Chapter 1
THE PHOTOGRAPH

WHETHER BEAUTIFUL OR TERRIBLE, THE PAST IS ALWAYS A RUIN.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seemlike artifacts from a lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass. I remember the spherical alcohol lamp that glowed like a tiny ghost, ringed with dancing blue flames, which hung over the dining room table of the house where I grew up. I remember the sweet, oily smell of coal smoke, and the creaking of horse-drawn carriages on the dirt road outside. Most of all I remember
the summer twilight over the mountains and how, on certain evenings, just before the sun sank below the horizon, it cast rays so luminous and golden that they felt like a solid, enveloping close into which a small boy could simply disappear. An intensity no light today seems to match.

These images appear as snapshots of a vanished world— literally vanished, considering how much has changed between those years and the present day. Since then, airplane flights linking the continents have transformed once-in-a-lifetime voyages into matters of a few hours spent in a comfortable seat. Things like telephones and automobiles, once improbable rarities possessed only by the very rich, are now taken for granted by average people. When I was young, the changing of the seasons was the most important punctuation of life: ancient rhythms that have since been replaced by electric lights that turn night into day and fragment each day into electronic-precision intervals measured by the punch-clock instead of the almanac.

Now, watching the young men and women dressed in skintight leotards rollerblade past the bench where I like to watch the sun sink over the Pacific on these warm Los Angeles evenings, I know that my world no longer exists. It has vanished utterly, and would be incomprehensible to these self-satisfi ed, bright-faced youths.

Thanks to the genius of human invention, things have sped up until I can hardly keep track anymore: the new-new internet, the new world order, the next big thing that seems to arrive every day (if the newspapers are to be believed). Carried on the tide of progress, we all seem to be fast-forwarding into a future where our memories become irrelevant relics from a useless and discarded past.

Let me be clear: I don’t mean to glorify the “good old days,” or to condemn the contemporary milieu. Whatever charms the past may have had, I don’t believe those bygone times were any better than the present (at least, apart from my own preferences—and I won’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself). Instead, what I’m trying to explain is that I am a kind of dinosaur: a member of a near-extinct species, fumbling with arthritic talons on the
typewriter keys as I write these pages.

Several years ago I took a composition course at the local communitycollege. During those sensitivity-laden sessions (where badprose was miraculously transformed into “challenging work,”and cliché into “irony”), the instructor taught us that a story shouldstart by making clear where the narrator stands, establishing thevoice. And that’s what I’m hoping to do here—only, rereadingthese last few paragraphs, I see that it doesn’t seem to be working.And to be honest, clarity in general isn’t one of my strengths thesedays. So maybe it’s best if I begin(again) by simply explaining how it all began.

IT WAS TWO YEARS ago when the little bells above the entrance tothe antiques store tinkled and the door swung open, a sweating delivery man staggering through. I looked up from the book I’dbeen reading and stood.

“Got a shipment for you,” he announced, dropping the packages next to my desk. “Need your signature.”

I wrote my name on the screen that he shoved in my direction. “See you around, boss.” He gave me a thumbs-up gesture before departing into the brightness of the world outside. I looked down at the three large boxes.

It had been almost a decade since I’d opened my antiques store, and by then it was a reasonably successful business, located in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb. I should emphasize that I didn’t start the business because I was ambitious. In fact, I had opened the store for quite opposite reasons: as a refuge, a way of retreating from life. Despite my decades of trying to feel comfortable in the world, I had never really managed to fi t into this place (this sprawling California city with its constant noise, its nirvanas of vitamin juice and self-realization—or this twentieth century in general, for that matter). The store was intended to be a place where I could hide, where I could be alone and let the world forget me.

To my surprise, although I didn’t have much in the way of a gift for salesmanship or knowledge of antiques, the shop provided me with a modest but healthy income, until a larger, more polished antiques store opened a few blocks away. Since then, to compete, I’d been forced to sell less furniture and more historical knickknacks.
For the most part these were old magazines and books that I purchased in bulk, mainly from estate sales in the Midwest: inexpensive curiosities that might attract casual shoppers who wandered in to purchase a fragment of the past.

Through the small windows of the shop, dusty beams of sunlight illuminated the cluttered interior of the space: the worn upholstery of armchairs, an assortment of Edwardian-era dressing tables with age-silvered mirrors, a curio cabinet bearing a row of ormolu clocks (all motionless, since I couldn’t stand the sound of their ticking). Outside, the shapes of palm trees shimmered in the heat.

I slit the packing tape on the first of the boxes and began to inventory its contents. Issues of Time magazine and Life magazine, covers displaying images of celebration and catastrophe. A newspaper clipping and a small black-and-white photograph that had been taped together fell out of one of the magazines and I stooped to pick them up, glancing at the picture. A snapshot of three people sitting at a table in a bar, two men and a woman.

The next thing I remember was the door swinging open, ayoung couple entering the shop. I looked up from the photograph, trying to wipe away my tears with shaking hands. The couple stared at me and I stammered something about the store being closed. They hurried away, and I closed my eyes again.

I told myself that the photograph didn’t make any difference or change anything. But already I understood that, whatever I might want to believe, everything had changed. All my efforts at forgetting and indifference were abruptly meaningless. Like it or not, I would have to go back and unbury everything. Somehow I would have to find a way of telling this story: of salvaging some fragment from the scrap heap of the past.

