California: A Novel (6 page)

A few months before Micah’s death, Frida had convinced him to come over. She told him Cal would be at work. They’d gotten drunk on the bathtub gin he’d brought in his jacket pocket. Micah had insisted they enjoy it in the alley below their unit, and Frida complied because she never got to see him and she didn’t want to scare him off. By then, her brother had become very particular about how he spent his time.

It was on that visit that Micah had told Frida the Group’s origin story. She hadn’t even asked; in her memory, he took a sip from his flask, leaned against the stucco wall of the neighboring apartment complex, and just started talking.

“A year after the quake,” he said, “some wealthy douche bags took their stupid Range Rovers or whatever and surrounded an ambulance. They wouldn’t let it south of Pico. Do you remember that?”

Frida didn’t. She wondered if this was more legend than history, but of course she didn’t say anything.

Micah went on: “Those assholes said whoever was dying hadn’t paid for those services.” He snorted and passed her the flask, which she took, grateful. “They didn’t want to share, didn’t care about anyone but themselves.” He smiled then, his eyes glistening. “The Group was born right after that, to fight that kind selfishness, to keep people empowered.” When Frida said nothing, he said, “Or at least amused.”

“‘Amused’?” Frida said. “But how?”

“A couple of the founders were into theater and performance theory, shit like that. Their early stunts were a little silly—I’ll be the first to cop to that. Sure, maybe skipping around in a Mexican wrestling mask gets more attention than a regular old protest, but it’s hard to be taken seriously when you act like that. But, then again, maybe that’s what’s kept us from being shut down.” He paused. “Nobody saw us as a threat.”

Micah reached for the flask, and once Frida handed it to him, he slipped it into his jacket and said, “Time to go.” He pushed himself away from the wall, gave her a cursory hug, and left. Like that. She hadn’t told Cal about the visit, but she was drunk and cagey when he got home, and he’d guessed.

The Vicodin was bringing this all back vividly. She shook her head at August. “Micah wasn’t one of the Group’s founders, but, yeah, you’re thinking of the right people. He only got involved after he finished school. He didn’t have debts like the first members, but I guess he had that same…” She searched for the right word. “Anger?” Frida paused. “By then, you know, things were a lot worse.”

August’s blank expression suggested that, no, he didn’t know. “What about you?” he asked.

“Me? I wasn’t in the Group.”

A bird cried in the trees somewhere.

Usually, she was angry at her little brother for believing that strongly in the Group and its edicts: that money only poisoned people, that government was just bureaucracy, corruption, and oppression, that working wouldn’t save them, only engagement would. Micah was always using that kind of language near the end—
engagement, engaged.
The Group didn’t have a manifesto, or if it did she wouldn’t know; it was so secretive by the end. But some of the members acted like a single unified truth was leading them forward. How could her brother value that stupid truth more than the blood pumping through his veins, his own beautiful, delicate joints, the intricate machinery of his breath?

Frida sighed and glanced at the bra she’d given August, now slung over the side of the carriage. “If bras are so in demand, does that mean there are a lot of women out here? How far do you travel? How many of us are there?”

“You know I won’t reveal my route.” He laughed. “Besides, that bra you gave me is made of fabric and wire, both valuable. And those little metal clasps, those annoying things? Also in demand.”

“So it won’t be a bra anymore? Is that what you’re saying?”

August said he didn’t know for sure how it would be used.

“What if I followed you?” she asked.

“Too dangerous.”

She nodded. They had stayed put since their arrival here; the Millers had never ventured beyond the big lake four miles off. Everyone seemed afraid, and August had stoked that.

Normally, August was eager to pack up and leave, but she could tell by the way he lingered that he wanted to hear more about her brother.

