Golden State

by Michelle Richmond

  “I call California a nation-state because of the diversity of our people, the power of our economy, and the reach of our dream,” Schwarzenegger had said in his second inaugural address. “The commerce and trade of the nations of the earth pass through our ports. The world knows our name. We are a good and global commonwealth.”

  When the new governor came out in favor of secession, rumor had it that Schwarzenegger called to offer his support. As it turned out, belief in California’s independence crossed political boundaries, created whole new allegiances, and dissolved old alliances that had once seemed set in stone.

  Other lawmakers were getting nervous. “The last time states attempted to secede,” a leading Democrat in the California senate warned in a news conference, “the result was a full-blown civil war.”

  “This is a different time, and we are a different country,” the governor replied. He eschewed the traditional press conference and instead posted his reply on Twitter, with eighty-four characters to spare. He refrained from mentioning the obvious: certain states were salivating at the thought of a California secession, dreaming of a nation unfettered by our left-leaning electoral votes. Meanwhile, scholars and politicians squabbled over whether or not states have a constitutional right to secession, or merely a right to revolution.

  Years before, in the rural Mississippi church that swallowed up the Sunday mornings of my childhood, the thickly toupeed and eternally sweaty pastor had been fond of delivering sermons on hedonism, in which “the dark cavern of Hollywood” and “that modern-day den of iniquity they call San Francisco” were equated with Sodom and Gomorrah. “It would do us no harm,” Brother Ray once said, “if the whole godless state slid right into the Pacific.”

  I used to imagine the state cutting loose like a glacier, floating off into the ocean: a gargantuan party barge carrying the sinners to their doom or, possibly, their salvation. Brother Ray’s sermons, which surely were intended to instill in us a reverence for our roots, an allegiance to our region above all others, and a fear of evil urban centers, had the opposite effect on me. His passionate warnings planted the seeds of my desire to head west.

  “Don’t leave,” my sister pleaded eighteen years ago, on the last day of my last summer in Mississippi. She was twelve then, standing in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me dismantle it piece by piece. My bookshelves were bare, my closet empty. A studio apartment was waiting for me in San Francisco. When my admission letter to medical school had arrived six months before, with a promise of financial aid, I’d been convinced that my life was finally beginning.

  “Christmas is just around the corner,” I assured her.

  “You won’t come home for Christmas.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Where will you get the money?” She flopped onto my bed, all arms and legs and chipped pink nail polish. Her legs were already longer than mine, stick thin and covered with soft light brown hair. Her height had always been a source of mystery, a secret clue to her paternity, one I could never quite decode. The only thing our mother would tell us about Heather’s father was that he was a regular guy, a very decent person. “Don’t worry, he’s not doing time at Whitfield,” she would say. “Tall and blond. Like the cute one in The Dukes of Hazzard.”

  Heather flipped through the folded clothes in the suitcase, messing up the order I had so carefully imposed on my meager belongings. “Can I have this?” she asked, pulling my favorite shirt from the bottom of the pile—a chambray button-down that had belonged to my own father, who died when I was five. He’d been sitting in the shade of an oak tree outside the bank where he worked, enjoying his pimento cheese sandwich, when a large limb fell from the tree. “It was instant,” I’d been told at the time. “He didn’t suffer.” Only when I was older did I begin to doubt that his death was painless. The chambray shirt had been worn and washed so many times it felt as soft as an old sheet. I didn’t want to give it to her, but I understood that this was a test. She was making a sacrifice, and she wanted me to make one, too.

  “Yes,” I said, as she unfolded the shirt and tied it around her waist. I felt so guilty for leaving, I’d have given her anything. My undergrad work had been at Mississippi State, only three hours from Laurel. Every other weekend for four years, I hitched a ride home with a girl from my dorm. I didn’t always want to go, but each time I walked through the door of the house where I grew up, I was reminded once again how much my sister needed me: the piles of dirty laundry, the empty cupboards, the way Heather rushed into my arms, talking a mile a minute, while our mother remained behind the closed door of her bedroom, sleeping off the exhaustion of two full-time jobs and her lingering grief. I’d spent every holiday and summer in Laurel, out of obligation as much as lack of money, so that it felt, in many ways, as if I’d never left home. Now I was leaving for good.

  “You wouldn’t like San Francisco,” I told Heather. “It’s freezing in the summer, and you can’t get fried catfish or proper hush puppies. Anyway, what would Mom do without you?”

  “What will I do without you?”

  4

  12:52 p.m.

  “You moved the furniture,” he says. “New bookcases?”

  Dennis Drummond. I’d recognize that voice anywhere.

  “Ikea.” I try to match his casual tone, aware that every word I say from here on out will have consequences.

  The cellphone crackles, and I move to get a better signal.

  “I looked and looked, but I can’t find that book I gave you,” he says.

  “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.”

  “You remember.” He sounds pleased. “Do you still have it?”

  “Of course.”

  I don’t tell him that I came across the book not that long ago, when I was going through the shelves at home, deciding what to keep, what to give away. It was late at night, I was alone. I hadn’t seen Dennis Drummond in almost a year. It seemed, at last, he had forgotten me. I no longer looked over my shoulder at the hospital. I no longer stiffened when the phone rang.

