by Nell Zink
“Seriously, what does it mean?”
“It means Matt’s into power. He gets a big kick out of power. Ask Jazz. Power excites him.”
“I can’t believe he got it cleaned up so fast.”
“You’d be amazed the things people will do for money. I, for instance, just accepted a job offer from my mom’s bank.”
“So are we safe if we come back? Matt’s going to be the fucking king of anarchy!”
“Of course you’ll be safe. What could give him more pleasure than watching you sip latte in his café? Maybe he’ll let Rob bus tables.”
“Jersey City is dead to me now,” Sorry says. “That was it. Did anybody tell you where we’re headed? Oakland.”
“What’s in Oakland?”
“Bicycles.”
“I’m not going to ask whose idea that was.”
“From there I might go to Venezuela.”
“Go there with dollars. You can sell them for incredible amounts on the black market.”
“Tell me all about it. But not on the phone.”
“Deal. Are Rob and Jazz around?”
“They’re in the room, doing that thing they always do way too long. I’m like, cut to the chase, people! But Jazz wants us to drop her off in Taos.”
“Wait—what thing they do?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Anka said, but I didn’t believe—I mean, she said Matt flipped out because he saw them in bed, and I thought it was just Matt.”
“It was not Matt. It was the love weasels.”
Penny has been working very hard at emptying her brain. She does not want this new information filling it up again.
“How come he didn’t tell me?” she cries. “I never knew!”
“They’re joined at the hip. They’re driving me crazy.”
She turns off the phone. Her eyes drip cold tears on her hot face.
INSIDE THE MOTEL ROOM, ROB is saying to Jazz, “You are aware that if you go all the way to Taos to ‘make love’ to a guy you haven’t seen in forever, you’re actually ‘fucking’ him.”
“I’m not going there to fuck him. I’m going to see how I feel about him.”
“And when you land on his doorstep, he’s going to know exactly what method you plan to use. Nobody travels that distance to talk. They have these things called telephones now. You’re laying yourself open to get hurt. Can’t I worry about you sometimes?”
“Why?”
“What are you going to do if he cooperates? I mean, after he makes love to you and says, ‘Have a nice life’? Walk out in the desert with the gun? You’re making it way too easy for him. All he has to do is let you have your way, and you’re turning it into a love story before you even see him. Do you have any idea what a fox you are? He’s not going to say no. It used to be at least you had some anatomical standards. So yeah, I worry.”
“I really loved this guy, and he was a nonsmoker with a nonhuge dick—a nonstarter.”
“How many of those do you know? Do you have a list you’re working off?”
“I’m in a different state of mind now.”
“Totally different head. That’s why you just ‘made love’ to me while you were planning how to get to Taos and ditch me.”
“I thought you were familiar with nonmonogamy.”
“At least make him do something. Like, tell him you’re coming to Santa Fe, and see if he volunteers to drive down.”
“I don’t think he’d do that.”
“So what makes you think he still loves you, for fuck’s sake?”
“He doesn’t love me! I left him for having a small dick and not letting me smoke! He probably hates me. Forget it. I’m going to go get a cigarette from Sorry.”
“You quit.”
“But if I started again, it would give me such a good excuse not to visit a doctrinaire nonsmoker.”
“Stay in bed with me, and I’ll take you to Taos.”
Jazz gets up, opens the door, and steps outside. Without a word, Sorry shows her Penny’s photo of the brass plaque. Jazz pulls her into the room. They show Rob.
AROUND ELEVEN THE NEXT DAY, they drive into Santa Fe. They window-shop, carrying large coffees from 7-Eleven. “Norman Baker Center,” Rob says out of nowhere.
“You’re like a Furby,” Sorry says. “Remember that toy that says random shit like it’s tripping?”
“Eight years I worked on that house. Eight years.”
“Spare us your lamentations.” Jazz points at a Zuni necklace in a window. “What’s that stone? It’s really beautiful.”
“It’s from a mine. You have no right to wear that stuff unless you work in a mine.”