“He’d been in love with an idea,” she said. That was true, wasn’t it? He wanted to rebuild L.A., neighborhood by neighborhood, and then he could do the same elsewhere. Not to make money, but to make the world livable again. Before he died, he’d helped set up the Group’s encampment near Echo Park. Every month more and more people were leaving for the Communities, but poor disheveled L.A. hung on. Micah thought the encampment was proof that people would be okay, even without money; anyone could come live there, he said, as long as they helped keep it running. He’d rebuilt housing, and the Group had spearheaded farming efforts in rambling, verdant Elysian Park; those fields needed crops, even Cal agreed on that. Rumor had it the Group would break into Dodger Stadium, too: the members would clean it up and make it a meeting place.

It all would have sounded idyllic if men with guns didn’t patrol the perimeters, if they hadn’t kicked out a bunch of residents who didn’t want to cooperate, taken their houses and clothing and anything the people couldn’t run away with on their backs. At least in Frida and Cal’s dark and cold apartment a few miles west they could say whatever they wanted about anyone. Cal, who was still earning a meager sum to run a garden, said that all the zucchini in the world wouldn’t lure him into their weird compound. “That encampment’s almost as bad as a Community, except the amenities are worse,” he’d said once. “Everyone there is giving up something. We just don’t know yet what that something is.”

The truth was, Frida wasn’t sure why Micah had killed himself. All she knew was he had wanted to save the world, and shake it up. He was
engaged.
He was devoted to his cause, whatever it was. He didn’t care about how his family would feel upon hearing the news. Even though she loved her brother, she couldn’t help but think that only a monster could put aside the personal.

Some days she missed Micah so much, she didn’t care what he’d done. She remembered how, in junior high, he’d made her a mask out of cardboard and tissues that looked like a bear vomiting streamers. How, for her fifteenth birthday, he’d sung “Happy Birthday” to her backward,
You to birthday happy,
his voice a terrible warble that had her laughing until she cried.

“I hope it didn’t hurt,” she said now. She could hear her voice dragging, the words slurring a little. “I hope it didn’t hurt when he blew himself up.”

She didn’t tell August that she’d pictured his death too many times to count. Imagined the duct tape tugging at his T-shirt, the weight of the explosives on his stomach and chest. Why had he said, “Listen!” to the crowd of shoppers? Every day she invented a new sound, a different story, he wanted his victims to hear. Listen.

“It was probably quick,” August said.

“You think?” Frida said.

Before the earthquake, when Dada was still working and Hilda didn’t have to scrounge around for cleaning jobs to keep the family alive, Frida would smoke her joints and bake, and Micah would be in the living room, studying like it was breathing. He’d always been the smart one. No one contested it. Frida could have treated him like a pest, a nerd she’d rather disown than have to talk to, but it had never been like that. “Don’t ask,” she told her friends when they wondered aloud why she didn’t just kick him off the couch so they could chill there. Sometimes they asked if she and Micah were twins, not because they looked alike or seemed close in age, but because they communicated like siblings who had shared a womb: wordlessly, without strife, accustomed to sharing the most limited of spaces.

Frida marveled now at how carefree she had been then. She didn’t have any idea what would happen. The world was already going to shit, but it had been going to shit for countless generations before her. Overpopulation, pollution, drought, disease, oil, terrorism: all of that existed in the background, in the distance. Frida never read the news. She was fifteen and stoned, and it didn’t matter if college wouldn’t be there because she could bake her way to adulthood. She would run a shop or be the head pastry chef at a restaurant, or she would have her own cooking site. The future existed, especially for her.

“Once the bell is rung, you can’t unring it,” Micah had said that night they got drunk in the alley.
You can’t go backward
was what he meant. But at fifteen she hadn’t understood that—had she even understood it at twenty-four, when Micah died? She actually had thought geniuses were working to repair the world. Stupidity had protected her. The bell had been ringing all that time, and she hadn’t heard it.

Sue brayed, and Frida wondered how long she’d been standing there, staring off into the distance.

“Maybe your brother felt good,” August said. “When he died.”

Frida should have wanted to cry, out of disgust or shock or sadness, but she felt nothing. Bless these drugs, she thought, bless this feeling.

This is what she’d always wanted. A painless life.

