Further Out Than You Thought by Michaela Carter Page B

it.
    She saw men and some women running the other way, too, back to the neighborhood, returning with their arms full of shoes, clothes, toys, with boxes on their shoulders. The big pack of Pampers. A microwave oven. The new TV for the family, the TV they’d never be able to afford. It was Christmas, without interest. A true miracle.
    Gwen thought she might turn around, go back where she came from. But what was there to go back to? Smoke and cars? There had to be a way out if she kept on driving.
    She drove—not too fast, not too slow—through the neighborhood that was not hers. She could have been driving down a street in any city. This was not the Los Angeles she knew. Though her drive past this neighborhood was routine, she’d always been in that world of her own making—of her own music and her own thoughts—sticking to the thoroughfare and seeing what she chose to see, driving with blinders on, mostly.
    She drove, and the people—a woman with a boy’s hand in hers, an old man leaning on his cane, a man carrying a box on his head—watched her in her dirty gray Nissan. They watched her and she watched them. Them. When had they become them ? When had they gone from subject to object? When had they become the other? The they on which one can project one’s own darkness, one’s shadow. In order to bring it to light?
    What she felt was their anger, frightening and beautiful. And what did they see in her? Privilege? A girl who had gone to college on her daddy’s dime? A girl who floated over the engine of the city, who flitted where she liked, who lived where there were trees and shopped at boutiques? No, she reminded herself. She wasn’t one of those people. The rich ones with assistants and nannies and maids. She wasn’t driving a Porsche. She wasn’t driving a Jag. She was in a dirty, gray, falling-apart Nissan Sentra, for Christ’s sake. And anyhow, this was what she saw, looking through her interpretation of their view. It was all made up. How could she possibly know what they saw?
    They watched her and she watched them and the street was longer than she’d thought. The street curved to the left and then to the right, and now she was driving faster, and she turned left, because she could see a way out of the maze. And here she was, back on South La Cienega, a few blocks from where she had been stuck in the traffic and the smoke.
    This time she wasn’t going to wait in line. This time she drove on the shoulder, in the lane that wasn’t a lane—past one streetlight, past two, past the smoke and the blockade of cars—until she was free. Free on the open road. She rolled down her window, took a deep breath of the burned air.
    The rush of it flooded her veins. It filled her with a new kind of high. She was beyond thought, her every cell feeling for her next move. She floored the gas pedal, and her tin can of a car went a hundred in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone as she passed a fire on her left, a torched store, another and another. Inside the chaos, she was all animal, all instinct; alive to the pulse of her blood, to the prickling of her armpits; alive to each impression—the bitter smell of the smoke, her burning eyes and nose and throat, the flames and the empty streets. It felt like she was in a war zone, and it looked like what she had seen on the news and in movies. But from inside her car, the city seemed quiet, dreamlike and open, as if anything could happen.
    And here, inside the slow-motion silence, her stale life was so much ash on the wind. She was light. She was flying through a city of rubble.
    In this new space only survival mattered. She reached for the bottle of water. A few drops left. Christ. And she didn’t have another. A person could live three days without water, she told herself. At least a normal person could. She swallowed, tried to breathe through her nose.
    The gas dial was past empty, as low as she’d