Without a word of explanation, Leo was out and running down the stairs to the beach. She pulled a sweater, a sundress, and a bikini from her suitcase and did a quick car-change. She tucked her notebook into her purse, put Fifi on her leash, and locked the doors.
She had the feeling she was in a strange land. The sea was misty and still, and descending the cement stairs was like walking through a series of veils. She could make out the faintest notion of the pier through the mist, and as she turned down the sidewalk she saw, taking shape further on, the little seaside shops—a bikini/T-shirt shop, Pizza By the Slice, a mini-market, and a café with a wooden sign that said ESPRESSO hanging from the awning. She was saved.
There were round tables for two on the sidewalk and she sat at one alone. Leo had vanished into the fog. She might as well enjoy her coffee; after all there was nowhere she had to be.
She sat in the white, wet light, thinking of the mushrooms in her purse and the baby inside her. Things inside things. Hidden. The town was hidden, the ocean, too. And the people—that was it, she realized, what was so odd: she hadn’t seen a single person. The street was deserted. A few cars had passed her, but she was alone on the sidewalk, alone at this café with her little white dog. It was a Saturday morning, so where were the people? Were they in their homes, afraid the riots might spread, break out in this beach town of surfers and bikini girls and older, retired folks? The thought struck her as ridiculous.
A girl appeared—as if she were the result of a magic trick—out of the thick air. Wearing black-rimmed glasses, her dark hair cut in a pageboy, she was bookish, with a hint of the mischievous in her smile. She’d make a good stripper—one with a literary pseudonym. Anaïs, or Colette, Gwen thought, watching her jot her order—a triple espresso and a croissant—on her small pad.
The waitress looked at her a second longer over her glasses, her eyes dark and pretty, and she left.
Where she’d been, Leo now stood, glowing, the curls of his hair tightly wound.
“Darling,” he panted, “it’s beautiful down there. You have to come. Be a good girl and eat your drugs and come down. My God,” he said, looking around. “I feel like a kid again. Like a king.”
“King of the apple blossoms.”
“Yes! That’s it! Gwen, there’s so much I want to show you. This was my playground.”
She opened the Ziploc bag. It smelled earthy, the way the soil in the middle of a forest might smell. “Listen,” she said. “I’ll make you a deal. If I join you down there, you have to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“This will be the last of it. For a long time.”
“Last trip to Neverland. Got it, Tink. Now, damn it, come on.” He grinned. “There’s that cave I want to explore with you, in the boulders.”
“And one more thing,” she said. “Sit down.” It was hard for him—his body was like a spring, ready to burst into the day, to leap and to run—but he sat at the table and she took both his hands in hers. “Leo,” she said, “this part’s serious,” and as she said it she knew. She felt the truth settle, felt it sink into the hollow centers of her bones, and while she could have sobbed, she watched herself finish saying what needed to be said. “By the end of this, this excursion, I’ll know. If we’re together, then we’ll give it a shot. If we’re not, then we’re not. And if we’re not”—she swallowed, made herself say the words—“it’s over.”
“What about the baby?”
“I’ll raise her on my own.”
“You’re serious.”
“I am.” She was someone else saying this, someone she didn’t recognize. Someone she couldn’t help but admire.
“Well,” he said, “you seem decided.” His dilated eyes were consumed, she could tell, by visions, his ears by voices calling him on. He stood and took Fifi’s leash. If she got the baby, he’d get the dog.
“But Tink, I want you to know that I love you. I’ll always love you.” He kissed her forehead, and she felt a warm river move through her as she watched him leave.
His love had never been the question.
Twenty-nine
SHE HELD THE mushrooms in her fist, looked at them on her open palm. Five pieces in all. Hard and rough and brown, like something that would fall from a tree in autumn—oddly shaped, dried-up seedpods. They weighed next to nothing. And yet so much hung in the balance. On the one hand psilocybin, and on the other—her world where she was right now. And where she was—well, it was hard to say, exactly. She was in the middle of a low cloud, drifting amid the possibilities. She wanted clarity—absolute, incontrovertible. She wanted to be grounded and sure—sure of her next play. Think strategy, she told herself, don’t listen to your big, dumb mess of a heart.