It has been two years since then, and I’m still struggling to fit the pieces together. At one time I imagined that I could be a good scholar, but if I’m honest with myself I never was—and, at any rate, I’m too old for such efforts now. Despite my hours spent hunched over library books and staring at the glowing hieroglyphics of computer screens, I still can’t prove anything.

More than once, in fact, I told myself that writing this story was a waste of time, a lost cause. But in the end, the cunning of desire always triumphs over the cunning of reason. (Or, as Byron put it, “There is no instinct like that of the heart.”) So that even after I’d decided to give up, at the least expected of times—sitting in my apartment, watching the electric nighttime silhouette of Los Angeles—it would all come crowding back to me…

Well, at least it’s a good story. (Of course I’d have to say that, wouldn’t I? But really: it is.) It’s a story about conspiracies and struggles to reshape the world; about secret wars between men like J. P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. It is about one of the strangest and least-known mysteries of American history: the
existence and disappearance of the Lost Kingdom of Ohio. It is about science and faith, and the distance between the two. Most of all, it’s a story about a man and a woman, and about love.

In my imagination, it begins with a day in the heart of winter. I can picture it effortlessly: the gray sky and the leafless trees, the solemn profile of a young woman standing near a riverbank. A whisper of cold on my cheek as I look up to see the first flakes of snow beginning to fall—

But that’s not right. That scene comes much later—or, looking at it another way, much earlier. Really, the only place I can honestly begin is in the middle of things, with New York City, in the year 1900. With the construction of the first subway tunnels through the dark bedrock beneath the metropolis, and with a young man so distant from where I sit now that he seems an unrecognizable stranger: a mechanic, an adventurer, and perhaps also a criminal,
named Peter Force.

The D.A. grants few interviews, but his positions are well known. Over the past year, the Los Angeles City Council has drafted several proposals to attempt to regulate the 137 medical marijuana dispensaries operating with permits in the city of Los Angeles. On each occasion, the D.A. has said that he will prosecute those who attempt to sell marijuana. Compromises, addendums, even thousand-foot proximity limits from schools do not soften his political stance. Apparently, Mr. Cooley thinks of voter intent as more of a survey.
But what a survey. According to a Gallup poll, 54% of Americans in the west supporting legalization. With dispensaries facing a variety of perplexing legal issues, it may be simpler to just outright legalize it. As of January 2010, there is a bill in the state assembly to legalize marijuana and place a $50 tax on each ounce sold. People familiar with addition and multiplication vouch for the economic feasibility of the plan, and the subsequent financial boon to the state.
So what is the dark side?
Many people in law enforcement feel that medical marijuana dispensaries are perfect fronts for crime/terrorist organizations. Oddly enough, fronts are not exclusive to drug operations. Perfectly legitimate businesses can set themselves up as fronts for lazy retired crime families. An otherwise pleasant seeming coffee shop on the West Side of Los Angeles was, for years, run by an unscrupulous Asian crime family with very insecure hairnets. And was the coffee remarkable? No.
Then there’s the problem of setting up a board to regulate medical marijuana. Where does the money come from to appoint a board who will watch over the dispensaries? What about malpractice insurance? How will the law be written, if everyone is far too stoned to do it?
The state assembly has a much better plan. Legalizing marijuana without classifying it as a medical substance will eliminate thorny bureaucratic issues, close doors to Evildoers (who are currently battling to be recognized as a separate entity from jazz fusion band the EvildoneIts) and boost revenue.
Or will it?

Revenue: the law, and the growers

“You gotta look at how the government works,” Jeff Joseph, the owner of the dispensary Organica, explains. He’s been running Organica since 2007. The majority of his clientele are card-carrying cancer patients. As a State Board of Equalization tax-paying business owner, he has a sharp grasp of revenue, and the keen understanding of human nature that anyone dealing with the public on a regular basis must possess.
“[The government] has two different aspects. They have taxation, but they also have law enforcement. The laws that they’re enforcing, that’s their business. Their business is not law changing. That’s our job. The law makers want to represent their constituents. But until the constituents’ voice is loud enough, they don’t really want to do anything. It’s a hot potato. Law enforcement is going to interpret the law to benefit them. Everybody’s going to interpret the law to benefit them, whoever’s interpreting.”
When asked about the potential revenue provided to the government by taxation, Jeff says, “Let’s look at this way.
“They already have a revenue basis. The people who are able to actually enforce the law already have the revenue base. They look at the tax as a threat to the revenue base.”
But this fear about a threat to the revenue base is not purely on the side of the law. If legalization were to become a reality, how would large-scale marijuana growers feel about taxation?
It should be noted that interviewing large scale growers is a bit like using carrier pigeons; it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work, but it does, somehow. As it happens, large-scale growers in California are pro-legalization. They foresee that if marijuana is legalized, large-scale corporations will take over, and a “King of Beers” situation will result, turning homegrown growers into the equivalent of microbreweries, whose high-end product will attract the discerning buyers.
Since the first wave of dispensaries opened, these large-scale growers have witnessed an increase in their sales. In some places, such as Humboldt county, growers feel that legalization would “bring legitimacy to a very old industry.”
But taxation does not necessarily excite them. Much like law enforcement, they are somewhat reluctant to part with a revenue stream that is working for them, in favor of an untested method.
So what is the solution?
As Jeff says, “[The law is] enforcing the statues that are there. We get the other side saying, well, people voted for this, we want to see this happen. You got a conflict of interest. People need to make a clear law. That’ll be the first thing.”

