Golden State: A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

  The smoke in the distance has grown darker, taller. Where is it, exactly? How far might it spread? And how fast? No good jumping to conclusions. More than likely it’s a garden-variety emergency—a kitchen explosion, a cigarette left smoldering on a mattress. There have been rumors, of course, predictions—riots, destruction, looting—but I have to believe that the whole thing, whatever its outcome, will go off in an orderly fashion. I’m not alone in this thinking. “This is, after all, a reasonable state,” our governor said last night, “and we are a reasonable people.”

  But there’s something wrong: glass on the ground, lots of it. It looks as though someone has taken a baseball bat to the line of cars parked along the curb. Three cars in a row, all vandalized—the Prius in front of me, the BMW behind, and in the middle, my humble Jeep. The windshield has been smashed, a sunburst of broken glass. The driver’s door is open. The stereo—just a year old, a gift from Tom—is gone. Both back tires are flat. Despite all the dire warnings, I envisioned a day of relative calm, the voters going peacefully about their business. It’s true that what we’re doing here has polarized the nation. “Save the Union” rallies in other states have degenerated to angry shouting matches. A pro-secession organizer was shot dead in New York, the campaign office of a sympathetic congresswoman was torched in Florida, and the governor of California has been deluged with hate mail. For the past two months, it seems, the whole country has been simmering. Still, deep down, I wanted to believe that California could get through this without a hitch, that in the midst of the storm, we could be civilized.

  I dial my husband. “Call me when you get there,” he said when I walked out the door. One of those matrimonial habits that will be so hard to break. The constant communication, the endless mundane updates: I’m here, or we need bread, or I’ll be home late, or I’m safe.

  Last night at the station, he used my cellphone to call his, which he’d lost again. He was always asking me to help him find his keys, his watch, some novel he was in the middle of reading. How many hours have I reclaimed since he moved out, by not having to help him find his lost things? What I’ve done with those hours, I can’t say. You think you’re so busy until you’re alone, and then you discover the disconcerting phenomenon of time on your hands. Last night when he dialed his number a song started playing, muted, from another room, and we followed the tinny music to the staff lounge, where we found the phone buried beneath a sofa cushion. “When did you change the ring tone?” I asked. For years his ring tone for my number had been set to Steve Forbert, “Romeo’s Tune.” He chose it for that line about southern kisses, and because Forbert is from Meridian, Mississippi, fifty-eight miles from my hometown.

  Last night, it played a different song—some instrumental I didn’t recognize. “It’s Ryuichi Sakamoto,” he said. “ ‘Put Your Hands Up.’ ”

  “Going mellow in your old age?”

  “You’d like him,” he promised. “I’ll make you a CD.”

  He will, too. In a few days, I’ll come home from work to find a padded envelope in the mailbox, a CD with a playlist, something on which he’s spent hours, each song containing a message I’ll be tempted to try to decipher. “It’s just songs,” he’s told me a hundred times. “There’s no secret message.”

  I imagine him sitting at his new desk—a small, sleek, modern affair—writing our address on the envelope. The desk came with his loft, a six-month lease south of Market, fully furnished. The place looks like a midcentury-modern showroom, everything tasteful and angular and somewhat cold, none of it scaled quite right for Tom. At six foot five and solid, he has a knack for making ordinary tables and chairs look like children’s furniture.

  Last night, over Thai take-out at the radio station, he made a proposition: “We can start over. Dinner, movies, late-night games of Monopoly and Life.”

  What I was thinking, but didn’t say, was that we’d already played the game of life. We’d had a nice go of it, too—the house, the sex, the dinner parties, the risks and rewards, even, for a while, the child. I imagine the board game, the colorful spinning wheel and the clunky buildings, the hopeful couple in a little plastic car, a blue peg in the backseat—a happy family. In the end, though, it didn’t hold.

  Tom answers the phone. “Everything okay?”

  “Someone broke into the Jeep. Glass everywhere. Can I take your car?”

