California: A Novel (5 page)

Micah’s little trick with his name, Cal thought, was proof that he was a liar.

A little light began to seep under the front door. In no time the whole thing would be framed with sunlight. Bo hadn’t built the best door, and in the winter they had to hang a thick rug over it to keep out the cold and, at the height of the summer, netting to keep out flies. These few weeks were the only time the door worked just as it was, letting in a breeze and those rays of sunlight.

Frida rolled back into him and grumbled more dream-babble into his neck. She slept so deeply, she was probably in L.A. now, ordering a latte. That dream often teased her, and she awoke upset. At least she wasn’t having the nightmares anymore, the ones about Micah. “Him leaving” was how she put it.

At his funeral, someone should have included Micah’s prankster nature in a eulogy, but no one did, no surprise. Not that his lying was a bad thing. Micah never carried a lie for long—what he enjoyed most was revealing his trickery.

Why was Cal thinking about Micah? About Plank? Time moved forward, but the mind was restless and stubborn, and it skipped to wherever it pleased, often to the past: backward, always backward. He wished he had an empty journal to scribble in. If he did, he’d get all this down. But he needed the pages he had left for practical purposes.

He looked at Frida once more. Her face was calm and blank, her mouth open now, the same expression she used to make when putting on mascara. Lines had begun to form around her eyes, and he was happy their only mirror was the rearview, taken from their car at the last moment. If they had a better one, she’d certainly complain about the smallest wrinkle, hold her face back with her hands, as his mother had done. “My face-lift,” she’d say.

If Frida really was pregnant, what would they do? He imagined cutting the umbilical cord with his Swiss army knife. He knew Frida would want to go find others; they weren’t the Millers, she’d say, and that was true. Families couldn’t exist in a vacuum, or not theirs, at least.

Or could they?

He felt her hand on his thigh.

“Hey you,” she whispered. For a second Cal wondered if she’d been faking sleep all this time.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“Poor thing.”

“Any lattes last night?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Ugh. Don’t dangle that in front of me. Not this morning.”

Frida yawned and sat up. She was wearing the oversize T-shirt she preferred to sleep in until it got too cold. The shirt had once been white and was delicate as tissue. A small hole had opened at her right shoulder blade, as if her bone had been sharp enough to rip through the fabric. Cal poked his finger through and touched her skin. Cal figured the shirt had once belonged to her father, but he had never asked. To bring it up now would only rattle her. She’d been wearing it since they’d starting sleeping together, and he loved how her nipples showed through the front.

Frida yawned once more and climbed onto his stomach, so that she was straddling him.

“You look good,” Cal said.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

He reached for her breasts, cupped one in each palm. She smiled.

“Good morning to you,” she said. She nodded to his crotch. “And to
you.
”

He laughed, running his hands to her waist. “You know what I like best about this place?”

She frowned. “What?”

“No one can hear me fucking your brains out.”

Frida blushed. He wanted her so badly. He loved that he could say this to her, that she wanted him to say it, and that nothing had ever felt so natural.

She had her hand on him now. She leaned forward, and he could smell her musky breath. “Sorry,” she said. “Morning breath?”

He grabbed her jaw and kissed her. “Yum,” he said, and pulled for her T-shirt.

Afterward, once they were lying side by side, Cal got to thinking again of that first night at Plank, about Micah. The beauty of violence, all that nonsense, Micah’s grave voice, as if he were imparting something vital to his new roommate.

Stupid Cal, he thought. Get that out of your head.

“Helloooo?” Frida was saying. With two fingers she flicked his dick lightly.

“Sorry,” Cal said.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing…I just can’t get a painting out of my head.”

He couldn’t tell her much more. After he’d graduated and was living in L.A., he’d tried searching for the pictures online. There had been one artist, near the end of the last century, who drew from photographs. Cal couldn’t remember his name; he didn’t want to remember it. The portraits were gray and deliberately blurry, just as Micah had described them. They were haunting, but they weren’t magnetic or beautiful. Not to him.

“A painting?” Frida said.

“Yeah,” he said. “More than one. They’re of”—he didn’t want to say the word, but he had to; there wasn’t a way around it—“they’re of terrorists. From Germany. In the 1970s.” He paused. “We were into them at Plank,” he said.

He thought his voice sounded innocent, like he was just talking about some random artist, but Frida sat up immediately. She was pulling on her T-shirt.

“Why are you thinking about
that?
” she said.

So she knew he was talking about Micah. Micah must have talked about those paintings with her, too.

