The Infinite Blacktop (Claire DeWitt Mysteries, #3)

by Sara Gran

Kill all the wise men. Burn all the books. The kingdom of truth is your birthright, and the only thing standing in between you and the kingdom is your own monstrous, idiotic, self.

But when the detective showed up and we spelled it out for her—the stepfather, the mother, the suicide, the other kid still in the house—we realized it would be many, many dawns before anyone cared about the girl in the canal. It would be until the earth wilted, until time stopped, until the sun burned itself to a handful of dust, until Judgment Day came and we were raised from our coffins and canals and back-alleys and bedrooms, until we were called up to heaven and then maybe, someone would care about the fucking girl in the canal.

I didn’t do those things to be nice so much as for the cocaine-like rush of good feelings and self-aggrandizement that they brought.

I didn’t know until I got there that the city was a web of mountains and valleys and canyons, starting out wet and cool and drying itself out into desert as it headed east, unlike anyplace else on earth; a maze of dead-end streets that were never parallel and curved in and across themselves like snakes. There was an energy to Los Angeles that was sharp and would cut you if you didn’t recognize it. Every grain of sand in the beaches and desert buried under the city was a little razor, ready and willing to wound.

But if you saw it for what it was, I was learning, you could maneuver in between the knives and glide through the city, like a needle in a record. You just had to keep your eyes open for synchronicity, and never expect kindness. Just shut up and be grateful when it appeared.

“Crabs in a barrel. One tries to get out, presumably to some kind of a better life, and the other crabs will pull him back down. They actually do this, you should see it sometime. It’s really pretty extraordinary. Although, who knows, maybe the crab majority knows something the escapee doesn’t.

Enjoying life as it unfolded was always hard. Since Constance died it seemed physically impossible. It was all just a long, infinite, blacktop of things you’d regret not enjoying later.

It was cruel and modern, as if beauty had been made illegal.

I didn’t tell her I’d been there. I didn’t tell her I was still there. I didn’t tell her: I hate myself that much every day. I didn’t tell her: the only thing that saved me is gone and never coming back. I didn’t tell her: I will be there again, and I will be there so often I will come to believe it’s my natural habitat.

And I knew that who I was was not entirely dependent on my results. I am who I am because of who I am, not because of the commodities I generate or even the, you know, the sacred objects that I generate. I am not my results. I am my process.”

within spitting distance of a dozen other big glass towers that radiated black arts and dark power—banks, talent agencies, law firms.

It didn’t matter what people had inside. It mattered what they decided to share with you. What you could reach in and steal didn’t tell you anything at all.

Maybe the humans of Los Angeles would miss Merritt, but its real estate developers would not.

I drank iced tea. I would drink in the morning if it made me feel better, but it didn’t, just left me confused and angry by the afternoon.

He realized that you can try as hard as you want to escape who you are, but eventually, you realize there is no escape. There’s nowhere to run, and nothing to run to. Nothing ever really changes. The state of life on earth is exactly what it is, and the only chance of a happy life is accepting that. Accepting life as it is. And knowing that there is no escape. And that’s the only freedom he’s ever been able to find.”

Later, as life wore on, I would realize that most people think everyone hates them. The truth is worse; for most people, no one is thinking of them at all.

I would go back to that hopeful girl and beat sense and logic and pain into her until she understood, finally understood, that hope was a scorpion, and that if you poked at it, you would be stung.

But now, with my lack of sleep and blood loss and trauma imposing on me what I was pretty sure they meant when they said a natural high—on top of all the drugs and their gift of unnatural highs—now it seemed obvious that as vicious as life could and would be, there was a logic to it. It wasn’t a logic a human could understand, but it was there nonetheless, and sometimes, if you let nature and pills open enough doors, you could just barely see the edges of it, see the shadow of the patterns, even if your eyes weren’t wide enough to see the patterns themselves.

“Sometimes the past comes up on us like a ghost. Sometimes life is like a haunted house. But there’s no way to leave. You just have to make your peace with the ghosts.”