“We’re at the center of the world,” Jim announces. Abe and Tashi start looking around like they missed the marker—should be a plaque or something, right? “Orange County is the end of history, its purest product. Civilization kept moving west for thousands of years, in a sunset tropism, until they came to the edge here on the Pacific and they couldn’t go any farther. And so they stopped here and did it. And by that time they were in the great late surge of corporate capitalism, so that everything here is purely organized, to buy and sell, buy and sell, every little piece of us.”

“Fucking Marxist Commie.”

“They must have liked lights.”

Jim shakes them off, waxes nostalgic. Mentioning history reminds him of the night’s mission. “It didn’t used to be this way!”

“You’re kidding,” says Tashi. He and Abe share grins: Jim can be funnier than the video.

“No, I’m not kidding. This whole basin was covered with orange groves, over two hundred square miles of them. There were more oranges then than there are lights now.”

“Hard To Believe,” his friends chorus together.

“But true! OC was one big orchard.” Jim sighs.

Abe and Tash and Sandy eye each other. “That’s a lot of trees,” Abe says solemnly, and Tash stifles a laugh. Sandy doesn’t bother; he goes into the famous Chapman laughing fit: “Ah, hahahahahaha— Ah, hahahahahaha.”

“Say, don’t you want to get off here?” Tash asks.

“Oh yeah!” Jim cries.

Abe ticks over the lane-change switch and they swerve into the right lane, then spiral down the offramp two levels to Chapman Avenue, eastbound. Sandy’s street. Only two levels here, and eastbound is the upper. In El Modena even that ends and they’re back on ground level, in two-way traffic. “What now, Professor?”

“Park in the mall,” Jim says.

Abe parks them. Jim consults his map for the last time. He is tense with excitement; this is a new idea, this mission, a sort of personal archaeology. Years of reading his local history books have given him an uncontrollable urge to recover something—to see, to touch, to fondle some relic of the past. And tonight’s the night.