C
al returned at dusk with four pathetic chanterelles, which looked so much like a dead man’s ears he didn’t want to touch them, let alone eat them. According to Bo, foraging was women’s work, and although Cal enjoyed the intensity of the process—the rooting around in soil, the animalistic obsession of it, his brain instructing him to
seek, seek, seek
—he thought maybe Bo was right. In the year and a half they’d known the Millers, Frida had become an expert at foraging. Under Sandy’s tutelage, his wife could spot fungi and berries where Cal saw nothing but trees and brush, and though he would never admit it, he found joining her on a foraging trip frustrating. Nobody likes to feel useless. On their most recent expedition, they had returned home with her bag nearly bursting, his nearly empty, and she had said, “It’s okay. You were my arm candy.” He had scowled when she’d said it, but tonight that kind of teasing would be a relief. Even though there had been no more arguing, the tension remained, and Cal wasn’t sure how to shrug it off.

The solar torches lit his path to the house. By sunset each day, one of them was supposed to bring a couple of torches inside, to illuminate the room. Without them, there would be nothing but blackness. Frida must have forgotten to do it.
Don’t worry,
he told himself. She had not fainted or been kidnapped. She had not been mauled by a bear or stung by some deadly mosquito. She was safe inside. She was just flaky. Always had been.

As he got closer, he saw that the front door was open to let in the last light and some air. And him, he supposed. Was that a sign that she’d forgiven him? Or that she had forgotten about him all together? The door was a mouth, and if he passed through it, he would fall into the dark throat of night. He shivered. Once the sun went down, he could easily imagine an evil out here. A stranger could come after them, a Pirate in search of food, tools, blood. Or a coyote might step through their open door, tongue out, eyes squinted. They weren’t safe, not ever. He hated to think that way, but it was the truth.

He yanked two torches from the ground and made his way forward. He wished he had his gun, but he’d left it behind for Frida.

Cal had purposely stayed away for as long as possible, so as not to overhear Frida’s conversation with August, her confession about the pregnancy. As if August were a priest, or even the pope. August was powerful: he knew everyone, could travel freely, and had probably heard everyone’s secrets. But why did he have that privilege? That burden.

“Babe?” Cal called out. He said the word lightly but not obsequiously; he had apologized when Frida returned from the well this morning, and he wouldn’t do it a second time. He was keen on getting past their little quarrel, and he hoped she was, too.

He tossed the mushroom bag on the card table in the kitchen area. He placed one of the torches next to the washbasin.

He heard Frida suck in her breath, not from their bed, but by the cots that Jane and Garrett used to sleep in. He shined the torch in that direction. She was on the floor, lying on her back with her hands behind her head, her legs twisted like a pretzel. Was she doing sit-ups?

“And then there was light,” he said. He smiled. She was safe.

“I see that.” She began bicycling her legs frantically.

“Are you okay?”

“No. I mean yes.” She laughed; there was mischief in it, he thought. “I guess I’m just feeling antsy.”

“Is it anxiety?”

She sat up, rubbed a hand across her face, as if to wipe something away.

He helped her to standing. Her eyes were pink. “You look terrible,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Not like that. Sorry.” There was the accidental second apology. He wanted, stupidly, to take it back. Instead, he laid the torch on the cot and, after a moment, took her in his arms. She let him. She felt fragile and hard, like a marionette.

“I got the garlic,” Frida said. “For free.”

“So you told him.”

She didn’t answer.

“How did he react?”

Frida sighed and leaned away from him. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Why?”

“Because it was so anticlimactic. He doesn’t have tests, he doesn’t know any midwives. It’s not like he’s tight with a shaman. And if he were, he’d never introduce us.” She picked up the torch and leaned it against the wall. This one they would leave here as their night-light. It would fade before dawn. Without it, back when they lived in the shed, Cal had felt his very limbs disappear in the merciless darkness.

“He wasn’t worried? Or excited?”

“He let me ramble,” she said. “And now I feel embarrassed.”

“Don’t be,” Cal said, but he could understand it. There was something about August that made you want to confess, and his silence kept you talking even after you wanted to shut up.

