Only Lola, commandeering the other bed an indeterminate number of hours later, broke the spell. “Jesus,” she muttered, looming above them. “When I said he needed a womb, I didn’t mean it literally.”
But Micah didn’t care—was surprised, in fact, at just how little she cared—pretending to be asleep while Lola grunted and sighed herself to sleep a yard or so away, and then truly sleeping, beautifully hard, despite the music and screams and howls from outside, until just before dawn. Talmadge was spooning her when she awakened, his face buried between her neck and shoulder; she could feel his jaw unfolding into what felt like a smile when she moved. Silently, and with animal ease, she took his hand in hers. Four days later, they were in Austin together, and eight months after that, New York City.
Which was where she found herself now, on Thanksgiving, chopping tofu into squishy little squares then limp carrots into rounds, while eavesdropping on Talmadge explaining the intricacies of squatting to Matty. “Water is key,” he was saying. “Just like in nature. You’ve got to have a water source. The Christian anarchist dudes took care of hacking that. Can’t even tell you how stoked we were to turn the faucet on and see all that nasty rusty water coming out. That was like, everything.” Micah smiled, remembering Talmadge’s head-cocked befuddlement when she shrieked—shrieked, jumping pogo-stick style in the kitchen, then nearly tackling him with an ecstatic embrace—when water came spurting from the tap in diarrheal squirts. “What else is it supposed to do?” he’d asked, nearly as giddy as Micah but uncertain why. (Their Austin squat had been communal, shared by six other people, with all the infrastructure hurdles having been cleared years before.)
She remembered, too, as she fired a match to light a homemade penny stove, his infinite, boyish fascination with the stoves—this whole life, she sometimes felt, was an epic ceaseless adventure for him. A British backpacker in India had taught her how to make the stove: With a knife or scissors, you sliced up three Heineken cans (“has to be Heineken,” he’d instructed; something about the can shape) to make a base, burner, fuel cup, and simmer ring. The burner, about three-fourths of an inch tall and made from a can bottom, got its edges crimped and its sides and bottom punched with holes, including a quarter-inch hole in its convex center. Once assembled, you placed a penny over the quarter-inch hole, which somehow (this was what Talmadge could never figure out) sealed the burner and stabilized the heat; after sliding the stove under a tripodal pot support (for one stove, Micah used irrigation stakes; for another, bent bicycle spokes), you filled the fuel cup with alcohol and lit it. (HEET, a cheap, methanol-based gas-line antifreeze, was their preferred fuel; according to Talmadge’s calculations, they averaged eighteen meals per twelve-ounce bottle, which went for two dollars at an auto-parts store at Cooper Square: eleven cents per meal.) Micah had two of their four penny stoves going now: On one, simmering gently, was a pot filled with lentils, wild rice, garlic, onions, basil, and cashews, and onto the other she placed a pot containing the carrot rounds, olive oil, and vegetable stock.
From a shelf above her she pulled down a cast-iron Dutch oven; after checking it for roaches, she blew the dust off the bottom and set it on the counter. Nearby was a beige disk of dough she’d made from whole-wheat flour, salt, soy milk, and olive oil. The olive oil wasn’t right but it was the only oil they had right now. This was for the pumpkin pie Talmadge had requested. “We gotta have something traditional,” he’d said. She dropped the dough into the Dutch oven and patted the center down to form a basin at the bottom. Arching her body sideways to read the recipe Talmadge had found on the internet and reproduced in his barely legible shorthand, she combined, in a mixing bowl, the chopped tofu with the contents of a dented can of organic pumpkin purée that Talmadge had scored, last week, from the Whole Foods dumpster. He’d rushed into the apartment that night like a man clutching a winning lottery ticket. But this was foreign to her: She’d never made anything like a pie before, and the vagaries of scrounging food from the trash rendered recipes more or less useless. You got what you got, and you did the best you could with it. Having never measured anything before, unclear in fact as to the difference between a teaspoon and tablespoon, she guessed at the amounts of ginger and cloves and cinnamon and allspice and sugar that she dashed into the mixture. After mashing everything together into a thick orange gloppiness, she dumped the mixture into the crust, fitted the heavy lid, and set the Dutch oven on a third stove. She lit it, and rejoined the boys in the main room.
