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“
Hi,” Nathan said, insisting, because she was dark-skinned and pretty and he felt the need to know why she was trespassing on a golf course. “Excuse me, but . . . what are you doing?”
“
I’m following the water.”
As soon as she said “water” Nathan heard it and felt it: the sound of liquid flowing, dripping, moving through the air, causing oxygen molecules to shift and cool. Looking behind her, on the other side of the fence, he saw a stream. About three feet wide and four inches deep, it curved around some bunkers near the seventh green, and then fell sharply, broadcasting a steady, metallic sound as it disappeared into a concrete orifice beneath Nathan’s feet.
“
Fucking country club,” Nathan said. “They shouldn’t be wasting water like that.” It was the middle of August, after all. In the middle of drought-parched LA.
“
No,” the woman said. She stopped drawing and looked at the water again. “It’s not theirs. So they can’t be wasting it.”
“
Well, who does it belong to, then?”
The woman paused for a second and answered with an amused smile. “The underworld, I guess.”
Sofia was her name and she described herself as a “river geek.” She said she was mapping the creek that ran through the golf course. And also its “tributaries.” It was an ancient stream, she told him, born from a spring at the base of the Hollywood Hills,
“
bubbling up from the underworld.” She showed Nathan her map, a series of blue pencil lines over a street grid she had pasted into her notebook. “It’s groundwater,” she said. Before reaching the golf course, the stream flowed into downtrodden Hollywood proper, around assorted industrial buildings and parking lots, and also through a junior-high campus and the television studios of KTLA. Sofia described all these things with a reverence that Nathan found disturbing: he sensed that she’d been doing this mapping expedition of hers alone, for weeks, and had never talked to anyone else about it until this moment.
Nathan returned the map to Sofia. He saw that the water in the culvert moved quickly, and was crystalline, as if it were some sylvan stream. This can’t be, Nathan wanted to say. This supposedly natural body of water was trickling under his feet on Third Street, in a wealthy neighborhood called Hancock Park that was surrounded by low-slung, less-wealthy Korean, Filipino, and Salvadoran neighborhoods that were themselves near the geographic center of approximately five hundred square miles of asphalt and concrete.
