52 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
of the earthquakes, Mull and the popu-
lation of the formerly unsheltered were
essentially living underground.
I
t was only a short distance from the
atrium to the drifter’s desert window,
which lay hidden behind a maintenance
door, at the back of a room full of breaker
boxes and wiring panels. The frame wasn’t
large, though wide enough to clamber
through. The view was panoramic. Yellow
scrub to a horizon of sand, sky-petitioning
Joshua trees, molten-appearing rock for-
mations. Had Mull never visited the des-
ert east of Los Angeles, he could have
mistaken it for Mars.
“You really went through.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“How did you get back?” Mull asked.
“I hitchhiked back, from J-Tree. It
ain’t that far.”
“Why did you return?”
The man shrugged. “Nothing else
to do.”
“How did you get back inside?” Mull
was interested, generally, to know which
entrances were in use. The one he’d used
had closed. Yet still new faces appeared.
The numbers grew.
“I came through the train tunnel,
under Union Station.” This reply took
a moment. Was the man uninterested?
Or unremembering?
“Have the trains quit running?”
“Maybe.”
The drifter’s tale of escape and return
tested Mull’s credulity. For one thing,
the height of the desert window looked
to Mull too dangerous to risk bridging
with a leap. And there was no sign of
shelter below. No road out of that blast-
ing sunlight. One wouldn’t have to break
one’s legs in the fall to die of thirst, such
distance from help. Even a turned ankle
could be fatal.
The man’s account was too vague. Had
he observed nothing during his sojourn
outside the house? Mull had yet to meet
anyone who’d persuasively gone outside
and returned; the matter of the present
state of the wider city was, for Mull, an
open one. Perhaps there was no city to
return to now, not as he’d known it.
In any case, Mull had put aside the
question of whether he would be capa-
ble of exiting the house if he wished. All
windows and doors worked in one di-
rection only. For instance, when Mull
had crawled over the debris and tried
the hatch in the now disappeared corri-
dor, it had led to another point deep in-
side the house. This was typical.
Mull had no idea whether he could
still transit outside. His own entry point
had grown remote as the house unfolded
itself through the series of earthquake
collapses. Would his car still be parked
on the other side of the door through
which he’d entered, at the bottom of the
public stairs where Reservoir Street de-
scended to Glendale Boulevard? It might
have been stripped for parts by now. Even
beyond his uncertainty about the condi-
tion of the city outside, Mull’s sense of
time had been damaged by his residence
in the house.
Mull excused himself from the window.
The vision of the desert was entrancing
but nauseating. So different from the life
he’d learned inside. The drifter said noth-
ing. Mull, as he left, attempted to mem-
orize the turns that led to this place, an-
other possible subject of his study.
E
nvironmental analysis. That had been
Mull’s field, when the earthquakes
began and the house first fell. He could
barely recall now what it was supposed
to entail. He’d studied the Los Angeles
River, the secret system of concrete chan-
nels, as often dry as carrying a trickle of
moisture, which went ignored by most
Angelenos. The fenced zones zigzagging
alongside the freeways were home to
wildlife—to lizards and frogs, swimming
rats, weird herons—and to unsheltered
humans, with their tents, their carts, their
fires. Mull had liked to think he was
“working” on that intractable problem.
Though, in comparison with the inter-
vention of the church volunteers, the food
banks, and the charity medical clinics,
anything Mull had to offer was paltry,
theoretical. He reported to no one. No
office of the city waited for his results.
Few students had ever affiliated with
Mull, choosing him as an adviser, say, or
to supervise their thesis work. His classes
were a requirement in the architecture
major; otherwise they’d have been empty.
The handful of disciples Mull attracted
tended to be those with roots in the wider
city, sometimes older students. Others
were transfers from the community col-
leges and living alone or with their fam-
ilies rather than in the dorms. Often the
type to wander from college, into trades
or the military, or off the radar entirely.
Mull had felt more than once that if he
were faithful to his ambivalence he’d have
followed them out of the institution, to
set up a life by the river.
Mull had been spending more time
there, testing himself for exile, before
the earthquakes. He’d leased an in-law
house from a friend, ostensibly a “writing
studio.” It backed onto a wide embank-
ment, accessible through a rent in the
fencing. The river’s concrete was streaked
with white trails of bird shit, liquid ejec-
tions stretched by velocity into a kind
of hieroglyphic language, if only Mull
could read it.
At the channel’s edge, where the rain’s
surges deposited refuse, one bare tree
sheltered a gnarl of sun-bleached junk,
stuff pitched through car windows from
overpasses. Most days, Mull was alone
at this crap oasis, his personal Walden.
Few of the tent-dwelling people chose
Mull’s embankment. Perhaps that was
because of the lack of shade, perhaps be-
cause Mull, in his studio, seemed to the
tent dwellers to be surveilling the area.
T
he time leading to Mull’s decision
to enter the house had been marked
by a series of catastrophic occurrences.
The earthquakes, but not merely the
earthquakes. In the contemplative vac-
uum of his present life those events
stacked in memory, as if they’d trans-
pired in a matter of days, or hours. In
truth, it had been almost five months
from the first earthquake to the mo-
ment when Mull committed himself to
searching for Rose Gutiérrez.
An example: it was at the third press
conference on the subject of the collapse,
not the first, that the assassination at-
tempt had occurred. The televised pre-
sentations were already threatening to
become routine, always the same three
men on the stage, flanked by policemen
and press secretaries: the slim dapper
mayor; the beleaguered president of the
housing authority; the architect Quin-
