California: A Novel

by Edan Lepucki

Sailor shrugged. “You assume this is a superior occupation.” He nodded at Dave, who was now watching the landscape. He looked like a dog, waiting for its owner to come home.

  “Anything withheld long enough does start to seem better, don’t you think?” Cal said.

  “You should write fortune cookies,” Sailor said.

  Dave hushed them. “Guys. Focus.”

  They fell silent and watched for movement as Dave had instructed. Cal kept his eyes roaming as Sailor explained that some of the Forms had been there long before anyone on the Land showed up. Cal held his breath as Sailor talked; he wondered if Frida had heard this before or if she’d learned a different history.

  “But we built a whole lot more, and we designed it so that they’d form the maze you walked through,” Sailor explained. From above, they were spirals. “Some of the spirals are square shaped,” Sailor said. “Come up during the day, and you’ll see. There is order to it. And the glass in the ground? That was my idea. Saw it in Peru when I was six years old.”

  “What were you doing there?” Cal had never met anyone who had been out of the country.

  “Guys,” Dave said again, and Sailor didn’t answer.

  After what felt like an hour, but could’ve easily been twenty minutes, Sailor said, “Break.”

  Dave continued to watch, but Sailor nodded at Cal, and the two men slid to sitting in what little free space there was.

  “We take forty-minute shifts,” Sailor explained. “But Dave always starts out crazy.”

  Sailor brought out a rag from his coat pocket, and he untied it to reveal a handful of pumpkin seeds. He gestured to Cal to take some.

  Cal took a few of the seeds. They weren’t coated in salt, as he’d hoped, but bare, a couple of them still slimy with pumpkin innards. “Can I ask you something?”

  Sailor waited.

  “How did you end up here? Why did you come to the Land?”

  “Why do you want to know?” This was from Dave. He held the binoculars to his face.

  “I was just curious,” Cal said. “I mean, why here?”

  “We were recruited,” Sailor said. “By Catherine with a C. We called her Catie.”

  “Catie with a C,” Dave said with a little laugh. “She was awesome.”

  “Are you sure that was her real name?” Cal asked. “I mean, I’m thinking it could be the same person who recruited Micah. Toni? Short for Antonia.”

  “I doubt it,” Dave said. “It was Catie’s first year doing it.”

  “They used a different recruiter every year,” Sailor said. “Cleaner that way.”

  “‘Cleaner’?”

  “As in harder to trace back,” Dave said. “The same woman coming to visit a bunch of boys at a weird school, year after year? That’s bound to draw attention eventually.”

  “So Catie with a C was part of an ongoing practice, to get Plankers?”

  “You bet,” Sailor said.

  “What did she tell you?” Cal asked.

  “What did Toni-short-for-Antonia tell you?” Dave asked.

  “Nothing,” Cal replied. “It was Micah she wanted.”

  “Then she wasn’t a good recruiter,” Sailor said. “They’re supposed to get at least two or three men interested.”

  “Why Plank, though?”

  “Why not Plank?” Sailor asked. “We know how to farm and how to cook and how to build shit. You need all that in this world. Plus, we’re intellectually curious.”

  Dave laughed. “I guess they tried to get some off-the-land types first, but they weren’t focused enough or smart enough or were just too hard to find. They needed people with skills, and Plankers have them.”

  “You’re talking about the Group, right?”

  No answer.

  He tried again: “Sailor, you said not everyone on the Land participates in the Group’s activities?”

  That’s when Dave turned, binoculars falling around his neck. “Jesus, Sail. You’re worse than a teenage girl.”

  “He’s at the meetings,” Sailor said. “What difference does it make if he knows?”

  “Knows what?” Cal asked. Find out everything. “What did the recruiter tell you?”

  “It was different for Micah,” Sailor said. “He’d never heard of the Group when he was in school. But by the time we were at Plank, we’d read about the stunts and Micah Ellis, the infamous suicide bomber, and even the encampment. The school was a month from closing when Catie showed up.”