  “Can you believe it’s been eighteen years since we met?”

  “No,” I say honestly. “I can’t.”

  “Tell me what you remember,” he urges. “From that day.”

  I take a deep breath. He wants to hear a story. So be it. This is nothing new. All those times we talked, he was always asking, in some form or another, for a story. More often than not, I would comply. Something about him made it easy to open up. By the time I realized that he was storing everything, filing it away in memory, I had already given him too many keys to my life.

  “It was at Green Apple Books, on Clement Street,” I say. “We were in the new fiction aisle, and we reached for the same book at the same time. There was only one copy.”

  “You wouldn’t let go of the book.” He’s right about that. His fingers had lingered on the spine. So had mine. “What happened next?” he insists.

  “I said you could have the book, but only if you took me out for dinner.”

  “I noticed your accent. I loved your accent, but you’ve lost it.”

  “I was fresh out of Mississippi. I haven’t lived there in a long time.”

  He seems calm. That’s good. I keep talking. Even when Heather sits up in bed, her face twisted in pain, I keep telling the story. “You said you’d do more than take me to dinner. You’d also buy me another book. We went upstairs, where they keep all the obscure paperbacks. You pulled out The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. You told me it was Rilke’s only novel.”

  I think for a moment and am surprised to see it so clearly: Dennis, standing in the aisle, holding the book, his hair already slightly gray, even though he couldn’t have been much older than I was. “When I asked what it was about, you said, ‘Time and death.’ ”

  “Time and death,” Dennis repeats. “Funny, I don’t remember that.”

  There is such tenderness in his voice, and yet I know that Eleanor is in the room with him, bruised and bloody. Less than an hou
r ago, he dragged her across the parking lot by her long, dark braid. Before that, he beat her. And that is not all—I know that Dennis also has Betty and Rajiv. I do not know how far he is willing to go.

  Over dinner that night eighteen years ago, I learned that Dennis was from Woodside, a small town thirty miles south of San Francisco favored by the equestrian set and wealthy Silicon Valley types. His father worked in tech; his mother was a near recluse who left the house only to be with her horses. Dennis had a business degree from Stanford, where he’d met his girlfriend, with whom he had recently broken up.

  I knew hardly anyone in San Francisco. He was good-looking and funny. He told me he worked for his dad’s start-up.

  “What’s a start-up?” I had asked.

  I liked the fact that he wasn’t in med school, the fact that we didn’t know any of the same people. His recent breakup wasn’t a red flag—far from it. In a way, it made him seem safe. I didn’t want a boyfriend; I was busy.

  “We had burritos at La Cumbre,” I continue.

  “Do you remember what happened after that?”

  “We went back to your apartment in the Duboce Triangle.”

  “It was an amazing night.”

  How far to take this? What to say? I remember how he removed my socks so gently, one by one, before we made love on his narrow bed. I remember how he lifted my shirt and kissed my breasts. I remember thinking that it was nice to be close to someone, in this strange city where I’d been feeling achingly alone. I remember that his apartment smelled like oranges. I remember the green pillowcases on his bed, and a white ceramic doorstop in the shape of a sheep’s head. When I woke up in the morning, he was lying on his side, staring at me. Had I noticed, even then, that there was something vaguely frightening in his intensity? I can’t remember.

  Over the next few days, we talked on the phone a couple of times. He asked me out again, but I was swamped with med school. The following week, he called to say that he and the girlfriend had decided to make another go of it. We parted on friendly terms.

  Four years later, when I was in my first year of residency at UCSF, on rotation at the VA hospital, I stepped into an examination room to see an attractive man sitting on the table, clad in a paper gown. His hair was longer, unkempt, and he had a beard. If it weren’t for the name printed on the chart, I might have had a hard time believing it was Dennis.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  I lowered the clipboard, stunned. “What are you doing at the VA?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I was National Guard.”

  I shook my head. “No, you didn’t mention it. What about Woodside, Stanford, the silver spoon, and the start-up?”

  “All true,” he said. “But before the start-up, when I got out of Stanford with a business degree I never wanted in the first place, I figured the National Guard would be a safe form of rebellion.”

  It felt weird, standing there in front of him with my clipboard. He had every right to be here, of course. And yet, considering our personal history, it felt like an invasion of my professional space. “Was it?” I asked impulsively. “Safe, I mean?”

  “Not so much. I eventually ended up in Desert Storm. It was supposed to be quick in, quick out, overnight victory. I wasn’t prepared for the charred bodies lined up beside the road leading out of Kuwait City.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  “If I remember correctly, we didn’t waste a lot of time on small talk.” He looked me up and down. “The white coat looks good on you, Julie.”

  “Short white coat,” I said. “I’m a resident.” My beeper started vibrating on my hip. “Sorry. I wish I had time to catch up, but that’s my attending physician. What brings you in?”

  He pointed to his heart. “It hurts,” he said, “now that I’ve seen you in your short white coat.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Okay, it’s not my heart. Just a lowly pain in the gut.”