“Look at that painting.”
“Where is that?”
“That’s Taos pueblo, man.”
Rob looks closer. “We could go to Taos.”
Sorry enters Jazz’s friend’s address in Google Earth. Her phone shows them the precise route from where they are standing, in front of an antique shop in downtown Santa Fe, to what appears to be the summit of a mountain. They microwave burritos at the 7-Eleven for lunch and depart.
The phone directs them to a dirt track opposite a youth hostel on bluffs above the Rio Grande. The minivan slips and slides as it climbs the hill. It stumbles down the other side over largish rocks. It slips up the next hill and down another one. Wireless LANs are out of reach. Even the cell signal is weak. The road courses along the bottom of a valley, in the streambed. They reach a potential turnoff, and Sorry says, “This phone has no clue where we are. But we need to bear right.”
Rob turns right. The minivan lurches over the lip of the creek bank and lands on a broad gravel road. “This must be new,” he says. He turns left (he is entering the road at a right angle, so he has to go left to bear right) and bounces, now at a healthy pace of ten to fifteen miles an hour, over washboard-like waves of crushed blue granite.
On a hilltop, the phone gets a cell signal. “Only six more miles,” Sorry announces.
“He better be cute,” Rob says.
“More to the point, he better be home,” Sorry says.
“People out here don’t lock their doors,” Jazz says. “It’s just a way to guarantee they’ll get broken.”
“You squatter slag,” Sorry says.
Rob slows the minivan for a blind curve. “Any neighbors?”
“Not on Google Earth.”
Rob sees wapiti. He stops to watch them browse in the streambed. He puts his hand on the ignition key, but he doesn’t turn it off. He shifts back into drive and rolls again, and the wapiti raise their heads. “This is beautiful. What do people eat when they’re stuck out here for weeks?”
“Survivalist apocalypse chow, like wheat berries and mandarin oranges in cans. But don’t get your hopes up! He might be home.”
Half an hour later, the driveway ends in a tight loop. They examine the bluff in front of them, confused. Finally Sorry says, “I see it!” She jumps out of the minivan and runs toward the front door, which stands almost parallel to the visitors’ line of sight. The house lies partially embedded in the mountainside, tucked halfway under the rock face like a cliff dwelling. Its facade is rock with lichens and saxifrage. The copper roof is painted dull brown. The outlines of the house are hard to see, even from close up.
“It’s weird he built a camouflaged house like this with a driveway visible from space,” Rob says.
“He’s not a survivalist,” Jazz says. She rings the doorbell. She knocks. She yells, “Anybody home?”
Sorry walks back to Rob. Facing the front door, she says to him conspiratorially, “There’s no car.”
“And no garage,” Rob says. “The road looks brand-new. He must have built this place with mules.”
“The house is open,” Jazz says. She goes inside.
The furniture is improvised from planks resting on stacks of hardback books still in their dust jackets and shrink-wrap, mostly in foreign languages. All are by the same author: Barrett Cartwright.
<
br /> “I take it this is Barrett Cartwright’s house,” Rob says.
“It’s his writing studio,” Jazz says. “He’s never here. He told me he keeps it stocked with food in case he ever feels like writing.”
“You make no sense to me at all. None. I thought you wanted to see him.”
“I did. But it’s not my life’s dream.”
Sorry stands in the humming glow at the open door of the fridge and says, “There’s at least four cases of cider in here.”
“He must have put in the road when he put in electricity,” Jazz says, distributing bottles to herself and her friends.
Intending to wash her hands, Sorry opens the tap over the kitchen sink, but nothing comes out. “Did you ever see Avanti Popolo?” she asks. “Israeli film about this Egyptian Shakespearean actor who survives in the desert by drinking vodka he gets from these dead Swedish blue helmets. Actually I can’t remember whether he survives—”
“No.”
“I hope your boy Barrett has water here somewhere.”
“Relax,” Rob says. “We’re a day’s walk from Taos.”
