San Diego, part 2

It began with the Mt. Soledad Cross, a monument honoring the brave soldiers felled in wars gone by. For years the city kibitzed about whether the cross, proudly visible from both the 805 and the 5 freeways, and elegantly illuminated under the clear night skies by ground lights, should continue to stand watch over the valley with its stern eye and unwavering sentimentality as it had done for some many tens of years already. For it was a religious symbol, and therefore suspect. Leave it be, came the majority reply, it’s more than just a symbol of Christ. For here rest the revered fathers and brothers and uncles of so many who passed through the barracks at Pendleton and Miramar and Coronado, storming beaches, parachuting into the south pacific, dodging the seething whistles of RPGs over Kabul.

But at some point, sentiments changed, and the debate grew hot. More residents crawled out of the cracks in the ground to demand its removal. It was silly, really. The cross was a monument first, a theological shape second, but still, people will complain about the color of the ocean if they’re bored enough. And so it happened that finally the rift grew between the believers and honor-bound--who stood together arguing the importance and unaffecting locale of the cross so high up on the mountain--and those who saw just a symbol of a deity that did not get top billing in whatever books they preached to their dinner guests.

Those who opposed the Cross were indeed a small faction, but nevertheless, the propositions came and went on the ballots to remove it, and one judge after another voted in zig zag succession to relocate and then retain its position. Taxpayer dollars were gormandized by the unrelenting efforts of those who persisted to bring it up every election cycle, as if this year, finally, hordes of pro-crossers would suddenly waver and realize the error of their ways.

I, myself, had never thought too hard on religion, having grown up in a family that spent its time worshiping libations and Sunday afternoon football. Religion to my folks involved a prayer to the Great Heissman Trophy in the sky that the Chargers would beat the point spread. Still, I voted to keep the Cross, because what harm was it causing? I had only visited it once, to read the names of the dead carved in the memorial wall beneath it, and to stare up at its stalwart presence, to see it up close in all its majesty instead of the occasional quick glance as I drove by. It was impressive.

It disappeared at 3:30 in the afternoon on Good Friday.

Poof. Gone. Just like that. No extra point.

Hundreds of witnesses who’d been driving along the freeway swerved into each other, twisting metal, shattering windshields, finally emerging from their cars with cut foreheads and dazzled countenances. I was lucky—in the initial fray, the car in front of me flipped on its side affording me just enough space to squeeze myself passed its gleaming rear bumper, avoiding actual collision, and steer myself into the shallow gully of a median between the north and south bound lanes. As I joined the cut and bruised crowd gathered on the road, who could care less about their injuries or the massive pile up they’d created, the same question floated through the cogs of everyone’s mind, vocalized in a collective: “Did you fucking see that shit? It just disappeared.”

A puppet of rational thought, I managed to voice the first speculation towards a logical answer. “Maybe it fell over,” I suggested.

“No way, dude.” This from the young man next me, his shirt torn from the pileup. “I saw it happen. It just popped outta existence.”

“I saw it too,” replied a short, gray-haired woman whose chin whiskers twitched like caterpillar silk in the afternoon sun. “I was looking right at it and it just disappeared. Fell over, my tukis. It was something else, something more powerful than that. I knew God would be angry at all those jerks who tried to remove it. It’s God’s work, and he’s gonna smite us all now. He’s gonna smite you all for your sins unless you repent right now!”

“Chill out, Jezebel,” shouted a mustached man in a Bikini Inspector t-shirt. He was holding his wounded arm up to his chest, rubbing the forearm to circulate the blood. “If God were real he’d have better things to do than fuck around with a lame cross. He’d be killing them sand-niggers overseas and making it so’s our boys don’t have to have their names etched on no memorials anymore.”

“You voted to remove it, didn’t you?” she shouted back, at which point the majority of people in the shocked and shaken crowd turned on the man and gave him a piece of their mind. I was certain that not everyone in the crowd was as zealous as the whiskered woman, but it seemed they were not taking any chances in the face of such unexplained phenomena. Better to take the “what if” side of things.

Ignoring them, I watched the top of the mountain to see if there were any clues as to where the cross had actually gone, but the longer I stared the longer I came to conclude the cross could not have just fallen over or been yanked by unseen aircraft or any other of the logical explanations that ran rampant in my mind. Mostly this had to do with the fact that there were people up there, people who’d been reading the names on the wall, who were now appearing at the edge of the summit, staring into the sky, looking out over the freeway, throwing their arms in the air and waving them in a universal gesture of confusion and awe.