“Pie’s on,” she said.
“Sweet,” Talmadge moaned.
“You’re making a pie?” Matty said. “Damn. This is better than Grandma’s.”
Talmadge said, “I was just kinda explaining the Tampon Tower.”
“Yeah,” said Micah, crinkling her nose. “Not my favorite nickname . . .”
“One thing I should kinda probably warn you about,” said Talmadge to Matty. “There’s bed bugs pretty bad. They snuck in on a mattress we found.” He yanked down his shirt collar to reveal a small galaxy of red bites. “They don’t seem to affect Micah so maybe you’ll luck out.”
Matty’s horror was blatant. “Maybe,” he said, “I can get some . . . kind of spray?”
“That’s cool, whatever,” Talmadge said.
Matty raised the whiskey bottle to his lips; his spooked expression suggested the desire for fortitude rather than flavor. Some of his mother’s insect phobia—she’d once thrown out everything in the kitchen cupboards, even the canned goods, after discovering a single dead weevil in a box of Cream of Wheat—had wormed its way into his own subcortex, and he couldn’t stand bugs. In his ideal world, the world’s citizenry would band together to conduct a mass slaughter of any creature in possession of more than four legs and/or unfeathered wings. He understood this was ecologically vile but longed for it anyway. As he’d often said, to his parents and his defense lawyer and the very few girls (three) with whom he’d hooked up for longer than a month, he was only human.
Talmadge watched a brown bubble form inside the bottle, then skitter upward through the liquid as Matty raised the bottle, as if it were fleeing Matty’s lips. Big gulp, he noted.
“Matty ripped that off a dead lady,” he announced suddenly.
Matty blew a mist of bourbon. “Dude!” he said, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Micah’s cool.”
“What dead lady?” said Micah.
“Damn, man. That was my gift.”
“It’s funny,” said Talmadge, though he wasn’t sure it was.
Rolling his eyes, and punctuating his speech with theatrical sighs, Matty explained, “Some old lady died on my bus. Somewhere in Bumfuck, Missouri. No one wanted to sit next to her so I was kind enough to volunteer.”
“Then he klepto’d her bourbon,” said Talmadge.
“I was doing her a favor! Like . . . like if you’d died in our dorm room, okay? It woulda been only polite to pry the bong from your hands.”
“Oh, I get it,” said Talmadge, grinning. “It was just good manners.”
“Hell yeah. What if, like, the driver radioed ahead and the old lady’s daughter was there to get her off the bus?”
“Was she?”
“Naw, I’m saying what if. How’s that gonna look? Her dead mom on the bus hugging on a sack of whiskey. No girl needs to see that.”
“She was hugging it? You, like, pried it out of her hands?”
“No, figure of speech. It was next to her, up against the window.”
“So you were just, what, tidying up the scene?”
“Right! See, man, I let her die with dignity—with pride. It’s all good. No one got hurt and everyone’s happy. Well, I mean, not happy . . .”
“Her daughter’s not happy,” said Talmadge.
“But she coulda been more not happy, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Unless she likes whiskey.”
“Why you jacking with me?”
“I don’t see an issue,” said Micah.
; “Thank you,” said Matty.
“Unless, you know, the whiskey was poisoned,” she said, “and that’s what killed her.” Repartee like this was rare for Micah, and Talmadge’s heart surged: God he loved her. The girl could hang. Even with Matty Boone, who for a few troubled moments appeared to be seriously considering the possibility of poisoned bourbon.
“Dude,” Talmadge whispered to him. “You’re so dead.”
“Who would poison an old lady?” Matty said.
Talmadge replied, “Her daughter.”
Busting into a loud, fat laugh, Matty exclaimed, “I made the daughter up!” He held the bottle out to Talmadge. “Here, man,” he said. “Drink up. Blood brothers against the wind. We go down together . . .”
