The Sigma Asset 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022

42: The North Pacific Gyre

Farsi and Korean translations at the end of the chapter.

In true Californian tradition, the day after the quake was like any other. Only minor injuries were reported on the news, phone masts were remounted, electricity cables were mended. The fault line was looking a little devoid of greenery, and the south side of Santa Elena Beach was littered with boulders, one of which had crashed through the jetty, its splintered boards later washing up on the northern gullies along with dozens of beams from Arenosa Pier's boardwalk.

The main casualties were the pier and the real estate development that Will had been working on near Arenosa Rocks. The development that Gloria had said time and time again was too close to the fault line. Will had worked such long hours before his surgery that he was on schedule with his contract when the quake had struck, his weeks of hard work crumbling to rubble.

Will was at that moment in Arenosa negotiating with the real estate developers about insurance payments for the incomplete part of his contract. He'd been pretty zen about it, sad for the construction workers who had worked painstakingly for so long, but happy that he'd had work for those weeks.

Clean-up teams picked their way across the beach while my two Monday students, who'd missed out on testing out the new piano because of the inconvenient earthquake, spent the morning getting to know the feeling of felt on steel. Both students' motivation had lagged since starting lessons, but their initial passion returned when they played real strings and hammers for the first time, and the sweetest strings at that.

I'd promised Gloria an exclusive eye-witness account of the quake, as an anonymous morning runner, for the Santa Elena Newsletter. She'd downloaded the earthquake's seismic data, epicenter maps, and all manner of earthquake trivia for the Special Earthquake Issue. My recollection of the quake didn't sound so exciting when typed into the pages of the Newsletter, but I declared the local hero to be Selena Perez for saving her yoga students from the Pier Studio before they all dropped outta the bottom of it.

Gloria was in good spirits, typing and chattering away despite the fact that Jules's beloved Pier Studio, and the pier itself, was under three meters of water.

"Julia has sadly postponed the purchase of FlowYoga while her accountant deals with the insurance paperwork for the loss of the Pier Studio," she said in sombre tones, but she couldn't hide the glee in her eyes.

"At least Lars finished his FlowYoga on Tour video series about Arenosa's yoga scene."

"Video series?" Gloria asked.

"Yeah. It's blowing up on Youtube." I held my phone in front of Gloria's face, skipping through Lars's impressively edited video featuring Jules describing the Pier Studio as the spiritual center of yoga in California, cutting away to licensed drone footage and press photography of the Santa Elena Faultline tremors, with Lars's kindly TV voiceover and sympathetic presentation of the wreckage.

A dumb mock-interview with Jules followed, where she talked about the blow that the loss of the studio would be to the community. A link to a crowdfunding web page came last of all, which seemed to be run by FlowYoga and not West Coast Yoga, the company who'd actually suffered the loss. Lars was pretty good at finding ways to make money.

"That man," said Gloria. "Everything is a business opportunity for him."

Gloria looked so disgusted by Lars that I was tempted to tell her that Selena would at any moment be giving an eye-witness account of blackmail and possible embezzlement to Charlotte's team at the D.A.'s Office, hopefully ending Lars's designs on Jules's company for good. But I was too chickenshit to say anything.

Selena's reservations about trainwrecking Jules's relationship with Lars had me dreading the heartbreak about to hit Jules full in the face. Could I just slink off to Korea before having to see Jules again, leave alone confess to her what I'd done?