Amputation

An Exclusive Excerpt from Bruce Wagner's Forthcoming Novel

Today, we are proud to launch our Fiction section with an exclusive excerpt from Bruce Wagner’s forthcoming novel, Amputation. With his signature mordant wit and cultural acuity, Wagner continues his literary excavation of Los Angeles and its inhabitants during a moment of existential catastrophe: the 2025 California wildfires. This polyphonic excerpt showcases why Wagner remains one of America’s most fearless chroniclers of our fractured society.

Django Ellenhorn, previously an Associate Editor, will now be helming our Fiction section. We will open submissions soon.

—The Editors

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who shall live and who shall die,
who in good time,
and who by an untimely death,
who by water and who by fire,
who by sword and who by wild beast,
who by famine and who by thirst,
who by earthquake and who by plague,
who by strangulation and who by stoning,
who shall have rest and who wander,
who shall be at peace and who pursued,
who shall be serene and who tormented,
who shall become impoverished and who wealthy,
who shall be debased,
and who exalted.
—Untanneh Tokef

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—Another child grows up to be
Somebody you'd just love to burn
—Sly and the Family Stone

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The night before, Trooper the Surfer was way up in the Highlands fooling around with the trans bros—most of them were topless but still had pussies—he wasn’t a chaser but met one at the beach (Rory) who said he ‘cracked the egg about a year ago and had top surgery.’ Trooper gave his stock lifestyle-response, his Pete Davidson/Chad ‘Cool,’ and Rory, smiling with a degree of seriousness, said, ‘I’m making my own decisions. I’m my own legal guardian and people don’t understand that.’ He invited the surfer over and whoa the manse was a fuckin motherlode. Trooper’s uncle couldn’t believe all the shit he stole—the trans bros were so rich they didn’t notice or care. His uncle said, ‘Hell, we need to go back,’ but they never got it together. But now the fires were coming and the unbreasted coven was comatose from G—all of them AirPodded except Rory, who loved his cheap Dóttir Freedoms headphones, and Jank, who loved his (Dad’s) $8,000 HIFIMAN Susvara Planar Magnetics—so no one heard the cold, cyclonic 80 mph Santa Anas—Didion and Ray Chandler wouldn’t know a cold Santa Ana if it super-scooped them from the grave, but that’s what it was—cold, cold, cold—all were oblivious to the embers ghost gust-riding the winds to dance with the detonated nitrous tanks in the guest house stocked for the Armin van Buuren DJ’d dumbly titled ‘Fyre Too!’ house party fest set for tomorrow. Nor did they watch the roof/walls blow out and marry the firestorm—nor see the cathedral-size canyon overlook living room window explode, instantly severing the Neo Rauch Die Herrin canvas (and Jank’s left subclavian). Nor could they witness the on-fire cougar studded with fatal shrapnel quills that cannonballed into the tableau like some animatronic loser fleeing di Cosimo’s great painting of a forest inferno; nor hear its sick-making stereophonic scream or smell the febrile anal bloodstink of its extirpation at the foot of the melted Basquiat black crowned king (a gift from Mom to Dad) and the melty Kara Walker and smelting steel-titted Louise Bourgeois’s The Good Mother (gift from Dad to Mom). Eerily, their cadavers were preserved (mostly) by a timely windblown plash of pink retardant, enough for an astute fireman to note in the aftermath that each had the same horizontal sub-aureole scar, i.e. what was believed to be a rich boys’ sleepover was amended by the coroner to a gaggle of FTM twinks.

Forensics revealed that only one, Dommy, had had bottom surgery, which had become a fount of chronic infection in his short life; the consequences of the newfangled penis’s charred erasure left the seventeen-year-old’s gender uncontroversially unassigned at death—

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Stephen

The comedian didn’t know if he was crushed or just pinned.

The tree was wet.

It was a tall pine, and he knew that meant its roots went horizontal, making it prone to toppling; a useless piece of trivia that did him no good just now. What would do him any good?

The winds were otherworldly—might they lift this thing? But then what?—he was unable to move.

How am I not dead?

