But who’ll take care of her? I wanted to shout. Of course that’s part of the plan. Kick out one and the rest of the family will follow, even if they have work. Efficient.
So we sit at the kitchen table. Pam’s post-doc has seven months to go. She needs to finish—even with it it’ll be hard to find work in the States, with all regulatory agencies under a hiring freeze. She’s thinking about that, I can see. Eight years’ work, and for what. I’ll have to take Liddy, too—Pam can’t work and care for her both. We have a month to get out. Meaning six months apart. The post-docs from China have to do worse than that all the time. But with Liddy so young.
We can protest, I say. Pam shakes her head, mouth bitter. Picks up In’tl Herald Tribune. Southern Club defaulting on all debt. Prediction of twenty-five percent reduction in world population called optimistic by. Civil war in India, in Mexico, in. Deforestation in. World temperature up another degree Centigrade since. Species going extinct—
I’ve already read it.
Pam throws the paper aside, looking beat. Never seen her so grim. Stands to wash dishes. I watch her back and can see she’s crying. Six months.
We are the aristocracy of the world. But this time the revolution will bring down more than the aristocracy. Could be everything. Crumpled newspaper, compartmentalized disaster. Catastrophe by percentage points.
We can avoid it, I swear we can. Must concentrate on that to be able to continue.
* * *
When the heart dies, you can’t even grieve.
Tom rolled out of bed feeling old. Antediluvian. Contemporary of the background radiation. Eighty-one years old, actually. Well-propped by geriatric drugs which he abused assiduously, but still. He groaned, limped to the bathroom. Came awake and the great solitude settled on him again.
Standing in the doorway, looking out at the sage sunlight and not seeing a thing. Depression is like that. Sleep disrupted, affect blocked, nothing left but wood under the skin and an urge to cry. The best pills could do was to take the last feeling away and make it all wood. Which was a relief, although depressing in its own way if you considered it.
It was this: when his wife died he had gone crazy. And while he was crazy, he had decided never to become sane again. What was the point? Nothing mattered any more.
Say two strong trees grow together, in a spiraling of trunks. Say one of the trees dies and is cut away. Say the other is left twisted like a corkscrew, an oddity, always turning in an upward reach, stretch, search. Leafy branches bobbing, searching the air for something lost forever.
So the great solitude settled on him. No one to talk to, nothing interesting to do. Even the things he had enjoyed doing alone were not the same, because the solitude in them was not the same as the great solitude. The great solitude had seeped into everything, into the sage sunlight and the rustle of leaves, and it had become the condition of his madness, the definition of it, its heart.
He stood in the doorway, feeling it.
* * *
Only now he had been disturbed. A face from the past. Had he really lived that life? Sometimes it was flatly impossible to believe. Surely every morning he woke up an entirely new creature, oppressed by false visions of false pasts. The great solitude provided a continuity of sorts, but perhaps it was just that he had been condemned to wake up every morning in the body of yet another creature under its spell. The Tom Barnard who ran buffeted in the storms of his twenties. Later the canny lawyer chopping away at the law of the land, changing it, replacing it with laws more just, more beautiful. We can escape our memes just as we escaped our genes! they had all cried then. Perhaps they were wrong on both accounts, but the belief of the moment, of that particular incarnation …
A face from a previous incarnation. My name is Bridey Murphy, I can speak Gaelic, I knew a Russian beauty once with raven hair and a wit like the slicer for electron microscopes. Sure you did—Anastasia, right? And he’s your grandson, too, the builder. Sure. A likely story. We can escape our genes, perhaps it was true. If he himself woke a new creature every morning, why expect his daughter’s son to bear any resemblance to any incarnation along the way? We live with strangers. We live with dis-junctures; he had never done any of it; just as likely to have been raising bees in some bombed-out forest, or lying flat on his back in an old folks’ home, choking for breath. Incarnations too, no doubt, following other lines. That he had carved this line to this spot, that the world had spun along to this sage sunlight and the great solitude; impossible to believe. He would never become sane again.
