by Heather Abel
David’s hand gripped the door as if he might slam it in her face. “Pretty much verbatim. Mikala and Scott just showed up one day after I refused to talk to them on the phone. Parked their van in the lot here. It was maybe early October, and I was still high on Percocet half the time. At first, I was so embarrassed I must’ve apologized a hundred times for being such a fuckup. Go on a little walk and fall down a cliff. Really swift, huh? Really shows how I was king of the place. Can’t even find the trail. What a joke. But finally, Mikala and Scott—they’re so rad—they insist they’re not angry, and we hung out for a week, went bowling and shit. We hashed it all out. After that, I must’ve talked to everyone at least twice. Kai, Jamal, everyone. All my friends. Once Tanaya learned, she told everyone.” He took a few steps backward, waved one hand into the apartment. “Are you coming in or what?”
She stepped inside, quickly took in the room. A blow-up mattress against the wall to her right, his sleeping bag unzipped, a headlamp beside it. Against the wall to her left, toward where David now headed, was a cupboard and counter with a hot plate, toaster oven, no sink. An open box of Pop-Tarts, a can of Pringles.
“Where do you wash dishes?”
“Bathroom’s in the hall. Same as the pay phone. Gets quite congenial out there. Nine apartments on this floor and about nine hundred cats. I’m sure you smelled the piss as you walked through. But the view—you need to see the view.”
She crossed the center of the room—boom box on a crate, beanbag chair leaking Styrofoam pebbles, wetsuit like a shadow shed on the floor—to the window. Expecting the ocean, she looked down seven stories to a Dumpster with its mouth open, displaying black bags like rotted teeth. She turned back around, leaned against the sill.
Her mission to tell David all he’d missed, a mission which had seemed so important and serious when she’d called Judy and waited for the bus, now was rendered useless. All morning, she’d thought only about obligation. She hadn’t thought about his bed, his height, the slant plank of his chest, his himness. She hadn’t thought his body would still be so interesting. She could feel the air molecules between them, feel the air shift as he moved.
But perhaps, she thought, watching his hands, those unvirginal hands, those copulating hands, she was wrong about her mission. She hadn’t wanted to disseminate information; she’d wanted to gather it. What did David think of Rebecca? Or did he?
“So that’s why you never returned my calls? Because you heard I defended Donnie? Who, as it turns out, wasn’t worth defending? You’re mad.”
“Nah. You were a rabble-rouser, a truth seeker. You were just being Rebecca.”
“So what then? Because I didn’t help you? That night?”
“Like I said, only one person tripped and fell down a cliff. And it wasn’t you.”
“So you talked to everyone. All your friends. And you never answered a single one of my calls. I was shocked you even opened the door for me.”
He shrugged. “I thought it was Yuji or Toast. They usually come by around this time. During Spanish. Listen.” He held up one finger.
There’d been a constant low-level chatter that she’d been tuning out, but now, tilting her head, she tuned it in. A woman, deeply upset, screaming in Spanish.
“Señora Martinez, next door. It’s her telenovela. Just as good as Mr. Thacker’s tapes. Remember those?”
She wouldn’t answer his question, since he hadn’t answered hers. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I can go then. I don’t want to disturb your language session.”
“Rebecca, come on.” He sucked his lips into his mouth, released them with a pop. “Look around. This. This is why I didn’t call you.” He jutted his chin at his room. “It’s lame. There you are in Berkeley, all your clubs and shit, and I’m a high school dropout living in an SRO. Cool!”
“But,” she began, not sure how to contradict him.
“No, it’s true.” He was looking down, rubbing his thumb at something on the counter. “I’m not the same here as I am in Llamalo. As I was in Llamalo. I’m a different person there. That’s the David you liked.” As if to change the subject, he looked up at her with a Howdy Doody expression, eyebrows raised, phony enthusiastic grin. “But, hey, it’s not just any SRO. It’s an SRO on the motherfucking beach. You got some time? You want to vamos a la playa with me?”