They tried not to bring up her brother. They’d agreed to never tell anyone out here about him, and even between them, both his death and his life were difficult subjects, so thorny they could cut themselves on his name.

If Cal told her Micah had liked the paintings back when they were at Plank, she’d freak out. In the world according to Frida, her brother had been a precocious boy and then a brilliant man, faultless until the Group got ahold of him. According to her, Micah never would have said such a thing before he became involved with them.

“It’s nothing,” Cal said now. He tried to pull Frida back, but she was already slipping out of his grasp. She crawled over him to get out of the bed. He couldn’t help but look at her nipples. There they were.

“Babe,” he said, sitting up. “Why are you so mad?”

“Please, don’t,” she said. She put on her pants.

“I’m going to the well,” she said. She was already pulling on a sweater, her boots.

“Frida—”

But she was opening the door, the morning light spilling into the house, falling across all its dusty surfaces, its sad furniture. It was ugly; Frida had been right.

Cal called her name, but only after the door had slammed behind her.

F
rida was chopping beets for dinner when she heard the crack of twigs and the rustle of trees and, after that, an animal’s hooves against the hard dirt of the path to their house. She could just barely make out August’s whistling, and then he stopped to mutter something. It sounded soothing, and she knew he was talking to the animal, Sue, probably congratulating her on another safe arrival.

Frida put down her knife and turned to Cal. They hadn’t spoken much beyond the necessary all day. She wasn’t sure why she was mad, and at whom, even. Her husband had brought up something stupid, something from a long time ago. It shouldn’t matter now, but it did.

They didn’t talk about Micah because, when they did, Cal got pissed and Frida got sad, and everything miserable about the world wedged itself between them. Frida knew what her brother had done; she had accepted it; she wasn’t in denial. But sometimes, the Micah that Cal remembered had not a lick of goodness in him. That dumb college kid who had once been into Gerhard Richter and other pretentious shit? That was her
little brother.
Whatever else he was, well, it didn’t erase that fact.

Cal probably wouldn’t bring up her family now, not for weeks. He’d be afraid that if he did, she’d fall into a grief spiral. As if never mentioning her brother or her parents made her longing for them disappear. As if he could will all that pain away.

Cal was sprawled across one of the couches, an arm slung over his eyes. He was thinking. This was an actual activity they did now—just lay down and let their minds wander. Sometimes they gave each other a term to meditate on:
Magic Marker, air conditioner, strawberry.
It was more entertaining than Frida would have ever imagined it to be. Sandy Miller had told her about it. She and Bo used to do it, before they had kids. “Jane and Garrett keep us busy,” she’d said. That made sense now: parenting as a way to kill time.

“He’s here,” Frida said, and Cal moved his arm off his face, sat up. “Get your foraging gear and meet him on your way out.”

“You can hear him? Your ears are as good as a dog’s.” He grinned, his version of an olive branch.

“Hurry,” she said.

Frida dried her hands and placed the beets in one of the metal bowls. With a little dried mint, they would be all right for dinner.

She heard August greet Cal. After a few moments, Cal yelled her name, and she headed outside.

The two men stood at the edge of the clearing, Cal with the foraging bag over his shoulder, the gardening gloves and paring knife in his hands. August had jumped off his buggy and was running a brush across the mare, who snorted at his touch.

The first time Frida had seen him approach the shed, sitting high on his carriage like someone out of Victorian England, she had felt oddly homesick. The carriage, choked with discarded furniture, car parts, crates of produce, and even a dollhouse, reminded her of those rundown trucks in L.A., filled with junk. There was always a hand-painted phone number on the side, to call if you needed something picked up and discarded. When she was younger, it had been a job for illegal immigrants, but over the years, more businesses like it began popping up, with all kinds of drivers. Near the end, they’d begun to disappear; you had to have a safe place to store your truck and its discards, or else all of it would be looted, and almost no one had that.

When she told August about these trucks, he had shrugged. “I’ve been out here a long time,” he said. But what was a long time? She’d wondered if he’d struck out for the wilderness before the earthquakes. At the time, Frida had been seventeen, Micah fifteen, and L.A. never recovered from the destruction. Nor had San Francisco, six months later. In the year following, the film industry—the kind that paid Dada, at least—left L.A. altogether, and the rich fled to the new Communities popping up everywhere. Hilda took to crying a lot and saying, “What now? What now?”