  Add that to the list of matrimonial habits that die hard: communal property.

  “It’s not here,” he says. “I took the bus. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d get far. I just heard there’s a police blockade at Stockton—a protest turned violent, and now they’re dispersing the crowd.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “Tear gas, apparently. It’s ugly.”

  So much for being civilized in the midst of the storm.

  “Your best bet is to walk to California and Davis,” Tom says, “catch the cable car to Van Ness, then pick up whatever bus is heading west.”

  “That’s not as easy as it sounds. I just busted up my ankle.”

  “Seriously? Hold on.”

  Some clicking and whirring in the background as he changes the song, and then his voice is so clear through the phone that he could be standing beside me: “A little Chris Isaak to get us in the mood this morning, folks. Quintessential California.”

  For as long as I’ve known Tom, there have been two of him—the public and the private—and I have felt by turns proud and grateful to be a part of his real and secret life, the one lived off the air. Although sometimes, it’s true, the boundaries have blurred. Like when a colleague at work would ask how I’d enjoyed my meal the night before at such-and-such restaurant, though I was certain I hadn’t told anyone I was going to eat there. Or they’d mention my problems with the roof, which had to be replaced.

  “I never reveal anything too personal,” Tom used to say when I protested. Still, I felt exposed. Now, Chris Isaak is singing “San Francisco Days,” and my husband is back on the line. I half-expect him to spill out the details of our divorce on the air, to list, item by item, all the ways we failed to make it work.

  “Want me to come down and get you?”

  “And do what? Carry me across town?”

  “It’d be just like old times. Except, of course, it wouldn’t. You never needed me to carry you anywhere.”

  “End on an up note,” I say.

  “Jules.”

  “Hmm?”

  There’s a pause on the other end, a sigh, while Chris Isaak croons, I still love you, I still want you. The message is one of surrender, of complete devotion; but the words never quite fit the moment. There’s always something lost in translation between lyrics and real life.

  “Jules, are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  Tom always could speak my name in a way that drowned out all the background noise. It’s that voice, bred for the radio. His father is a natural crooner, a successful businessman who sings Johnny Cash tunes at local fairs and corporate events in his spare time. He sang a couple at our wedding—“I Walk the Line” and, because he’s not without a sense of humor, “Folsom Prison Blues.” My husband doesn’t sing, he talks, but it doesn’t matter what he says. He could be reciting the alphabet or reading the phone book, and people would listen. Even me. Even when he’s just saying my name. Especially when he’s saying my name.

  “Jules, are you still there?”

  End on an up note. It’s what my residency adviser, Dr. Bariloche, used to say on rounds. No matter how bad the news, exit the room with a smile, she would tell us. In the early days, I took her advice as gospel, but over the years I came to realize she’d been mistaken. Sometimes optimism is not called for. Sometimes, what is needed is an acknowledgment of just how bad things are, and how much worse they might get.

  “I’m here.”

  3

  Today, the people of California are voting. The ballot boxes are ready; the citizens are poised to act. What once seemed like an outlandi
sh notion has become, almost overnight, a real possibility.

  In retrospect, is it possible to pinpoint the moment when things began to change, the event that set all of this madness in motion? I remember certain headlines, vaguely anxious conversations with friends and colleagues, a growing sense of excitement coupled with an equal measure of unease. I remember twenty-somethings in leg warmers and bomber jackets, dressed as if they’d just discovered the ironic eighties, standing on street corners with their clipboards and ballpoint pens, shouting, “C’mon, people. Let’s put it on the ballot!” Even their anthem was a throwback to a time when they were toddlers: the Scorpions, “Wind of Change,” blasting from portable iPod speakers.

  “Boy, that takes me back,” Tom said one night several weeks ago. We were sitting at a sidewalk café in Noe Valley, having just come from the mediator’s office, where a young woman in an exceedingly tight dress had assured us that our divorce need not be rancorous.

  “Are you married?” we asked her in unison.

