They leave OC and track through the immense nuclear facility at San Onofre, eighteen concrete spheres crowding the narrow valley like buboes bumping out of an armpit, powerlines extending off on ranked towers to every point of the compass, glary halogen and xenon and mercury vapor lamps peppering spheres, towers, support buildings. “Camp Pendleton,” Jim announces, and they all pitch in together: “Protecting California’s Precious Resources!” Or so the neon sign says. The motto is a joke; aside from the nuclear plant, the Marines have contracted with the towns of south OC to take all their sewage into a gigantic treatment facility, which covers the hills south of San Onofre. Concrete tanks and bunkers resemble an oil refinery, and altogether it’s as extensive as the power plant north of it. Then comes the land they’ve leased for the desalination plant that provides OC with much of its water; that means another immense complex of bunkers and tubes, nearly indistinguishable from the nuclear facility, and a whole stretch of the coast blasted by salt mounds and various processing tanks.

After that they’re into the supercamp for Marine recruits, then into Oceanside, and the precious resource is passed. Past Oceanside it’s like OC on a rollercoaster, same condomundo and mallsprawl and autopia, broken up only by some small dead marshes in the low parts of the rollercoaster ride. Yes, San Diego, along with Riverside and Los Angeles and Ventura and Santa Barbara, is nothing more than an extension of OC.…

They get off on La Jolla Village Drive and track west, around the megaversity to La Jolla Farms Road. Here they are stopped at the security gate, Sandy calls his friends, and they’re in. La Jolla Mansion Road, it should be called; they track slowly by a long series of multimillion-dollar homes, all single-family dwellings. Abe, who lives in an annex of his parents’ house on Saddleback Mountain, isn’t impressed, but the rest of them stare. Humphrey goes into his real estate mode and estimates values and mortgage payments and the like in religious tones.

Sandy’s friends’ house is near the end of the road, on the ocean side, therefore on the crumbling edge of Torrey Pines Cliff. They find parking with difficulty, go to the door and are only let in after Sandy’s friend Bob Tompkins comes and okays them. Bob is fortyish, tanned, golden-haired, perfectly featured, expensively dressed. He shakes all their hands, ushers them in, introduces them to his partner Raymond. Raymond is if anything even more perfect than Bob; his jawline could open letters. Perhaps they got their start in modeling.