On the Fourth of July the grandmother took Vase to the top of the warehouse where a rickety carriage of iron stairs led to the roof. The sky was as orange as a snake’s belly and smelled of powder and dust and oil. They sat without speaking watching the brilliant detonations which Vase had never seen before just as she had never seen the full horizon of sky over Los Angeles and when the grandmother felt tired Vase was sorry to have to leave the sight so soon.
Vase had only been with the grandmother for a couple months at that point. The grandmother had taught her how to garden and read and she was now learning new words from the library of old paperbacks printed on groundwood paper that were stacked in piles over much of the warehouse. While Vase did this the grandmother worked in her private quarters on humming machines doing business for the municipal government. Then in the evening the grandmother would cook herself a stew using the root vegetables Vase had harvested and sit sipping at her table while Vase stewed in the black bath that bubbled in a metal basin which had been built into the center of the kitchen. Then the grandmother would say good night and leave Vase there in the dark until morning.
There were no guests. The grandmother made short calls and sent messages through her computer about her work and men in black vans would once in a while knock on the heavy front door to drop off boxes of essential equipment and supplies. When this happened the grandmother would tell Vase to keep to the agriculture room or one of the other out of sight parts of the warehouse before unbolting the latches but the men never stayed anyway. By fall the grandmother began to let Vase ask her lots of questions because neither of them had anyone else to really talk to. She tried to answer in as many words as possible so Vase would learn how to be a conversationalist although she kept professional and revealed as few truths as she could.
That winter the grandmother received an especially long phone call and told Vase that she had to leave for the night or possibly two to deal with some pressing matters for the mayor. She packed a briefcase with folders and hard drives and set the black bath to boil and left Vase in the dark locking the door to the warehouse behind her from the outside. The car that arrived for her took her north to City Hall on a circuitous route that was without incident but when the driver started it again in the morning to return the grandmother to her warehouse they were both instantly killed by the detonation of an explosive device that someone had wired to the ignition switch.
Vase stayed in the black bath for a long time. Her hair and skin became black and her teeth became black and her eyes became black too. The mayor tried sending some of her staff to the warehouse to retrieve what the grandmother had been working on there but the city broke into real disarray and none of them made it. The lights had been left on in the agriculture room and the vegetable garden overgrew and vines and bunches of foliage took root in the decomposing books and doves and chickens made their way in through one of the windows after it was knocked out by debris from one of the neighboring buildings which had only been reinforced for earthquakes. The sky was red and black then but Vase did not see this.
After the bombings stopped boys began to make their way through Los Angeles in search of sustenance and items of value to sell secondhand. One of them entered the grandmother’s warehouse with a crowbar through the door in the roof and was surprised when he found a bubbling vat of what looked like oil with an oil-colored girl asleep in the middle of it. He thought she was very beautiful and took a photograph with his phone and when she remained unresponsive to his camera flash he touched her to see if she would wake. Her skin made his hands itch and smell like copper and he tasted copper in his mouth too. When Vase stood up they were both startled. Vase tried to talk to him after waiting in the dark for a while but by then he was the one who did not move no matter what words she spoke to him. She heard the door swinging upstairs and went to the roof and watched the sun set in the green sky over the far-off encampments of Santa Monica.
By that next Fourth of July the rains had really picked up and so had life in the city. Inside the squash and tomatoes rotted into stinking beds of seed. The birds which had survived began to move out of the warehouse and traffic could be heard again on some of the streets in the distance. No one wanted to set off fireworks anymore but the air was so thick that people could use colored spotlights to create patterns in the raindrops and chalk particles in the sky. Vase sat silently on the roof and watched a blue and magenta spiral burn through the atmosphere above City Hall and saw shapes like silver serpents move eastward over the Hollywood Hills and into the long desert where Las Vegas had been. She did not understand that the grandmother would never come back home.
The rain covered her completely. Her skin became translucent and she felt warm and cold at the same time. She wondered what the word was to describe this feeling but when she asked the last of the doves it answered with a cruel platitude that had nothing to do with her question at all and soon she was all alone again.