This beachfront is on top of a freeway. There are several ways to get here. You can be born here, on the sand or in the water. You can come crashing out of the waves, bruised and tumbling out of the heavy tide. You can be dropped down from a helicopter or jump from a moving truck. You can dodge barreling cars going eighty miles per hour, disrupting their verticality with your horizontal aims. You can find a secret passageway of chipped stones, the pieces collected from the various buildings demolished to make the freeway that have since been grouted together. We’re all here baking in the sun.
There are people that I’m close to. We line up on printed blankets and pass around bottles of sunscreen, lathering each other up in the places we can’t reach. There is Ava, who holds her red heeled sandals by the straps in one pinky, and walks around showing off her newly made body. When she holds them like that, her shoes look like cherries dangling from the stem. Cathy plays hypnosis from a speaker buried halfway in the grit. She rubs powder on her gums and spits polka dots around the turf.
Edie feeds her baby slices of apples from crates that have washed up on the shore. Every so often a cargo ship will come to a fiery disaster in the distance, blind and unable to navigate because of the sharp glare of the glass buildings that keep springing up behind the freeway. She rests him on her knee and hands him slice after slice. Sometimes he munches away happily, other times he shakes his head no, and crawls off from her lap.
Simone drives the freeway every morning to get to work. On the way back, he throws over cold coke bottles with outstretched arms, and we pay him back with a flash of a tan hip or an air-blown kiss. He takes a pair of binoculars out of the glove compartment of his Citroen, and we can see him fiddling with his jeans. The empty bottles come in handy to beat off screeching gulls.
When the sun starts to hide away, pulling in an ash-powder-blue curtain of sky, we switch the music and stand up to move around. Crowded together, we can feel the residual heat of the day beating in each other’s skin. If traffic is bad, the swarm of stopped drivers can see black outlines of us with our arms up, swishing and swaying like a chorus of broken palms.