The Program

The Program
PROLOGUE

To the bemusement of the tourists and a third-grade class shepherded by a portly teacher, the woman crouched naked near the fourteen-foot mammoth and urinated. Her hands gripped the kinked-wire fence encircling the vast Lake Pit, the La Brea Tar Pits' main attraction. Her face was smooth and unlined; she could still have been a teenager.

A few of the children laughed. A stout man in a white Vandyke and a pinstripe shirt ceased his lethargic tapping on a set of bongos, gathered up the bills he'd accrued in an overturned boater, and scurried off. A golden-years tourist clucked disapproval, clasping her strap-held camera to her side. Her husband gazed on, mouth slightly ajar, as if unsure whether the vision before him was real or a preview of senility.

Heedless that her ankles were getting splattered, the young woman stared through the fence at the fiberglass family of Columbian mammoths, life-size props for the prehistoric death trap. The baby mammoth stood in its father's shadow on shore, watching its mother mired in the hardened surface a stone's throw out. The mother stayed snapshot-frozen in her sinking terror, her upper legs midflail, trunk extended.

Farther into the lake, the tar crust gave way to a murky brown liquid that fumed and bubbled with eruptions of methane. The sludge beneath the surface housed the world's richest deposit of Ice Age fossils. A thick, oppressive smell pervaded the area – equal parts sulfur dioxide and baked Nevada highway.

The woman turned to face the crowd, and it froze, as if this rail-skinny girl were wired with explosives. Her inside-out panties lay where she'd kicked them off, crowning the heap of clothes to her left. The backs of her arms were purple, contused from elbow to shoulder.

"Why isn't anyone helping?" the naked woman implored the onlookers. "Can't you see? Can't you see what's going on?"

The teacher blew into the whistle dangling around his neck, withdrawing his class to the picnic area near the rest rooms. A two-man security team motored up on a golf cart, cutting through the thickening mass of gawkers. The driver hopped out, face shiny with sweat. His partner stayed in the cart, fingers drumming nervously on the security decal; dealing with a naked woman pissing on county property was a far cry from tending to sunstrokes and graffiti.

Backhanding moisture off his forehead, the driver spoke into his radio. "Is LAPD on the way?"

From the burst of responding static resolved a few security catch-phrases. "…backup en route…crowd control…detain the perpetrator…"

He plucked at the front of his blue shirt. "Ma'am, please put your clothes back on. There are children present."

An appeal to common decency wasn't the shrewdest approach when facing a naked crazy person.

Cars had backed up on Wilshire Boulevard, parallel to the fence on the lake's south side; spectators were standing on top of a bus shelter for a better vantage. Onlookers streamed over to the scene. At the west edge of the park in the cafe of the neighboring county museum, the windows were all but blotted out with faces wearing blank expressions of morbid curiosity. A KCOM cameraman tripped over a cable and went down, cracking his lens and bloodying his palms.

The girl's head pivoted frantically as she suddenly became aware of the commotion. Her chest heaved. When she spotted the four blue-uniformed officers cutting through the crowd, she sprinted along the fence, to a proliferation of gasps and shrieks from the crowd. At the south edge of the lake, a break in the fence accommodated a low cast-iron bridge. She vaulted deftly over its side, landing on the strip of dirt, and scurried back near her previous post, this time just inside the enclosure.

Three of the cops froze on the other side of the fence; the fourth followed her route and paused with one black boot up on the bridge's rail. The girl's eyes darted, terrified pupils held in crescents of white. "Can't you help? Why won't you help?"

One of the cops, the oldest, eased forward, gesturing down the fence line for his partner on the bridge to stay put. "We're here to help."

She walked down the slope to the father and baby mammoth at the shore's edge, treading on yellow flowers.

A note of alarm found its way into the veteran cop's voice. "Ma'am, just hold up now. Please don't go any nearer."

The girl rested an arm on the baby's side, staring out at the doomed mother who remained sunk in the sludge, rocking slightly in her perennial grave. The girl was crying now, shoulders heaving, wiping tears off her cheeks with the back of a slender hand. The air was filled with an electric charge, the anticipation of something horrific about to occur.

The other officers were fighting to calm the spectators, who were shouting advice to the cop and demands to the girl. She remained lost in herself.

"Get them back!" the veteran cop shouted. "Get up a perimeter. Let's get this girl some space."

His hand was still extended, holding his partner on the bridge in place. He tried to keep his voice calm and reassuring while speaking loudly enough for the girl to hear him over the commotion. "My partner there, his name is Michael. He's gonna wait right there until you're ready for him to come down. Then, when you decide, we can come help you take care of that mammoth."

A burst of bubbles broke through the thick tar near the female mammoth, creating a momentary pool before the crust re-formed. The girl turned back to the lake. The cop on the bridge tensed like a retriever at the edge of a duck blind.

"Wait!" the officer shouted. "Talk to me. Tell me what I can do."

She stopped and gazed at him. Her face held a sudden calm, the calm of determination. "The Teacher says to exalt strength, not comfort."

She turned and strode out onto the lake's tar surface. The cop on the bridge leapt down, but he was a good thirty yards away. The older cop was yelling, veins straining in his neck, and the spectators went mad with a sort of frenzied, hypnotic motion, like concert viewers or soccer fans. The girl's bare feet slapped the black surface, which started to give as she neared the enormous female mammoth twenty yards from shore. The crust gave with a wet sucking sound under her next step, and she screamed. Her arms shot up and out, and she struck the thin layer of congealed tar with her right knee and elbow, both of which immediately adhered to it.

The crowd surged and ebbed, drawn and repulsed.

The girl tried to pull herself up, a gooey sheet forming between her trapped arm and the lake's surface, but then her hip stuck and she rolled to her side, the tar claiming her hair. One of her legs punched through the crust into the brown liquid below, and her body shifted and started a slow submersion. Still she struggled toward the mammoth.

The cop from the bridge was standing on shore, and the veteran cop was still shouting – "Get a rope! Throw her a goddamn rope!" – both meaty hands fisting the wire rectangles in the fence so tight his fingers had gone white.

The girl strained to keep her face free and clear, pulling against her entangled hair so hard it distorted her features. Aside from her panicked eyes, she seemed weirdly calm, almost acquiescent. Both of her arms were mired now, her lower body nearly lost, and the crowd watched with horrified apprehension as she sputtered, a quivering, sinking bulge. Her face, the sole oval of remaining white, pointed up at the midday sun, sucking a few last gasps before it, too, filled and quieted, enveloped beneath the surface.

The crowd was suddenly silent, deflated. From the throng emerged the sound of one person sobbing, then another. Within seconds a chorus of cries was raised.

The veteran cop was on the radio, sending for an aerial ladder truck from the fire department, shouting across the receiver between transmissions for security to locate a garden hose. He'd sweated through his undershirt and uniform, the dark blue turning black in patches. When his partner reached him, he was still staring at the dented ring of tar where the girl had disappeared.

His lips barely moved when he spoke. "What the hell could make a person do something like that?"

The tar slowly constricted around the spot where the girl had sunk, until it again formed an oblivious, smooth sheet.