THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 53
tus Burnham, with his shock of white
hair teased to the ceiling, his black col-
larless suit, his red-framed glasses, look-
ing as though he belonged more on the
stage of the Cannes Film Festival. Their
incomprehensible maps and charts, at-
tempts to track the rescue efforts, to de-
cipher the shape the structure had taken
as it settled and settled again.
Who had been the assassin’s target?
The architect took the only bullet, in
his spine. Just days before Mull entered
the house, Burnham had reappeared on
television, a glimpsed form in a wheel-
chair, hair still coiffed. Why had Mull
been so glued to the news? In his rec-
ollection, he’d been watching live the
morning that the L.A.P.D. perp-walked
the would-be assassin: Mull’s onetime
student James Gutiérrez.
A
s it happened, Mull had once been
at a dinner party with the archi-
tect. At a private home, that of an au-
thor Mull knew, a glamorous type, who’d
married the sister of the mayor. Though
the man never spoke aloud any sugges-
tion of access or influence, this associa-
tion by marriage conveyed an air of civic
celebrity that the author plainly relished.
Burnham seemed to style himself a
man of action, in some mid-twentieth-
century Hemingway or Picasso sense.
His only battles, so far as Mull could tell,
had been with aggrieved civic institu-
tions, or with neighbors of his proposed
incursions upon sunlight or airspace. The
money that flowed everywhere around
men like Burnham guaranteed that he
vanquished all such opponents.
Another thing Burnham vanquished
was dinner parties. At least this one. His
monologue began lightly enough, with a
disquisition on Los Angeles as the site of
a contest between flatness and what he
called stepped tessellations. “The richer and
crazier you are”—here Mull began in-
stantly to hate him, for this romantic con-
flation—“the likelier you are to occupy a
tessellated planar environment. The sim-
plest example is the standard canyon house.
Notched into a ravine, turning a buttressed
backside to anyone approaching from
below. But the spectacular examples are
those private homes the studios rent, at
great expense, to play the domiciles of vil-
lains in science-fiction movies—”
Mull tuned out. He looked to his
table companion at his left for a side
conversation. A woman he knew, who’d
left academia to serve on the city’s plan-
ning commission. She, too, gave signs
of impatience with Burnham’s preen-
ing. She had to explain it to Mull, who
was being a little slow. Burnham had
sold the city on his solution to the prob-
lem of Skid Row. The tens of thousands
living unsheltered, the tent cities strung
along miles of streets. That explained
the confluence of guests here. Burn-
ham’s table talk was a rehearsal for the
public unveiling of his plan, the tesser-
actic shelter.
The dinner concluded with Burnham’s
toast to the partnership. “Why shouldn’t
our refugees from late-stage capitalism
participate in the wonders of hypercu-
bic spatiality? You don’t have to under-
stand a house to live in it.”
It struck Mull, at the time, as ten-
dentious. Crypto-scientific nonsense.
He left before dessert.L
ately Mull wondered if Burnham
had, in a sense, delivered exactly
what he’d proposed. The psychic ca-
tastrophe of unapproachable canyon
houses, windows that functioned as one-way glass, rooms locked in abutment,
like coffins. All of these had been the
domain exclusively of the canyon dwell-
ers. Burnham had brought such mar-
vels to those finding shelter along the
overpasses and riverside embankments.
Should he be blamed for the earth-
quakes? Some claimed that the faults
had been triggered by the anchoring of
the structure to the bedrock. Yet Los
Angeles had been overdue.
In any case, the collapses had turned
Burnham’s revolutionary shelter into
its own opposite. At its unveiling, the
tesseractic house had been a kaleido-
scopic tower, impossible to gaze upon
except from below. Now it could be
seen only by peering into apertures in
the ground. Sinkholes, some of which
might even be dangerous to approach.
In a time of continual earthquakes, the
windows into the earth could only in-
spire fear.T
here’d been more aftershocks the
day Mull had been in the visiting
room at Men’s Central, talking with
James Gutiérrez. Entombed in the win-
dowless vault of the jail, Mull took the“I don’t know about tides. What about torts? I know about torts.”