He could move his arms at the elbows, painfully jostling them into shrugged-up surrender like a beaten-down cormorant making a futile pass at drying its wings. There were fires on the mountain and in patches nearby, yet he barely felt the heat.

No, the flames will not consume me. This I know. This, I feel.

Sometimes though there was a prolonged fury—crazed battalions of embers scattered and divebombed, hot ash drones reconnoitered, a damned murmuration of lost soul starlings, a violent, epileptic shimmering here, there, everywhere—and he could hear himself shouting, the awkward perverse jubilation of a brave super nerd with a death grip on the rollercoaster’s steely bar . . .

He still could wrap his arms around the tree, dark with water and retardant.

‘That’s a good thing,’ he said aloud; a defunct optimist smote by the Immensity.

He thought of The Lord of the Rings, its very pages made from trees such as this. The books that saved him after the jet crash death of his beloved father and brothers. He closed his eyes and willed Treebeard to lift him in its arms, as he did with the hobbits Merry and Pippin.

Evie will be worried I haven’t called . . .

His beautiful bride of forty-two years.

How many times had he spoken of the night they first met? He’d rhapsodized about it during Late Show preshows, memorialized it in PBS interviews with obsequious starstruck priests and with devout Paley Center grovelers. At the time, the comedian was still (sort of) with his girlfriend Anne. Anne wanted to get married. She told him, ‘Fish or cut bait, Stephen.’ He went back home to mull it over (or maybe cut bait). Charleston was his Shire, the fruitful land that gave him strength and power. He told his mother about his dilemma, and she asked if he loved Anne. When he said that he did, Mom said, ‘Do you want to marry her?’ He answered that he didn’t know. ‘Well,’ said Mom, ‘that isn’t good enough.’ So he went to the Spoleto festival to watch a little opera, music by Philip Glass, poems by Allen Ginsberg. After the play, at a party, he saw Evie across a room and thought, That’s who I’m going to marry.

They talked for hours before the epiphany of realizing that they knew each other when they were kids. God was chasing me all along, in the form of Evie. As the conversation meandered, Stephen spoke of a poet from Charleston whose work he was having trouble finding when suddenly a voice behind them shouted, ‘That poet is my father!’ When the comedian told the story, he’d always say, ‘That was the sign. You see, the poet’s son sneezed a blessing upon the specialness of meeting Evie’—then thoughtfully help listeners to understand the origin of the term. ‘It’s from the Robert Fagles translation of the Nausicaa chapter in The Odyssey, which hearkens to an old superstition: When someone sneezes during the telling of a fantastical story, it’s a blessing and means the story must be true.’

When the heinous hothead winds receded, he spoke out loud again, reciting a line from his favorite E. E. Cummings—i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees—then cursed himself for losing the thread; he couldn’t remember what came next. Was pain scrambling his memory? Was he feeling pain? There was some . . . but really more of a numbness, a primordial ache, for which he was grateful.

The observation was replaced by an inkling—one he needed to push away:

The pain will come, and when it does, it will be intolerable.

He glided to an old favorite, Matthew 6:27, as a reset. He mustered the energy to declaim, ‘Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?’ Then, ‘And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers . . . wildfires!’—pleased by his improvisation with the text—‘that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?’

To prove he still did, he began another recitation: Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven (‘What a sight I must be!’ thought Stephen. ‘It’s a bad Beckett play’), that stunning ode to God’s fierce, love-soaked pursuit of errant, fleeing souls, and, as if to prove to himself and the cosmos that he was of profoundly sound mind, if not of body, he didn’t stop until the final, 182nd line:

  
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter
. . .
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’
  

Ah, there.

Ha!

Much better . . .

He’d always had the knack to disgorge a long poem.

Each time he gave in to the flourish, something gnawed. Stephen knew it was just a party trick (like Cavett and his self-beloved anagrams), a braggadocio deceit, a contemptuous, peacocking artifice—nothing more than a tool of seduction honed on college girls back in the day. But there he would be again, enthralled with his own bullshit, preening like a busker as he did his Lay Theologian Laureate shtick at ecumenical conferences and strutting his stuff while accepting the prestigious Laetare Medal at the University of Notre Dame. He even marathon-versified with Fallon, Conan, Whoopi, and Chris Rock when they pilgrimaged to Italy to meet ‘Papa’ Francis. On the streets of Rome or a table in La Pergola, he couldn’t help himself burn through the Pilgrim’s Prayer or Aquinas or Yeats, just to wow them. It was like jumping out of a cake, nude. But instead of his tits, he was knocking them dead with his brain. All was vanity and Stephen knew it.