Lawsuits and fees

Before a clear law can be made, however, it’s much better to start suing people. At least, as of March 2010, this seems to be the solution of city attorney Carmen Trutanich, who filed a lawsuit against Organica, among others, to prevent over-the-counter sales of marijuana.
But not to worry. Public advocacy group Americans for Safe Access filed a counter-lawsuit against the city on behalf of the dispensaries.
The lawsuits were prompted by the February 3rd signing of a city council bill limiting the number of dispensaries to 70. The law hasn’t quite taken effect, as its passage hinges on the city approving the fees that the dispensaries will pay to remain in operation.
It’s the revenue, stupid.

“She was young. I don’t know how young, because it was dark and it’s hard for me to tell black peoples’ age,” began one trucker’s story. Help was coming, I thought, from a world that was drastically different from my own—comfortable, liberal, all-embracing LA.
It was Lyn Thompson who realized that truck drivers have an unusual proximity to human trafficking, and are thus ideal for identifying victims. Her initiative Truckers Against Human Trafficking aims to stop sex trafficking—especially forced prostitution—by reaching out to these members of the trucking industry.
As a result of the organization, the National Human Trafficking Hotline, to which Lyn’s awareness campaign directs truckers, has received countless calls from drivers across the country concerning human trafficking activity. Since the LAPD and the FBI rely heavily on tips and leads, these calls have proven fundamental to the liberation of trafficking victims nationwide.
Here’s what’s remarkable about this. These people care. These truck drivers from middle America are incredibly concerned and morally compelled to take action. Obviously not all of the truckers care, but a few of them do, and these few are spreading the word through the network of truckers like gospel through a grapevine.
“Personally, I think anybody that ignores it, I’m not sure I wouldn’t want to give them a bloody nose,” said Scott Weidner, President of Transport for Christ.
As I spoke to these individuals with backgrounds so drastically different from my own, I guiltily found myself wondering why they got involved. Why do they care?
So I asked them. I asked them the question that I have so often asked myself. Their answers are dispersed throughout the words that follow. I suspect that for the truckers, it’s a matter of human dignity and personal pride that leads them to feel sympathetic towards the sex slaves; more sympathetic, that is, than the average American newspaper reader—sympathetic enough to take action.

THE VISIONARIES

Truckers Against Human Trafficking began as an initiative of Chapter 61 Ministries, an anti-slavery organization in Oklahoma. Women in Trucking is an affiliated group, as is Transport For Christ, an organization working to diminish the demand for prostitution among truckers. “We started this seeking God,” explains Lyn Thompson, a devout Christian from Oklahoma and the founder of Truckers against Trafficking. “Everything we do is based in prayer.” Again, a foreign world, I thought. But it occurred to me that Lyn’s reason for caring—religion, conservativism—had something fundamentally in common with my own concern. I care about sex trafficking because I care about sex. That’s the fault of my conservative, religious mother (who grew up in the bubble of Jewish Costa Rica), and the resulting sex-is-special upbringing from which I no longer try to break free.
In October 2008, Lyn and her co-founding 5 daughters put on a human trafficking awareness conference, where Phil Gazely, Social Justice Advocate on Human Trafficking, was invited to speak. Phil mentioned the role of gas station attendants in identifying trafficked victims, which he hopes will become “a movement.” The gas station outreach idea began in the mind of Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves and a key player in America’s fight against human trafficking. Lyn decided to take the idea one step further.
Since then, she’s been educating truckers about the issue, and raising awareness nationwide via radio shows, websites, webinars, awareness conferences, and wallet-sized cards with detailed instructions on how to identify a victim.
Why truckers? A massive amount of sex trafficking takes place at highway rest stops, truck stops and gas stations. Usually, victims of sex trafficking put on a smile for their buyers; they’ve been threatened from their pimps that if they do otherwise, they will be beaten and tortured, or their families will be killed. But if a girl sees one client repeatedly, a relationship may begin to form, and eventually she might trust him enough to confide. Transient populations—like truckers at a truck stop—are ideal in the eyes of traffickers, because the men won’t be there long enough to “remember her face, or form a bond,” explains Lyn.
In addition, the victims “are transported primarily across interstate freeways,” says Phil Gazely. “What we’re doing is getting people to be our eyes and ears.”
Truckers, then, are in a two-fold unique position to spot victims of trafficking. The initiative is to educate these truckers about sex slavery, to help them identify the signs, to inform them that the “prostitutes” they encounter are not all there of their own volition.

