I live very near Sullivan’s Gulch.  In fact, the neighborhood association I live in is called the Sullivan’s Gulch Neighborhood Association, even though the gulch itself is now the home Interstate Route 84 and a railroad track.  The only people who can be said to actually live in Sullivan’s Gulch are the very few hardy souls who pitch tents on the banks, propped up against the trees.

The rest of us live in an area commonly called “the Loyd District” and identified by the Loyd Center, which was once a bright new icon of urban merchandising–it was a “mall”–and it had an ice rink.  I live at a senior center right across the street from Loyd Center and that is how I say where I live when people don’t respond to the street name and address.

One of my favorite science fiction books has a reference to the Loyd Center.  It is not all that surprising in one sense since the book is by Ursula Le Guin, one of the brightest lights the literary scene of Portland ever had. [1]. The book is The Lathe of Heaven and it is set in Portland.  It is set in Portland so firmly that the city itself, with its river–“the much-bridged Willamette”–and its mountains, especially Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood, are characters with their own parts.

Unfortunately, the novel cannot be said to have a timeline.  George Orr has “effective dreams,” dreams that change everything and that change the history that precedes it.  So the last part of the book might be before or after the first part of the book.  There is no way to tell.

Except for this one thing.  The last two events of the book break that pattern.  In the first, we establish that George Orr will no longer have “effective dreams” and the world can go back to the old chronological progressions as we know them.  In the second, we see him dealing with “the prior times” as best he can because he can remember them even though he can no longer create them. As we will see, he meets his wife again like that, even thought this time, she is a stranger.

The climax of this strange story comes on an evening when George and his wife, Heather, are on their way to Loyd Center for dinner.  Heather is caught, as everyone is, in the disjunction of historical times, which is why she says, when George asks her where she would like to go for dinner, “Chinatown. Ha, ha.  I mean Ruby Loo’s.”  Between the “Ha, ha” and the “Ruby Loo,” the narrator informs us that. “the Chinese district had been cleared away, along with the rest of downtown, at least ten years ago.  For some reason, she had completely forgotten that for a moment.”

George is fine with Ruby Loo’s and they set out for their location, which is in the Loyd Center.  They are currently in the buildings that were once OHSU.  [3] Still, Ruby Loo’ s is easy to get to, Le Guin tells us:

“…the funicular line stopped across the river in the old Loyd Center, once the biggest shopping center in the world, back before the Crash. [2]. Nowadays the old multi-level parking lots were gone, along with the dinosaurs and many of the shops and stores along the two level mall were empty, boarded up.  The ice rink had not been filled in twenty years.  No water ran in the bizarre, romantic fountains of twisted metal.  Small ornamental trees had grown up towering; their roots cracked  the walkways for yards around their cylindrical planters.  Voices and footsteps rang overclearly, a little hollowly, before and behind one, walking those long, half-lit, half derelict arcades.”

They made it to Ruby Loo’s, but then disaster stuck.  Dr. Haber, an empty meaningless man, has learned to use the Augmentor and how to dream “effectively” and the world was changing as George and Heather looked.  The Willamette had run dry.  The river bed was full of grease, bones, lost tools, and dying fish.

George had to go back to Haber’s office and turn off the switch.  Le Guin says:

“He knew where the Augmentor stood.  He put out his mortal hand along the way things go.  He touched it; felt for the lower button, and pushed it once….When he raised his head and looked, the world re-existed. It was not in good condition, but it was there.”

He knew all his past life was gone–including Heather–and he wandered the streets of Portland.  He was stopped by one of the aliens he had dreamed up in an earlier “effective dream” and who had stayed in Portland.  The name of this one was E’nememen Asfah.  He lay down, exhausted on the Alien’s bed.  “I am tired” he said.  “I did a lot today. That is, I did something.  The only thing I have ever done.  I pressed a button.  It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.”

And E’nememen Asfah said, “You have lived well.”

That is the last we hear of Ruby Loo’s or of the Loyd Center.  George does meet Heather again.  She is not, in this new, half-broken reality, his wife any longer, but he knows who she is.  “He knew her,” Le Guin tells us.  “He knew this stranger, how to keep her talking and how to make her laugh.”  So they go out for a coffee and we as readers are satisfied.

[1]. I used to have a running route that went past her house on NE Thurman and I always thought I should run a little more carefully until I was elsewhere.  She was a force to be reckoned with, as I saw it.

[2]. Crash with a capital C doesn’t mean some fluctuation is the economic market.  The Crash was a wholesale change in the geography of Portland, a time when subways appeared or disappeared, and where bridges that used to be there suddenly were not.  We can appreciate Heather’s momentary confusion.

[3]. Portland was also, in another one of those nonsequential pasts, “the Capital of the World” and all those grand buildings from which George and Heather left in hopes of getting Chinese food were government buildings–Research and Development, Communications, Industry, Economic Planning, and Environmental Control.