In the fog her hand all but disappeared and the mushrooms seemed to be floating. There wasn’t any tag on these fungi that said eat me. She could put them back in her purse and watch Leo from an easy vantage. She could sit on the shore and meditate. She could exude the illusion of calm assertion. Maybe she could even fool herself.
But the mushrooms were here, here in her hand. And Leo was right about one thing. They were just a fungus—a fungus that might help her to see.
She smelled them again. Their bitter odor made her salivate, and her stomach turned on itself. The old trip returned in a flood of colors, images, feelings.
She remembered the quality of the light, the indistinct brightness that had held her in its trembling mystery as though she were inside the body of a huge, slow, deep-breathing animal. She remembered the terrible, ever tighter enclosures and the expansion that had followed and that she’d felt born into, as if she were brand new.
She let herself enter that day again, let it all come back. It had the quality of a dream, or of a scene from childhood, cast in a sepia light. It had been at Laguna Beach, just north of here, where they had eaten the mushrooms, more than a year ago. It had been October, the fog thick as it was today, the sand fine and white as ash and the sea like milk—shining, cold, frothy—and far, too far across the slow sand. She had taken a step, and another, and the sea had been no closer; for every step she took it took two. She looked for Leo but he had disappeared somewhere up the beach.
She remembered how the mushrooms had come over her in waves, each one bigger than the last. The world had groaned like a giant intestine, pulsing, contracting and expanding. And her own insides had done strange things, flips with twists.
Heading through the white morning to find Leo, she’d stumbled through the icy surf. She found him hidden between boulders, at the far edge of the shore, and she crawled back, behind him, into the shade of the boulders, her body convulsing and her heaves dry. She held her sides and rocked like a sick child until Leo held her and rocked her and they rolled off their towels onto the damp sand.
She had felt like she was dying, like they were dying together in their shared dream.
And inside her something had raced, something afraid of the darkness, the mouth closing around her—as if she could escape, could crawl out of her body writhing in the sand. If death were a mouth, it had shut around them and was swallowing. She could hear it humming as if they tasted good.
Down, down, Alice in the hole, the slow fall. She clung—to the sand, to Leo’s hand—her fingernails digging in, as if they could save her.
Stupid girl, her mind had insisted. The mushrooms were poison and you took too many.
Leo held her and she held him, but she was alone in the hole, in the stomach of her mind, in the fear of losing herself. She felt her body dissolve, the molecules separating, making room for the Other—for the Great Unknown—to enter. So this is how it feels to die, she was thinking, when she heard singing.
Leo’s song had become the blue of deep oceans, and she moved her fingers and her toes, stretched her body between them. She could still see him sitting on the sand, singing with his eyes closed, a whirling Middle Eastern chant. And the sun and sand and sea were inside his song. She was in it, too, running inside th
e music, tearing off her jeans and T-shirt and meeting the waves head-on in just her bra and her panties. They had been the only people on the long stretch of beach, and she sent the water with her cupped hands skyward, where it caught the sunlight, each drop a bright bead, and all of it alive, all of it rainbow, the whole spectrum hanging like a garden in the air.
Leo’s eyes had seemed a universe of their own, shining, flecked with gold and green, gold-green and green-brown. His pupils were tunnels, and inside them she felt his heart thrumming, his good heart. He was more than she had thought, much more. Lit from inside he was a luminary, a cathedral with its stained glass glowing, or else a plain old house with its windows open and into which she’d found herself eager to peer.
All that day the sand had glimmered with fool’s gold and quartz. The day had seemed long as a lifetime, and in it she’d known the truth. She didn’t have to waste her youth working some stupid job. She had known the stones were dreaming her into existence, those shining boulders that held the beach in place.