THE HEROES

One massive truck stop in Ontario, just half an hour outside of LA, is particularly notorious for “prostitution.” In fact, prostitution got so bad, that the city of Ontario had to put up a fence around the station to keep the prostitutes out. Nevertheless, the problem persists. Chaplain Michael DeBay, who permanently ministers out of a trailer at the Ontario truck stop, told me “I hate to say it but they’re like cockroaches, those prostitutes.”
At night, truckers at the Ontario station and elsewhere find themselves uncomfortably solicited by a bang on their truck door, or a shout over the radio: “any guys looking for some company?” In the words of Stephen King, truck driver, “You’d be in your truck and they’d be beating on your door and you’d tell them no, go away.” But most truckers didn’t turn down the knock at the door. The organization Transport for Christ is devoted primarily to preventing truck drivers from turning to prostitutes.
“There’s always a good handful of truck drivers,” says Chaplain DeBay, “that make it bad for the rest of them”—that is, by having sex with prostitutes, thereby tainting the trucker reputation. I’ve come to learn that truckers generally care a great deal about maintaining an honorable reputation. Dave Bowman, trucker and head of Christian Truckers Network, alludes to the problem: “Now we’re getting our reputation damaged and tattered by a small group of truckers who will haul anything for a buck including human slaves.” In other words, truckers are not only the heroes, but the villains of the story. Or at the very least, accessories to the villains. And it’s up to the truck driver to reclaim their dignity—much like the sex slave whose dignity has been ruthlessly stolen from her.
In LA, an estimate of 10 thousand women are currently being forced to work as prostitutes. But the typical truck driver has no reason to suspect that when he calls for a prostitute over the radio, he may well get a sex slave instead.
“Most truckers think these women are doing it just to make money, and treat them just as prostitutes,” says Stephen King, who has been a trucker for 15 years. Now that he’s been taught to recognize the signs of trafficking, he has spotted a great deal of suspicious activity.
In August, Stephen was chatting with a man who (due to the economic crisis) had recently lost his home and was living out of his car at a truck stop. He told Stephen that he had seen a vulnerable young girl offering her services. The two men reported the situation to the national trafficking authorities. Later, they learned the girl was 15 years old and being held against her will.
At a different truck stop, Stephen spotted 2 girls with a suspicious man. This caught his attention because one of the girls had a black eye. When the man went to the bathroom, the 2 girls entered the chapel, where they found Stephen, approached him, and said “we need help.”
Because these girls are being moved all the time, they have no idea where they are. An inability to identify surroundings, coupled with the confusion that naturally follows, provides an important red flag for truckers who are on the look out.
One anonymous trucker reported the following. When a young woman asked him if he wanted to buy her services and he declined, she said “you see that white Cadillac over there? I’m gonna get the hell beat out of me if I don’t bring back a certain amount of money.”
Similarly, Keith Thomas, a trucker from Indiana, reported a “young girl knocking continually and desperately on his truck door.” Had he not heard about Truckers Against Trafficking earlier that week, “I would not have thought of human trafficking. I didn’t even know human trafficking existed until I heard Lyn on the radio.”

* * * * * * *

The above cases might lead one to believe that once awareness has been raised, truckers merely help out because the crime literally comes knocking at their door. After all, it’s harder to take action when sex trafficking is merely a headline in an easily closeable newspaper.
LAPD’s Kimberly Agbonkpolor, Program Manager of the LA Metro Task Force Against Human Trafficking, explains: “As long as we as a community ignore [trafficking] it will continue to flourish.” A fundamental step which is often overlooked is the acceptance of human trafficking. “We as a society still cannot grasp how slavery can exist today; we see it as something that we have abolished hundreds of years ago,” explains Daphne Phung, Founder and Executive Director of California Against Slavery.
But, if these vast amounts of women are being forced to sleep with 25 men per day, “someone has to see it,” says Kimberly. The truckers do. But it takes more than that; Kimberly describes a fear-induced silence in some communities, which prevents people from reporting instances of human trafficking.
In other words, the blunt proximity to human trafficking is only the foundation of the truckers’ concern. What enables them to overcome the fear, potential repercussions, or even laziness to report suspicious activity is, I propose, a personal connection to the crime.
Bear with me for a few paragraphs as I indulge in an anecdote to prove my point:
I was mid-interview with a victim of human trafficking in LA. As she told me her horrific story, her face was only a few inches away from mine. Curiously, at the moment when her second wave of tears was on the verge of erupting, I found my mind wandering. Shit. I’m going to be late to this dinner. The dinner was in half an hour, with a friend of a friend of a friend, who was quite well connected. I still had to pick up a bottle of wine—or a box of chocolates—where does one buy fine chocolates in this part of Los Angeles? How much money should I spend on them? Oh my god, It’s 5:42. If she’s not done talking by 5:43 I’m going to have to interrupt her.
“She was never convicted! My trafficker did six months of house arrest, and that was it!” The tears had begun.
Perla is a woman of remarkable strength who thought she was following the American dream when she was transported from Mexico; instead, she was locked up in an LA sweat shop and forced to work as a slave. After 40 days, she managed to escape, in spite of threats from her trafficker that her children would be harmed.
“Perla, I’m so sorry, but I have to go,” I said. “Do you think you could finish up in about one minute?” I really did feel bad. I felt worse than bad. I felt horrified—what the hell have I become. Here was a victim of modern-day slavery, and I didn’t even have the courtesy to let her finish her story. This was a tale of extreme injustice, of helplessness and hopelessness; this was a violation of basic human dignity.
Why didn’t I seem to care?
After tormenting myself for a bit, it dawned on me that something was missing from this case. Sex. Perla had not been forced into prostitution, but into sweat shop labor. Even with the injustice of trafficking literally staring me in the face, I was simply not as moved as I had been when, for example, I spoke to a woman, Gaby, who at 13 had been forced to have sex with 10-20 strangers a day. When Gaby was done with work, her pimp would put salt on her vagina and tie her up before simultaneously beating and raping her. I’ll admit: Perla’s story, which was not one of sexual exploitation, didn’t haunt me in the same way.
Consider who else cares, enough to take action. Daphne Phung, founder of California Against Slavery,* was appalled to learn that when young girls are bought and sold for sex, the girl frequently gets blamed instead of her trafficker (as a result of society’s inability to grasp modern-day slavery in America). Daphne first encountered trafficking when she began writing her senior thesis on sex slavery in Southeast Asia, where she was born.
More directly, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in LA uses a survivor-centered approach to combat the phenomenon, training liberated victims to speak out against human trafficking.
Over the past year, I have spoken to so many who fight against human trafficking (social activists, victim therapists, human rights lawyers), and I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone who cares enough to take a stand is personally connected to the issue.
What about our truckers. How does trafficking relate to them—especially the non-Christians, or the ones who sleep with consenting prostitutes—on a personal level?
Many help out of guilt. I spoke to several truckers who had slept with a prostitute at least once in their past. After they learned about human trafficking, they began to wonder whether they had purchased sex from a consenting woman. “I didn’t realized they were being forced into it,” said one trucker.

