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The parking lot was remarkably undersubscribed for a major tourist attraction but of greater disappointment to Honor was the uninterrupted collection of mini-vans and people carriers and station wagons with artificial wood panels that people bring to the zoo. Conscious of the urgency building and roaring and screeching behind her she was about to settle on a yellow Range Rover for no better reason than a parrot had perched on it when she spotted the ideal ride to navigate a city-wide car accident — a black and candy-apple red Harley Davidson Electra Glide stood alone and illegal in the shade of the picnic area.

She was stripping a wire from the brake light of the bike to use as a jumper when a distinctively human scream punctuated a sudden and total end to the entire orchestra from within the zoo and all was silence. Honor froze by instinct or because a lioness was walking from the zoo exit with the leisurely confidence that often accompanies four inch fangs and five inch claws.

Honor continued her work crouched behind the motorcycle while the lioness sniffed the air and twitched her ears. Drawn by the shade or the scent of prey or an interest in motorcycles, the massive cat approached. Honor was the picture of still waters, utterly motionless on top while her hands worked frantically and blindly to bridge the ignition wire. She couldn’t bring herself to look down to verify her work and she knew that there was an exactly fifty percent chance that she’d bridged the wrong circuit or, put another way, the odds were two to one that she was about to be eaten.

Good odds and time was up anyway. Honor stood and faced the lion and pressed the ignition button and nothing happened. Or any rate, the motorcycle didn’t respond. The lioness did. She stopped and gave Honor the sort of quizzical look that a heavy-weight boxer might give when called a sissy by an old man on crutches. Then she braced her shoulders and bared her teeth and coiled her muscles for a decisive leap.

With the rapidity of a flip book Honor visualized her options and all of them concluded with her being eaten by a lion. There was no shelter nor distraction nor weapon. There was just the motorcycle. She smiled at the lioness in a manner that she hoped would convey that it was she who was responsible for the freedom the animal now enjoyed. The lion appeared
unappreciative but still didn’t leap. Only her ears moved. Something had distracted her in Honor’s final seconds on earth.

Then Honor heard it too. A growing mechanical wheeze like the sound of steam escaping was coming from all directions. It was a jet, flying very low and apparently evocative of some dark memory of lions in captivity. The jet burst into view and, with a parting glance that suggested that Honor was guilty of unsportsmanlike behavior, the lioness shot away across the parking lot.

Honor was grateful for the intrusion but peripherally aware that it brought different consequences. A jet meant people. Conscious people who doubtless have firm views on the proper use of rental Ferraris and bulldozers. Honor set about correctly hotwiring the motorcycle and placing herself in a position from which she could reasonably claim ignorance of anything untoward that might have happened at the Los Angeles Zoo that afternoon.

But then the sound stopped. Honor looked up to watch the passenger jet enter a powerless glide and dive out of view toward the ocean. She was once again the only conscious person on earth.

Riding a motorcycle is its own sort of freedom. Riding a Harley Davidson at top speed on the sidewalks of downtown Los Angeles without a helmet moments after narrowly escaping death by lion is a sense of liberty very nearly approaching flight. Honor flew now toward the coast, guided vaguely by a need to drive a train or steal a yacht or eat caviar with her hands.

The city was different from Honor’s short memory of it. It was still gridlocked and silent but there was movement now among the people on the streets. Tentative groups were loosely forming and some even gave the appearance of a wary sentience. Mostly, though, if they had any interest at all it was in raiding the fruit and vegetable stalls on the sidewalks of Chinatown or the scattered and sparse and understocked grocery stores Honor passed along Broadway as she entered the theater district.

This wasn’t looting, though. It was more like grazing on fruits and flowers and unwrapped bubblegum and cigars and whatever else might confused for food by the debutant consumer. The citizenry was docile and unthreatening and gave the impression of a Disney movie placed in a Los Angeles populated entirely by orphaned baby deer. If there was any sign of menace it was in the subtle sameness of the little herds — some tall blond men in golfware or, quite possibly, clown costumes had assumed control of a delicatessen next door to a café under the administration of a dozen hare krishnas. Across the street four or five motorcycle cops had been joined by two security guards to occupy a candy store. The effect was subtly disturbing and suggestive of some developing peril but the only explicit effect was to make Honor realize that she was hungry.

