, she felt that time and the absence of time were one and the same.
It didn’t take long to pack.
