The street was pure Manhattan. People walking in a constant flow. Delivery guys shooting through traffic on electric bikes. Cars. Storefronts, some exuding the smell of pizza, bagels, or thick corned beef sandwiches. The energy and noise of a great conglomeration of people just living.
I liked walking alongside Ani. She had a light, easy stride, covering ground smoothly.
As we walked, I turned towards her.
"I'm just going to download it to you. Ask any questions you want."
She nodded. "Go ahead. Download."
I began.
"So I speak Turkish. But not only Turkish. As far as I know, I can speak any language. And read and write them too. I'm not exaggerating, I'm not being facetious."
She took that in.
"So you speak, say, Arabic?"
"Yes, Arabic and all dialects of Arabic. And Finnish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Portuguese, Latin, Croatian, Greek in all versions, Hebrew, Spanish, Armenian... everything I've come across."
She spoke to me. She was speaking in Russian.
"
In college, I minored in Russian. The book we were taking about, in the movie who was your favorite actor?
"
I answered in Russian.
"
Dorothy Malone, of course. But that bookstore scene in the movie is different than in the novel. You're talking about the Howard Hawks movie, right? There's a later version with Robert Mitchum that cuts that scene altogether. The Mitchum version is bizarre, it's set in London instead of Los Angeles.
"
"
But Mitchum was a good actor. Plus, he had street cred,
" I continued. "
He was arrested for marijuana possession in Los Angeles and did 60 days in the county jail. This was back in the late '40s. When he got out he supposedly said, 'You meet a better class of person in jail than in Hollywood.
'"
"Shit," she said, switching back to English. "You speak Russian like you were born in St. Petersburg."
A pause. "Okay. You speak a lot of languages. How?" she said.
I had never told anyone this.
It felt like stepping off a cliff.
But I kept talking.
"It happened four years ago, when I was finishing my residency at UCLA," I said.
"I pulled a girl out of the L.A. River. I'd been mountain biking. It was raining. Then a few weeks later a woman showed up at my house and--"
I could hear myself rambling.
"Woah, stop," she said. "Slow down. Give me a little more detail. Take your time."
She reached up and rested her hand on my shoulder, giving a light squeeze. Her touch felt good.
"It's okay. I'm a good listener."
We had reached the Clinton Street Café. We went in and sat down at a booth. A woman with a gun under her jacket, and a guy in a suit with a bunch of junk floating through his head.
A waitress came over and we ordered coffee.
I told Ani the story.
XII.
It had happened in my third year of medical residency. I was renting a house in Burbank. When I had days off I liked to mountain bike. I'd mainly go in the Verdugo Hills, maybe up the dirt fire road by DeBell golf course and then down the La Tuna Canyon singletrack. Or over to Brand Park and up the four mile fire road to the top of the Verdugos, a real lung-pounding climb.
Sometimes, when I was done with the dirt, I'd ride down to the L.A. River. There was a bike path on the south bank. You could get on at Victory, and ride the bike path seven flat miles down to where the river channel went under the 110 Freeway, and then seven miles back.
The L.A. River is really a huge storm channel, built on the path of the original natural river. Its banks were entirely concrete, starting in Canoga Park and running fifty miles until it emptied into the ocean at Long Beach. Its bottom was concrete too, until you hit Glendale, and then the bottom was the natural riverbed of dirt and sand, while the banks remained concrete. From that point, for the next five miles as the river curved around Griffith Park, there were full grown trees and sandbars in the river bed, along with bushes and numerous birds. Then, after the channel went under the 110 Freeway, the bottom was concrete again.
The river had a half-trapezoidal shape. Both concrete banks sloped down to the riverbed at a sharp angle. The channel was maybe 300 feet across at the bottom, 500 feet across at the top, and 35 feet deep.
Most of the year, the water was a trickle, only a few inches deep. But when it rained, the river transformed into a monster.
When it rained, water surged into the channel from numerous storm drain entrances and smaller side channels, and the concrete river would fill ten, fifteen, or twenty feet deep, with a current ripping along at 30 miles per hour or more, sweeping along with irresistible force, filled with debris. It was deadly to enter the channel when it rained. Every year several people fell in during storms and drowned, their bodies found many miles downstream, or even out at sea where the L.A. River finally emptied. People who were homeless would camp on certain sand islands in the riverbed during the dry season, but would flee at the first hint of rain; or, if they were slower but lucky, would be rescued by the Sheriff's swiftwater rescue team, clinging to the branches of the full-grown trees swamped by the flood. If they were unlucky, they would not be seen again.