* * * * * * *

There is one part of the story that I have not yet explained. One has to wonder why these good-natured, altruistic truckers are prone to prostitution in the first place. The answer is simple: Loneliness.
“They’re out there on the road and they’re lonely. And these prostitutes—they know it,” says Chaplain DeBay. As Keith Thomas put it, “you’re gone so much that your kids grow up when you’re not around. I’ve been married 30 years to the same girl, and that’s pretty fortunate. Most of these guys don’t make it with the same wife, because they’re away so often.”
Another driver sat in her truck for 5 days without stepping outside or speaking to anyone.
Hell, these truckers are so lonely that in addition to rambling on, they started throwing my questions right back at me: how did YOU get involved in fighting human trafficking? And I was happy to talk to some of them, more than others. (Becoming a trucker is a lot like becoming a professor—many times, people go into the profession due to a lack of social skills.) During one interview, I thought to myself, Poor thing. He just wants somebody to talk to. So I listened for a little while.
Chaplain DeBay said, about a driver who had come to confession earlier that day, “I’ll probably never see that guy again. That’s the beauty of this in a way.” Thus it seems that the victims of trafficking aren’t the only ones whose faces are forgotten within the transient world of the truck stop.

IN SUM AND 
IN CONCLUSION

“I know God hates injustice,” says Lyn Thompson. It’s her closeness to God, and His presence in every aspect of her life, that fuels her. “It’s not just a Christian issue. This is an issue of humanity,” says Scott Weidner. And, for the truck drivers, I can’t help but return to the words of Dave Bowman, “It is a matter of pride in being a trucker.”
Truckers against Trafficking reaches out to drivers with “you can be a hero.” A hero has pride. A hero has dignity. A hero does not sleep with sex slaves or transport them. Why not become a hero.

* * * * * * *

The tale of Truckers Against Trafficking, then, is a 3-part story; that of the victim, the visionary, and the hero. But these storylines were not as separate as I initially expected them to be. Even I, the spectator, managed to become intermingled.
When I spoke to Keith, I was touched by his dedication to basic human decency, and to helping others. “It’s a ‘me’ mentality out there,” he said. “If you’re continuously thinking about ‘me,’ then your life gets pretty miserable.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of wisdom right there,” I said, to which he replied with a blush of a laugh. I went on, “I’m a writer and I think about those issues all the time—helping others, making your own happiness. You know what I mean?” He did.
And then I thought: I’ve really come to like this trucker who’s on the other end of the phone, somewhere out there on the road. I rather hope things turn out alright for him.
Against all odds, a trucker ended up being the person in this story with whom I identified most. Perhaps it’s through forming these personal connections with one another, by digging deep to the basic shared level of human dignity, that little by little, we too can become heroes. ν

* California Against Slavery needs 
signatures by March, for their proposal to strengthen anti-trafficking laws in 
CA through ballot initiative. 
Sign now at californiaagainstslavery.org 
or visit castla.org to get involved.

Short Fiction by Sophie Kipner

In his dusty office turned makeshift crime lab in downtown LA, amateur crime detective Morton Forthston squints to read the fine print through his grandfather’s magnifying glass in a room too dimly lit. Anonymously delivered by carrier pigeons through his apartment window on 7th and Grand, the three white, origami-folded notes that lie in his hands are sealed with the acronym, ACNAIB. He opens each to find a clue: the first written in magic marker, “Billy.” The second had come a few days later: “Bianca;” the last, “Noah.” Believing in circumstance over coincidence, he knows he is on to something, although he’s not quite sure what.

On this quiet Sunday night, Morton is a rarity. He will wake up tomorrow—unlike his co-inhabitants—remembering what he did the night before. Thankful for his severe allergy to marijuana, he is one of few locals unaffected by the rampant, widespread epidemic of memory loss plaguing the city since the drug’s legalization five years ago. After failing attempts to interact with the public, he found no use in trying, as everything he said had to be explained. And then, explained all over again. Left happily to entertain himself with matters of importance, like crime solving, the modern day Francois Vidocq, a real life Sherlock Holmes, assigns himself to investigate the correlation between the high turnaround of caged Asian elephants at the Los Angeles Zoo and the increasing rates of amnesia among the middle to lower socio-economic classes. Perplexed for some time by the lower rates of memory loss among the rich, Morton would take his curiosities with him during his day job, driving cars full of tourists around LA in a Pink Bus, filled to the brim with artwork made of recycled trash. On one of his routine stops a few weeks ago at the LA Zoo, he noticed a change in the elephants on display. Each visit, despite the signs that indicated the residency of a lone Asian elephant by the name of Billy, each trunk, tusk and ear was different.