  “God, that was depressing,” Dave said. “Remember how classes kept getting canceled?”

  “She talked to us about the projects the Group was undertaking to revitalize L.A., and she gave us books to read. She told us what similar organizations were doing in other cities.” Sailor paused. “I seriously had no idea where I was going to go until she came around.”

  “But you didn’t go to a city,” Cal said. “This is nowhere.”

  “We trained in L.A. first,” Sailor said. “The Group wanted to end senseless violence in areas with minimal population.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Dave raised an eyebrow. “Pirates, Cal. Bands of marauders. Sailor is babbling about how we were trained to protect settlers in this area from Pirates.”

  Sailor’s voice pitched a little higher; he was excited. “The argument was, why should those criminals take and take from innocent people? They had no mission beyond greed. In some ways, they were a lot like the people who started the Communities, taking from the less fortunate, hoarding it for themselves. We came with about twenty others to make this area peaceful.”

  Cal couldn’t find the words to speak, and Dave smiled. “That’s why you’re still alive, my friend. Because we eradicated the threat.”

  “You’re welcome,” Sailor said.

  Dave sighed. “Break.”

  Sailor rolled his eyes, and stood.

  Dave sat across from Cal on the floor. Cal reminded himself to be quiet, let them keep talking, let them lead him to the answers. The meek will inherit the earth: wasn’t that the phrase? He wasn’t even sure what that meant, even after the Sociology of Thought seminar at Plank. During that class, he’d almost wished his mother had sent him to Sunday school. The Christians, and the former Christians, they’d had a leg up during the lectures on Jesus.

  Dave yawned loudly and Sailor, eyes to the binoculars, said, “The more Dave yawns, the better he is at this job.”

  “Good thing yawns are contagious, then,” Cal said.

  Dave laughed. “You’re witty, California.”

  Cal winced. He’d noticed, over the last week, how every person he got close to on the Land turned into Micah, if only for a second. It could be a small, borrowed gesture or some phrase Micah had used the day before or his method of skating across an insult in such a way that it was barely detectable to the victim. Back at Plank, Cal had done it, too. Once, in a class, he’d found himself drawing goats with human faces in the margins in his notebook, the very same beasts Micah liked to doodle when he was bored. Cal had stopped midscrawl and even gone back to black out the evidence of his mimicry. Was he ashamed that he’d imitated his friend so brazenly? Or was it that he knew, in his heart, that Micah was inimitable?

  Fuck it, Cal thought. The meek didn’t inherit a thing. “Why would the Group want boys from Plank?” he asked. “So what if we can grow food and talk about Kant? That’s hardly what makes someone want to join the Group. It doesn’t compute.”

  Dave laughed. “Wow, really? That’s like saying you don’t see how so many radicals could come out of Berkeley in the 1960s. These things happen. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the Group was coming to Plank long before you got there, and long after you left.”

  Sailor nodded. “Why do you think it was still open when so many other schools were shutting down?”

  “But not everyone there was a terrorist,” Cal said.

  “Of course not,” Sailor said. “I’m not a terrorist, either.”

  “But you’re in the G
roup,” Cal said.

  “It’s not a gym membership,” Dave said. “It’s not like they give you an ID card when you join.”

  “Who knows what we are now anyway?” Sailor said.

  “What does that mean?” Cal said.

  “Back at Plank,” Dave said, “Catie told us about a frontier that needed to be tamed. She said the Pirates were mercenary killers who needed to be stopped.”

  “And that appealed to you, even though you’d be connected to the Group? You knew what they’d done, you just said so.”

  “Eventually we got to meet Micah, work with him,” Dave said.

  Cal said, “I wouldn’t have pinned you for a killer, Sailor.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Sailor said. “I did what was right.”

  Cal remembered what Frida had told him. If it had been Pirates that Micah had killed, wasn’t that a good thing? Not killed, but beheaded.

  “We helped get this place settled,” Sailor said.

  “What about the people who were here before you guys showed up?”