A fundamental sin. But now he was cornered. He couldn’t dravest away, let alone stand. The winds kicked up and the fiendish fireflies swarmed with superheated abandon. He howled and winced and thought of Evie and their kids and wept. The crying caused him pain. With the outburst came both fear and release.

The only poem that came to mind was a prayer, to which he dare not give voice: Yes, Father. Let God’s love descend upon me like holy embers.

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Esther

A week before, in her home in the Highlands, she hosted Ta-Nehisi Coates at a fundraiser for Gaza children. (She spoke with him about a film project too.) Among the guests—likeminded friends she called the Pacific Palestiners—were Hunter Schafer, Angelina Jolie, Quannah Chasinghorse, Kehlani, and her pretend-bestie, Debra Winger. The bakery she owned—with its tiresomely nonbinary celeb-whoring Esthergen waitstaff—catered the event, but the hubby wasn’t there because a few weeks ago, she accused Rocky of having an affair and kicked him to the curb. Of course, he denied it and left under sheepish protest, checking into Shutters. But only after his wife, with passive-aggressive largesse, pressed her Black Card into his hand. She had him on a tight leash. He remained expressionless as he took it. What was one more degradation?

Esther loved Debra Winger for tweaking Netanyahu on the actress’s IG, and she got all horned up by her new friend’s merciless playfulness (Debra loved spelling out ‘zi0ni$t’ and ‘Isr*l’). And Esther loved that she celebrated the martyred Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, slaughtered in an airstrike along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and her three children.

A few months ago, the ladies started DMing. Esther was the first to reach out, and when Debra wrote back three hearts on fire, she knew they would be sisters for life. Esther nicknamed her TD—Truth Diva.

In her twenties, she wanted to be Debra Winger, a sexy, vibrant, radically independent Jewess (Esther used that word every chance she could get just to fuck with people) who rolled over for no man. Apart from spending months on kibbutzim in their teens, there were all kinds of parallels. (They’d independently done the Hoffman Process!) For one, TD’s husband, Arliss Howard, was kind of a nerdy submissive, like Rocky. For another, they were born on the same day of the same month of the same year. The weirdest thing, though, was that Esther’s shrink and Debra’s mom were both called Ruth Felder. But their most cosmic bond was that when Debra was eighteen and got back to the States from visiting Jerusalem, she was in a car accident that blinded and paralyzed her for almost a year; it was during that time TD decided to move to LA and become a movie star. When Esther was around the same age, a freshman in college, she caught Guillain-Barré and got paralyzed herself, but only for three weeks. During her own time of immobility and rank fear, she vowed to move to LA and open a kosher bakery with the monies her father had provided in a trust.

After Ta-Nehisi read a section about visiting Palestine from his latest book, there was a lively, gemütlich Q&A. The crazy gorgeous, divine as fuck Quannah Chasinghorse eloquently compared the genocide to what happened to the people of Alaska’s Turtle Island. When it was time for Esther to say a few words, she had a spontaneous, amazing idea. She said that many of her dwindling bakery customers (‘the lobbyists,’ as Esther called them, were leaving in droves and denouncing her) wore yellow ribbons for Israeli hostages and their families. The hostess paused dramatically and told the group, ‘I think we should have black ribbons. For heart and conscience-holders like Mansour Shreim, Mar’i Abu Sa’ida, and Murad Nazmi Al-Ajloun—all of whom, among thousands of others, are still imprisoned in Israel. They’re not even allowed family visits! And they are tortured.’ The response was subdued, except for Quannah, whose pierced eyebrow raised in scampish delight. ‘I’ll hand out the ribbons at my bakery, with the chocolate rugelachs! Or bury them in challah like a Cracker Jack surprise!’ Most were too young to get the Cracker Jack reference, but everyone laughed.