By now both lanes of the freeway were backed up, and horns were blaring from those too far back to know what the commotion was about. Fearing mob mentality at this point, I raced back to my car and drove down the middle of the median until I was able to cut across the jam to an exit, receiving several obscene finger gestures, and continued on home via the back roads.

***

The following Tuesday, as I sat reading yet another article in the Union Tribune about the strange disappearance of the cross, the television, which was turned low to a daytime talk show, cut in with the local news for the repeated showing of a home movie in which the neon letters on the infamous El Cortez Hotel downtown (not far from my apartment, in fact) not only winked out for a minute, but rearranged themselves before turning back on selectively to read ZERO.

It goes without saying at this point, with the Cross story in my lap, and the mysterious moving letters before my eyes, that I concluded something was seriously amiss with the city. Hoping the Tribune might know more, I ventured to call the news desk and see what they knew. But the phone had no dial tone, and fingering the hook yielded nothing but more dead air. Naturally I tried my cell phone, but it too was not getting a signal.

For the rest of the day, the video played repeatedly, with several expert talking heads assuring us there were scientific answers to what was going on. What those answers might be, however, they could not suggest. The video showed no other humans up on the side of the building, showed nothing in the sky that could have yanked the large steel letters off the building and then reattached them so flawlessly. I’d be remiss to not mention that the words of the whiskered women emerged from the depths of my mind. Truly, some form of higher power must be at work.

But if such were the case, what did the cryptic ZERO on the hotel mean? Was it a message for us mortals, we lost and damned who walked the earth flouting God’s laws? Was this the zero hour, as they said?

I remained glued to the television for the rest of the night and well into the next day, until it turned off and never came back on.

***

Like the rest of San Diego, I was preparing to leave the city when word came back to me that the cross had reappeared. I was in line at the local pharmacy buying juice boxes to take with me on the drive out of town, when a man ran inside yelling that the Mt. Soledad Cross was now standing proudly in the middle of the Coronado Bridge, splitting traffic to the sides.

“It’s aliens,” he went on to say. “They must have an invisible ship and they’re messing with us. They’re going to come and capture us and make us work in mines.” With that, he turned and ran out the door.

“Aliens shmaliens,” replied the cashier, ringing up my juice boxes, “It’s the second coming. God is letting us know he’s on his way to pass judgment on us. The heathens will be maimed in hell fire. Do you want cash back with this?”

“No, thank you,” I replied, and took my juice boxes and left.

The radio in the car was not working, which seemed to be par for the course with every other automobile in the city. The freeways were jam-packed, bumper-to-bumper, with panicked citizens heading East and North, as if Los Angeles and Las Vegas were not the innermost circles of debauchery and sin but rather havens of purity. All of us heathens I thought, just running willy nilly to the far corners of the globe to escape something our overactive minds thought was angry divine intervention. Truthfully, I was more ready to believe an alien invasion than the smiting hand of the Almighty.

Four hours passed during which time I gained naught but maybe three miles of road, a deep sunburn on my arms, and a belly full of juice. It occurred to me at that point there was simply no way I was getting out of San Diego by nightfall. I might have waited it out and continued on to LA (a multiple-hour drive to LA was nothing new to us San Diegans anyway) were it not for the fact that as I was punching the tiny straw through the foil hole of another juice box the sky opened up and rained sand. Nay, rained is too serene a word to describe the sheer force at which it poured down. It fell with the sound of a tornado gale, chewing into the cars with a ferocity that was terrifying to behold. Around me, the thoughtless and/or curious stepped from their cars only to be stripped to the bone by the sandblast of tiny pebbles, skin and muscle disintegrating in a rapid mist of redness. My windshield cracked and the roof of my car began to sag toward my head, screeching like a banshee as the fame collapsed under the force of the strange and terrifying storm. With the booming noise came complete darkness as the torrent of falling earth blocked out the sun. Within seconds I was engulfed in a black cave of metal, the only other discernable sounds around me faint screams, groaning automobiles, and my own galloping heartbeat.

And then just like that, it was over, the last of the pebbles pinging the roof, bringing everything to a silent standstill. The sand trickled down the broken windshield and found its way to the ground, revealing a freeway now buried in dessert. Dunes had formed in areas, and to see it as I crawled out of my car window (the sand had risen half way up the door) it looked like the wastelands of the Sahara .

Around me, people emerged from their dirt cocoons, struggling up onto the ecru hills, rubbing sand from their hair, their clothes, spitting it from their mouths. Others were not so lucky, the sand having piled up over their vehicles so that only a lifeless arm poked out here and there like a new form of plant life.

