At any rate, herewith Chapter 2 of what is currently called Jewel Box (I'm not wild about that title). Chapter 1 is here, for your reference.
Chapter 2: The Road Worrier
The rain stopped at precisely 8:47 am. Carol Munch knew that because she had been perched in front of the window, staring out at the pouring rain, a clock on the window sill next to her. She would be extremely late for work, but she absolutely refused to drive when it was raining. For some reason, was her thinking, Southern California drivers were incapable of comprehending the concept of water falling from the sky and the freeways became free-for-alls and were even more nightmarish than they normally were.
So for the past three hours, Carol had sat in front of the window, silently cursing singer/songwriter Albert Hammond, whose 1973 top five smash “It Never Rains in Southern California” was one of the things that had drawn Carol and her husband to the South Bay town of Mall Beach nine years earlier. After the first year, when much of the month of December made a liar out of Hammond, Carol’s then-husband Edward simply shrugged and said “I guess songs can be wrong. Who knew?”
But by then Edward had been completely absorbed in his work. A comparative zoologist by training, he had accepted a professorship at Mall State, a small Southern California college located in downtown Mall Beach.
As the rain ended, Carol quickly began getting ready for work. As she bustled about her bedroom, she grabbed a locket from her dressing table. A gift from her sister back east, it had come in the mail only a day earlier and had been sent to celebrate what would have been Carol and Edward’s 15th anniversary. Within the locket was a picture of Edward. It wasn’t actually a photograph; Edward actually hated to have his picture taken, so all anyone in the family had to remember him by was a caricature that had been drawn one Friday night on the Santa Monica pier. In the picture, a big-headed Edward wore a bib, had a knife in one raised hand, a fork in the other, and, with a huge goofy smile, was about to dig into a large supine lizard reclining on a bed of salad greens.
The caricature was a playful reference to Edward’s chosen field of study.
Dr. Edward Munch (no relation to the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch) had been a pioneer of—and, in fact, the inventor of and, well, sole researcher in—the field of gustatory taxonomy. Dissatisfied with the system of classifying animals and plants that had been devised by Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th century (grouping animals and plants with similar physiological characteristics into phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species), Dr. Munch sought instead to classify animals and plants according to how they tasted. Ultimately, he desired to answer a question that had been eating him (as it were) his entire scientific career: how many animals actually do taste like chicken?
Needless to say, such a system required a not insubstantial amount of empirical evidence—which is to say, eating. So, for several years, Dr. Munch traveled the globe, sampling as many creatures as he could, and his life’s work—the immense A Concordance of World Organisms: Encyclopedia and Cookbook—was coming together nicely. His monograph, “Functional Morphology of H. hydrochaeris With and Without Pork Gravy,” was a smash hit at that year’s National Zoological Conference and had even led to his helping found a new cable channel, a joint venture between the Discovery Channel and the Food Network.
But, alas, it was all to end too soon. While in the Amazon rain forest, he had no sooner taken a bite out of a large, brightly colored—and, unbeknownst to Dr. Munch, poisonous—tree frog, than he uttered what were to be his last words (“needs paprika”) and, according to one witness at the scene, did a remarkable imitation of his Norwegian namesake’s most famous painting. He then fell face first onto the frog, and a brilliant scientific career ended just as it had begun: with Dr. Munch wearing a lobster bib.
As Carol continued to be haunted by the loss of the one great love of her life (especially after she had finally forced him to accept that she would pick the romantic dinners) she smiled forlornly. She clasped the locket around her neck and reflected on what was the great irony: at the same time that Edward was digging into his fatal frog, back in Mall Beach, his research assistant Claude Linguette had just perfected the LickMaster 3000 Electronic Tongue which could analyze the taste of any object placed in it and correlate that taste with a database of more than 180,000 individual flavors.
The rain gone and the sun finally muscling its way through the cloud cover, Carol turned the light off in her bedroom, padded out to the kitchen, and grabbed her car keys from the counter. Distracted as she was by the terror of the thought of having to drive for 90 minutes on the 405 Freeway, she didn’t get a good grip on keys and they fell to the floor. She looked down and stared at the keyring on the floor. She had five keys, her car key was in the middle and it was so much larger than the other keys that it looked to her like her keyring was giving her the finger. Figures, she thought. And that pretty much summed up the way she perceived the act of driving in L.A.
She picked up her obscene keys, took her umbrella from a coatrack by the front door, opened the door, and stared outside at her car in the driveway. She took a deep breath, and out she went.
It should be noted, in the event it hasn’t been made apparent, that Carol hated driving. Well, not so much driving per se, but rather other drivers.