When the Pacific Palestiners were thanking her and saying goodbyes, Debra squeezed Esther’s arm and whispered, ‘The black ribbons are genius.’

‘I’m getting death threats, TD—always anonymous! That’s when you know you’re on the right side of history.’ She leaned in closer. ‘Those cowards think they’re the real Jews. But the real Jews know.’ When she added ‘Shalom,’ Debra smiled a dark, loving look of solidarity then squeezed her arm again and was gone.

That night, Esther lay in bed scrolling through her text messages.

you sic cunt mengele is getting his pliers ready to tear off your sagging tits and stuff them up your HAMASIFFIED shithole///the dead babies yr besties used as shields at their hospital HQs will be suckling on those jewhating teats/// christopher hitchens is already being raped in hell by the martyrs he was so in love with teehee!

Then another—

With all due respect, you clearly know so very little about the history of the Middle East. I say that as a Jew and a historian living in Israel who has seen firsthand—

Then—

you are killing your father! I ran into him at the Brisket and he has lost so much weight

Then—

GOOD ON YOU everybody knows los zionistas collaborated with the nazis during the hollowcaust (that’s what the leonard cohen song ‘everybody knows’ is about—kike kollaborators)

And at last, which made her heart jump:

did u know your loser hubby’s fucking the GREY’S ANATOMY grifter Elisabeth Finch?

Humph.

She would need to look into that.

She took two trazadone and fell into a deep sleep.

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Karen

On the military plane back to LA, the mayor spoke to a hundred staffers and knew she was being pilloried. During a break, a helpful aide handed her an iPad with an online interview with the fiery, charismatic Yvette Nicole Brown (Community) testifying that ‘Karen Bass has a spine of steel. She's also been a Black woman in America for a long time, so none of this is new to her. We are mad, because we're tired of it.’ It almost brought the mayor to tears. The actress was a big supporter of hers from the beginning. They didn’t talk much but were text-buddies, in bursts.

The embattled leader surprised herself by spontaneously calling right then and there, startling them both to giggles when Yvette picked up.

Karen spoke in medias res: ‘They keep writing why didn’t I cancel my trip after they said there was going to be moderate to strong Santa Anas and extreme fire conditions. Santa Anas and fire conditions! That’s what I’ve had for breakfast most days in our beautiful city, Yvette, for sixty years!’ The actress hooted. ‘Lord, I’ve been hearing that since I was a little girl raised up in Venice. Daddy was a postman and oh he loved the weather. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor Santa Anas stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds! But you know what? Try as we may, we cannot avoid fires, mud slides, and wrecks on the 405.’

‘Or the Orange Hitler Man,’ said Yvette.

‘That too,’ laughed the mayor. ‘And how is anyone going to avoid a hundred-mile-an-hour wind?’

It was strange how randomly her daughter Emilia’s death reared its head to pair itself with anything at all. The car crash tragedy happened more than twenty years ago but seemed to have a deathlife of its own. Freeway accidents and fire seasons in LA—does that mean you stop driving? Does that mean you don’t travel for a joyous, historic occasion at the behest of the President?

It was almost 90° in Accra.

Their plane had been delayed so they bypassed the hotel; she would have to change into her dress at the palace. The route from the airport to the Black Star Square had been carefully choreographed to highlight the beauty and modernism of the capital. Still, when they couldn’t avoid driving past a shantytown, one of the delegates distracted the mayor with small talk because a whole section of it was inconveniently on fire. The stink of burning metal and sewage was knockdown pungent, yet Karen maintained her bland trademark smile, never breaking the delegate’s gaze in the pretense of not really noticing. On the palace grounds, they were misted by the aerosol of a sweet, musky bouquet. Ambassador Palmer said that it was a fragrance called The Vatican, from Maison Yusif, a young Ghanaian company that had just won the prestigious Perfumista Award in France.

