He came down from the foothills into the gray before dawn and the sun was still crouched behind the ridgeline and the basin lay beneath him like something dreaming of itself.

The freeway unspooled beneath him. The downtown towers rose in the half-light and strained against each other for the sky, glass and steel vying, yearning, each one desperate to be the one the sun would touch first. He watched them soften. The edges ran. One tower bent toward another like a man telling a secret and the glass wept slow down its face and pooled in the streets below and no other driver turned to look.

He passed palms on Figueroa and their shadows did not yet exist, the sun still held itself behind the hills, shadowless light, a world unfinished. Unpronounced. Overpass supports were bending. He knew they were not but he saw them bow as in prayer. He gripped the wheel, drove on.

Unhoused lined the underpasses. A man folded in a doorway like a letter no one would open. A woman pushing a cart piled high with the architecture of a life and the wheels screaming against the pavement. He felt the concrete in his own spine. The cold of it. The way the body learns to fold itself small.

Beyond the towers the ocean waited. He could not see it but he knew it was there, gray and patient at the edge of everything, ready to receive what the city would one day give. All sliding west toward that final basin.

He exited the Santa Monica freeway and slid down the two lanes, down the hill, drafting, dancing between left turners and illegally parked cars to the right past old LA homes loved and not yet lost. He pulled into the lot and the potholes held last week’s rain like dark eyes watching. He cut the engine and it ticked and the world was still soft at its edges.

The shepherd stood at the edge of the lot as he turned in. Ears up. Eyes the color of honey and ruin. Behind it the lean-to made of tarp and providence and inside the shape of a man sleeping or dead or dreaming his own melting city. The dog watched him and he watched the dog and between them passed some understanding other than speech.

He got out and walked to the door and the guard said morning and he said it back and the word meant nothing and everything. A spell to make them both seem real. He showed his badge and the guard nodded and he was through.

He skipped the elevator. Always took the stairs because the elevator was a throat and he was not ready to be swallowed. Four floors. His legs knew the count. His eyes still held the dog and the lean-to and the sleeping man curled like a question.

He reached his floor. The hallway hummed its fluorescent hum. He walked to his cubicle and sat and the gray foam walls and bad chair received him and the screen glowed its pale blue welcome and the visions left him like water.

Below in the lot the sentinel shepherd had not moved. It stood in the almost-morning with its ears turned toward something no one else could hear and it waited as it had always waited as it would wait still when the sun finally cleared the hills and struck those jealous towers and remembered themselves solid for another day. And the ocean beyond them. Patient. Receiving. The true and final clock toward which all time flows.