If August hadn’t seen the reports of wildfires in Colorado and Utah or, later, those snowstorms across the Midwest and the East Coast or the rainstorms north of here, he would have no idea how battered the world was. And besides, would they have bothered a man who only whispered his secrets to a mule?

August was wearing what he always wore: a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, the pants pushed to his calves like britches; white tube socks; and the black lace-up boots of a soldier. His head was covered, as always, with a black beanie, and his wraparound sunglasses shielded his eyes. He never took them off. Frida hated how she saw herself in their reflection, which kept her from looking him in the eyes. His intention, she presumed.

He nodded at Frida but returned his gaze to Cal, who had begun walking backward.

“I gotta run while the sun’s still up,” Cal was saying. “She’ll take care of everything.”

“I’d expect that,” August said.

Frida was close enough now that she could greet him properly. Always a handshake.

“Nice to see you,” he said. “You look well.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I feel great.”

Cal looked away; he had the worst poker face.

Once Cal was gone, August invited Frida to come around to the back of the carriage. “I have a few new things,” he said, and climbed up. Frida remained where she was. No one was allowed up on the carriage except August.

“Do you have any garlic?” she asked. “Cal wants to plant some. For flavoring, obviously. But also to ward off colds.” This might be a perfect segue, she thought. Something about how she’d need to stay healthy, that the stakes were higher now that she might be pregnant.

“Let me check,” August said, and rummaged through his belongings, which, today, included an old bicycle, missing its seat, and a pile of tarps, one of them already shredded to confetti. A moment later, August was grinning. “I’ve got Vicodin.”

Had she heard him right? She’d never been much of a pill popper—as a teenager she’d preferred weed above all else—but she imagined the Vicodin sliding down her throat, on its way to making her feel good. A buzz: that’s what she wanted.

“Did I hear you right?”

“I knew that’d get your attention. Always took you for a party girl.” August pulled something from a mesh bag and stuffed it into his pocket. He climbed out of the carriage. “I’ve got a couple of the big boys. Seven hundred fifty milligrams.”

Frida nodded. If she was pregnant—what would happen? “I thought the Communities had killed the drug trade.” She remembered reading about it back in L.A.; the Communities were so safe and clean, even smoking a cigarette could get you exiled. That, and not paying your membership fees. “But I guess they’ve got to have a black market.”

August just raised an eyebrow; he never wanted to talk about the world beyond.

“I guess Vicodin was always legal with a prescription,” Frida said, keeping her eyes on him. “And those Community bastards still have access to everything that makes you feel better. Have a cold, call the doctor, et cetera, et cetera. Right?”

August was silent.

“What are you asking for it?” Frida asked finally.

“I knew it,” he said. “You love pills.”

“I was always more slacker stoner than glamorous party girl. A pothead through and through.” She shrugged. “But I could use a little fun.”

“But you don’t have any pain,” he asked, “do you?”

“Define pain,” she said, and laughed. But he remained serious, and she shook her head. “I told you, it sounds like fun.”

He said the pills would cost her. After a couple of offers, he finally accepted a bra, barely worn when they had moved here and almost forgotten. Frida knew Cal would never notice its absence.

“I’ll throw in the garlic for free,” August said, reaching into the carriage to stuff the bra into a duffel bag. “The bulbs I’ve got are a little shriveled, don’t know if they’ll take anyway.”

“A steal!” Frida cried. She wouldn’t have to tell Cal a thing.

From his pocket, August pulled an amber-colored plastic vial, the prescription information torn off. “Put out your hand,” he said. He shook out two white pills onto her palm.

“Two seems a bit much,” she said.

He handed her a canteen. “It’s water,” he said, and Frida threw one of the pills back before she could change her mind. She bit the second pill in two and downed half of it. The other half she handed back to August.

“Gee, thanks,” he said, but slipped it back into the vial.

Frida was ready for the high to slink upon her. It reminded of her being a teenager, when she’d nurse joints until the world felt different. Once she was rightly stoned, she’d go and make dessert. By high school, baking had become a kind of obsession. She’d plunge her hand into a bowl of silky, sifted flour, so high she thought she was communing with the stuff, and she couldn’t wait to taste the cake at the end. She liked to bake all night, and at some point her mother would walk in and tell her to finish up, it was time to sleep. She often missed her morning classes, and her mother was too crazed to even notice.

“Do you always have drugs to trade?” Frida asked. Already, she felt the world going loose and dreamy.

August shook his head. “Rarely, and if I do, it’s this playground stuff.”

“I do feel like a kid again, even if this isn’t weed.”