Karen stood beside the presidents of Nigeria and Kenya for an official photo before having a much-anticipated private audience with the newly inaugurated Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, Ghana’s first female vice president. Both wore red—something providential that made them smile—Jane in a red kente gown, the mayor in a dress from Sergio Hudson. They were about the same age and the honored guest immediately felt a sisterhood. She couldn’t wait to tell Kamala all about it. What a lovely antidote and bookend it was for her other sister’s heartbreaking loss!

A glorious tribal circle of lady warrior drums . . .

Jane was a maverick whose focus was inclusivity, gender equity, and the empowerment of girls. She was also a PhD in English literature, and when Karen learned that, she said out loud, ‘Oh my!’ The mayor had always felt insecure at not being book smart. (It didn’t do a thing for her when her stepdaughter Scythia said, ‘Mom, you’re the smartest woman I know.’) By the time of their chat, Karen had already been cued about the conflagration back home but was doing her best to stay present. She warmly told Jane that ‘the other vice president’ sent her personal regards—and with that PhD in mind, added that Kamala’s favorite book was Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Jane said Song of Solomon was her favorite too. Then she asked Karen if she’d ever read The Fire Next Time.

The ladies winced almost imperceptibly at the faux pas.

Jane covered it over by backtracking and mentioning that Toni Morrison loved Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.

‘My shameful secret,’ Karen confessed, wanting to be transparent, ‘is that I’ve always meant to read James Baldwin but never seem to have the time. I have read him,’ she lied, ‘but not in depth.’ Though she did share that she loved the actor who portrayed Baldwin in The Swans, a miniseries that soon became ‘my guilty pleasure.’ Vice President Jane hadn’t heard of The Swans. Karen said it was ‘about another marvelous writer, Truman Capote. I haven’t read him either!’ laughed the mayor, and Jane was charmed.

While the logistics of returning to LA were being plotted, everyone in the delegation now knew what was happening in California. The King himself sympathetically took Karen aside and spoke of their own trouble with fires in Ghana. He said they too had high winds but everything was made worse by congested access, poor water distribution, and ‘delays in raising the alarm’—things he was trying mightily to remedy. The Commonwealth Secretary-General chimed in about the fire that gutted close to two hundred shops in the Kumasi Market. ‘The fires are quite expensive,’ he said. ‘One of these terrible incidents had a cost of seven million cedi.’

On the way to the military plane, Karen thought of her father, the letter carrier.

The shantytown was still burning.

She told an aide to order Song of Solomon, and some Baldwin too, but not The Fire Next Time.

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Roderick

The stuntman was staying with his girlfriend Sonata at her mobile home in Tahitian Terrace but they wouldn’t evacuate until later that night. It was only 3 p.m., so when Steve urgently texted him, Rod heeded the call. (He was already up at the fire road clearing brush.)

He jumped on the Harley and sped down Palisades Drive from the Summit to help Steve move residents from Cielo, a superluxe assisted living home in the Highlands that someone told him cost its tenants at least $20,000 a month. He passed three men on scooters who were on their way up, all hooded, hunched down and determined. They had empty bike messenger bags slung on their shoulders. Rod called 911 and somewhat guiltily said, ‘I think they may be looters. You know, marauders, whatever. They don’t look like they live here and they definitely don’t look like they’re here to help.’ The dispatcher asked if they had weapons. ‘None that I could see.’ When she patched him through to the police he got cut off. By then, he’d arrived at Cielo, so let it go.

The media had crowned Steve Guttenberg, a borderline pudgy, faded actor, as the Everyman ‘folk hero’ of the hour (when his wife teased him, he hammily sang, ‘We could be folk heroes, just for one day!’) due to his native humility, decency, and sense of community—anachronist qualities that now, perversely, evoked nostalgia. A segment of the bygone world was still besotted by the former star of Police Academy, a sweetheart who didn’t seem to have a nasty Hollywood bone in his body. Before asking the stuntman to pitch in at Cielo, Steve was helping to move the abandoned IONIQs, Rivians, and Teslas that had been left on Sunset Boulevard by panicked homeowners, blocking the only route of evacuation and firetruck access. The pileup looked like the set of a Universal Studio tour that had suddenly morphed from disaster film to a comically surreal Blues Brothers demolition derby. When three Waymo taxis inexplicably rounded Lake Shrine and smashed into the gridlock of their driverless cousins, a cop just shook his head and smiled. He told Rod that the fires were probably disrupting guidanceware, which was likely the cause of the oddball-looking machines going rogue. In the current situation, it helped that Steve had a real affinity for first responders; his dad had been an Airborne Army Ranger and New York City cop. The actor and the stuntman used to bump into each other in the Village at Hank’s or Starbucks but Rod actually knew him from when he was an assistant stunt coordinator on a reality sports show called Holey Moley. (Steve was one of the judges.) But the reason he had Rod’s cellphone number was because only a week ago, by strange coincidence, they both happened to be at the horse ranch of a producer in Point Dume.

