by Edan Lepucki
* * *
Over the next two days, Frida began to get a handle on things. The lingo, for one. Residents on the Land didn’t work; they labored. They didn’t garden; they farmed. And those Spikes that surrounded them? They were called Forms.
Learning these terms gave Frida a thrill. It was easy, like learning pig Latin or the gibberish she used with her friends as a girl. Her new Land friends couldn’t keep her out of conversations for very long—not that they were doing it on purpose; it was just the way they spoke about their world. The vocabulary was so simple, it was impossible not to start using it.
Frida was officially out of her half coma. After all, the Vote wasn’t far off. Not that she and Cal had talked about that. He was too busy asking Micah question after question to notice that his wife was campaigning.
If anyone noticed what Frida was up to, it would be her brother. Nothing ever got past him, never had. He’d always seemed to see her for what she was.
Was that still true? There was something weird about Micah now, and not only that he was alive when she’d been grieving him for the past five years. He didn’t participate in Morning Labor, for instance, nor did he seem to have a security shift, as far as Frida could tell. At dawn, when everyone else was headed to work, he disappeared with a handful of others, all of them men, Frida noted, including Peter. (His cabal of yes-men, she imagined Cal saying, but she didn’t dare bring this up with him.)
No, Micah was odd because he could send people away with a distracted wave without seeming like an asshole and because he hadn’t yet asked after Hilda and Dada, not really. He hadn’t yet asked to be alone with her, didn’t seem interested. As if it hadn’t occurred to him.
Then, on their fifth day on the Land, Micah came into the kitchen at the end of Morning Labor. “Want to go on a walk?” he asked her. Just like that. A few minutes earlier, her fellow cooks had told her that housekeeping had been sent to clean out Sue’s stable, which meant August would be returning soon. He was a few days behind schedule, though no one had any idea why. Or they did, but they weren’t telling Frida.
When Micah walked into the kitchen, the group got giddy. Not Fatima, who, Frida knew, spent a lot of time with Micah. But the others, even Anika, seemed to speed up their movements and speak louder, come into focus, into high definition.
“Can Frida leave early?” Micah asked Anika, who nodded and took Frida’s knife out of her hand. Strands of purple cabbage hung like party streamers from the blade.
“Leave it to me,” Anika said. “I’ll clean it up.” This was not the same woman who had gotten all huffy about the beans on Frida’s first shift.
They left through the back door. Construction on the new outdoor oven would begin soon, perhaps beautifying this dry lot of soil behind the Hotel. Until then, there were only the outhouse and a large fire pit dug into the dirt. The day before, Anika and Burke had used the pit to roast rabbit; the animals had been caught in rusted-out traps that almost everyone was worried about. Burke claimed that the contraptions wouldn’t last through the year, and Fatima had accused him of being an alarmist.
Morning Labor ended at lunch, but Frida had recently learned that some people spent the afternoons rotating through optional jobs like hunting, foraging, trapping, and composting. There was also construction of the Forms. Frida had wanted to join that group, but Sailor said it was by invitation only. He told her they could help with plumbing, if she wanted, which meant getting rid of human waste: cleaning bedpans, digging new latrines. “Everyone’s favorite,” he said. If not, she should just take it easy. He said most people had their afternoons off. “We value leisure time here,” he said, “and the boredom of a slow life.”
Weeds scraped at Frida’s ankles as she followed Micah. It was still warm out, and Fatima had lent her a pair of sandals. They were a size too big, though, and with each step they slipped off her ankles and slapped the ground, bringing up dust that settled under her heels. Micah seemed to sense she was having trouble keeping up and slowed down.
“I was afraid we’d never get to hang out,” she said when she’d reached him.
“Really?” He turned to her. “I didn’t mean for you to think that.” He pointed across the meadow to the untended land that bordered the Spikes. The Forms, she reminded herself.
“Let’s head for the shade,” he said.
“Are you going to murder me there?”
“Looks spooky, I know,” he said, with a laugh. “But I promise, they’re just like any other woods around these parts.”
They passed the large garden, which had all the same vegetables she and Cal grew, though far more of them. There were also kale and a kind of squash she didn’t recognize and what looked like a persimmon tree, lying dormant. She saw Sailor bent over the plants and wondered why Cal hadn’t volunteered for that team.
“I hear your husband’s on the brick headache,” Micah said, and tapped his forehead, making his straw hat wobble. It looked like his beard had been trimmed, if only by an inch or so. Or maybe it was the same length, and for once it had just failed to shock her.
“I think they’re almost ready to build the oven,” she replied.
They kept walking. A group of people was heading with buckets to one of the Land’s three wells, and Micah waved to them. She guessed they were on housekeeping.
Once they’d passed the camping area, where people could come to sleep outdoors, Micah asked, “How is it?”
“How’s what?”
“Being married?”
“It’s good,” she said. “I mean, I don’t exactly notice it anymore.”
“It can’t be as natural as breathing.”
She wasn’t sure what he was getting at. “No, I guess not. But we’ve been together for a long time. You know that.”
“It was just you two out there.”
Frida nodded. Should she bring up the Millers?