  I asked him the requisite questions, jotted things down on the chart, feeling utterly confused but not unhappy to see him. It was like finding an old ticket from a great concert in the pocket of a coat I hadn’t worn in years.

  “Lay back,” I said finally. He did. I pressed my fingers to his abdomen. “Does this hurt?”

  “No.”

  “This?”

  He grimaced. “Yes.”

  I was a toucher then, and I still am today. I know doctors who prescribe a slew of tests the moment a patient walks through the door, but I prefer to listen first and use my hands.

  Dennis squinted into the light and said, “This is a little weird.”

  “If I remember correctly, you have a thing for beer.”

  “Why, you want to go grab one?”

  “How often do you drink?”

  “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  “Seriously,” I insisted.

  His face reddened. “Yep.”

  “Headaches?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you feel sluggish in the morning after drinking beer the night before?”

  “Check.”

  “Sit up, please.”

  I listened to his heart, felt his lymph nodes, unsettled by our unexpected intimacy. By then, I was with Tom; touching an old lover, even in this context, felt vaguely inappropriate.

  “So,” he said. “What’s wrong with me, Doc?”

  “It’s possible that you’ve developed a gluten allergy. Go off the beer and bread for two weeks. No pasta, crackers, nothing with wheat.”

  “I’m allergic to wheat?” He sounded disappointed.

  “Maybe, maybe not, but there’s no harm in ruling it out.”

  He reached for his jeans. “Now that I’ve thoroughly embarrassed myself with my rather pedestrian illness, can I get dressed?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “After I shut the door, you can do whatever you want.” I took a step toward the door.

  “Can I take you out to dinner?” he asked.

  “Thanks, but I have a boyfriend.”

  “Bummer.”

  For a few moments we just looked at each other. Finally, I reached awkwardly to shake his hand. “It was good seeing you.”

  “You too, Julie.” He didn’t shake my hand so much as hold it. “See you around?”

  “You know where I work.”

  Two weeks later, I ran into him in the cafeteria.

  “You were right about that allergy,” he told me. He had shaved his beard, and his face looked lean and tan. “I switched from beer and bread to wine and tequila, and now I’m fine.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “One of the counselors here runs a support group for veterans of the Gulf War. Turns out, a bunch of us are more fucked up than you’d expect.”

  “You don’t seem fucked up.”

  “We’re all fucked up. It’s an anger-management group. Plus, I was kind of hoping to see you. How serious did you say that boyfriend of yours is?”

  “Pretty serious,” I answered, smiling.

  After that, I’d sometimes see Dennis around, and we’d have coffee in the cafeteria. He always had a lot of questions, and I had no reason not to answer them. I trusted him, and over time, I came to consider him a friend. That year, Tom and I got married. A couple of years after that, I finished my residency and took a long-term position at the VA. Eventually Dennis got married and had a baby girl. His marriage didn’t last. When I saw him, I never knew what to expect. If things were going well, he’d be on top of the world, in an ebullient mood, looking trim and handsome. But if things weren’t working out, which seemed more often the case, he’d be gloomy and bloated, dressed sloppily. He had jobs and lost them, he fought with his parents, he wrangled with his ex over custody of their daughter. Every few months, he’d call me, and we’d have coffee, and I’d hear about his latest troubles and, occasionally, triumphs: a new relationship, a better job, a temporary truce with his parents. “What about you?” he’d say, and I’d look into his blue eyes, feel
that slender thread still connecting us, and fall into the same old pattern of talking more than I should.

  He’d listen intently, nod his head in all the right places, and at the end of our conversation I’d always feel a bit better. But then, invariably, everything would spiral out of control again. It was sad to see him losing hold. I wondered if these tendencies had been there all along; had time and circumstance simply intensified the person he’d already been? Or was it more complicated? Had the cumulative trauma of military service, divorce, unemployment, alcoholism, and the rest changed him at some fundamental level? Could this happen to anyone?

  It wasn’t until two years ago that Dennis really started getting weird. He’d completely lost custody of his daughter, and he seemed desperate for someone to talk to. He’d argued with the counselor who ran the PTSD group. When I suggested counseling with another colleague of mine, he became enraged. He’d run through a string of meds and decided none of them was right. I felt for him. At the VA, prescriptions are limited by government contracts. Off-label prescriptions aren’t uncommon, simply because we have fewer choices than private hospitals. A patient who needs Zoloft might get Paxil instead; someone whose symptoms call for Lamictal might end up on Topamax. Off-label uses are particularly widespread among the psychotropic drugs, whose boundaries seem more fluid. A psychiatrist might end up prescribing a drug to treat one or more symptoms, without treating the root cause.

  Eventually, Dennis became more demanding. Coffee once a month suddenly wasn’t enough. He would insist that I meet him for lunch or help him fill out a job application. He started coming to the VA with made-up ailments, always insisting he see me. Last year, I worked out an arrangement with the staff to pass him on to someone else. Often, it was Rajiv. Dennis started calling me at home then, and hanging up. Finally, Tom and I had our phone number changed. Somehow, Dennis got hold of the new one. “I just want to talk to you,” he’d say on the voice mail, over and over again.