  “They mean well,” Dave said.

  “Do they know what’s going on? That you’re part of the Group?”

  Someone was coming in on the walkie-talkie. “All clear?” Dave said, and waited for the person to say, “Affirmative.”

  “Ask Mikey,” Dave said to Cal.

  “Most people on the Land live simple, happy lives,” Sailor said. “They do their chores and make food together. It’s a peaceful place.”

  “Are they mistaken?” Cal asked.

  Dave shook his head. “Of course not. It’s just that their lifestyle needs to be supported by a select few of us. We’re active, so they can be passive.”

  “‘Active’?” Cal said.

  “Ask Mikey,” Sailor said again. “He’ll explain.”

  “We don’t know that, Sail,” Dave said. “Break.”

  A few hours later, after Cal had assiduously studied the hand-drawn maps Sailor had given him, he headed for the Forms. Dave had insisted he wear a scarf. “Before dawn is when it gets the coldest, and if you get stuck, you might be out here for a while.”

  “The trick is to compare what’s in front of you with what you remember from the diagrams,” Sailor said before they parted ways.

  “Do you have that kind of mind?” Dave asked.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Cal said, and clicked the light on the helmet he’d been given.

  Beneath the moon, the Forms had been eerie, but in the funnel of light they were sinister. The objects within them had been wrested from their original purpose, and they were now misunderstood, lost. It must have been a huge sacrifice, Cal thought, for the residents of the Land to give up these things in the name of protection.

  He noticed an empty picture frame and then the boomerang shape of a rocking-chair leg. A doll speared with barbed wire. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that they were just objects. He forced himself to look again, and closely. “Commit all this to memory,” Dave had said before leaving him alone.

  Cal had no exact purpose except to walk through this maze with an alert mind. He had his pistol and the walkie-talkie, and Dave would find him should he need help. The goal, really, was to just get used to the Forms, to learn them as he would streets in a strange city.

  He walked slowly, careful of the glass at the outskirts. The easiest way to understand the layout of the Forms was to imagine a series of spirals. He studied each Form as he passed, memorizing its contents. The door of a washing machine; a plastic air-freshener plug-in; a shopping basket missing its handles. Just objects. Collected by people, reused by them.

  Not many had seen the maps. Sailor had unrolled them solemnly, said, “These are closely guarded,” and hovered as Cal read them. Cal understood that the others—the ones not in the Group—were hemmed in by these Forms. They couldn’t leave easily, not without people finding out. Not that they wanted to leave. They lived a good life here, and that was all anyone could hope for nowadays.

  Cal stopped walking and turned off the lamp on his helmet. The miner’s cone of light disappeared. His eyes should get used to the dark, as an animal’s did, and as his own had, back when he and Frida were holed up in the shed. He imagined the Form next to him exhaling, relieved to be back in the safety of darkness, and Cal felt a kinship with the thing.

  In L.A., when Cal could no longer improve the world by growing food, he had resolved to escape the wretchedness, take Frida to the edge of the world, and start over. And when he discovered the Millers had killed themselves, Cal had buried their bodies and resolved to retreat once more from ugliness, from the familiar wretchedness that seemed to follow them. How impossible, though, to turn one’s back on all the horrors in the world; there had to be another way to live.

  Passing beneath these makeshift monsters, Cal understood that he was now part of Micah’s scheme. He would be man enough to admit it. Frida was wrong; he didn’t think this was Plank, the sequel. This was a brutal wilderness where people did what they had to in order to survive. By taking back his gun and ascending the Tower and studying the maps, Cal had tacitly accepted whatever was going on behind closed doors on the Land. That’s what Frida would say. She was right about that, but maybe that wasn’t a terrible thing. Cal had rejected the Group back in L.A., but out here, where there were Pirates to fight, and people to protect, it was easier to accept. It made sense. There had to be a part of Frida who agreed with that.