  “No, but I know a great many married people—divorced ones, too,” she answered brightly, as if that made her an expert. Anyway, her assurances were unnecessary. The end of my marriage to Tom has been sad and exhausting but never rancorous. We don’t despise one another. Between us, there is no lack of mutual respect. Neither one of us did anything specifically to hurt the other. Instead, something happened to us, a wound from which our marriage was unable to recover.

  That night at the café, “Wind of Change” blasted from the window of an apartment across the street. I heard the soaring notes and thought of Berlin in 1989—the dramatic events on which the song was based. “I was glued to the TV, watching the wall come down,” I said to Tom. “I wanted to be over there, in Eastern Europe, where the world was changing.”

  “It’s changing here, now,” my husband said. “These kids, they’re on a mission.”

  True enough. “The student volunteers are the real heroes in this fight,” our governor has said. You have to admire their righteous aggression, as if daring you to pass them by without signing up for the cause. And I did sign their petition, standing in front of the Safeway across the street from Ocean Beach, chatting amicably with the good-looking college kid in a SURF MAVERICKS T-shirt, who offered me his purple pen and proclaimed “Awesome” with such conviction, I longed to share his enthusiasm. It was so easy to scribble my name on the page, never bothering to read the fine print. After all, a signature seems so harmless until one considers the fact that, in California, the number of signatures required to put an initiative on the ballot is laughably small, a tiny drop in the bucket of our state’s population. And once an initiative is passed, the state legislature is powerless to reverse it.

  After the success of the petition, the campaign began in earnest. There were editorials in every newspaper, commercials on television and radio, town hall meetings across the state. The new president of the United States weighed in (“foolish”), along with the minority whip (“ludicrous”), not to mention every D-list celebrity who could book five minutes on cable news.

  And yet, if there were some way to revisit these moments, to watch myself and others, eavesdrop on the conversations, I think I would be bewildered by our collective apathy. Until a few weeks ago, it all seemed like so much babble. Few of us believed that anything would come of it. After all, one becomes accustomed to a certain level of security, a certain level of, well, certainty. We understand the possibility of change up to a point. What we are not prepared for, what we lack the capacity to imagine, is a seismic shift. The wall going up or coming down, the decades-old dictatorship falling, the familiar boundaries disintegrating.

  As a doctor, I regularly experience that moment when I sit across the desk from a patient and tell him or her the news—cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s—that moment when, with one utterance of a phrase, I turn someone’s world on end. After all these years, it’s still the part of my job I dread the most. There is a look of confusion, a flicker in the eyes, as the diagnosis takes shape in the patient’s mind. Everything must be reevaluated according to this new knowledge, which the patient will carry around like a thorn in the side, a stone in the shoe, until the day he dies. The seismic shift writ small, in the bedrock of an individual life. No one is ever quite prepared for it.

  One morning three months ago, I was standing at the bedside of Mr. Luongo, a quiet man known throughout the ward for his habit of addressing everyone, even the youngest orderlies and volunteers, as “ma’am” or “sir.” My residents were gathered around me, trying to get to the bottom of Mr. Luongo’s recent seizures, when he grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume on the television mounted on the wall. “Call the cartographers,” a familiar voice said. “We will have to draw a new map.” I looked up at the screen. There was the governor standing on the steps of the capitol in a sharp gray suit, his signature hair holding its own against the wind. It was a rather melodramatic thing to say, but he is that kind of politician. Before he was the governor, he’d been the mayor of San Francisco. Most had assumed he’d soon be making a bid for the White House, that each office he held in California was only a stepping stone to something bigger. Which was why almost everyone was stunned when he threw his hat into the ring with the secessionists.

  “There comes a time when ‘states’ rights’ must be more than a catchphrase,” he continued. “That time has come for California. It is our right and our destiny—our responsibility—to become a sovereign nation.”

  “Fucking idiot,” Mr. Luongo spat.