Honor found herself in the drunkenly ill-focused former downtown Los Angeles which looked like the genteel founding quarter of a much nicer metropolis that had lost most of its treasures in a rigged game of chance. The proudly patchwork gothic/deco/Spanish-residential Los Angeles City Hall and the comic-book detail of the Hall Of Justice seemed to be justifiably embarrassed to share their neighborhood with the obstinately dull Civic Center and aggressively ugly police services building. But the courts and the county jail and sheriff’s office and LA Detention Center gave Honor a subversive thrill that she only partially understood, and she decided to play out her next adventure here.

She rolled to a stop outside the Regent Hotel because it looked old and expensive and the sort of place that would have an absurdly over-priced wine list and just enough caviar on hand.

The hotel was an immaculate relic of an age when what things looked like mattered. Honor entered through a revolving door of wood and brass and beveled glass into an age when it made sense for a hotel to have a two-story, rosewood paneled lobby overlooked by an expansive mezzanine accessible by twin staircases, all resting on a tiled mosaic of Poseidon rising from the surf accompanied by a dolphin. The maritime theme was repeated on the walls by commissioned floor-to-ceiling paintings of ships in peril and bustling seaports. Poseidon's realm was scattered with deep velvet armchairs meticulously disordered so guests could read their newspapers and plan their trysts and doze in peace in what would normally be a crowded LA hotel lobby. The only light was from enormous leaded glass windows facing the street and the suspended dust particles gave the abandoned foyer the character of something frozen in aspic and undisturbed for generations.

Honor was alone in the lobby. To the left was a bank of house phones and to the right the curtained entrance to a darkened restaurant with a brass sign on a pole “Welcome to Milo’s. Please wait to be seated.” Beneath the mezzanine was a marble-topped reception with cash registers and a brass desk bell. Behind that was a swing door and a key rack with old-school metal keys. On a whim which seemed ill-advised the moment she pursued it Honor struck the desk bell and was astonished by the sharpness of the peel such a little bell could produce in the awesome quiet. The door behind the reception desk pushed slowly open.

A gangly young man in an ill-fitting brown plastic tuxedo moved tentatively into the narrow corridor behind the reception desk, his eyes fixed intently on the bell. His name-tag said “Darryl” and beneath that were little American and Spanish flags denoting the languages he spoke fluently yesterday, when he knew what languages were.

Darryl took in the reception area as though seeing it for the first time and indeed he probably was. He’d only become aware of existence this morning and since that time doubtless assumed that the staff office with its seemingly unlimited supply of crackers and chocolate-covered mints and bottled water and monogrammed hotel pens represented the generous limits of the known world. The ringing of the desk bell gave him cause to doubt a lifetime of assumptions.

Honor stepped back from the desk, unwilling to break Darryl’s trance. The clerk tentatively approached the bell, raised his hand, and struck it. He showed no change in expression but Darryl was clearly pleased with the effect and he repeated it, again and again, until the overlapping, high-pitched frequencies became in that space and time the most annoying thing the world.

The curtains to the entrance of Milo’s parted and produced a large sphere of a man in pristine kitchen whites and his own nametag, “Milo”. He also had a butcher’s knife and the universal empty stare but his version was humanized slightly by the permanently furrowed brow unique to heads of state and accomplished chefs.

Now Milo was newly born, seeing the world a few hours ago for the first time standing upright in a kitchen with a cleaver in his hand. He’d always had that knife in his hand. It was part of him, and quite possibly the most important part. It was certainly the only way he knew how to communicate. And there was something that he wanted to say.

Milo walked slowly but deliberately to the reception desk, across from Darryl, who continued to entertain himself with his new form of self-expression. Milo seemed to see only the bell until he looked Darryl in the eyes and calmly chopped off his hand.