She watched him find his sweatshirt, keys, put the Pop-Tarts in the mini fridge. He wasn’t wearing the red bandana, and his hair was lionlike around his head. There was a haltingness to his movements, not the languid way he moved across the plateau. Whether this was from embarrassment or physical pain or physiological damage from the fall, she didn’t know. But he wasn’t the boy she’d seen at Samohi either. He wasn’t furtive, wasn’t sullen or awkward. Still, he scared her. What would he do with his life? What would he care about now?
Outside, the dazzling world mocked the gloom she’d felt in his room. Right in front of his fetid aquamarine building, grandly named the Sea Castle, were a multitude of delights: the bike path, a playground on the sand with swings and seesaw, circus sounds coming from the pier, the slow turn of the Ferris wheel at its end. “Behold!” he said. “The sparkling ocean!”
They slipped off their shoes and walked past a homeless encampment and the lifeguard tower to the water’s edge, her feet numbing in the cold sand. Surfers paddled toward the dying afternoon swell. An oil tanker on the horizon, the white triangles of three sailboats, contrails of airplanes spelling out messages from above: corona gold for your thirst. tan don’t burn. hot hot girls dance party.
He kept his gaze seaward, not on her. Clearly he wasn’t as aware of her body as she was of his. Dejected, she realized that only she could feel the distance, the molecules, now salt-watered, between them. Even as he talked to her, she felt forgotten.
Their conversation was perfunctory. How was her mom? How was his? He asked when she was headed back to Berkeley. A few days, she said, adding that she was an English major now.
“A fine language,” he said, not seeming to understand the significance, what she’d given up.
Or maybe he did understand, because he turned to her. “I still miss being there, you know. I miss it all the time. I miss Caleb. Look, I’m not naïve. I’ve thought a lot about how flawed he is. He yelled at me the night I left. And apparently, he yelled at you, too—that’s what I heard. He lied. All that shit. He’s a deeply flawed human, but who the fuck isn’t? The thing is, Rebecca, I’d go live there, I’d go in a heartbeat if I could, even knowing what I know.”
An elderly woman—seventy? eighty?—passed right in front of them, slowly jogging through the surf in a metallic bikini, her skin a deep tan, her short hair canary yellow, bangles jingling on her wrists.
“The thing about the mitzvot, though,” David continued, nodding hello at the woman, who fluttered her fingers back at him. “This idea of his. I know where Caleb got that from.”
“Where?”
He smiled his usual smile, crushed tin. “Zacky. Remember my friend Zacky Reznick? Caleb got it from Zacky Reznick’s rabbi.”
“How’s that even possible?”
He shook his head; he’d tell her some other time, he said. Right now, he had six dogs to walk before dinner. One of his less strenuous jobs. In the mornings, he delivered the LA Times. Four thirty a.m., if she could believe it.
She said she’d walk him back to the Sea Castle. He stopped short, though, just past the bike path, everyone rolling by them, a wheeled parade. He looked at her.
“Rebecca.”
She was nervous. She didn’t know when she’d see him again or how to say goodbye. She started telling him about the classes she’d taken this semester and how politics was aesthetics, and everything was aesthetics, really, if you thought about it. A man in a turban and white tunic glided by on roller skates. A woman in a wheelchair held the leashes of two dogs that pulled her along the path, American flags waving from the back of her chair. There were bikinied women swaying back and forth on Roll
erblades. Teenagers on lowriders eating cones of soft-serve while biking. Men biking while holding boom boxes. A girl like a statue on a skateboard, carrying a Coke can which held a single bird-of-paradise stalk. Rebecca explained at length why the supposed literary canon wasn’t actually canonical. The world might end if she stopped talking, she would talk on and on for the preservation of the world, as all the world’s peoples rolled by, oblivious to their salvation, just hours before the war started.
“Hey, Zoom.”
“What?”
“Can you just shut up for a second?” He brushed her hair from her face, curled it around her ear, leaned to her. She opened her mouth like she’d learned, and they returned to the dark woodland at last.
That night, Judy came over after dinner to listen with Georgia to NPR’s live countdown to the war. Ira sequestered himself behind the closed door of his bedroom. He said he needed to work on his book. Why should he stop to hear the news? He knew the news.