  “It’s about time.” Debbie, a first-year resident in podiatry, was gazing up at the television with a look of undisguised admiration. She’d met the governor once at a fund-raising event in Berkeley. He’d touched her back while moving through the crowded room, his hand lingering a moment longer than necessary.

  “What happens to you—to everyone at the VA—if this goes through?” asked Rajiv. I wanted to tell him not to worry, that everything would be fine. Instead, I shrugged. “I have no idea.” It occurred to me what a strange limbo we would be left in, should the initiative succeed.

  In the days that followed, the governor’s performance was played ad infinitum on the national and local news, parsed by the pundits, analyzed by the lawyers, and much maligned by other politicians, even those of his own party. He was called a traitor, a hero, a fool. One powerful southern senator said, “Is it really surprising, coming from that immoral, elitist hotbed of wacko liberalism called California?”

  Many Californians were enraged, but a great many were inspired. Before his announcement of support, the secessionists had been considered a fringe faction, percolating their extreme ideas on the sidelines for decades, not to be taken seriously. The governor’s speech, combined with a perfect storm out of Washington, D.C.—a tide of radical conservatives elected to Congress, an impending attack on Iran, a legislative ban on stem-cell research, a dismantling of basic gun control legislation, a federal rollback on offshore drilling regulations, a constitutional amendment that struck down gay marriage—changed all that. To top it off, California was on the verge of bankruptcy.

  “We sent $315 billion to Washington last year,” the governor wrote, in an open letter that was published in every major newspaper in the state. “We received $245 billion in services. That’s $70 billion that we paid to build roads in Juneau and fighter planes in Huntsville, while we’re forced to fire teachers, close schools and nursing homes, release violent offenders from our prisons, and gut social services. And let’s not forget Crystal Springs.”

  Crystal Springs Reservoir, which lies on top of the San Andreas Fault twenty miles south of San Francisco, had been in need of seismic repairs for decades. Last summer, during a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, the dam finally collapsed, as geologists had long warned it would, putting an elementary school in the small, wealthy town of Hillsborough underwater. Forty-seven children who were attending summer school that day drowned, along with three teachers. Their photogra
phs were all over the news for months, as were the pictures of two dozen runners, hikers, and mothers with strollers whose bodies had been washed off the adjoining Sawyer Camp Trail when the dam broke. The Crystal Springs repair was part of a planned $4.5 billion overhaul of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct system, largely funded by the state, but the project had been put on hold due to budget cuts.

  “We had the money to fix that dam,” the governor wrote. “But we sent it to Washington instead.”

  If the governor was polarizing, he was also charismatic. By the following morning, vendors were already hawking secession merchandise in Union Square. T-shirts and bumper stickers and key chains and underpants declared, CALIFORNIA IS MY COUNTRY.

  I bought one of each. Not that I really wanted California to secede. Not that I thought it could ever really happen. But I did appreciate the historical significance of the moment.

  Today is the day, then: democracy in action. It’s up to the voters to decide whether we will stay or go. Whether we will protect the union or destroy it. In the past three months, Roger Harte, a tech billionaire from Palo Alto, has poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign for secession. The opposition was slow to organize, even slower to pony up funds for a fight they didn’t believe they could lose. Just as they began their anemic counterattack, Congress allocated $12 billion to erect a gigantic electric fence along the entire border between Mexico and California.

  “When they sealed the border, they sealed our fate,” the governor proclaimed, standing before an energized audience of thousands, wearing a tie striped red, white, and green, the colors of the Mexican flag. At a rally in the area known as Tehrangeles in L.A., he posed this question to the crowd of Iranian Americans: “When the drones fly over your relatives’ homes in Tehran, do you want them dropping bombs bought by your taxes?”

  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, certain members of the state legislature were busy drafting a constitution, and it was rumored that the governor of the world’s eighth-largest economy was meeting with prime ministers and presidents. Less than a decade earlier, another governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had sat down with then prime minister Tony Blair at the Port of Long Beach and signed an accord between California and Great Britain on global warming.