“Here’s to you, Maybelle,” Talmadge said, swinging the bottle toward the painting, and Micah winced as it went vertical. Whiskey had been her father’s preferred medicine, in his case moonshine, and she dreaded the bosky smell of it on Talmadge’s skin tonight. She didn’t mind the weed, to which Talmadge had mostly limited himself since his self-described “come-to-Jesus” moment at Burning Man. The rest of it, though . . . she worried.
“Ah, death . . .” said Matty, reclaiming the bottle from Talmadge; the word hung there, awkwardly, as if Matty was quoting something he couldn’t remember the rest of. Shrugging, he fetched a box of cigarettes from the side table and drew one out of the package. Micah’s eyes were drawn downward to where he’d ground two previous cigarettes into the floorboards. A sliver moon of ash already skirted his chair.
“Here,” she said, sliding a ceramic plate from beneath one of the fat candles, for him to use as an ashtray. The plate, which was trimmed with gold paint and petaled like a flower, had come from the trash of a nursing home on Henry Street, and there’d been something poignant about it, she remembered, as with the teddy bears she often came upon, or the wedding dress she’d once unearthed. With some discarded objects you could almost feel the history embedded in their cell structure, the heat of their absorbed sentiment, as if you might be able to hold them to your ear to hear their stories told, the way a seashell confides its memories of the sea.
“Whoa, check this out,” Matty said, skimming the plate’s inscription. Acidly, he read it aloud: “‘God bless our home . . . Bless this home, dear Lord above, with Happiness, and with thy Love.’”
Embarrassed, Talmadge said, “You find what you find out there. If it ain’t broke, what the hell . . .”
“I like it,” said Micah.
“You find what you find, right,” Matty said, setting aside the plate while knocking a gray spiral of ash to the floor. To them both, he said, “On the real, though, I’m still trying to, like, uh, digest all this. What’s the point again? I mean, like, eating from the trash . . .”
As if physically dodging the question, Talmadge leaned quickly back in his chair so that Micah could field it.
“It’s about . . . well, a lot of things,” she began. Exhaling deeply, she smoothed the wrinkles of her dress on her thighs. Something about the smoothing evoked the nineteenth century: a pioneer woman fixing to explain salvation to a savage. “I mean, the trash, yeah. Okay. Foraging is about refusing, on a totally personal level, to join in the overconsumption that’s just, just sucking the life from the planet. It’s about shunning commodity culture, or disposable culture, whatever, it’s different words for the same thing. The amount of waste this society generates, it’s enough to feed and clothe and sustain entire other countries. And I’m just talking, like, reclaimable waste now. Multiple countries. So it’s not only possible but doable to survive off that waste stream. I mean, check out the pumpkin pie cooking in the kitchen . . . Exhibit A.”
“Right, okay,” said Matty. “That’s, like, Freeganism, right? I met some Freegan chick in Portland—”
“Freeganism is a marketing term,” Talmadge sniffed.
“Yeah, we don’t go in for all the isms,” said Micah. “Once you’re an ism, you’re political, and that’s a dead end. The labels are just another domestication device. Look at environmentalism. Everyone’s favorite pet ism. The golden retriever of isms, right?” She smiled at Talmadge, from whom she’d cribbed that line. “I guarantee you that someone, right now, maybe even on this block, is replacing an incandescent lightbulb with one of those compact fluorescent ones and feeling all nicey and righteous because they’re helping the planet. And at the same time, right now, someone else is buying a hybrid car because they want to save the planet. And think about that word, man, buying. You just have to sit back for a second and think about the whole psychology there. Those people are doing their part, in their minds. They’re paying their money, they’re doing their part. They can go to bed tonight knowing they’re, like, on the side of the angels. That they’re the good guys—”
“Wait,” Matty said. “Go back. Those are bad things?”
“They’re meaningless things,” Micah replied. “They’re placebos, get it? They’re meaningless tools that the system has devised to make people think they’re doing something, and to get them to buy something at the same time. It’s like, okay, this architect who got this big environmental hero prize, from the president or something, for putting this so-called ‘living roof’ on a freaking truck factory in Michigan. Planted native grasses and shit up there, called it songbird habitat. I mean, Jesus, just roll that around in your head for a while. Our environmental heroes are the assholes designing truck factories. I mean, my fingers can’t do those stupid air quotes fast enough.”
