Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the novel’s recurring threshold between Dan Davis’s private winter and the future he must learn to inhabit. On 3 December 1970, he searches for the Door into Summer in the city; after thirty years of cold sleep, he returns to a Los Angeles swollen by migration and organized around the elevated Wilshire Ways. The same place thus frames two very different struggles: an intimate crisis of hope and a concrete effort to find work, shelter, and a route back to the life he lost.

Setting and Urban Change

The city first appears through Dan’s winter metaphor rather than through a neutral survey of streets. Southern California has little snow, and what there is remains on the mountains for skiers; downtown Los Angeles offers no convincing physical winter. Dan locates the season instead in his own heart, admitting that his quest for the Door into Summer is bound up with self-pity even though he is healthy, nearly thirty, and not broke. The city’s climate cannot explain or cure his mood: summer weather surrounds a man who feels trapped in winter.

By the time Dan wakes in 2000 and begins trying to establish himself, he sees Los Angeles as a city transformed by the Six Weeks War and its aftermath. It escaped the war’s one-second slum-clearance plan, and refugees poured into it; apparently, even those with homes elsewhere did not return. Dan describes Great Los Angeles as less a conventional city than a condition, crowded until it feels as packed as a woman’s purse. The disappearance of smog has not brought relief from urban pressure: he even wonders whether it helped keep people from leaving, as sinus sufferers once had reason to do. His account makes the future’s abundance and technological improvement inseparable from congestion and population stasis.

The City in 1970

On 3 December 1970, Dan’s search for the Door into Summer takes him through swinging doors into the Sans Souci Bar Grill. Carrying an overnight bag, he chooses a booth in the hallway’s rear and waits for service. The bag answers with a growl: Pete, the cat, is inside. The small scene joins Dan’s inward desolation to the practical habits of a man traveling with his closest companion and his belongings; the “door” he seeks is not a literal portal but an imagined escape from his present state.

Los Angeles also supplies the ordinary infrastructure of Dan’s 1970 life. His car is parked beneath Pershing Square; he pays the attendant, sets the automatic driving system toward the arterial west, and puts Pete on the seat. Yet the city’s fast, dangerous traffic makes him distrust automatic control, which he judges insufficiently fail-safe. Once they are west of Western Avenue, he takes manual control and wants a drink. Modern machinery may move him across the city, but it does not eliminate his unease or his desire to redesign what he considers a flawed system.

The 2000 Return and the Search for a Foothold

After leaving the Sawtelle Consolidated Sanctuary, Dan sits on a bench outside, facing the Wilshire Ways, and tries to decide whether to go east or west. He has kept his composure indoors, but is badly shaken; his available cash amounts to about a week’s meals. The warm sun, the drone of the Ways, his biological youth, and the fact that he still has his hands and his brain give him grounds to act. He opens the Los Angeles Times to the help-wanted pages and deliberately turns away from professional engineering work toward unskilled jobs. The city’s elevated routes and newspaper classifieds become immediate tools for someone whose old credentials and position no longer secure a place in it.

Dan takes work that pays twenty-one dollars a day, bringing home about sixteen after deductions. He finds that he can manage on inexpensive meals, but housing is harder in a city full of people who seem never to leave. His immediate list of problems is extensive: find a job and a place to sleep, catch up in engineering, locate Ricky, return to engineering if possible, and find Belle and Miles without going to jail. He also wants to investigate the history of Hired Girl and the origins of Eager Beaver, which he suspects is really Flexible Frank. Los Angeles is therefore not just the place where he waits for the past to be restored; it is where he has to turn a crowded, unfamiliar future into a set of solvable tasks.

His first search for Ricky produces evidence that she existed, but not a reliable route to her. A school transcript could have gone to any of many thousands of public schools, and Dan cannot know how long it would take to contact them or whether their records could produce an answer. In a quarter of a billion people, he reflects, one little girl can disappear like a pebble in the ocean. The scale of the city echoes that larger national scale: Los Angeles’s crowding and Ricky’s disappearance both expose how difficult it is to locate an individual within immense populations and institutions.

Work, Routes, and the City’s Institutions

Once Dan learns that Miles and Belle are no longer running Hired Girl, he chooses to seek work there rather than apply to one of a hundred other automation firms. Hired Girl and Aladdin are the leading names in appliance automatons, and his choice is partly sentimental: he wants to see what his old company has become. On Monday, 5 March 2001, he visits Hired Girl’s employment office, fills out a dozen forms unrelated to engineering and one that matters, and is told not to expect a call. When an assistant dismisses his engineering degree because he has not used the skill for thirty years, Dan leaves before answering angrily, circles three-quarters of a mile to the building’s front entrance, and insists his way past successive layers of staff to ask for the general manager. In a company that uses human receptionists rather than its own automatons, his technological expertise does not automatically grant him access or authority.

The Wilshire Ways also give Dan a rapid connection between the city’s separated districts. While living in West Hollywood, he needs cash before he can travel to Riverside. He rides downtown to the nearest twenty-four-hour bank, at the Grand Circle of the Ways, and uses the universal checkbook system: a citywide cybernet clears the transaction, while radioactive coding identifies the checkbook. Cash reaches his hand as quickly as it would at his home bank across from Hired Girl. He then takes the express Way to Riverside, reaching the sanctuary in daylight. The system makes a long-distance transfer effortless, but it cannot shorten the emotional distance between Dan and the person he is trying to find.

Los Angeles remains the setting of Dan’s return to the confrontation he left behind. On the evening of 3 December 1970, he takes a cab to within a block of Miles’s house, arriving early because he is unsure of the time of his first visit. From a position a hundred yards away he watches the curb; after seeing a car pull up and switch off its lights, he recognizes it as his own. He retrieves a spare key he has hidden in the trunk, lets the car roll downhill without lights or engine, and turns it into the alley behind Miles’s house. Familiar streets, a remembered hiding place, and a carefully controlled route let Dan approach the past on his own terms. Across the novel’s two periods, Los Angeles is at once the crowded city that makes starting over difficult and the physical ground on which Dan’s unfinished history can be resumed.