She closed her eyes, opened them.

“Don’t tell Cal, okay?” she said.

“Tell him what?” he asked, and she caught her reflection in his glasses. She looked drawn and tired. Jesus, what was she doing? Endangering the life of her child?
Oh, Frida,
she told herself.
Relax.

They were standing on the other side of the carriage now. She put her palm on the mare. She felt a peace emanating from the center of her body. A mellow.

“I was much less tired looking when Cal and I met.”

She wanted to complain about their stupid fight, tell someone, but from August’s pause she could tell he wouldn’t care to hear any of that. She’d wait him out.

“How did you two meet?” he finally asked.

His question was innocuous—maybe he wasn’t really interested in the answer—but now she would have to talk about Micah.

“Through my brother,” she said. “They were roommates in college.” But Plank wasn’t just any college, and that would need explaining, too.

“Your brother. Huh.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Older or younger?”

“He’s dead.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, and that was probably obvious to August, who, for a moment, remained silent.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She didn’t want to answer, but she knew she would, and that she’d tell him everything.

“He was a suicide bomber,” she said.

“Shit.”

She could tell he was truly surprised. Perhaps August had been a vagabond at the edge of civilization for so long that, for him, history was news.

It was true: Micah had strapped dynamite to his chest and blown himself up. He had killed thirty-one people and injured many others. Everything else about him was merely postscript, and the same probably went for Frida. She was the sister of a suicide bomber, the guy who blew himself up at the Hollywood and Highland mall, the man who had yelled, “Listen!” before pushing the button that set off the timer, which set off the explosion.

“He was the first to do it in L.A.,” she said, “which made him…notable.”

After Micah, she explained, people were killed at the supermarket, at all the other malls, at gas stations. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago, Memphis. The good cities, all of them rendered violent and terrifying by men and women who martyred themselves in the name of—what?

“I thought I got over it,” she said.

“But you didn’t,”

“Right, I didn’t. Not really. I put on a brave face, you know? For my parents.”

“Understandable,” he said.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him.” She paused. “Cal brought him up this morning. That’s why he’s on my mind, I guess.”

Maybe now she’d tell August about her possible pregnancy. He’d be especially nice, maybe offer her some free stuff. Or he might be mad she’d taken the Vicodin. Cal certainly would be.

The pills were doing their job. Her nose was tingling, and the space above her upper lip had started to itch. Her tongue felt a little thick, and so did the air. Things seemed so calm; it was as if the whole world had slowed.

She thought she could sense her parents, Hilda and Dada, nearby, as if they’d just gone into the house to get something.

After Micah died, Hilda wouldn’t come out of her bedroom. She started to stink, and her hair hung in greasy strips around her sagging face. She kept refreshing the news pages, trolling for articles about Micah. She would leave anonymous comments, sometimes trashing her own son, calling him evil, sometimes celebrating what he’d done. She used all kinds of usernames, played all kinds of roles, became other people, told Frida it helped somehow. Dada didn’t go into the room very often, and Frida had to take care of everything. Two years later, her father had called
her
the traitor, for planning to leave L.A., for planning to leave them. He wouldn’t forgive her for abandoning the family. He had already forgiven Micah.

August cleared his throat, and Frida shook herself back to the present. She realized she hadn’t said anything for some time.

“Sorry.”

“I read somewhere about Iran, back in the day,” August said. “They had these backpacks. For kids, you know? Decorated with pictures of suicide bombers like they were SpongeBob. Remember that old cartoon?”

Frida shook her head. “My brother was in the Group.”

August squinted, like he was trying to figure out what that meant. Then he said, “Was he one of those pissed-off students?”

So August hadn’t been gone so long; he knew what the Group was. According to Micah, the L.A. contingent had emerged a year after the earthquake, mostly college students who had been left with insurmountable debt and no way to pay it back. Nobody knew about them back then, or they did, but they didn’t care. In the beginning, the Group was concerned that the city was still in shambles: collapsed houses and condemned schools everywhere, and the 101 severed in two at the 110. The Group couldn’t believe the rich were complaining that their own neighborhoods weren’t getting fixed fast enough, especially when it seemed like the only areas of the city that functioned at all were the affluent ones. A few of the founders were interested in politically motivated performance art; it was a means to get attention, they argued, a more interesting way to express their dissatisfaction. That was the theory, at least. Half a year later, the first Community opened, and people still hadn’t heard of the Group. It had taken a long time for anyone to notice them.