He explores the house. After he turns on the main water supply in the pantry, the tap spurts clear and cold. He turns on the boiler.
SORRY TAKES A WALK THE next morning before breakfast. Over steel-cut oatmeal with molasses, she proposes they found a farming commune and stay at Cartwright’s house forever. She removes the sixteenth cigarette from her second-to-last pack of American Spirits, taps it on the table, and goes outside to smoke.
Rob suggests one week. Jazz agrees, saying that the water (tank on the roof) and food (pantry) supply are not infinite. Even the four-plus cases of cider suggest a single man-month. Three guests for a week leaves her friend a week’s grace before he has to go shopping. Sorry comes back inside and proposes they stay five days, explaining that in emergencies she can get by on five cigarettes a day.
AT THAT VERY MOMENT, AN online gaming buddy of Matt’s who works in the NYPD’s “Real Time Crime Center” data-mining and crime anticipation unit (cf. Minority Report) agrees to locate Jazz’s cell phone.
His first attempt fails. On World of Warcraft’s internal chat software, he writes, No dice. Prob burner phone.
PKK pond scum, Matt replies, but hella hot, if I catch up she will be so raped.
THAT DAY, SORRY SMOKES FIVE cigarettes.
She intuits that using up her cigarettes is going to make her unhappy. She doesn’t want to leave Cartwright’s house.
On the second day, she smokes four, and two on day three, leaving her with fifteen.
Day five: three. Day six: three. Day seven: three. Day eight: none.
Day nine, she feels the return of her mania. She wonders whether it might be a reverse placebo effect, but the colors seem so vivid, the sky so vast and blue; Cartwright’s work so gripping, her own unwritten poetry so good.
She walks the hills on the hottest days alone. One day she climbs a small but steep and jagged peak, and standing on the top, she takes off her shirt and says to the sun, “Sunlight. Fill my heart.” Thereupon sunlight fills her heart (inexplicable process defying prose description). On her return she gives the six remaining cigarettes to Rob. “Keep these for me,” she says. “If Cartwright materializes, I’m really going to want them.”
He rolls one between two fingers and says, “I don’t know how you can smoke these anyway. They’re way past stale.”
“It’s the dry heat. It’s like they’re always burning. I can sniff them and get a rush.”
He sniffs one. “I could have one right now without getting addicted. There’s nowhere to buy more.”
“That’s not how it works. You’re addicted forever. You’d just go back into withdrawal.”
He sighs.
UPHILL FROM THE HOUSE LIES a sort of roofless cistern, a steep-sided reservoir about twenty feet by thirty, of unknown depth. “That’s our backup drinking water,” Rob protests when Jazz suggests going swimming. She points out the little fishes and the turtle. In the shimmering heat of the afternoons they all swim, pawing away mats of algae.
At the full moon, Jazz goes out alone, naked, to swim at night in the cold. She sees two wide-set eyes on the bank, watching her, shining bloodred, and in the morning she finds mountain lion tracks. Each is as big as her fist, like a dog track without claws.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she tells the others the next morning. “I was almost eaten alive by a mountain lion.”
At the news, Sorry lights American Spirit number negative six.
THAT VERY SAME SECOND, MATT’S friend in the NYPD concludes his series of attempts to find Jazz. Sorry dude she’s underground, he messages Matt. Clear blue sky.
“NOTE, OR NO NOTE?” JAZZ says, regarding the dining table.
“Don’t leave him a note,” Sorry says. “Let him wonder.”
They bump nine miles down the new gravel driveway. At the bottom, where it hits the main road, there is a fence, a ditch, and a new, high, solid gate, very much locked. The security system involves a camera pointing outward and, on the uphill side, a post with a keypad. They turn around, drive back two miles, and use Google to find the shortest route to Taos. It directs them back the way they came in.
Rob says there’s something symbolic about benefiting from the time lag between information and reality.