But that face. That tough sharp voice, its undercurrent of scorn. He had liked her, in Singapore, he had thought her … attractive. Exotic. And once he and his young wife had climbed up through the cactus on the back side of Rattlesnake Hill, to watch a sunset and make love in a grove of trees they had helped to plant some incarnations before, in a dream of children. Sylphlike naked woman, standing between trees in the dusk. And jumping across time, a ghost of joy. Like an arrow into wood, thunk. Pale smooth skin, dark rough bark, and in that vision a sudden spark, the ghost of an epiphany.
They shouldn’t be allowed to take that hill.
Bridey Murphy, the canny lawyer, stirring inside. “God damn it,” he cried, “why didn’t you leave me alone!”
He limped back inside and threw on his clothes. He looked at the cascading sheets on the bed and sat on it and cried. Then he laughed, sitting there on his bed. “Shit,” he said, and put on his shoes.
* * *
So he came down out of the hills. Through trees, sunbeams breaking in leaves, scuffing the trail, watching for birds. At Black Star Canyon road he got on his little mountain bike and coasted down to Chapman. Coming through the cleft in the hills he looked to the right, up Crawford Canyon to Rattlesnake Hill. Scrub and cactus, a little grove of live oak, black walnut and sycamore on its round peak. The rest of the hills in view were all built up, exotic trees towering over homes, sure. Height equals money equals power. A miracle any hill was left bare. But OC Water District had owned Rattlesnake Hill before El Modena incorporated, and they were tough. Toughest watermasters in California, and that was saying a lot. So they had kept it clear. But a year or two before, they had deeded it over to the town; they hadn’t needed it to fulfill their task, and the task was all that mattered to them. So now El Modena owned it, and they would have to decide what it was for.
* * *
Farther down Chapman he passed Pedro Sanchez, Emilia Deutsch, Sylvia Waters and John Smith. “Hey, Tom Barnard! Tom!” They all yelled at him. Old friends all. “Doesn’t anything ever change down here?” he said to them, braking to a halt. Big smiles, awkward chat. No, nothing ever changed. Or so it seemed. Nothing but him. “I’m off to find Kevin.” “They’re playing a game,” Pedro told him. “Down on Esplanade.” Invitations to come over for dinner, cheery good-byes. He biked off, feeling strange. This had been his town, his community. Years and years.
Down on the Esplanade diamonds a softball game was in progress. The sight of it stopped him, and again the wood in him was pierced by ghost arrows. He had to stop.
There on a rise behind the Lobos dugout lolled Nadezhda Katayev and a tall fat man, laughing at something. He gulped, felt his pulse in him. Out of the habit of talking; a great wash of something like grief passed through him, lifted the wood, buoyed it up. Grief, or …
He pedaled down and joined them. The man was the new town attorney, named Oscar. They were deciding which movie star each ballplayer most resembled. Nadezhda said Ramona looked like Ingrid Bergman, Oscar said she looked like Belinda Brav.
“Nah she’s prettier than that,” Tom murmured, and felt a little creak of surprise when they laughed.
“What about me?” Oscar said to Nadezhda.
“Um … maybe Zero Mostel.”
“You must have had quite an interesting career as a diplomat.”
“What about Kevin?” Tom said.
“Norman Rockwell,” Nadezhda decided. “Hay in his mouth.”
&n
bsp; “That’s not a movie star.”
“Same thing.”
“A cross between Lyle Sims and Jim Nabors,” Oscar said.
“No crosses allowed,” Nadezhda ruled. “One of the Little Rascals, anyway.”
Kevin came to bat, swung at the first pitch and hit a sharp line drive to the outfield. By the time they got the ball back in he was standing on third, with a grin splitting his face. You could see every tooth he had.
Nadezhda said, “He’s like a little kid.”
“Nine years old forever,” Tom said, and cupped his hands to yell “Nice hit!” Automatic. Instinctual behavior. Couldn’t stop it. So much for changing your memes.
Kevin saw him and laughed, waved. “Little Rascals for sure,” Nadezhda said.
