Cities of Night

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It was the afternoon of the day of my death, and I was in bed with my Japanese concubine when Haiyan, my housekeeper, announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

“Take him to the bar and get him a drink,” I quavered in Mandarin, trying not to laugh because Paul Pope was no more an archbishop than I was a Sufi. Prescient I may often be, but I had not foreseen the arrival of the Pope of Perversity on this most auspicious of days; not only was it the day of my death, but I knew with terrible clarity, that it was the day of The Big One: California was about submerge like Atlantis, and Nevada was about to become beachfront property.

I may have retired fifteen years ago from the professions of novelist and screenwriter; nevertheless you will be constrained to consider, if you know my work at all and take the trouble now to reread that first sentence, that I have lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening. But there is really nothing fake about it. Reality often plays into the hands of art. That I had celebrated my ninety third birthday two months earlier was a fact; the living room was still festooned with old-fashioned birthday cards. That Paul had come, albeit unexpectedly, to visit was a fact. But only I knew what the rest of the day had in store for the pestilent millions who swarmed over the West Coast like red ants picking clean a carcass.

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