Rebecca sat at the kitchen table. Judy, looking like an aged child in white billowiness, stood at the counter, fiddling with the radio dial to try to avoid the unavoidable static. Georgia was removing everything from the fridge in order to sponge the shelves, lining up comestibles on the counter. Mustard, horseradish, a flotilla of butter pats on a plate, an opened can of cream of mushroom.
“When did I even use that? Six months ago?”
Judy pressed her thumb into the spider plants on the windowsill to check for dry soil. “They’re David’s age. Exactly his age. The boys there.”
“Here, a stub of cheddar from the eighties!” said Georgia. “From the Reagan administration. Eat it!”
Instead, the three of them ate the entirety of the Entenmann’s pound cake that Judy had brought, right from the box. They drank a bottle of red wine. And although the radio commentators kept talking of bombers poised to set trails across the sky, Judy and Georgia began to distract themselves with the analgesic details of gossip.
They did nothing, because there was nothing to do.
As Judy mocked each of Joe’s girlfriends, Rebecca remembered a time when she’d been driving with Ira—on their way to San Diego, where she would color her Chinese village while he interviewed a human coyote—and he was trying to explain a dialectic. Consider, he’d said, the speed of this Volvo heading south on the 405 and the delicacy of The Pirates of Penzance playing on the tape deck. The two were in opposition: Gilbert and Sullivan’s meanderings, variations upon variations, chirrup, chirreep (For he is a pirate king. Yes, yes, he is a pirate king), and driving’s simple forward thrust.
Why was she remembering this now? But of course. The synthesis. “Marx’s true delight,” Ira had said, hitting his thumb against the steering wheel in time to the music.
She wanted to call David and explain. Whoever he’d been on Aemon’s Mesa—that boy, that beautiful and confident boy, was with him still. Just as Caleb was both visionary and deceitful. There was no line, fine or otherwise. One carried the other. And Rebecca was just one person, prudish and desirous, optimistic and hopeless. Just one Rebecca. For it was, it was a glorious thing to be a pirate king.
Standing, she told Georgia and Judy that she’d be right back, and she tugged open the sliding glass door. In the newspaper’s morgue, she dressed quickly, shoved her driver’s license and twenty dollars into the pocket of her jeans, leaving the rest of her wallet behind.
When she returned to the house, all humor had slipped out the open door. The mothers were seated at the table, listening.
“Jesus fuck,” Georgia was saying. “Jesus fuck.”
Judy patted a chair.
“Sit with us, Rebecca.”
“Actually, can I use the car?”
“What for?” Judy asked.
Georgia stared at Rebecca for a moment, then turned and shouted, “Ira! Rebecca wants the car keys!”
He emerged from the bedroom, removed his glasses with his right hand, pressed the fingers of his left onto his closed eyes. “It’s late. It’s too late to go anywhere.”
But Georgia said, “Let her, Ira. One of us should be there.”
It was nearly midnight when Rebecca parked in Westwood, in front of a closed taqueria. After she locked the car, she knelt to thread its key with the lace of her left boot, tucking the key behind the tongue and retying her laces. The traffic signals flashed yellow, caution.
She walked past the sleeping homeless, the gated apartment buildings. Already she could hear it, like being inside someone’s body: the stethoscope boom of the heart, the high-pitched gale of blood flowing.
Two cop cars drove slowly in the direction she was walking, pausing to look at her. Then, in sync, they turned on their lights but not their sirens and raced ahead, as if responding to silent screams in the night.
She saw the weary or worried leaving, walking toward her. A young man hoisted a sleeping toddler. There was a white-haired couple with handwritten signs, the man saying, “It really felt like it could get violent. I never appreciate being pushed.” A middle-aged woman, her quilted coat pinned like a general’s with buttons: war is not healthy . . . give peace a . . . visualize world . . . another mother for . . . imagine all the . . . Rebecca’s bile rose.
But what if Caleb were right? Not about everything, of course. But what if, in the visionary hemisphere of his being, he’d landed on something. Or Zacky Reznick’s rabbi had. Maybe all you had to do was act as if it mattered.