  The past didn’t matter if it was the future they had to worry about. It would all be okay; he’d have to convince Frida of that. At least for now, alone in the dark save for the glow of the moon, it seemed okay to him.

  Cal soon found that he wasn’t lost, that he could recall the maps Sailor had unrolled on the tower floor and see the maze’s tricks before him. He did have that kind of mind. He walked carefully but with confidence. He put a hand out to the closest Form, gentle enough that the edge didn’t cut him. They were just objects. Made by people to fight people, and to protect them, too.

  Maybe all along he had wanted Micah to find the revolutionary in him. He’d wanted someone to seek out that place in him that could be powerful.

  17

  It was darker than dark, and far too early to meet Anika downstairs, but Frida couldn’t stay in bed any longer. Cal wasn’t back from security yet, and thank goodness, because he was the whole reason she couldn’t sleep. Imagining him out there, patrolling the Forms, or watching from the Tower for any suspicious movement, made her sick.

  She crept out of bed and put on her shoes and coat in the dark. She lit a candle, and followed its light out of the bedroom and down the hallway. The stairs creaked with each step, but she kept going, one hand dusting the banister as she went.

  Once Frida was outside in the cold, she followed the flame’s flickering light down the path. If Cal was up in a Tower, he’d see her. Was that what she wanted? She couldn’t shake the thought that he might blow his whistle instead of climbing down to talk. Stop being so dramatic, she reminded herself. She’d asked him to find out everything, and that’s what he was doing by watching the borders until sunrise. He’d learn this place for the both of them.

  Frida let the candlelight dance across the dirt. She kept her eyes on the flame but didn’t move. She had no plan, nowhere to go. Every time she thought of her fight with Cal, and about Anika’s story, about the Pirates attacking this place, about the kids who used to live here, about her brother beheading another man, and about Cal being blind to what had happened here, she wanted to scream. She stared into the flame. It was so feeble against the blackness.

  She always took off when they argued, as if it might kill her to stay another second with Cal when she was angry. She should have stayed, shouldn’t have been so gutless, so afraid to hear him out. He wanted to make things better, no matter what it took, and she couldn’t stand that.

  The Land didn’t get as quiet as the wilderness did. Even in the middle of the night, Frida could hear two
people talking nearby, and in another house, someone was humming. There was the occasional sleep-snort, too, and the creak of a bed as someone rolled over. There was so much life here.

  Frida shielded the candle with a cupped hand and stepped forward, one foot in front of the other, as if walking on a balance beam.

  Before she’d left the Bath, she had asked Cal to find out everything. He’d asked the same of her, but she’d nearly forgotten that part. It was her job, too, to discover the Land’s history. Cal said Micah didn’t care about the past, but that had to be false. Everyone cared about the past.

  Frida had never been inside Micah’s house, but it had been pointed out to her a few times, even by her brother himself.

  “If you ever need anything,” he’d said. “That’s where I sleep most nights.”

  “‘Most nights’?” she’d asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “Not like that,” he said. “I don’t have a girlfriend if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  It was a one-story structure made of wood that had darkened and gone brittle over the years. Its roof sloped, and its two front picture windows were boarded up.

  Across the doorway hung a curtain made of thick material and torn at the side. It was probably as cold in there as it was out here, Frida thought, and dark. As she stepped up to its entrance, she practiced what she would say: Tell me exactly what went on here. What have you done in the name of containment, and where does it stop? She would ask him what happened to the children. Anika shouldn’t have to be the one to retell such horrors.

  “Hello?” she said as she reached the doorway. She pulled the curtain aside, prepared to walk into the house, when her hand hit something solid. Frida saw that behind the curtain was a wooden door, sturdy as the Hotel’s, sturdier than Anika’s, and a metal knob. Of course her brother had a door, it was just hidden.

  Frida struck her knuckles against the wood, hard, and then once more. When there was no answer, she turned the knob. With a click, the door opened.

  She found herself inside one large room. Two windows across from the door would let in the first of the morning’s light; they had not been boarded up, Frida realized, because their glass was intact.