The clerk managed to fuse shock and fear and pain and a soupçon of genuine curiosity into one extended and unidentified vowel as he picked up his right hand with his left and tried to put it back on. The chef observed the carnage he’d unleashed with the blank detachment of a lab technician noting the result of a satisfactory but largely predictable experiment. The clerk’s labors grew more desperate and unfocused and, in addition to describing a graceful arc of blood across the key rack, he knocked the desk bell to the floor where it bounced twice on its side and rolled to Honor before having a little wobbly spin and settling at her feet, dinging merrily all the way.

After a brief internal struggle the chef formed another isolated thought — the immutable conviction that Honor and the bell were conspiring against him. He began maneuvers against them both. Honor backed toward the door, leaving the bell to fend for itself and very deliberately moving slowly and, even more deliberately, quietly. She waved a hand blindly behind to sense for unexpected chairs or the door. This was somewhat liberally interpreted by the chef as an act of aggression and he lunged, leading with his cleaver.

Honor dodged and danced and behaved as randomly as she could muster, hoping to leverage her steep experience advantage against Milo’s decided lead in the sharp object category. She jumped from chair to chair and kicked over tables and tested the weight of an indoor palm before abandoning it as a potential weapon, all while offering what she hoped would be interpreted by a mindless chef as encouragements to return to his kitchen and see to his soufflé.

“Milo? Is it?” said Honor when she’d put a divan between them. “Milo I need you to know, whatever happens between us, that as God is my witness I did not touch that bell.”

If the chef was moved by this or disappointed in the small fib he showed no sign of it. He received it all as though it was perfectly normal and indeed from his perspective it might well have been — he was, in this regard, entirely non-judgmental. He wanted simply and exclusively to cut something off Honor, something that would give the same type and degree of satisfaction as that provided by the clerk’s right hand, and he redoubled his efforts. He also learned quickly and soon he stopped following Honor the long way around chairs and being startled by the mirror behind the counter of house phones.

Honor’s advantage was rapidly fading so when she found herself with her back to the door it was an effort to resist the urge to dash through it. Instead she stopped and faced Milo and raised her hands in surrender. Milo raised his knife.

“Okay Milo, that’s it. Let’s take this outside.” Honor turned and pushed through the revolving door in an easily duplicated maneuver that the chef didn’t hesitate to follow.

And Honor was back in the lobby, having exercised her advanced understanding of revolving door technology to leave the chef blinking on the sidewalk at the sorcery that caused his adversary to literally and completely disappear. He looked back on the enchanted door with a melancholy nostalgia for the good times he’d had within, judged the past as lost forever, and turned to face an uncertain future for man and cleaver.

Darryl was no longer struggling. He sat on the floor behind the reception desk and looked longingly at his severed hand while he rapidly bled to death. The spectacle served to remind Honor of the fleeting nature of life and that she was by now ravenously hungry. She pushed through the heavy purple curtains of the domain of Milo’s former glory and onto the threshold of yet another subtle and striking aberration from the instinctively normal.

Milo’s restaurant was resolutely posh in that way that invariably misses the mark. The tables were small and never-the-less inches apart and uniformly ugly with yellow napkins clashing with royal blue table-cloths and carefully mismatched silverware. Each table had an almost exhausted candle and the room was otherwise lit only by the daylight that fought past the thick castle curtains over two floor-to-ceiling windows. It was cool and quiet and empty of customers but the service
staff had occupied the booth in the corner and were squatting like pigeons on the bench and on the table itself and they had gathered between them all the bread-baskets in the building. It was this that Honor, in spite of a lack of experience of the hospitality industry, felt might be out of the ordinary.

Light from the foyer announced Honor’s entrance and the waiters stopped nibbling on sections of stale baguette to look up at her as one mind, causing them to resemble a startled extended family of meerkats dressed adorably in identical royal blue tuxedos. Honor was immediately charmed. So were the service meerkats who until that moment had been unaware that anything more interesting than bread existed anywhere in the world and now in their midst was a female of the species.

The silent stillness lingered for a moment like an awkward encounter at a funeral until the alpha waiter hopped to the floor and loped over to Honor and offered her a basket of butter rolls that were almost entirely free of spit. Honor received the basket as though graciously accepting a lesser entertainment award and took a seat at the centermost table. The maitre d’ crouched on the floor and peered at her over the flower arrangement. More servers approached and one-by-one and eventually simultaneously placed their offerings of baskets of bread, many of them empty, on the table. Honor took it all in with good grace but found herself wishing she’d selected an establishment with a less gimmicky menu.