The connection presents itself: Billy the elephant is anonymous note #1. One sign down; two to go.
Relieved and equally pleased with himself for solving the first clue, Morton walks with an extra hop in his step into the kitchen and turns on the television while the kettle begins to boil. The news reporters repeat the statistics, continuing to instill fear and confuse the people, just as they did yesterday to an audience who has no doubt already forgotten. Nonetheless, the people keep smoking, as is the case with tobacco, and the severity of the amnesia’s effect increases by the minute. Special Report appears across the television screen as District Attorney Steve Cooley stands at a podium next to Mayor Villarigosa, advocating the benefits of marijuana both physiologically and psychologically. Being one of the few people listening who would remember that both opposed the bill at their inauguration, a confused Morton starts to thread cause with effect. What would benefit city councilmen by legitimizing a drug that caused memory loss? Reconciling them, he hypothesizes that lying government officials, high turnover of imported elephants, and an amnesia epidemic all point to a childhood saying encapsulating it all: An elephant never forgets.

Monday morning’s sun rises and Morton heads to the zoo. En route, he hears a report on the radio about Truckers Against Elephant Trafficking, in which they interview a local artist and animal rights activist, Bianca Kolonusz-Partee. As he walks in through the Zoo gates, he bumps serendipitously into a half-naked man with ACNAIB indelibly written across his ribcage. Out of character, he asks the man what it means. The man lifts his pensive eyes to meet Morton’s, takes a moment to collect his answer and then tells him it’s the name of a loved one written backwards so his heart can read it. Morton imagines crawling inside the man’s lonely ribcage and from the inside, next to his heart, he sees the name: Bianca. Connecting the dots, he crosses sign #2 off his invisible list, although he’s now faced with having to find her.

His favorite crime thriller writer, Louis Bayard, is giving a talk tonight on his new book, The School of Night, at The Lawrence Asher Gallery in Beverly Hills. He heard Louis is one of the few unaffected by amnesia, but either way, it’s worth the risk; Louis wouldn’t forget what’s already been written. At the gallery, whilst looking at himself in a mirror, he notices ACNAIB reflecting from behind him, barely in view. Turning around in haste, he walks over to a visually arresting installation piece—a featured landscape made from colored pencils, product packaging, adhesives and map tacks, to find none other than Bianca Kolonusz-Partee’s signature on the bottom right-hand corner. He finds the artist in the crowd and explains the series of events that have led him here, to be standing right in front of her. Bianca discloses what she believes to be the cause he’s been searching for. As it turns out, Cooley is allegedly behind an elephant saliva-trafficking scam, pocketing more money than what he could get if the laws were reversed. “The natural laws of supply and demand,” she explains. The room is now redolent of weed as the two share notes, trying not to breathe in too much.

Morton quickly learns the following key facts: the city has been covertly selling elephant memory on the black-market for an audacious fee. Cooley has been using the zoo as a cover for trafficking these elephants into the city, exploiting and disposing of them one by one. Billy, the longest-lasting elephant to date, has proven to be a valuable resource as his memory depletes at snail’s pace in comparison. Affluent customers are told through the grapevine that rubbing fresh Elephant saliva in a slow, circular motion on one’s head cures amnesia. Sold as “Elephant Ram juice,” the cellular components in the saliva are believed to stimulate the hippocampus; the fastest route for absorption being through the head.

Outraged by the sexual nature with which the “Elephant Ram Juice” is extracted and applied, Bianca and Morton jump in the Pink Bus and head towards the zoo. Picking up more trash along the way, Bianca assembles scraps, wrappers and tin into artwork in the back. After summoning help from all the members of Truckers Against Elephant Trafficking, support was not light. Hundreds of 18-wheelers begin to break through the locked gates at the zoo to rescue the tortured animals. Witnessing the act as each long-necked giraffe, cuddly wombat, hissing hyena and kind-eyed elephant cram into the trucks, Morton realizes he’s stumbled upon sign #3: Noah. Smiling richly like the Cheshire Cat, he dusts off his hands as a bona-fide crime detective.

The next morning, as the smog settles once again along the LA skyline, the unsuspecting zookeepers arrive to find thousands of art installations in each cage, where Billy and his friends stood just hours before. Each statue magnificently sculpted and poised as if it were the animal itself. Looking in awe at a sea of energetic, bright colors, decoupaged fabrics on wood and bedazzled eyes of rhinestone, the zookeepers and visitors notice nothing out of the ordinary, simply because they couldn’t remember the difference.

—Fool’s Errand, Louis Bayard

Although novelist Louis Bayard undoubtedly deserves a much longer introduction, all you need to know is that he’s as hilarious over the phone as he is in print. Enjoy.

Julia Ingalls: You’ve written five novels. Fool’s Errand was about the quest for love, Endangered Species was about the quest for family, whereas the novels Mr. Timothy, The Pale Blue Eye, and The Black Tower seem to be about the quest for identity.

Louis Bayard: Oh, wow! That sounds good.

JI: We’ll put it together as a blurb, I guess. But do you agree with that? What made you want to write in the past?

LB: You’re talking about binding all this together, that implies that I put much forethought into this than I really did. What happened is that I’ve written these two books. They were put out by a small press, and they sold decently for a small press book, but I got an itch for a larger audience. I had this particular idea about Tiny Tim, of all people. I’m not even sure where it came from. I was talking to my agent, and I mentioned it, and he got intrigued by it. This historical thing grew out of writing about Tiny Tim.
I didn’t set out to be a historical novelist. I’d never written that way before. I’d never written a thriller before. It was really a self-education to put that together. That’s the logistics of how that happened. Because the book did well enough, the publishing industry being what it is, they kind of want you to do more of the same thing. The next book was about a real-life French detective who inspired Poe [François Vidocq]. They’ve all been linked that way. There’s at least some tangential link. Maybe the second and third book, not so much. But I can see where identity plays a part, and where family plays a part in a lot of these books. Mr. Timothy is the creation of an alternative family. The Black Tower is about trying to reconnect with his parents after their deaths. I can see all of these things resonating.