They began the nightly task of setting the card table for dinner. Frida peeked into the mushroom bag but said nothing disparaging about its contents or lack thereof. She seemed to move about the room as if in a fog, humming along to herself. In Cal’s youth, his mother would sometimes stay up all night, editing a local commercial for extra cash or designing banner ads that no one ever clicked on, and in the morning she’d say, “I’m out of it,” with a look that conveyed that he was, conversely,
in
it. That’s what Frida was doing now, with her little floaty movements, her lack of conversation, those strange sit-ups. She was sending herself out of it. At least she didn’t seem angry anymore.

“I want to know where August goes,” she said suddenly. She held the bowl of beets aloft, like a trophy, and with an exhale placed it on the table. The torches gave the room a streetlight glow, a marry-me dimness, but Cal was used to it by now, sick of it even.

He sat down without responding. They hadn’t had this discussion in a while, but Cal realized he’d been waiting for Frida to bring it up ever since she told him she’d missed her period.

“You know it’s too dangerous,” he said.

“So says August.”

“You don’t believe him anymore?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what? We have no idea who’s out there. What if there are Pirates? Don’t tell me you aren’t frightened of them.”

“I’ve never run into a Pirate. Have you?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“So we still don’t know if they’re out there. But we know
someone
is. And August, with his goods to trade, his vague answers. I’m sick of it.”

“I want us to be safe, Frida. That’s what matters most.”

She said nothing.

“I know you’re mad at me.”

“Oh, stop it,” she said.

She began to serve the beets, and Cal did the same with the sprouted beans. They were healthy, necessary to surviving out here, but they tasted terrible.

“I’m just curious,” she said. “Don’t you want to know what they do with the bras?”

“What bras?”

“Before,” she said. “I traded him a new bra.”

“Before when? And for what?”

“It’s not important. What matters is what’s out there. I need to know, Cal. Don’t you?”

“If we leave, who will protect this place?”

She snorted. “Maybe we can find another house to steal.”

Cal was about to bring a bite of the awful, humid-smelling beans to his mouth, but now he paused. “Don’t do that, Frida,” he said.

“Do what?” she asked. She was acting like a kid playing with her food.

“The Millers are dead,” he said. “Get over it.”

So this morning she was upset about Micah, and now she wanted to argue about their living situation. And August. She could be worse than a drunk, teasing for a brawl.

He put the fork in his mouth because if he didn’t, he would say something nasty, even though his only true impulse was to protect her. Not that she wanted his protection; Frida never wanted any man’s protection. To her, the whole idea of chivalry was pure self-congratulatory bullshit. She couldn’t even abide the phrase
women and children first.
The night they met, she had asked, “You know why they don’t say ‘men and children first’?” He said he didn’t. “Because that would be redundant,” she replied.

Cal had let her get away with that one, but only because she was naked, and because they’d just slept together for the first time. It was commencement weekend at Plank, and Frida was a stowaway. Micah was getting smashed with the other graduating Plankers, their families already asleep in their motel beds two towns over. No one was there to see Cal graduate. His mother had died a few months earlier in the big snowstorm that decimated Cleveland, and his father, who lived an hour away from her on his little farm, had either disappeared or was dead, too. Cal tried not to think about it.

When he and Frida met, she asked after his family. “Who’s coming to the ceremony?”

To his surprise, he told her the truth, and she said, “I’ll be your guest.” By then, he had heard so much about this Frida, Micah’s famous older sister: the baker, the badass. And there she was: red lipstick like a glamorous wound, big white teeth, those sparkling eyes. Her strong, pointy chin. Those wide hips he wanted to kneel before, like a vassal. Falling in love with her had been easy. And, now, sitting across from her, eating this wretched meal, the same one they’d had for six nights in a row, he still loved her. He would take care of her, even if she didn’t realize that was what he was doing.