Clearly, thought Rod, there’s some kinda karma goin on with us.

Rod, on the other hand, never had much luck as an actor. When success finally came, it arrived sideways. A casting agent sent his reel to Denis Villeneuve but the director was more impressed by Rod’s fearless, elegant athleticism than his lifeless recital of ‘We are House Atreides. There is no call we do not answer.’ When he hired him to be Timothée Chalamet’s stunt double on the Dune movies, word quickly spread through the below-the-line grapevine. He was an exceptional horseman and wound up in Morocco for Gladiator 2—most fun ever. Fawning, horned-up Roderick Paisley IG fan clubs mushroomed overnight. One site, A Complete Unknown, proclaimed him to be ‘superior in beauty’ to the young star he famously shadowed. ‘He is nothing less,’ it pronounced, ‘than the Ryan Gosling of Timothée Chalamets. He is Timothée Squared, the ayahuasca to Chalamet’s MDMA.’

Gung-ho Guttenberg was already at the rest home when Rod arrived. Six ambulances had somehow been mustered and the disoriented lodgers were being brought out in bathrobes one by one for transfer to a hotel in Chino Hills. Some were compos mentis, some were not; some were crying or laughed too loud and too long for no apparent reason. The caregivers were near breaking point. Rod helped one of the residents pack. The old man clung to a piece of battered metal, a weird, ruined toy that on further questioning was revealed to be an ancient fire engine (a keepsake from his childhood). He kept talking about his mother. ‘She owns fucking Pepperdine,’ the old man shouted. ‘The old bitch probably started this fire to smoke me out! Her name’s Rindge—sound fucking familiar? She still owns the whole coast and don’t you believe otherwise! I am her son. Why won’t she return my calls?’

As Steve left for Lake Shrine to help volunteers water down the roofs, he shook the stuntman’s hand. ‘That ranch was crazy beautiful,’ he said, referring to their recent chance meet in Point Dume. Rod thought it best not to ask any questions about whether or not the project that he had overheard Steve talking about with the producer who owned the place was moving further along.

‘The thoroughbreds,’ said Rod. ‘You have no idea what those things cost. And the maintenance! It’s like owning a yacht.’

‘Hope it doesn’t burn,’ said Steve, almost wistfully. ‘Well, thanks again, buddy. Let’s have a bite at Hank’s when all this nonsense is over.’

On the way to his motorcycle, the stuntman encountered a distraught DWP worker in the half-dark, leaning against a wall. He wore a gleaming hard hat and held a clipboard like a useless prop. He glanced up at Rod and began talking as if they were already in the middle of a long conversation.