And she could become anyone—anyone she pleased.
So she’d quit her day job, her desk job, her file-and-answer-the-phone job for $7.25 an hour, and she’d ventured out, into big bad Los Angeles, and found herself a job stripping. Her life had changed. The fungus had helped her to see the possibilities.
But now?
She couldn’t do it. She folded the air from the bag and zipped it closed. The mushrooms had never really been an option. She had another, a different, journey to take. Her waking dream would be lucid and the magic in her life, real.
Thirty
THE WAITRESS BROUGHT the croissant and espresso, and Gwen shoved the baggie to the bottom of her purse. Here were the almonds and dark chocolate from her pregnancy-test purchase—almonds for protein and chocolate for joy. She tore off a chunk of the fresh croissant, stuck a slab of chocolate inside it, and dipped the corner of her makeshift chocolate croissant in the espresso. She closed her eyes and let the taste fill her body. She took her time eating, savoring the flavors.
As she watched the fog thin and lift, revealing patches of blue—sky and ocean—her thoughts found Leo. She imagined he was down the beach, inside his beloved cave, singing. Perhaps by now he’d emerged and flung himself into the waves. Wherever he was, he was in his Neverland, where he was happy.
She could get in her car right now. She could leave him.
The sudden notion terrified and then thrilled her.
But it would go against the pact she’d made with him. If I join you, she’d said. At the end of this, I’ll decide. But she hadn’t joined him. She hadn’t taken the mushrooms, which meant the pact was broken, and she didn’t have to tell him a thing.
If she took off, when he came down from his trip, he could walk to his mother’s place. Gwen wouldn’t be stranding him, she’d be leaving him where—if he decided to—he could make his way back home. And if she left right now, she could go to the Cornell, throw everything she owned in her car and leave town.
But where would she go?
Not home to her father. Returning to Phoenix, pregnant and without a man, returning to the house she grew up in—even the thought made her stomach turn. What would her father say to his country-club pals? And anyway, she wouldn’t raise her daughter under her father’s roof, in a house that was less a home than it was an extensive hotel suite. She tried to picture the house as it was now, but she had a hard time seeing it. In the years since her mother’s death, her father had added nothing to the place. Rather, he had served as a negative force, emptying the rooms of what had once been there. He threw out her mother’s clothing, her makeup, her hats and her purses. And then, when Gwen left for college, his need to banish her spread to the study, where he stripped the walls of her photos, cleared the shelves of the books her mother had loved. Old hardbound collections of Yeats and Whitman, Keats and Woolf and Hemingway. Without telling Gwen, he’d given them to charity. Seeing the shelves empty, Gwen wanted to scream and throttle him, to punch him until her numb body felt pain, until she could feel again. Instead, she’d embraced the numbness. She had turned to ice and taken a vow of distance, which, given his own emotional sovereignty and the fact that he hardly looked at her, she was sure he hadn’t noticed. Even her bedroom became a shell of its former self. She had taken the things she cared about—her clothes, the typewriter, her cigar box of treasures—and the rest of her belongings he’d boxed in the garage. Only her bed remained, along with an empty bureau. It had become little more than a guest bedroom. He’d done what he had to do, she told herself. But one thing was certain: the home she’d grown up in was no longer her home.
She needed a fresh start, somewhere other than Phoenix or Los Angeles.
She thought of her aunt in Santa Cruz. Sam the bohemian, who made her living painting—canvases, murals. She painted her own version of human, dreamy and kind, with wide-set eyes and Renoiresque bodies, who inhabited a land where animals were equals, a human who seemed led more by her heart than her head. She and Loni had an apartment a block from the ocean. Every room was painted a different vibrant color—orange, purple, red. She’d visited them once, a few years back, when she’d needed a break from Leo and the city. Santa Cruz was a place Gwen could live. A quirky ocean town. A place that was far from L.A.
It was also Brett’s hometown.