It had been raining for three days, a steady, drenching, February rain. That afternoon there was a break of several hours when it was not forecast to rain, and I took advantage to get in a ride. I pounded, gasping, up the Brand fire road, its dirt ruts newly sharpened from the downpour. After resting at the top I cruised down, enjoying the downhill ride, and then headed to the L.A. River bike path, intending to add some easy flat miles. It started lightly raining again as I entered the bike path at Victory, but I was already drenched in sweat and didn't mind.
The bike path was deserted, I was the sole person on it. At a small homeless encampment next to the path, about a mile down from Victory, the people were huddled zipped in their tents and tarps, invisible. After passing the encampment there was no one.
The river on my left was in full flood. It looked to be more than 20 feet deep now, churning brown water roaring down the channel, the noise a beating rhythm. The raging water was hypnotic, terrifying and fascinating, and I had difficulty taking my eyes off it as I rode.
Down another mile and the rain increased. The bike path here went under a bridge that spanned the river south of Colarado Boulevard. I pulled under the bridge out of the rain, turning to go back.
Looking upstream, I saw the bike path was not deserted. A hundred yards upstream, a girl was crossing the path heading towards the river. She was wearing a white dress. She looked like she might be nineteen or twenty. She immediately struck me as being out of place. After a few moments I realized she was barefoot. She walked slowly and stared straight ahead. Her movements were trancelike, abnormally deliberate.
She climbed through the railing that separated the path from the downward concrete slope of the river proper. Robot-like, she kept walking straight down the bank, not stopping.
She was going to walk into the river.
With adrenaline clarity I saw and comprehended several things at once.
First, the girl was going to walk into the river; and she would be swept downstream to her death.
Second, where I was standing over my bike, a large sand island near the bank had a cluster of full-grown sycamores. The trees had maybe ten feet of their height submerged by the rising water, and some were in danger of being ripped out by the force of the current. The bushes around the trees' bases had caught a large amount of brush and debris. In the debris was a red wooden door, lost from some house or construction site far upriver.
I not recall thinking anything coherently. Certainly I did not make any rational calculation that I could do this and live. Rather, I just found myself dropping my bike, climbing through the railing, and running down the slope. It was as if I were viewing myself from the outside.
As the girl stepped one foot into the water, a hundred yards upriver, I waded into the freezing water and grabbed the red door.
The girl took another step forward and tottered for a moment as the current gripped her lower legs. Then the river swept her legs from under her and she was ripped downstream. She made no sound.
The water was deathly cold, like having raw concrete abrading my skin, and stunned me. But the door was solid wood and floated. I threw myself on the door like a surfboard, gripping the sides and kicking and paddling with my arms. The current immediately took the door in its grip, accelerating us wildly outward. The sound of the moving water pounded my ears, and water flailed at my face, blinding me. With great effort, I was able to face the door upstream, though already fifty yards below where I had launched. The force of the water was irresistible, overwhelming.
Lying flat on the vibrating door, I couldn't see the girl. Then I spotted her arm raised above the water, her white dress partly visible before she went under again.
I tried to position the door, but it was sheer chance that swept her directly towards me. In only a few more seconds her body approached, bobbed above the water; and in an incredible instant I grabbed her under her arm as she swept into the door. As soon as I touched her, she snapped out of her trance and screamed, though I could hardly hear her voice through the pounding sound of the water, which seemed to scream back.
I managed to haul the girl halfway onto the door. I shouted at her to grip on; I don't know if she heard me, but she did hold on. The sturdy red door bore the additional weight. I was kicking and paddling with all my strength, trying to get back to the river bank. It was only twenty lateral yards to the concrete bank, but it took me endless minutes to cover that twenty yards, all the while being swept downstream. Finally, I ran the door into another cluster of trees and brush next to the concrete bank. Somehow I got the girl out of the water and we climbed a few feet up the sloping concrete above the waterline, and collapsed.
