Today I saved a snapshot of Angel’s Flight, deconstructed, taken from the top stair of Historic Bunker Hill. You could fantasize and romanticize this part of the city in which I live but you’ve never realized.  

“Imperfections alone 
are not distinctions enough 
to render a verdict 
on the differences between 
a snapshot and composed photo. 
All film flattens and melds 
under a hard press.” 

I want to say. 

In this image, the majority of buildings surrounding the view have been demolished—that’s what the archival note beneath the image describes. A set of four God rays cast down and center the trolley car tracks. The tracks appear ripped apart, uprooted. But the God rays evoke the presence of angels nevertheless, standing in for one of Los Angeles’ oldest and most beloved tourist attractions. When the photo was taken, you could buy a ticket for the trolley at the bottom of the hill–good for only one ride in one direction. That direction would be up, and who’s to say how you’d come back down. You might’ve just fallen, tumbled, disappeared with the slush of rainwater along the curb cut, to the grate above the storm drain, flushed with the ambient disregard for all the patina of asphalt and carried away with the cumulative stream into the Pacific Ocean. 

*****

All dogs go to heaven, I want to say now.
However I resist the notion that a dead dog can be anyone’s angel.

I make a new list of phrases to describe what it’s like to be in love with a city in place of a person, how sexless and charged of an experience that is, here in Los Angeles:

– Pennies for Heaven

– Gay Parasols

– Ordered to leave LA, they did (first heartbreak)

– Crepuscular viridescence

– I’ll tell you forever, I live in Hell. Meet you there.

*****

Once I tried to write about my love for you, Los Angeles — what you do to me, when I walk all over you, and how in return, your impermanence imprints tired treads all over me.

It’s like the circular nature of celestial bodies suspended in orbit. I can’t believe how I wrote of this despair of our love just before the recent fires. Before those fires set our corporeal bodies ablaze. I just can’t be serious, eating this blood orange under a blood moon, waiting to bleed from my womb. I am a downtown degenerate, demanding absolution from this lunar eclipse.

The angels here must be both virgins and sluts, especially if I choose to believe Mary Magdalene sucked off Jesus’ feet, choked on her own hair, wet with tears, holy water to lubricate the swallowing of forgiveness and sublimation of climax. 

*****

Last year I wrote about Bunker Hill on a daily walk. Just as I do now–and of all things in this place, the unending experience of passing through this object of a city:

“All futures and histories of this city present at the same time. This afternoon was doused in something like a marine layer. Ocean spray rippled over the tourmaline windows of Bunker Hill. I noticed the reflective motions of the sky in the window’s reflection on my trek back from Little Tokyo. And just like that, they were gone from my view down at the bottom of the hill, where I was posted at the corner intersection of the 3rd Street Tunnel. 

It was during this final few good hours of daylight when I reached this point, and the smoggy exhaust of the tunnel sucked the moisture from my skin.My skin was already dry (not wet) in the way my long lost twin flame had once described as the far reaching effects of wildfire as ghost-dust. But the sky was still blue where I stood, and to those in the know, this glistening of afternoon light meant its fall here in Los Angeles. 

Surely soon, the Santa Ana winds will whip up the next catastrophe along the foothills, where perhaps the last of the local mountain lions go extinct in the seasonal blaze, that last carcass entombed in ash.What once could’ve been a fossil, will be roadkill on the 405. History is all about who makes sense of numbers as letters, but none of this city’s story will be coherent exactly, just deeply misunderstood.

***

Mind you, the only human remains found at the La Brea Tar Pits were of a young woman; and it was previously thought that she was buried there with her dog because a species of domesticated canine bones laid near. Yet, archeologists recently dated the dog to thousands of years older than the woman’s, which means it was immaterial if she died. Not an essential fact that by accident she sunk into the oil field. It’s neither here nor there if her tribe ceremonially ushered her body into the afterlife with a stray or companion. What matters is that she had been there at all. 

She was the only human (so-far-as-we-know) to have existed with all the great megafauna; the mastodons, the smilodons, the dewy ferns and redwoods, imperfect mice and yesterday’s camel. All other human life, as result, is simply implied. Let sleeping dogs sleep. 

***

Unassuming corners of concrete fortified by sycamore leaves. These function as the rudimentary jetties of downtown LA. The unaccounted plots of pavement that, by way of incidence, could belong to the homeless. Except the homeless don’t own them, due to laws and greater society’s irreverence. No matter, these cemented spaces feel neither public nor private. They are there where you were when you were there, if you were to ever be here with me. Such as earlier today when I passed Angel’s Flight on my walk home, looking up. 

People love it, Angel’s Flight. I don’t because of the tram’s tendency to fidget under buckling heat. I find its stature unimpressive and diminutive. Behind the trolley tracks, on Bunker Hill’s knoll, is a trapezoidal patch of Florida grass. The city officials let the grass proceed to overgrowth and then death. A tourist in line for the trolley commented that the lawn looked like straw. I’d agree, except it’s an imitation, inorganic and fragile just like the quality of my hair.

I wondered about what else this tourist thought of Los Angeles. Did they find it a mirage? What happens now when their mind acknowledges such banal open terrain? Or…What’s the opposite of mirage? An image for which the imagination plays tricks on you in order to have you see past or forget the image altogether? A secret of looking and hiding in plain sight. If not for this lie, no one would ever come clean about reality in this city. At least, not as a pedestrian. I want to notice everything so I can transmit the truth to you…The way lovers seek to be as connected as conjoined twins.

A block up from Angel’s Flight, I passed a poster about a woman gone missing, Hannah Kobayashi. The poster stated there’s a disturbing video of her entering the metro station near Crypto.com Arena. Weeks earlier, local news reported that she’d missed a connecting flight at LAX, and I suspected it was on purpose.

This week, her father had flown in from Hawaii to aid in the search for her. Sometime between then and now, police found him dead near LAX, having suffered “multiple blunt force traumatic injuries,” which I interpreted to mean that he succumbed to a fall.

***

Indeed. I search the online archives now…

A chief investigator just confirmed he’d jumped from the top of a parking structure in a press interview.

Tonight, now, as I write, the ghost-dust settles into twilight. The skyscrapers shine and dim from oily black to muted blue to California pink.

I receive another alert: It is footage of Hannah crossing the border into Mexico. Broadcasts feature a clip of an LAPD representative commenting on her evasion: “She’s an adult and she can choose to be missing.” The local paper speculates a motive as to Hannah’s desire to not be found. Quotes reference her friend’s belief that Hannah harbored an urge to “step away from modern connectivity.” In the comments of other social media, people suspect Hannah left Hawaii to meet a man in Los Angeles, presumably someone whom her family disapproved of. 
Three years back, another woman named Heidi Planck went missing. She’d disappeared in the building next to that exact same metro station near Crypto.com Arena. She’d just walked her dog in the alley between Hope and Flower Street. Heidi’s dog was found on a high floor of a new apartment building nearby. Footage shows Hiedi entering this building with her dog on leash. However, and to no evident explanation, no footage exists of her leaving the building. Moreover, she did not live in the area and knew no one who had.

So, to this day, it is unclear why she was there at all. Was Heidi intending to meet a clandestine lover, just as Hannah might’ve? Where do sleeping dogs lie?”

…

Jacy Bryla is a writer and editor currently living in Los Angeles. In the past decade, she picked up an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, a habit of trail running, and an orange, street cat named Gian Carlo.