JI: The Black Tower specifically seems to be written at a much more cinematic clip. The chapters come at you much faster. Was that intentional?

LB: Cinematic is probably a good word for it. I definitely wanted to keep that moving. I was just remembering a key thing in the writing of that book for me—I usually just write the whole way through, and then read it all whole way through, but because I was going on vacation and I didn’t want to bring my laptop—see, these are the way things happen, like these silly little things—so I just printed out what I had. I was astonished by how much fat there was in the book. There was a lot of larding—most of it, research. One the traps of being a historical novelist is you do a lot of research usually, and then you want to shoe-horn it in there wherever you can to reassure people that you’ve been working really hard, and you deserve a gold star for all your hard work, and then you go back and read it with an unbiased eye, and think, “I really don’t need that. Readers don’t really need to know that.” I wound up scissoring away a lot of that stuff, and the result was so lean that it forced the whole book in that direction. I liked that it was moving so rapidly.

JI: It really does accentuate scenes. For example, the scene in the morgue at the beginning at the book with the piano forte in the next room, is incredibly realized. It’s fun to read because you’re there, you know.

LB: Good. That came out of research, which is where a lot of great ideas come from. I read something about the morgue and how the morgue-keeper lived in the same building, and his family was next door, that was inspired by the reality of it. I was fascinated by that juxtaposition.

JI: It comes across really well.

LB: Good!

JI: To give you your gold star for all your research.

LB: [Laughs.]

JI: You got a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern. You must have always wanted to be a writer from when you were growing up. Why did you choose journalism as opposed to trying to write fiction directly?

LB: I should say my college senior year thesis was a book of short stories. If somebody had rushed a printed collection and turned me into the next David Leavitt—I’m trying to figure out who was the ideal at the time—um, I would have gone that way, but nobody was rushing to publish these, so I liked the idea of journalism because it I thought it get me out in the world and introduce me to some more reality than I had experienced at that time in my life. Since I had anticipated going into journalism, I realized I would need to get some clips. I thought a master’s program would be the best way to go about doing that. I left there fully convinced that I was going to become a newspaper reporter. But I couldn’t get a self-respecting newspaper to hire me. So I became a flack in Washington and stayed on there in that capacity for various people and organizations. And eventually became a freelancer, which is what I’ve been since ’95.

JI: Wow. Congratulations on that.

LB: I’ve served a lot of masters. A lot of the work I’ve done is not by-lined. I write junk mail, I write newsletters, I’ve paid the bills in a lot of different ways.

JI: Is that difficult to switch from one style of writing to another? How do you make sure that your writing remains what you want it to be when you do a lot of commercial work and then you get back to fiction?

LB: I do the fiction work the first thing in the day. I’m at my freshest. If you wait longer in the day, things always come up. It’s like those people who put off exercise until 4’o’clock, something happens, the phone rings. I write as long as I can, which some days is all day, and some days it’s just an hour, but I try to get at least an hour a day. The discipline comes in stopping and going on to the other stuff that is frankly less interesting but is more immediately remunerative. I’ve developed a pretty good balance over the years. I sit down and do it. Any professional writer just kind of has to do it. That’s how bills get paid. You don’t have time to futz around. But we all have our own procrastination tools.

JI: It seems like you consistently write really hilarious, wonderful columns. I’m thinking specifically of the work you do for Salon.com. Specifically, there’s an essay you wrote called “Attention: All You Memoir Fabulists.” My favorite example is Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ where you say, ‘Reviewers have flagged the following line: Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.’ And you say, ‘We should change the second line to ‘Sorry.’”

LB: That article was prompted by an example of a memoirist who had been fabricating her story. People saw it as a fabrication, but really, the issues we think are uniquely modern have an ancient providence. And the whole question of telling the truth about one’s life lies outside of time, because we all tell fictions about ourselves and our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We’re all fictionalizing. It’s a vexed area, trying to decide if something is fiction or non-fiction and where the line is.

JI: Would you consider doing a novel in a slightly more contemporary historical period like the 1960’s or the 1980’s?

LB: I would love to. I’m not wedded to horses and carriages by any means. The book I’m working on now, half the story is told in the modern day. It’s really quite refreshing not to have to ask myself, ‘What the hell would they be wearing?’ I have this basic frame of reference. On the other hand, I found to my surprise I had to do almost as much research about modern day stuff because there is only so much in the world I experience on a daily basis. It’s taken a lot more work on the front end than I thought it would.

JI: Is the book about the Elizabethan “School of Night?”

LB: Yes.

JI: And the contemporary period that you’re working in, is that literally modern day?

LB: It’s literally modern day. It’s like, now. And it’s Washington, D.C, where I live. In a way, I’m revisiting some of the terrain of my first two books. And using a little more comedy as well. Or trying to, anyway. It’s interesting; I’m right in the middle of it, and I’m conscious that I’m using different registers. The historical tale is set in 1603 England and has a more tragic register. The modern day is more of a caper, has more of an antic quality. I’ll be interested to see when I do the critical stuff of re-reading the manuscript, whether those different registers come together or clang against each other.