An expectant hush fell over the service staff as Honor selected from the baskets and the decision itself launched a pushing match the gravity of which was difficult to read. The maitre d’ objected to a basket of sliced pumpernickel placed directly over his butter rolls and he seized the offending waiter’s toupée and flung it across the room. The two busboys struggled without the benefit of language to highlight the advantages of their respective offerings of breadsticks and petits viennoiseries and the grunting grew worryingly unfriendly. Honor endeavored to cast oil on the troubled waters, selecting something from every basket, even the empty ones.

And so the party proceeded largely peacefully until a noise or a movement or a communal sixth sense drew the attention of the wait staff and Honor to an almost invisible door next to the bar and partially concealed by another curtain of royal blue iron. Like the walls the door was a stained oak blackness but it housed a portal window through which shone the shiny, curious faces of the kitchen staff. Slowly the door pushed open and the sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers crept into the dining room. At any rate they may have sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers but Honor didn’t know what sauciers and sous-chefs were. To her they were men in white outfits not unlike that of the formidable Milo, with the important distinction that where Milo had been armed with a cleaver these men had fruit, an enormous stainless steel bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers, a bag of flour and an entire cooked leg of lamb, carried like a baseball bat.

The objective of the kitchen staff was identical to that of the wait staff, although they were appreciably better prepared for the task of impressing a date. They pushed the waiters aside and their bread-baskets from her table and lay their treasures before her. In addition to a greater quality and variety of wares the kitchen staff, possibly from careful observation of the failure of the wait staff to secure Honor’s favor, appeared to have a greater facility for hospitality. The sous-chef tore strips from his leg of lamb and demonstrated eating it before offering a generous handful to Honor. The salad chef gingerly placed tomatoes in Honor’s lap and the bag-of-flour chef entertained her by creating clouds of white dust.

“Any chance of a glance at the wine list?” asked Honor as she assembled a sloppy and unwieldy sandwich from a bit of just about everything on the table. They understood only that she wanted something else and as Honor dined the staff rallied around the restaurant and into the kitchen and behind the bar returning with all manner of thing that they thought she might like to eat, including flowers and candles and a fur stole from the cloak room. None of them seemed to be exactly what this beautiful and desirable and clearly finicky creature needed next. Finally a busboy presented her with a bottle of mineral water and the staff froze into a concrete trance as she accepted it, opened it, and drank deeply, igniting a run on the bar.

It was then that the factions formed into militant groups delimited by shared interests and similar clothes. The sous-chef or, at any rate, biggest chef, took a leadership role in assaulting the bar which had been occupied by the floor staff, led by the maitre d’. The wait staff, doubtless selected from the more presentable and lithe struggling actors who offered themselves for employment at Milo’s restaurant, were little match for the kitchen staff, all of whom appeared to have learned their trade in the nation’s prisons.

The battle grew violent and then fierce and finally bloody and very soon ceased altogether to be entertaining. The kitchen staff overwhelmed the bar and either developed or remembered an uncanny natural capacity for tenderizing meat. The waiters that didn’t abandon their station and run off in all directions were beaten against the bar’s floor of polished California granite. This left five stout and tattooed kitchen workers bloody and victorious and newly confident of their claim on Honor so when they rose from behind the bar they were varying degrees of enraged to discover that she had left during an entertainment that had been largely for her benefit.

At that moment Honor was touring the back halls of the hotel. The only light was standard blue emergency lighting and the halls and walls and floor had a cloned character to them that gave the staff area of the hotel a labyrinthine quality. She was lost. But she had her sandwich and sense of adventure and there were treasures, it seemed, behind every door. An oversized linen closet — more of a linen hall — yielded a plush robe with the insignia of the hotel over the left breast. Another equally cavernous room appeared to be the liquor store and was lined with shelves of every variation on the theme of hard liquor, from Bourbon and Scotch to grappa and rice wine. The treasures were stacked to the ceiling — about the height of two average sized Honors — and the only uncovered spot was a high window leading to the outside and secured with two-inch bars of exactly the sort, in Honor’s expert opinion, used in zoo enclosures.

