They walked down the sidewalk and stood at the bottom of the steep asphalt drive leading up to the little garage at the side of the house. The place looked lifeless. The yard had long ago gone to dirt. Neighborhood dogs—and their shameful owners—had left behind little cairns of shit in various states of petrifaction, by which time could be measured. The dogs had respectfully not disturbed one another’s offerings such that they were scattered in some sort of strange canine-logic grid. They looked like ancient religious shrines or deities. Some of those could be as old as you, said Dean. Maybe you could use them in your art, James replied. For some reason, a tire was sitting on the roof. It seemed to be a necessary component of the satellite dish.
There was a car in the drive. A nice and completely non-ironic and spotless black Land Rover with dealer plates. It was too nice for the house and seemed to already be making the house disappear. Such spaces of disappearance were familiar in Los Angeles and could be considered a Mike Davis sort of phenomenon: crap house + luxury car = eventual tear-down of said house and re-development of lot into massively obnoxious mansion-like house by, in all likelihood, transplant from another state who came to California to be rich by doing nothing of true significance yet getting paid very well to do whatever it was he/she did. There were two of those irritatingly- and egotistically-proud university stickers on the real window: Cornell and Harvard. One got the sense that the driver had indeed attended those schools. It was the sort of car one had the urge to smash or at least throw pebbles at.