“It is God,” said an old man standing next to me, his eyes wide with wonder, sand falling from his shoulders. “Just like Sodom, he has buried our city.” He fell to his knees and began to pray right there.

Taking the remaining juice boxes from my car, I began to walk north.

***

Nearly 30 hours passed as I made my way up the desert once referred to as the 5 freeway. Several others walked alongside me, most looking straight ahead, but a few looking to the stars as if some kind of answer were painted there. Talk was minimal, consisting mostly of further speculation on whether or not God was angry, or if all the strangeness of late was some kind of natural phenomenon. “They thought the Aurora borealis was God setting the sky on fire,” remarked one woman. “But then scientists proved it was an atmospheric occurrence. There’s always explanations for these kinds of things.”

“Bullshit,” replied another, “Eskimos don’t believe in God. They believe in all that Indian mumbo jumbo, what with all the spirit gods and totem poles and shit. And besides, how do you know God didn’t create the atmospheric occurrence thingamajig? God created everything.”

But, thankfully, these debates were few. Mostly, we walked, slowly, slipping up and down the dunes the way one does at a beach, skirting our way around half buried cars, and pulling the occasional overlooked survivor from their half finished grave. Streams of people passed us walking south, and more than a few told us not to bother with our trek. “It’s walled off,” they said, but we had no idea what the cryptic words meant until we reached the San Onofre Nuclear power plant, which somehow had managed to lose one of its breast-like structures. In its place was the Museum of Man, moved from the center of Balboa Park forty miles south of us. And of course, we saw the wall. It started right at the back of the plant, and extended outward to the east and west –out across the Pacific—a great brick hindrance that rose far up into the night sky until it melted with the blackness of space.

Nailed to the center of the wall, in line with where the 5 should pass through it, was a killer whale. I did not understand its significance until a teenage boy with spiked green hair appeared beside me and said, “The fuckers even got Shamu.”

***

The walk back south was long and arduous, and I ran out of juice at the outset. The lot of us scavenged cars for food or drink, but with the exception of the occasional stale bag of chips and liberated M&M under a car seat, we found nothing. By the time we reached the downtown area, we had lost half our numbers. Some people decided to cut east, some west to the docks along the ocean, and others to their homes. When I walked down the sandy offramp into Little Italy, I started at what the downtown area had become: the buildings had been changed, reshaped, restructured, with rooms and halls jutting from the sides in a manner that made little sense, the kind of architecture a young child might create from Legos. I was unsure which building was even mine anymore, and tapped a passing policeman on the shoulder for information. “Search me, buddy,” he replied, “the world has turned against us. I don’t know where anything is, or what anything is. A group of us are hopping aboard the Midway and getting out of here, heading into the Pacific and heading to Asia or maybe Australia.”

“Asia is normal?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Rumor is someone got through to China and it’s happening there as well, but can’t be sure. That was a couple days ago. We haven’t had contact with anybody since then. There’s also some story about a big ass wall running around the county. Pendleton was gonna take some tanks to it but they don’t know where the tanks are now…’cept that one,” he said, pointing up to a highrise a block away that’s penthouse roof supported the unmistakable outline of a Sherman tank. “You wanna come with us?” he asked. “There’s plenty of room. You got kids and a wife or anything?”

“No,” I replied. I had never married. In truth I knew few people, a result of working from home as a ghost writer and not making enough money to hit the bars on the weekends. “No, I think I’ll stay here, see if it all changes back.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, scanning the streets, which were covered in sand dunes like the freeway. “Just be careful. You can never tell what’s gonna happen next.”

And as if to prove his point, the palm trees lining the street beside us suddenly winked out of existence. “See what I’m talking about,” he said. “How long before it comes after us? Say your prayers. I’m outta here.”

He left me and headed toward the seaport. I followed behind him for a while, taking in the strange new city, wishing I had a camera so I could write it all down later. Trees grew from buildings, the trolley tracks cut across the sky with seemingly no support, Petco Park had been replaced with a collection of school buses fused together to form a giant rotary telephone. Perhaps the most startling addition now stood where the Hyatt Hotel used to be: the statue of Christ the Redeemer, once home on the mountain top of Corcovado in Brazil. Now, it looked out over the bay toward the Coronado Bridge, where the Mt. Soledad Cross stared back.