The next room was actually two rooms and had two doors and no theme to speak of — it was stacks and shelves and boxes and baggage of everything that the most twisted and imaginative guest can ever contrive to forget in a hotel. It was a predictable lost-and-found of clothes and jewellery and junk but it was also an Aladdin’s cave of fishing rods and bicycles and punching bags and an astonishingly large number of stuffed and mounted domestic animals, accepting that anything more than one taxidermied Dachshund is astonishing.

Honor was browsing this storeroom of wonder when the kitchen staff caught up with her. They were tired and snorting from their battle and from running the length and breadth of the labyrinth looking for the guest who in their primitive view had run out without paying for her meal. Once the entire complement of kitchen workers were in the storage room Honor put down the remains of her sandwich and open her arms and smiled “come on over here, you”. The sous-chef cautiously but confidently approached his prize and as he entered her swing zone Honor selected from behind her back a 1-wood from a bag of golf clubs and pitched a perfect drive into the left side of his head. The club bent and the sous-chef stared immobile and disappointed at Honor, who dropped the club and dashed out the remaining door.

The pursuit that followed had something of the air of a French farce as Honor took a series of deliberately random turns through thickening clouds of flour dust only to come face-to-face with a dishwasher. She evaded capture by blocking the hall with the door to the pump room, turned, and found herself looking into the ghostly white face of the flour chef. Honor reluctantly but quickly threw her terry cloth robe over his head and again got lost in the maze of hallways somewhere between the restaurant and the hotel foyer. When she finally found herself briefly alone she took the opportunity to hide behind one of the seemingly countless identical doors. She was trapped in the liquor closet.

She heard the entire kitchen staff grunting and regrouping in the hall and was adjusting to the prospect of a long and well-stocked silence when she saw with a sort of resigned horror that she’d tracked clearly defined floury footsteps into the room. The door swung wildly open.

The massive sous-chef seemed somewhat bigger now and infinitely less romantic, having lost any inclination of mating with Honor and wishing now only to reassert his authority. In a moment he was on her like an angry chef on a weedy maitre d’.

The dead weight on her chest and the powerful hands around her neck competed in a lumbering marathon to compress the life out of Honor. This was just nature unfolding as it will, the strong dominating the weak, the large eating the small, the great and nicotine-stained crushing the life out of the civilized but slightly too adventurous. Honor mused again on this unwelcome concept of consequences and again found them not to her taste.

This unexpected and, in Honor’s view, unwarranted demotion in the food chain grew more real and possible and lucid until it was the only thing in existence and she raised her arms above her head in surrender, stretching until the neck of a bottle nestled firmly in each hand. The smooth angles of Jack Daniels in the right, a classic baseball bat of Wild Turkey in the left. Honor brought them together on each of the chef’s temples with the precision and force of a clash cymbal player in his one solo moment of a Russian symphony with his judgmental mother in the audience.

The Jack Daniels exploded in a cloud of glass and Tennessee cask-ripened sour-mash. The Wild Turkey held strong, still hoping to hit one out of the park. The chef was softened and bewildered and fell away to position himself helpfully on his knees with his head at roughly the level of a tee-ball. Honor couldn’t resist manifesting the metaphor and she treated herself to a brief wind-up before again testing the surprising strength of the bottle of Wild Turkey, which again held as the chef’s head bounced improbably off his shoulder and rebounded in a rubbery wobble like a porcelain bulldog rear dash ornament. The chef stared intently into the middle-field as though he saw there something that had scared him as a child. Then he fell the rest of the way to the floor in the way that only 225 lbs of lifeless meat can fall to a floor.

Honor rewarded herself with a deep intake of air and turned to some crates of Mouton Cadet for richly needed support. She was enjoying the recovered liberty to breath and promising to never again take it for granted when the otherwise jolly tinkling sound of glass addressing glass drew her attention. The remaining kitchen workers were arming themselves with a bottle in each hand.