Los Angeles serves as more than a backdrop: it is a city of attempted returns and sudden departures, where private family histories meet the machinery of commerce and surveillance. Frenesi repeatedly passes her mother’s neighborhood without finding her; DL turns the city into a temporary refuge and reinvention point; and Prairie’s reunion with Ché unfolds in a mall that packages Hollywood history as entertainment while watching its visitors closely.

A City of Return and Departure

Frenesi comes back to Los Angeles on business after withdrawing from ordinary civilian life. On these visits she drives east of La Brea, slowly following the flat residential streets toward her parents’ house, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation had once done throughout her childhood. She searches for Sasha Gates, but never sees her in the yard or at a window. The careful, repeated drive makes the old neighborhood a place of suspended expectation: Frenesi can approach the family home, but cannot turn that physical proximity into a meeting.

The house eventually supplies an answer through signs of changed occupancy rather than through Sasha herself. Frenesi notices toys scattered across the lawn, new cars in the garage, and a bright plastic tricycle. To learn where her mother has gone, she must ask more favors than she had meant to request. Sasha has moved to a small apartment not far away. The narrative leaves open whether she stayed in the house as long as she could in the hope that Frenesi would return, or whether age or some devastating discovery about her daughter finally made her give up waiting. Los Angeles thus holds both a trace of the family’s past and the uncertainty of what has become of it.

DL’s Temporary Reinvention

Los Angeles also becomes a practical way station in DL’s flight from Ralph Wayvone. After escaping his pursuit near Drain, Oregon, she changes cars before reaching the city. She has previously placed a packet of documents in a Wilshire bank, and those papers let her choose a new identity. She pays cash for a 1966 Plymouth Fury, buys a wig on Western Avenue, and transforms herself in a service-station restroom on Olympic into a markedly less conspicuous woman.

The city is not her destination. With the radio playing the Doors’ People Are Strange, DL enters the eastbound freeway and begins a long drive away from the places she is leaving behind. She remembers Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs interchange, Indio, and the Mojave, imagining the desert in pale but intense colors even as she keeps looking in the rear-view mirror. The journey turns departure into a repeated act of looking back: the landscape recedes, but remains emotionally difficult to relinquish.

DL drives without stopping until the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, where she arrives around midday in fog and heavy traffic. There she rents a small apartment and takes a job as a typist and records clerk at a vacuum-parts distributor. The contrast with her earlier mobility is central to the episode: Los Angeles enables a change of identity, while the ordinary life she seeks lies far beyond it. Her imagined alternative is a settled, unremarkable existence, not another spectacular escape.

Prairie, Ché, and the Commercial City

For Prairie, Los Angeles brings a limited success in the search for family connection. She manages to reconnect with her old friend Ché, but Sasha is out of town, and Prairie cannot reach her. Sasha’s recorded telephone message suggests that the phone may be monitored. The city therefore offers Prairie a companion while keeping the mother she seeks beyond contact.

Prairie and Ché’s shared history is rooted in their explorations of shopping centers. They were among the first habitual shop-rats at Fox Hills and also knew the Sherman Oaks Galleria, sometimes hitchhiking for days to reach malls that proved to be little more than folkloric false El Dorados. The outings mattered because they could be together, not because every destination lived up to its promise. That history gives their meeting at Hollywood’s Noir Center a personal as well as cultural weight.

The Noir Center borrows the look of films made around the Second World War and recalls the Bradbury Building, where scenes from such films were shot. Prairie likes those old black-and-white movies, in part because her grandparents Hub Gates and Sasha Gates, and Ché’s grandparents Dolly and Wade, belong to Hollywood’s history. But she dislikes the mall’s aggressive exploitation of that past. The store’s departments turn noir into a chain of puns and consumer brands: mineral water appears under Bubble Indemnity, furniture under The Lounge Good Buy, cosmetics under The Mail Tease Flacon, and food under The Lady ’n’ the Lox. Prairie’s familiarity with stories from Hub and Sasha makes her less willing than the mall’s marketers to mistake Hollywood’s polished screen image for the whole city; she knows that corruption extended through both its powerful circles and its underworld.

Surveillance, Evasion, and the Return to Vineland

The Noir Center’s imitation of old Hollywood is not just decorative. Its guards wear brown suits with pointed lapels and fedoras, while closed-circuit cameras and computers make its surveillance more sophisticated and hostile than the casual monitoring Prairie remembers from older malls. Those earlier places had real fountains and living plants; there might be a young worker willing to trade a hamburger for earrings, or even an ice-skating rink. Against that memory, the Noir Center’s security turns an ordinary commercial visit into a scene of controlled visibility.

Prairie and Ché approach the mall by zigzag routes, as though they expect pursuit by stalkers, the Child Welfare Service, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When Ché arrives, her leather, canvas, metal, and denim clothes, bazooka-style purse, and high feathered crest make her conspicuous even as the two friends try to evade notice. During their escape from the mall, Prairie throws herself into the pursuing crowd, reaches Ché, grabs her wrist, and spins them both toward the exit. The cheerful mall music continues to soothe the other customers, recasting a raid-like flight as harmless youthful commotion; a buoyant arrangement of Chuck Berry’s Maybellene accompanies their disappearance into the evening. In Los Angeles, evasion and spectacle occupy the same space.

Later, Prairie arrives at Takeshi Fumimota’s office to find it in disarray after he and DL return from the destruction of Ditzah Pisk Feldman’s home and the burning of the 24fps archive. She is frightened and has little choice but to stay close to the two of them. On the journey back to Vineland, they buy a Lamborghini LM002 for $135,000, and Prairie describes the ride as like being taken aboard a UFO. Her thoughts turn to an imagined parallel world in which her mother chose not to have her, leaving Prairie to pursue Frenesi as if haunting her. Los Angeles has offered a friend, a missing mother, and a brief place in the search; it has not resolved the family’s separation. The movement away from the city carries that unresolved longing into the next leg of the story.