“Yeah, but what are you saying?” Matty challenged. “Like, everyone’s supposed to be eating from a dumpster?” Talmadge leaned forward, stiffening in his chair and averting his eyes from Micah’s. This was the side of Matty he’d dreaded: the disruptive, pigheaded Yankee side, dismissive of anything unfamiliar. Like that of a chained dog barking at every stranger, his initial reaction was always to catapult threats or insults. (On their first visit to town together, as Ole Miss freshmen, Matty had looked up at the Confederate war memorial overlooking the Oxford town square and announced, “That’s way too fucking big for a second-place trophy.”) Talmadge noted the level of whiskey in the bottle; from what he remembered, liquor didn’t soften Matty’s edges. He was regretting, now, spilling the beans about Matty jacking that bottle from the dead lady. He’d thought Micah, who shoplifted fairly regularly, might find it amusing, and maybe even respectable, since she deemed waste a greater crime than theft. He’d been puzzled by his own queasiness and had wanted Micah’s verdict. But attitudes colored actions: If Matty acted like a dick, he thought, then that story just dickened him further. I shouldn’t have said anything, Talmadge decided, staring at his boots.
Unflapped, Micah responded, “Don’t get hung up on the foraging. That’s what everyone does. Everybody gets all freaked out about the diving, the whole Freegan thing. What I’m saying is that you can’t fight the system, or even change it, if you’re part of the system, if you’re beholden to it. Because the only weapons the system puts into your hands are different lightbulbs and cars. Chemicals in the same bottle but with a green label and flowers on it. The same old shit with a different label. They’ll comfort you by saying the way out is through nonsystemic change. That’s the whole Al Gore thing, right? That we can all modify the system to quote-unquote save the planet while maintaining the status quo. But it’s bullshit, man. It’s beyond bullshit. The status quo isn’t sustainable. Nonsystemic change doesn’t help when it’s the system that’s the problem.”
Her tone was gaining forcefulness, the inherited embers of her father’s fire and brimstone reddening inside her. Cold, techno-dry words like nonsystemic came off her tongue with improbable heat and passion.
“So to answer your question about why we live this way?” she said, raising her hand to encompass the apartment, the cooking smells drifting from the kitchen, the pink sores on Talmadge’s shoulders, the dainty salvaged plate that Matty wasn’t using for an ashtray. “To stay out of the system,” she said. “T
o say no.”
Talmadge had never heard Micah put it that way, and resisted the downhome urge to spring from his chair shouting amen. But Matty scrunched up his face and, lifting the bottle to his lips, said, “See? That’s where shit like this always gets a big fail from me. It’s like all the brothers in prison talking about the Man. Who’s the Man? They didn’t know. The guards, the cops, me, whoever. The Man. So all this shit about ‘the system’ is like . . . I mean, whatever. What the fuck is ‘the system’?”
Caustically, Matty laughed, looking to Talmadge for support; but Talmadge had resumed studying his bootlaces, his amen dunked in the muck of his discomfort.
“Civilization,” Micah said.
“Say what?”
“Civilization.”
“Uh . . . go on.”
“The entire structure of society. The way it’s driven by growth. The whole concept of progress which is as arrogant and stupid as Manifest Destiny.”
“Manif . . . ?” Matty’s lifted hands conveyed the question mark.
“You know, the idea that white people were ordained by God to settle the West and murder the indigenous peoples. Totally indefensible today, in the exact same way that civilization will be indefensible a hundred years from now. Civilization is like, like some drug that we can’t get enough of, can’t resist, that we’re helpless without. But producing that drug requires the systematic destruction of the planet. Every ounce of civilization requires, like, a hundred pounds of soil and air and water, and then generates, like, fifty pounds of waste. The math doesn’t work, right? It’s simple. At the end of the equation there’s nothing but waste.”
Dropping his cigarette, then screwing it into the floor with his bootheel, Matty said, “Then why not live in the woods? I mean, Jesus, if civilization is the problem, what are you doing living . . . downtown?”
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