‘I didn’t always have this godforsaken job!’ His cheeks were wet with tears. ‘I don’t wear the epaulets of my bonafides—not my style. But I don’t mind saying I have three magna cum laude degrees from Harvard, that’s right. Chemistry, economics, and law. Did you know that when the St. Francis dam collapsed, William Mulholland immediately resigned? That’s right. Immediately. And that was William Mulholland. Know what he said? “A true leader takes responsibility for their actions, be they successes or be they failures.” That’s what he said. I just wrote an email to Ms. Quinono, the CEO and Chief Engineer of LADWP, which will very likely cost me my job. I asked her to resign for not delivering sufficient amounts of water to this area. Yes, I did. I wrote that without hubris and without regrets. The Santa Inez Reservoir holds 111 million gallons but was drained about a year ago. You can see it from here, right over your shoulder . . . it’s a crater. By the way, here’s some trivia: know who was the youngest commissioner ever of the DWP? And went on to become its president? Rick Caruso! But let’s get back to why, why might you ask, was ol St. Inez drained? Well now, that’s the 111 million-gallon question, isn’t it. I’ll tell you. I’m gonna tell you—it was drained cause it was covered. Lo and behold, one day some sweet imbecile found a tiny little rip in said cover. Oh dear! Oh goodness! So the woke, broke, paranoid pencil-head geeks—that’s Frank Zappa, but you’re too young to know—they rolled back on their mutant heels and proclaimed that ol’ St. Inez . . . must be drained. Why? Because the water was no longer safe. Oh, they are all about safety! Safety for people! Safety for plants! The Super Scoopers are banned from using ocean water to put out fires because the plants get stressed out and die. Oh, they’re looking after us, I tell you, all creatures big and small! Who knows what perilous microbes snuck in through that torn piece of fabric! Maybe bird flu or Covid or cancer! Just a few months ago, Ms. Quinono said she was more interested in filling racial quotas than reservoirs! I shit you not, sir. The Board thought it prudent to pay Ms. Quinono $750,000 a year to fill aforesaid racial quotas. $750,000 a year. Would you like to hear something else? They never did a background check. Background checks were a no-no for Quinono! Want to know who recommended her? Her bestie, the right Reverend Karen Bass—or should I say the left Reverend Karen Bass. If they’d sniffed around just a weensy bit, they may have learned a particularly sordid detail: Quinono was in charge of the re-electrification of Puerrrrrto Rico after Hurricane Maria. And guess what happened one year later—80 percent of Puerrrrrto Rico was still without electricity! Know who Ms. Quinono-no-no worked for next? PG&E! The bankrupt syndicate that burned down half the state! It’s a revolving door, like FDA bureau-rats being hired by Pfizer, and Pfizer scum being appointed at FDA . . . but Reverend Sock Puppet Bass, the ultimate cyborg cipher, Zen master Karen, said, Oh, she’s perfect! Let’s make her the CEO of a six-billion-dollar concern! And come, let us double that parsimonious PG&E salary! Come, let us double her housing allowance! They finally said they couldn’t fix the reservoir cover rip cause it cost 140K—they just couldn’t decide amongst themselves how to pony up the pennies that would have saved this beautiful city . . . ’

His monologue was cut short by a seizure of tears.

Just then, a squad car screeched to a stop just a few feet away and cops rushed over, pointing guns at the DWP worker’s head. He dropped the clipboard and immediately sunk to his knees, whimpering.

A heavyset nurse came over to look at his face.

One of the policemen asked, ‘Is this him?’

‘Yes,’ she said, trembling with rage. ‘Yes it is—it’s him, the impostor! He said he was here to check the meters but one of my gals caught him boostin valuables from the rooms. We checked with the DWP and they said, ‘We didn’t send no one out to the address where y’all are.’

She stood above the sad sack detainee, with hands on hips.

‘You don’t work for the city,’ she declaimed. ‘You work against it—and its most vulnerable people. Shame on you stealing from these helpless old folk!’

Amputation is available for preorder and will be released on August 12, 2025.

Amputation is the first novel to be written about the inferno that obliterated two Los Angeles cities in January of 2025. Major characters are comedian Stephen Colbert; Karen Bass; a Timothée Chalamet stunt double; a fiercely pro-Palestinian heiress and her Zionist father; disgraced Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch and a failed indie film producer—along with an assorted battalion of ordinary people, opportunists and looters.

A fable drenched in hyperrealism, Amputation is a burnt jewel box showcasing Wagner's transcendent, scabrously poetic powers as he explores the lives (and deaths) of the fire victims, and the consequences of dereliction, delusion, incompetence—and impermanence.

Bruce Wagner has written fourteen novels, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,”—I’m Losing You (PEN USA finalist), I’ll Let You Go, and Still Holding—and the PEN/Faulkner-finalist Chrysanthemum Palace. His more recent titles include ROAR: American Master and The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. He lives in Los Angeles.

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