The candles had been burning a long time.

She said something about the pasta and he agreed and the palms on San Vicente stood black against a sky that was changing color though neither of them could see it from where they sat. The restaurant moved around them the way restaurants do. Voices. The clink of things. A man in a white jacket passing with plates held high.

Goldman came and he was pleasant and young and did not know what was coming for him either. Tall. The asymmetry of it all. None of them did. That is the nature of this evening out.

They had finished the wine and the plates had been cleared and she said cappuccino and he said the same and they sat in the manner of people who have eaten well and said most of what they came to say. The air was unusually warm and smelled of rosemary, something sweet.

What came to the table was Cabernet.

They looked at it. Two glasses of dark red set down with care. They did not send it back. You don’t send it back. You drink what is brought to you and you say thank you and this is a form of grace though no one calls it that.

What had happened in Simi Valley that afternoon was  happening in the streets. A jury of people who had watched a man beaten on a corner in the dark had seen something different from what others had seen. The tape had run continuously on every television in America. The man on the ground. The batons. The geometry of it. And still. And still they had said no.

He left a tip and they walked out into the night.

The 10 east opened before him and the city was on fire.

Not metaphor. Not the fire of anger or the fire of injustice though those too. Real fire. Columns of it standing against the dark on both sides of the freeway, orange and rolling, the smoke blotting the stars. He drove between them. The lanes were nearly empty. He held the wheel and watched the burning and did not stop because there was nowhere to stop and nothing to do and the fires did not care that he had just had dinner, what someone had brought him and he had drunk it anyway. Somewhere back there Goldman was wiping down tables and counting his tips and going home to whatever his life was or would be.

A man lay at the intersection of Florence and Normandie and no one came for a long time.

That was years before. That was as it had always been.

He drove on. The city burned like something that had needed to burn and had finally found a good reason.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​