The town of Mall Beach, California, had been founded in 1773 by a Jesuit priest by the name of Father Carmelo Jello (pronounced “Hay-yo,” it should be noted). One of the original Spanish missionaries to settle in the area, the town, like so many in California, was originally centered around Father Jello’s mission, named San Serrif, notable for a peculiar unadorned style of architecture. The mission was distinguished from others of the period by Father Jello’s policy of not exterminating the indigenous peoples if they failed to wholeheartedly accept Church dogma. In fact, Father Jello was known as quite the humanitarian, and even after his passing and the mission was abandoned, he remained quite the hero and the remains of the mission had remained intact for over 200 years. In the 1960s, it was converted into a shrine to a period in pre-colonial history that people weren’t actually ashamed of. Unfortunately, in the early 1990s, the mission was torn down to make room for a shopping mall—indeed, the mall that gave Mall Beach half its name.
The other half wasn’t really a beach per se; the town fought with the county and neighboring towns to give San Serrif at least some oceanfront. It was Southern California, after all. The others relented, and it was agreed to redraw San Serrif’s borders so that a one-inch-wide strip of land was allowed to stretch from landlocked San Serrif through five miles of coastal Flako del Mar, and reach the Pacific Ocean. And thus it was that San Serrif changed its name to Mall Beach, hoping to lure tourists as well as local Southern Californians to take advantage of its immense mall as well as its “exclusive” oceanfront property, although taking advantage of Mall Beach’s beach was only possible if you were no larger than a small tree frog.
Carol pulled out of her driveway onto Beech Street and made an immediate left onto Beech Road, which merged onto Beach Drive and intersected Beach Boulevard two lights down. She had just missed the green left turn arrow and sat back and waited the 20 minutes it would take for the seemingly endless series of light permutations to cycle back to her lane. In a way, she was glad. She was in no hurry to hit the freeway. Her boss would probably be mad that she was so late, but tough. It was the company’s own damn fault for moving. When the company had been located two blocks from Carol’s house, she walked to work and was early or at the latest on time every day. When they decided to move the company 90 miles south to Rancho Bastardo, she was upset—for reasons you can pretty much fathom by now.
The left-turn arrow finally turning green, she turned left into Beach Boulevard and headed north toward the 405 Freeway. Traffic was still heavy, even at this relatively late hour, and she inched her way toward the freeway on ramp. She pulled up to the metering light and, as it turned green, she closed her eyes and gunned the engine. Pulling onto the freeway always reminded her of a airplane taking off. The surge of the engine, the g-forces pushing her back in her seat, her heart in her throat, he knuckles white with terror. She successfully merged into the freeway without much incident. Now, she had to get over a lane or two as the rightmost lane would abruptly vanish one exit later—a phenomenon that took her completely by surprise the first time she had ever driven this route, since there was no warning that the lane was going to do any such thing.
Traffic remained heavy, yet everyone was cruising at about 75 or 80. Naturally, everyone tailgated. She clutched wheel tightly in her hands, and went with the flow. In her rearview mirror, she saw a pair of SUVs pinballing from lane to lane on opposite sides of the highway. Exploiting the slightest opening between cars—be it two car lengths or one Ǻngstrom—they shot forward like it was the Indy 500. As they both simultaneously loomed up quickly in the rearview mirror, Carol knew for sure they were going to hit her. She couldn’t imagine how they could not—but, miraculously, they shot by. (Unbeknownst to Carol, 10 miles up the road they would miscalculate their trajectories and collide with each other, eliciting an inappropriate yet satisfying round of applause from many of the other drivers who had been terrified by them.)
As she espied more hellbent drivers approaching at multiwarp speeds behind her, Carol could feel her heart pounding in her chest. Oddly, it was accompanied by the sensation of some other object—hopefully not an internal organ—pounding on her chest. Whatever it was, it was radiating some kind of heat—not a searing, painful heat, but rather a calm, soothing heat. She was too busy being terrified of the traffic to pay much attention to this strange sensation, and as she saw a sports car shoot over four lanes and attach itself, leechlike, to her tail, a very strange thing happened. Her car started to rise.
“What the hell?!” she exclaimed, as, indeed, her car moved vertically, until she was moving at the same forward speed, but only 100 feet above the freeway.
Now her heart was really going, but the other pounding sensation, and the accompanying heat, had abated. Now she had to deal with the fact that she was also terrified of heights. There was what sounded like a sigh that came from her chest, and the heat and external pounding started again. Her car descended and she landed in a clear spot of freeway. At the same time, every other car on the freeway rose 100 feet above the road surface. They all stayed in their lanes, and they all followed the curve of the highway and it wended its way southeast. In fact, all the cars behaved exactly the way they would if they had been on the ground—the only difference being that they weren’t. Carol was surprised—to say the least—but she was happy. There were now no cars around her to terrify the life out of her and for the first time in her life, she enjoyed the drive to work.
When she pulled off the freeway 65 miles later, all the other cars were restored to the road surface.
True, her boss berated her for being late, but she didn’t mind—and soon, no one else minded her lateness. Given how happy her mood was, they all felt that whatever the reason for her lateness, it was worth it.
Carol didn’t ask questions, like how it happened, but she was inordinately happy to discover, when she started her trek homeward at 5:00, the same thing happened.
When she read the L.A. Times the following morning, she discovered that Steve Harvey’s “Only in LA” column was entirely devoted to the incident.
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