She sucked on the last square of chocolate, looked around her. While she’d been imagining a new life, the world had taken shape, born from the cloud of possibilities. It was crisp and clean, and she could see the horizon, blue on blue. Closer in, though, the water was a brownish-reddish color, more like a muddy river than an ocean.
She asked the waitress about it and the waitress gave her glasses a nudge so they sat higher on her nose. “Well,” she said, “the phytoplankton are blooming.”
“Phytoplankton?” Gwen said, happy for the diversion.
“Plant plankton.” The girl smiled. “It isn’t toxic or anything.”
Gwen downed the rest of her coffee and the girl went for the check, leaving Gwen alone with her thoughts. Could she really leave Leo? Her breath was shallow, her heart skipped ahead. If she were ever going to do it, now was the time.
Thirty-one
SHE PAID THE check, tipping the waitress twice what she needed to, and walked to Frank’s Mini-Market to buy the razor already. And water, she always needed more water. You can take the girl out of the desert, but you can’t take the desert out of the girl. That was how Leo explained her obsession. Though really it was so much more. Water was essential, pure. The source of life, her mother had taught her, and renewal.
Outside of Frank’s, the Los Angeles Times with its headlines was front and center. King Case Aftermath: A City in Crisis. She picked up a paper, feeling strangely guilty. Los Angeles was in crisis, and what had she done? She’d skipped town. When the going got tough, she’d split—just like she was thinking of splitting from Leo.
She skimmed the front page. Bush Ordering Troops to L.A.; Police Struggle to Get Upper Hand in Turmoil; Unrest: Deaths Placed at 40, Eclipsing the Watts Riots; Injury Total Is 1,899 Since Outbreak of Violence Wednesday. Her eyes stuck on the number: 1,899. Nearly two thousand people were hurt badly enough to go to a hospital. She realized she was light-headed, and she leaned on the doorjamb.
She opened the paper and read on: Looters, Merchants Put Koreatown Under the Gun. She thought of Jin—the man who had, for years, filled their donut, their cigarette and vodka, their bottled water and aspirin needs. She hoped he was all right. He had the things he cared about—his family, his business—right there in the heart of L.A. He couldn’t just take off, the way they had. She wondered if he was still guarding the store with his gun.
Her eyes skimmed the page. Authorities were gaining the upper hand for the first time in three days of the worst urban unrest in Los Angeles history. There was a photo of looters and a store with smoke pouring from the windows. It was La Brea, the caption said, a few blocks from their apartment. She h
ad breathed this very smoke, watched it fill the air not two days ago. And here she was, on a quiet morning and from a safe distance, reading her life. Some part of her still didn’t believe it had happened—in Los Angeles of all places.
For the years she’d lived there the city had lain docile and half-asleep under an entropic smaze of promise. It was the land of dreams that really could come true—not just America, but Hollywood. Had even she—somehow—been still hoping? For what? For some big break to come, not for herself—she’d quit that game before it quit her—but for Leo, for the record contract that would give the world (and, more important, her father) the chance to see in him what she had seen all along. And now the dream was gone. There was nothing more to hope for.
When Wrong and Right Blur. Looting Assumes Trappings of Justice if System Is Seen as Failing, Experts Say. Did it really take an expert, she was thinking, when it occurred to her—she’d been one of the looters, which meant this article was referring to her. And in her case, wrong and right had blurred. She had been caught in a war zone. Normal laws were out the window. She’d needed water and gas. She could have left some cash on the counter, but for whom? How did she know the cash wouldn’t have been taken by someone else, she reasoned, wondering where her theft fell on the karma scale. She would tip double for a while, she told herself, until it evened out.
Some Residents Flee to O.C., the next headline read. She had to laugh. Here she was, safe behind “the Orange Curtain.” But how many people had gone all the way to Tijuana to escape the grid gone haywire? She supposed they’d been the minority, since popular opinion didn’t view Tijuana as any kind of haven.
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