World on Fire

OLIVIA NUZZI was a star political correspondent until scandal led her into exile—and to a California up in flames. In an excerpt from American Canto, our West Coast Editor takes stock of scorched earth

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I woke the morning after Election Day on the wrong coast of the right country. A brush fire had come charging across the road, through two houses, and onto the cliffs above the sea. But I did not know that yet.

All I knew was that my phone was ringing, and when I picked up it was a friend, walking along the Atlantic in Palm Beach, where I was supposed to be, and she was dodging sources and subjects, like I was supposed to be, and when the conversation turned to a sensitive topic, right around the time I was wondering why my coffee was not brewing, the call dropped. The power was out.

A few minutes later, the planes swooped down to spray the flames in the bluffs. I watched from the Pacific Coast Highway, as far away from my problems as I could get on land, which was not far enough. You cannot outrun your life on fire.

On the coast, the streetlights and traffic lights and the lights in the big windows of the big houses turned to black. It was not until I made my way up to Zuma that I saw the fire had been right behind me. The pink clouds puffed up to the south. Then the flames peeked over the hill. The sky grew lighter as the fire swelled and made its way to the sea. I watched from the deck as the night turned orange. How many like the rattlesnake, his little soul swallowed without ceremony in one breath? And where would the coyotes go? They did not walk across the deck and leap into the garden tonight.

12:40 a.m., 100 acres burning.

I stand on the edge of the earth. I wander through the burned-up grasslands. Any fantasy of creation I understand as a fantasy of destruction too. In every spark of life, an ember of death. A trillion little deaths a minute, collecting quickly around your ankles, tethering you to the beach, dividing you from the sea. Off the cliff over the Mediterranean and onto the cliff over the Pacific.

2:15 a.m., 850 acres burning.