Jazz says Google is a palimpsest—not a menacing medium that never forgets, but a return to the days when parchment was precious, before paper became common and disposable. It is a library that maintains all of human knowledge, eternally safe from fire and decay. “Got to have our Internet pieties down cold if we want to survive in the Bay Area,” she adds, putting her feet out the window.
Dusty wind swirls in the minivan as it creeps downward through dry valleys to Taos, where they stop for sodas.
THE FIRST MEETING OF THE Committee to Retake Nicotine is well attended. On a Tuesday night at eight, thirty people crowd into the DJD living room, with eight on the DJD itself.
Anka describes the night Jazz shot the bucket monster. She carefully avoids prejudicial labels such as “asshole,” relating the events as accurately as she can.
“I’m confused,” a young man says. “Isn’t Matt Baker the guy who cleaned up Nicotine to open it to the community?”
“Let her finish what she’s saying,” a woman says. “I saw about this house on Facebook, and I’d definitely be interested in living there.”
Anka keeps her speech short, around three minutes. She closes with a plea for solidarity. No one, she says, should be allowed to drive residents from CHA homes.
When she is done speaking, Sunshine raises his hand. He presents arguments for eminent domain.
(1) The Center will attract visitors and new community members, growing the community and raising its profile. (2) Nicotine was the largest house in the CHA community, with the largest rooms—a natural community center—yet it was entirely in private hands, although it lacked a coherent activist agenda. (3) Rob may have brought it on himself. (4) Trashed by its residents, Nicotine is being restored by the Center’s donor free of charge. (5) Sunshine’s own increasingly popular climate change events have outgrown DJD’s facilities—particularly the DJD itself, which is showing significant wear and tear—and for several years he has [resented] (he uses a different word) Nicotine’s having a very large living room that goes unused because it smells like an ashtray. (6) Once that room is aired out, there will be space for an indoor day care center with yard access on the ground floor—unless the bookstore is planned to be really huge, which Sunshine doubts. (7) On social media, there have been rumors that the second-floor yoga studio will have a changing room and showers.
Because the community’s few toddlers currently gather in a Children’s Garden consisting of picnic tables in a vacant lot that has broken bottles and rusty scrap poking up out of the ground, several women stand up to applaud. A Stayfree resident proposes that Stayfree spearhead the cooperative day care center at the Bake
r Center. Another suggests teaching the children to bake so they can pay their rent in kind—in cake pops for the café!
There is happy laughter, along with a murmuring groundswell of approval for the yoga initiative.
Penny sits passively on the floor. She imagines telling the room about her relationship with Norman Baker. She imagines warning them against trusting Matt, as though Anka had not said enough. She imagines inspiring them to retake Nicotine the way she wants it retaken. Each time her hand begins to creep into the air, an adrenaline rush raises her heart rate, and she lowers it. Her interest in the topic is too strong. It’s crippling.
She is tired out from doing the recommended preliminary reading for her upcoming assignment as a global commodities market analyst trainee. She is already in regular contact with her supervisor. Her mother receives glowing reports. She brings intense concentration to the books and PDFs, with the continual sensation that if she didn’t, she would be staring at her phone for eighteen hours a day, ritually conjuring thoughts of Rob while ritually banning thoughts of Matt.
It can’t be done. The two men are linked now by irreversible violence.
In fact her daily time investment in ritual phone staring is a mere two hours. She feels done for and double-crossed, and she has seldom been more productive. Still, when the topic is Nicotine, her default mode is vacancy. She concentrates on her new job. Her feelings are down deep inside her head where they started out.
OVER THE NEXT WEEK, SUNSHINE conducts what he calls an “open mouth strike” against the Nicotine residents and Penny. He impugns their motives. To maintain plausible deniability, he avoids social media. In person, he intimates to friends that the Blue Bloc’s intervention in the #climbit action may have led to Susannah’s injuries. He insinuates that the Blue Bloc may include police informants. “Why were no charges filed against Penny and Sorry? Why wasn’t Jazz at the Freedom Tower?” he asks, rhetorically.