They had reached the lip of the woods. There were Spikes—Forms—bookending this section of trees, and probably beyond it, too far away for Frida to see from where she stood. Micah stepped aside and swept his arm across the space before them like a circus ringmaster.
“Cal’s dream come true,” he said.
“These woods?” Frida said, but she already knew what he meant.
“No. The two of you, the end of the world.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “Just that Cal has always preferred you above all others.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” She walked ahead, into the trees, as if she weren’t afraid of the darkness there, the branches that might cut her.
He only let her lead the way for a few seconds, and then he moved in front of her. As with Sailor in the Spikes—The Forms, she told herself again—Micah somehow knew his way through this dense forest. If you looked hard enough, if you were willing to step over bushes and dead trees, you could discern a path.
“Is August coming from this direction?” Frida asked.
He shook his head. “He can’t get the carriage through, so he has to go around.”
Micah was wearing the same green Polo shirt he’d had on the day they’d arrived, and Frida tried not to look too hard at it. It would only bring back that first day again, and she couldn’t revisit that. If she did, she might lose her footing or stop speaking or hyperventilate. Sometimes breathing wasn’t natural. Instead, she kept her eyes on a piece of loose straw, flapping from the brim of his hat. Perhaps because she couldn’t see Micah’s face, she felt emboldened to ask him questions.
“So August told you I was out here,” she said.
“He returned from the last trip and said, ‘You won’t believe it, Mikey.’”
“Did you? Did you believe it?”
Micah didn’t reply, and she couldn’t even guess what his reaction had been. Before, she’d been hurt that he hadn’t come to see her, but now she felt angry. She deserved answers.
“This way,” he said, and pointed up.
She thought for a moment that he was asking her
to shinny like an animal up a tree trunk and was about to tell him she didn’t have the upper-body strength for such shenanigans, when she saw pieces of wood had been nailed into the trunk. A little ladder. Someone had built a wooden platform in the tree.
Micah made a basket with his hands and knelt. “I’ll give you a boost.”
“Is this the clubhouse?”
He stood up and sighed. “No, Frida, this isn’t the clubhouse. It’s just where I go to clear my head.” He held out his hands again. “I just thought you might like to see it.”
The wood steps were smoother than she expected, as if some Land member had buffed them before nailing them into the trunk. If Micah had been the kind of little brother who liked sports and played war and broke bones and heads off Barbie dolls, this might have felt like a return to their youth. But as a kid, Micah had preferred to be alone, preferably indoors. Sometimes he could fall into a stormy mood, but if you left him be, he’d cheer up eventually. He liked to read books and take apart the toaster and post videos on the Internet about their bathtub. At eight he read about the sixteenth-century seaman Martin Frobisher, who discovered Canada and later fought off the Spanish Armada. Micah became obsessed with him and for months asked everyone to call him by that name. Nobody did, not even Frida, who usually put up with him. Hilda just laughed it off and said, “My children: the greatest mystery of all.”
While Micah was being a nerd, Frida would roam the neighborhood, hiding in people’s backyards, pretending she’d run away. Once she’d broken into the yard directly behind theirs, just for kicks, and had accidentally stepped on a tortoise. The house was a freakin’ menagerie, Dada said later. The animal’s shell was warm against her bare feet, and solid, but there was the knowledge of a soft body beneath it, and Frida had screamed. Micah happened to be in their own backyard at the time, and when he heard her, he stuck his head over the fence and said, in the beleaguered voice of Hilda, “Come now.” He had just turned six.
Micah’s grown-up tree house was an open wooden platform with the trunk in the middle and a single railing around the edge, as if fighting off the branches. Frida had never been on a boat, but she felt like this was what it must be like, standing at the helm, the water beckoning and teasing and scaring below. She didn’t think she was afraid of heights, and this tree wasn’t very tall, but it had been a long time since she’d been above anything, even a canopy of leaves, and she held on to the railing with both hands.
They sat on two collapsible camping chairs, and from a plastic toolbox, Micah pulled out a cloudy glass bottle and two creased Dixie cups. The cups had begun to collapse in on themselves, and Frida could tell they’d gone from soggy to stiff and back again multiple times.
She nodded at the bottle. “What’s that?”
“I’d call it whiskey, but then you’d be disappointed.”
“You guys make liquor here?”
He shook his head. “We traded for it.”
“Who makes it?”
He raised an eyebrow and poured the alcohol into the cups, which sagged with the weight of the liquid. “Please don’t give me the Cal treatment, Frida. All day, people are asking me questions, wanting my advice, asking for solutions. And then, on top of all that, your husband comes along with an endless questionnaire. I just want to relax.”
“Oh, fuck off, Micah. I just spent the last five years thinking you were dead. And here you are, playing king in a tree house. You don’t get to relax.”
Her brother looked skyward, as if a response might be written in the tree branches above. “You make a valid point,” he said, and handed her one of the cups.
She took the cup, but she didn’t drink. Just one sip wouldn’t hurt the baby, would it?
“A bouquet of lighter fluid and piss,” Micah said, and downed his.
She put the cup to her nose. Being drunk actually sounded wonderful, and the sharpness of the liquor was as pleasing as it was revolting. The burn traveled through her nostrils and into her throat.