JI: How much time do you allow yourself to edit your work after you write it?

LB: Part of it is that when I have it to where I want it, I send it to my editor and she goes through it pretty diligently. I make response to her edits. The Pale Blue Eye was substantially re-written between the first and second drafts because of what my editor rightly suggested about structure and shape of the story, things like that. But I don’t know. I give myself a few weeks to go through it and hack away at it. Usually, it’s hacking away. Most writers are like that. We write more than we need to. There’s a great quote by Roger Ebert, in an obituary for Paul Newman. I think they quoted Roger Ebert saying, “He spent the first half of his career figuring what to put into his acting, and the last half deciding what to take out again.” I think that’s true. As you get older, you realize it’s much more of a taking out. You know the stuff, you know you don’t need as much. That’s the mistake I see in aspiring young writers. They blast you with words. They want their voices to be heard. It’s hard to convince them they could be heard much better if they just pare away a lot of that stuff.

JI: It seems it also has to do with structuring it so you don’t get lost in tangents—which, I suppose, is the same as cutting it down.

LB: Sometimes it is a plot fix. I honestly think plot is relatively easy to fix, or it can be. The stuff that can’t be fixed is if the voice is insecure. For that reason, I always take the longest time with the first chapter. The current book, I spent several weeks on the first chapter, because I wasn’t happy with the voice, and who the narrator was, and it took me a while to get fine with it. Once you get that in place, it goes much faster. There’s no substitute for a sure, confident voice. Plot–you can lift things up, move things around. In The Pale Blue Eye, I actually removed an entire character. Not a main character, but a secondary character. She served no plot or function, she was there really just to entertain me. And that was harder in a way than killing off a character, to remove a character entirely. It requires a lot of juggling. In the end it was worth doing.

JI: What do you think is your ultimate ambition—well, that’s kind of a strange question. Let me put it a different way.

LB: [Laughs.]

JI: Do you feel accomplished? Are you looking to write ‘The Perfect Novel’?

LB: I don’t know. I think I may have given up on writing the next “Great Gatsby.” I think that falls to one or two people in a generation. I like writing in genre, I like the idea of writing entertainments. I have no belief that my work will necessarily outlive me. But I think you can write some thoughtful things in the context of genre. Some of my favorite writers have been genre writers. Raymond Chandler, Ruth Randall, Patricia Highsmith, in the same way that Dostoevsky did, but they do it in the context of a particular entertainment form. The trends I like in literature today is that a lot of those genre lines are being blurred, and you’re seeing people like Michael Chabon writing detective novels.

JI: For a while there, it seemed that literary fiction was at an incredible remove from plot or narrative based fiction. I think it’s good to weave them back together. I think either extreme becomes dull, but if you somehow interweave them.

LB: I agree. I wonder how much of that had to do with academia. For a while, in parts of academia, the whole idea of a story was cast in doubt, the idea that fiction should tell a coherent story. I was rather frustrated with the idea that we should always remind our readers that this is fiction. I love the illusion of being swept up into a story, and not having the writer constantly nudge me and say, “This is just fiction you’re reading.” Well, I know that.

JI: Do you pick the cover art on your novels?

LB: I get to weigh-in. I suppose if I ever chose to exert it, I would have veto. I try to be open-minded about it, because I recognize that I don’t always know what works in the marketplace. If I truly hated a cover, it wouldn’t fly. It becomes more of a collaboration between me and my editor and my agent. I feel lucky to have a team helping with this stuff. Authors are frequently not good at anything but writing. We’re not good self-promoters or marketers, and certainly not visual artists.

JI: Why do you think that real-life 18th century French detective Francois Vidocq [a principal character in The Black Tower] is no longer as well known as his fictional counterpart Sherlock Holmes?

LB: That’s a question I asked myself. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to make him better known in America. He was back in the 19th century—his memoirs were best-sellers on both sides of the Atlantic—he was well-known enough that Poe and Melville and Dickens could allude to him, and readers would know who he was it. I’m not quite sure what happened to him. I’m not sure why he ended up in the dustbin of history. I sometimes wonder If it’s the funny spelling—the ocq at the end of the name—people don’t know how to pronounce that. Holmes, of course, is such an easy thing to spell.

JI: That’s sad, but you’re probably dead-on. I have to admit my ignorance: I had not heard of Vidocq before I read The Black Tower.

LB: I hadn’t either, until I read the Murders in the Rue Morgue. That was the first time I saw his name in print. Because the character Dupin was immediately at pains to elevate himself above Vidocq’s example. It’s like, who is this guy? It’s a slaying of the father impulse, saying ‘I’m better than this guy.’ Kind of like Holmes would later do with Dupin. There’s this whole history in detective fiction of the next generation of detective rising from the ashes of the previous one.

JI: Who is the 21st century’s detective? Who embodies that?

LB: Among the writers currently out there? I think the model is still Chandler and Hammet. I’m not sure we’ve had our 21st century guy yet.

JI: Do you think the prevalence of crime drama on television could be the template?

LB: Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the forensic scientists. All the CSI guys. The idea that we can solve crimes by putting attractive people in laboratories.

JI: Don’t forget the cool music.

LB: Yeah, the cool music. And these very dramatic lighting effects! Which I’m thinking in any laboratory would be like, “I can’t see.” These like, Chiaroscuro compositions. “Can anybody see through their microscope? I can barely see you.”

Louis Bayard’s new novel is The School of Night.