Turning a corner, she could see the blocky Federal Building, its two white columns lit up in the night, and the crowd—two thousand people? ten thousand?—gathered on the lawn in front of it, some on a makeshift stage. Placards bobbed like coral polyps from a reef. Banners swam eel-like in the current. She could hear whale calls from those giving speeches into bullhorns. At the edge of the crowd, sprinklers were rhythmically dousing a village of tents.
Why join two or ten thousand people when just now in Kuwait teenagers in dun-colored fatigues that never can mimic the blandness of sand played gin rummy as they waited?
Llamalo? Belief will follow.
She heard a voice shout into a bullhorn and the crowd roar in response. “What did she say?” asked a man coming toward Rebecca. “They started the bombing,” his friend responded. “It started.”
She took off toward the noise, running slowly, then faster. And then, overtaking her, charging down the middle of the street, was someone camouflaged to asphalt, a guy in black pants, black sweatshirt, black ski hat. She watched him tear by like a panther. But then he faltered, glanced over his shoulder at her. She caught his eye; he circled back.
“Hey. Haven’t I seen you camping here?”
“No, not me.”
“I could’ve sworn.” He leapt from foot to foot, his breath rapid. “Did you hear? They started the bombing.”
“Yeah, no, I heard.”
“We’re going in, taking over the building. A group of us. We’re going inside.” He cocked his cocky head. “Are you up for it?”
A black mittened hand outstretched to her.
Llamalo.
Acknowledgments
First, an endless mesa of thanks for that most wonderful thing—friends who are stellar writers and generous readers: Jessica Bacal, Lila Cecil, Emily Chenoweth, Rachel Graham Cody, Jenny Gotwals, Lisa Jones, Lisa Olstein, Jon Raymond, Claire Reardon, Scott Rosenberg, Gabe Roth, Mary Strunk, Tali Woodward, and Leni Zumas. For the weekends writing with dogs and the occasional baby, the constant joy: Matthew Brookshire, Alison Hart, Luis Jaramillo, and Abigail Thomas. For an optimistic decade of belief in this book: Dale Peck. For invaluable support of all sorts, thanks to Ingrid Binswanger, Carmen Hernandez, Andrew Kidd, Wylie O’Sullivan, Lisa Papademetriou, and Maud Macrory Powell.
Thank you to the women who cared for my daughters while I wrote, including the teachers at Fort Hill, and especially to Mary and Kathleen Bordewieck. And to the places where I wrote: the Writers’ Mill, the Brooklyn Writers Space, and the office provided by the Five Colleges Women’
s Studies Research Fellowship.
Ira’s “Dear Friends” letter was borrowed in part from the far superior letter my grandmother, Miriam Borgenicht Klein, wrote to the Barnard College class of 1936. Escadom is an entirely fictional place, with its fictional landscape and woes. My knowledge of actual western Colorado was augmented by Boomtown Blues by Andrew Gulliford and Naomi & Dev’s Plant Book by Naomi Sikora and Dev Carey, as well as by time spent living there, for which I thank Ed and Betsy Marston, Jackson Perrin, and Lisa Jones.
I’m so grateful for Doug Stewart. There would be no book without his unfailing enthusiasm, kindness, and advocacy. And huge thanks to everyone at Algonquin, especially to Kathy Pories for her wisdom and discernment and for saving David’s life.
Erin White read over every word and then read them again, all except for this sentence, and now I find my gratitude for our friendship is beyond words. To think someone with such intelligence, insight, and love of the high desert could appear in a cold New England office and bring me the sun!
Thank you, family. To Emily and Rick Abel for belief in me, in books, and in this troubled world. Thanks to my sisters, Laura and Sarah Abel, and to the families you created. Thanks to the Zuckers for bringing me into your family.
Lastly, gratitude to my loves, Susannah and Rose, for each day of you. And most of all, to the brilliant and patient Adam Zucker, who has made not only this book but also my entire life smarter, funnier, and more grammatical. You are my favorite place.
Heather Abel was raised in Santa Monica, California. She attended Swarthmore College and subsequently worked as a reporter and editor for political newspapers. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from the New School, where she later taught creative nonfiction writing. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters.