Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the city Tatum Gray had made home over a decade before his move to Dale City, and its importance lies in the contrast between the person he became there and the quieter life he is sent to afterward. Initially oppressive to someone raised in Wickenburg, it gradually taught him to welcome a crowded, stimulating urban world. When he leaves, and later walks through Chicago, his memories of Los Angeles give his response to both places its measure.

A home built through adaptation

Tatum grew up in Wickenburg, Arizona, where he knew almost everyone by sight. Against that small-town familiarity, Los Angeles first struck him as loud and oppressive. Its lights, people, smells, and sounds seemed to press in on him from every direction. The early experience is one of sensory overload: the city did not immediately feel like home simply because he lived there.

That first reaction changed with time. Tatum spent ten years in Los Angeles, and as the city became familiar, its constant activity began to appeal to him. He came to enjoy the sense of life moving around him rather than experiencing it only as noise and intrusion. The city’s significance is therefore personal as well as geographic: it represents an environment to which he had to adjust, and eventually one whose intensity suited him.

Work and the departure

Los Angeles was also the setting of Tatum’s professional life before his move east. He had worked in the Los Angeles field office, and his later arrival in the Behavioral Analysis Unit prompted recognition as the agent from Los Angeles. Asked how he had moved from the field office to the unit, he could describe the transfer only uncertainly, as a promotion of sorts. His connection to the city is thus established both through his career history and through the way colleagues identify him by it.

His departure followed what he describes as one misunderstanding with his superiors and then many similar ones. The result was a life in Dale City, Virginia, a place he regards as offering little of the excitement he associates with a large city. This account does not make Los Angeles an uncomplicated refuge: Tatum left it because of professional circumstances. But the contrast reveals the cost of that move for him. He had not merely changed offices; he had been taken away from a kind of urban energy he had learned to value.

Family carried across the move

Los Angeles was also home to Tatum’s grandfather, Marvin. After Tatum’s grandmother died, Marvin took the loss hard and moved in with Tatum in Los Angeles. The move came shortly after Tatum’s relationship with Paige ended, placing two personal changes close together in his life there. Tatum’s household became a place of family responsibility as well as his own recovery from a breakup.

When Tatum later told Marvin he was going to Dale City, Marvin announced that he would go too. Their shared relocation makes Los Angeles the point of origin for a household that does not simply dissolve when Tatum changes postings. Tatum describes his grandfather as difficult to handle, and worries about Marvin’s drinking, marijuana use, and the possibility that his health might fail while he was alone. The move therefore carries practical burdens alongside their closeness: Marvin follows Tatum, but Tatum also feels responsible for looking after him.

Los Angeles as a measure of other cities

Tatum’s memory of Los Angeles becomes especially clear during his time in Chicago. Walking toward a pub, he takes in the surrounding activity and remembers how, after years in Los Angeles, he had come to enjoy the feeling of a city in motion. Chicago is not Los Angeles, but it gives him something Dale City does not: the sense of being somewhere things happen. Passing people, movement in the street, and the possibility of a ride make the contrast immediate in his perception.

The comparison does not erase Los Angeles’s difficult beginning or claim that the two cities are alike in every respect. Rather, Los Angeles supplies the experience against which Tatum recognizes what he misses. Once overwhelming, the city became his standard for an energetic urban life; his response to Chicago shows that this attachment survives his departure. In the narrative, Los Angeles is consequently more than a former work location. It is the home Tatum adapted to, the household he shared with Marvin, and the absent city that helps explain his dissatisfaction with Dale City and his renewed pleasure in Chicago.