But she couldn’t.
“I’d rather not,” she said.
“Seriously?” he asked. “You? Turn down a drink?” But he was already putting down his empty cup and taking hers. Between his fingers, the edge of cup folded into a triangle, threatening to spill its contents. Micah brought it quickly to his lips.
“I have so many questions,” she said.
“Ask them, then,” he said. “But up here, there’s no need to be a mouthpiece.”
“‘A mouthpiece’? You mean Cal’s?” She leaned back. “Don’t be typical, Micah.”
The phrase was out before she could even think about it. Hilda used to say it to him when he’d refused to eat dinner with them or put on shoes to go to the market. Or when he’d say something witty and cruel, his mouth curved mean and smug.
“I want to know just as much as my husband does,” Frida continued. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s only natural.”
“I can’t believe you just said ‘Don’t be typical’ to me.”
“Now you know how it feels to see a ghost.” She smiled. “Brings you back, doesn’t it?”
He looked bashful for the first time since she’d arrived.
She picked up his empty cup and swiped at its bottom with her index finger, then brought her finger to her mouth. The liquor tasted sour as vomit.
“Ugh,” she said. “You must be really desperate to drink this.”
“Maybe,” he replied. “You know how it is, not having all the things we used to have.”
“Tell me about it!”
Cal never wanted to gripe about what they were missing from the old life. He said talking only made the loss more palpable, the absence more glaring. He said it was a form of self-punishment.
Micah seemed to agree with Cal, because he didn’t go on. Instead, he took off his hat and ran his hands through his scraggly hair. Frida was glad she couldn’t see the top of his head, that bare spot. Micah looked more like her with his hair long, and she realized she was proud of this. It would help with the Vote.
“I want to know why you did it,” Frida said.
Micah raised an eyebrow.
“Stop with that phony face,” she said. “Tell me.”
He sighed. “Look at it this way: no one’s looking for me, are they? The police, Homeland Security, they were idiots. Or, I don’t know, maybe they were just underfunded. They got a piece of me, tested my blood. They had a piece of clothing my poor family could identify. They had enough to close the case, and they did.”
“‘My poor family.’ Listen to you. There have to be easier ways to disappear.”
“I was the head of the Group by then. One of them, anyway. You had to have known.”
Did she? She supposed she should have. “So what?” she said.
“What I did, or what I pretended to do, proved we were serious. Not only to you and everyone outside, but to our own members, the little shits who’d started skulking around only because they’d heard we might feed them.” He shook his head and put his hat back on. “My stunt proved we were in control. For the first time, people were scared of us, really scared of us. Until that day, no one important cared about what happened outside the Communities.”
“I hate to say it,” Frida said, “but they still don’t care. But maybe you knew that all along, and that’s why you didn’t actually commit suicide. Maybe you were too chickenshit to do it for real.”
He smiled. “That’s beside the point, don’t you see? My stunt, whether real or not, freaked out the Communities, and it got us new members. Good ones. People saw we could be powerful.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Within a month we’d expanded our encampment by a mile.”
“But what about the guy who really did blow himself up? He died anonymously for your…cause? Just like that?”
“Better that than to die pathetically, ignobly.” He looked at her. “Isn’t that how Hilda put it? I read the websites. I read what she thought of me and what I’d done.”
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Frida felt the old anger feathering in her chest. “You know she came to terms with it. They both did. They had to.”
“I suppose,” Micah said.
They were silent. Micah’s words filled Frida’s head—my poor family. That was all they were to him. Three people he could dupe.
“Frida?”
“How are they? Do you hear from them?”
“Ah,” he said, grinning. “See? That’s what you really want to know.”
“Just tell me. Are they okay?”
The day Hilda and Dada moved to the Group’s encampment, Frida said she was disgusted. “I know you’re scared out here, I get that,” she’d told them. “I know they’ve promised to keep you safe, that you won’t have to worry about money. They’ll probably treat you like royalty. But they took Micah from us. Doesn’t that matter?” When her parents wouldn’t answer, she told them of her and Cal’s plan. “We’re getting out of L.A. as soon as we can.”
“Don’t be stupid,” her mother had said. “You have to stay.”
That’s when her father had called her a traitor, for leaving willingly. Frida didn’t say that Micah was the real traitor. She wouldn’t.
Her mother had hugged her goodbye and said, “Enjoy the air out there.” Her father had hung back, saying nothing.
The Group had welcomed Hilda and Dada to join them and partake in their resources. They would make sure they were safe and that they’d never go hungry. After all, their son had died for the cause. All the Group asked for in return was the house, which they’d dismantle for parts, and the land, which they’d use for who knew what. Frida didn’t want the property; she didn’t care about inheritance and all that. The pain she felt at their leaving for the encampment was about something else. She was losing everyone. Cal had been trying to convince her to leave L.A. for months, but it wasn’t until her parents told her of their plan that she agreed to go. There was no reason to stay.
“I haven’t been in touch, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Micah said. “But the encampment stretches to downtown now. And there’s another one planned. This time, near the beach.” He paused. “I’m sure they’re fine. Better than fine.”