Maybe it is God, I thought. Maybe he’s driving us mad before he comes to take our souls. Maybe it would do well to say a prayer. But I didn’t know what to pray for. Salvation? Redemption? What? And would a prayer even make a difference now? Surely one can’t eschew faith for this long and then expect to be let into the big clubhouse in the sky when they’re suddenly proved wrong. And yet, in my moment of weakness, I kneeled down and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, hoping that my good civilian record would go a ways toward my judgment.

“...And give us this day our daily bread...” I was saying when the massive shadow passed over me and drew me from my speech. When I opened my eyes, I saw before me, staring down with a chillingly adorable face, one of the Pandas from the San Diego zoo. With a snort, it sniffed my hair, shoved me to the ground with its head, and then, as if bored, walked off. Balled up (because this is what I’d always read was a sure fire deterrent for bears) I watched as it ambled off toward the water, as if it too was following the police officer. It was soon joined by two other Panda bears, all walking in a row. Did the zoo have three bears, I wondered, or two? I couldn’t remember, and I didn’t care all that much. I leapt to my feet and followed closely after them, thinking now in biblical terms, that perhaps they too were bound for the Midway. A twenty first century Noah’s Ark, if you will.

As they walked, they took in their surroundings, pensive and curious, sniffing this and that. The Midway drew close, its massive sides looming overhead, and up high I could make out people standing at the edge of the flight deck. The three bears stopped at the bottom of the stairs leading in to the main hanger where the museum admission offices were, and sat on their haunches.

“Look,” Someone yelled. “Pandas. Quick, let’s get them on board.”

The sight of the majestic bears brought a throng of people who approached rashly, walking right up the animals and attempting to pet them. Their cooing went unnoticed by the bears, but the disregard for eons of hunting instincts did not. With lightning reflexes, the bears swiped out with lumbering paws, their razor sharp claws extended like star points, and disemboweled those who were closest. Soupy gurgles of terror and pain erupted into the air as the bears yanked gray and pink viscera from the gaping wounds they inflicted. In a rush of madness, those who could ran back up the stairs into the ship. At the sight of the animals and the thought that more could be out there, I was suddenly eager to rush into the ship, but the bears sat eating flesh between me and the entrance, and so I bided my time until I might get aboard and assess the situation.

From the deck of the ship, some people discovered me hiding behind a large dune where the museum parking lot used to be. They waved me forward, eager for me to join them, but the bears were now moving closer to the stairs. Their fur stained red in places, they looked up into the ship’s hold and bellowed with all the air in their lungs.

And the shipped winked out of existence.

***

I’ve been hiding in the Star Of India for two days. The ship, not far from where the Midway once sat, was a tourist attraction in the summer seasons. I had ridden on it when it first was renovated in the late 70s, as part of a story I did for the local paper. Its history is chilling, and I think this has something to do with the fact the bears have not ventured up the bolted gang plank yet—though they do sit nearby and watch it.

Built in the 1860s in the Isle of Man, the ship has become something of a ghost hunters’ attraction of late. As the story goes, the first trip to sea resulted in a mutiny. On the second trip the boat nearly capsized in a storm and resulted in the death of the captain, who was buried at sea. After that she was sold off as an emigrant ship, with small berths and poor food rations creating strenuous conditions for passengers. Several died each voyage, and it’s said their souls haunt the lower decks.

Whether or not they fear spirits as other animals are believed to do, the bears have so far kept at a distance, watching me with a keen eye for the moment I set foot on the ground. But, if I’m not mistaken, each time they come close to study me, they seem to step closer than their former boundary. The occasional person stumbles by, but I am too far away from the sandy road to shout a warning to them about the Pandas. I have only seen one man out run the giant animals…the rest have ended up as dinner, their screams echoing off the Tetris-style buildings that now make up the city.

You’re asking why I don’t just escape while they’re sleeping, or maybe untie the boat and sail away? For one, I don’t know how to sail, and the boat is too big to handle with out a sufficiently trained crew. Two, The Pandas don’t seem to sleep. One will wander off, and in the distance something about the city will change. When that bear returns, another will take leave. Every time, something in the city winks out of existence, or is moved, or is replaced. You would think they are artists, they way they will sniff something, like a streetlamp, paw at it, and then growl low, after which the street lamp becomes an airplane or a lobster dinner.

No doubt the majority of people still alive out there are on their knees praying to God. But I must admit, as I sit here, eating from a box of crackers unearthed in the ship’s storeroom, that I think God has little to do with this. I think the pandas, with their increased global numbers of late, and by whatever power they’ve managed to hide from us all these years, are doing some rearranging.

THE END

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