Chapter 4 of an unfinished book based on The Odyssey, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. This episode opens with the series' musical introduction and universal cold open, then follows a single story — the next chapter after Episode 6 — out of the private hillside and into a Los Angeles morning of ash, roadblocks, and concrete water.

Tonight, just after midnight, arrangements break on wet streets under ash rain, at a roadblock under a dead traffic light, in a half-open window where an acolyte offered coffee, in a dead raft sedan under a Vegas sign, and in a concrete river washing smoke from a mouth.

For three blocks the car works — not well, but sufficiently. Virgil drives with both hands; fax paper presses his ribs; island smoke will not leave his hair. Beside him, Dante sits as if occupying a function: papers open, eyes never still, disaster manageable only if named before it gets sentimental. At a roadblock under a dead traffic light, Dante offers medical transport — for the gentleman in transition — and a city worker points them away with the irritation of a minor god assigned to drainage.

What follows is wind and ash, a bus of faces under hazard lights, Dante absorbed by uniforms and blocked lanes, and a young woman in a white vinyl coat who offers coffee and a folded towel. She says Nelly sent her. Dante's rule: don't take warm drinks from weather. The freeway offers Las Vegas through smoke; fire jumps the median; the raft dies under the green sign. They walk through helicopter rain to a locked fence and the city's concrete river — infrastructure that has accidentally remembered flow — where Virgil washes smoke from his mouth.

This episode is about departure without arrival, care that is also a leash, and the first water that asks nothing of a man except that he wash.

Featuring:

Virgil

Dante

The acolyte in the white vinyl coat

The city worker

Nelly (offstage)

"Don't take warm drinks from weather."

This Day in Deaths is a fictional series. Names, places, and events in this episode are invented. This episode is Chapter 4 of an unfinished novel (Chapter 1 appeared as Episode 2; Chapter 2 as Episode 5; Chapter 3 as Episode 6).