Years ago, his father had hit a deer on the highway. He’d told Cal to stay in the car. “Turn up the music,” he said. Cal did, and like a good boy, he kept his eyes on the air-conditioning vents as his father walked with a tire iron toward the suffering animal. “I put the deer out of its misery,” his father explained later, and Cal felt grateful that he didn’t have to watch or participate. His father had taken care of it.

He’d kept Frida from seeing the Millers’ bodies because it was too horrible. He had taken care of it, but she was resentful. She acted like he’d killed the Millers, even though all four of them were dead in their beds when he found them, the covers drawn up to their chins as though they were waiting for Santa Claus,
visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.
The rest of the poison sat on the kitchen table, white powder he didn’t recognize in a glass bowl, waiting there like some sick invitation to death. He knew it was poison by its smell—the lack of one.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,
Cal had thought.

When they first began spending time with the Millers, Cal had occasionally worried that one day their tiny world would collapse: someone would be attacked by an animal or catch an illness that turned deadly, or maybe fifteen years down the road one of the kids would run away to the nearest city, or whatever was left of it. He didn’t think it would happen like this, though. He had never once imagined suicide. For months afterward, Frida kept asking, “Where did they get the poison? Why not use something natural, like nightshade?” She wanted to know why Cal had gotten rid of the powder before she could see it. As if she didn’t believe him.

He’d dragged their bodies out one by one and buried them. He remembered thinking how much Garrett had grown since the first time he and Frida had met him; the boy was now four and seemed tall for his age. He’d stay that way. The thought had made Cal sick. He’d tried to throw up, but he found he couldn’t.

It took all day and half the night to bury them, and he had injured his back. He’d focused on the pain, imagined it as a thick red belt along his waist, because it was the only thing his mind could handle. He would keep it together.

He had returned to the shed the next morning. Frida was crying, just about out of her mind. She thought something had happened to him. Something had. “We’re moving,” he said, as if he’d simply been house hunting.

They waited two weeks before they dragged their stuff to the Millers’ place; even then Frida thought it was too soon, that it was disrespectful, greedy even. Cal told her it was wasteful to let the house sit empty like that, that Sandy and Bo must’ve wanted it this way.

“They sent me to find them,” he said, but that was all.

He supposed he’d always withheld things from her; sometimes the whole story should not be repeated. He wouldn’t describe how it felt, to carry those children.

Frida thought that the worse things got, the more women lost what they’d worked so hard to gain. No one cared about voting rights and equal pay because everyone was too busy lighting fires to stay warm and looking for food to stay alive. “It’s like the only thing that matters anymore is upper-body strength,” she complained. “Brute force.” This was before the Millers died, when he told her he could lift the firewood on his own, warned her she’d get a hernia. Frida had been pissed, but, really, what did she have to be angry about? Yes, they had to rely on an antiquated division of labor. And yes, she would be rescued first from a sinking ship. Wasn’t that a relief? “Spare me your white man’s burden,” Frida had said—which reminded him of Micah, in their Postcolonial Sexualities course.

Cal was sure it had been the worst for Bo. He had probably been the last to eat the poison. Someone had to make sure their dosages were correct and that his children, his wife, wouldn’t awake. It must have been terrible. Who
wanted
to be a man?

Cal looked at Frida across the table. She was scraping at her food with the fork, her focus anywhere but on him. He cleared his throat. “Frida,” he said.

“What?” she asked, and looked up.

“I have no interest in finding out what’s beyond the territory we’ve already explored.” He paused. “All I need, all I want, is right here. With you.”

The only sound was Frida’s fork hitting her plate.

“I hate these beets,” she said.

Though he agreed, Cal shook his head. “You have to finish them,” he said. Already the possibility of their unborn child was exerting its influence. It needed the nutrients.

Cal had last seen Bo alive six months ago, when the Millers had come to the shed for dinner. It was the beginning of spring, and Cal had again found himself missing the jacarandas in L.A., which had to be blooming soon. Two years earlier, they’d left town before the trees blossomed, and sometimes he imagined the purple flowers pastel against a cloudless sky. He used to love that, and how, come summer, the sticky flowers would carpet the sidewalks.