* * *
They watched the game. Oscar lay back on the grass, rubbing one pudgy hand over the cut blades, looking up at clouds. The sea-breeze kept them cool. Fran Kratovil biked by, and seeing Tom she stopped, came over with a look of pleased surprise, greeted him, chatted a while before taking off. Old friends.…
Kevin came to bat again, lined another sharp hit. “He’s hitting well,” Tom said.
“Hitting a thousand,” Oscar said.
“Wow.”
“Hitting a thousand?”
They explained the system.
“He has a beautiful swing,” she noted.
“Yes,” Tom said. “That’s a buggy whip swing.”
“Buggy whip?”
“Quick wrists,” Oscar said. “Flat swing, high bat speed. It looks like the bat has to bend to catch up with the rest of the swing.”
“But why a buggy whip?”
Silence. Hesitantly, Tom said, “A buggy whip was a flexible pole, with a switch at the end. So it makes sense—a quick bat would look more like that than like a bull whip, which was like a piece of rope. Funny—I don’t suppose anyone has actually seen a buggy whip for years, but they still have that name for the swing.”
The other team came to bat, and got a rally going. “Ducks on the pond!” someone yelled.
“Ducks on the pond?”
“Runners in scoring position,” Oscar explained. “From hunting.”
“Do hunters shoot ducks when they’re still on the water?”
“Hmm,” Tom said.
Oscar said, “Maybe it means that knocking the runners in is easier than shooting ducks in the air.”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “It’s more a question of potential. RBI time, you know.”
“RBI time!” someone in the dugout yelled.
* * *
Then Doris came blasting over a grassy rise and coasted down to them, skidding to a halt.
“Hey, hi, Tom.” She was excited. “I went to the town offices and checked through the planner’s files to see if there were any re-zoning proposals in the works, and there are! There’s one for Rattlesnake Hill!”
“Do you remember what the change was?” Oscar asked.
Doris gave him a look. “Five point four to three point two.”
The two men thought about it.
Nadezhda said, “Is that an important change?”
“Five point four is open space,” Oscar replied. He had rolled onto his side, and was lying on the grass with his massive head propped on one hand. “Three point two is commercial. How much are they proposing to change?”
Doris glared at him, incensed at his evident lack of concern. “Three hundred and twenty acres! It’s the whole Water District lot—land I thought we were going to add to Santiago Creek Park. And damned if they aren’t trying to slip it by in a comprehensive zoning package.”
“It’s stupid for Alfredo to try to slip all this stuff by,” Tom said, thinking about it. “There’s no way it’ll work for long.”
Oscar agreed. For the zoning change alone there would certainly have to be an environmental impact statement, and a rubber stamp town vote at the least—perhaps a contested town vote; and much the same would be true of any increase in the amount of water bought from MWD.
“The smart way to do it,” Tom said, “would be to explain what you had in mind for the hill, and once that was generally approved of, get the necessary legislation through for it.”
“It’s almost as if…” Oscar said.
“As if he needs to do it this way.” Tom nodded. “That’s something to look for. If you can find out why he’s trying to do the groundwork first, you might have found something useful.” He gazed mildly at Doris and Oscar. Oscar rolled back onto his back. Doris gave Oscar a disgusted look, and fired away on her mountain bike.
* * *
After the game Oscar returned to work, and Nadezhda asked Tom to show her the hill in question. They went by Kevin and Doris’s house, where Nadezhda was staying, then through the back garden to the bottom slope of the hill. An avocado grove extended up it fifty yards or so. “This is it. Crawford Canyon down there to the left, Rattlesnake Hill above.”
“I thought so. It really is right behind their house.”
Working in the grove was Rafael Jones, another old friend. “Hey, Tom! Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine, Rafe.”
“Man, I haven’t seen you in years! What brings you down here?”
Tom pointed a thumb at Nadezhda, and the other two laughed. “Yeah,” Rafael said, “she’s shaking up our house too.” He was part of Kevin and Doris’s household, the senior member and the house farmer; he ran their groves, and the garden. Tom asked him about the avocados and they chatted briefly. Feeling exhausted at the effort, Tom pointed uphill. “We’re off to the top.”
“Okay. Good to see you again, Tom, real good. Come on down and have dinner with us sometime.”
Tom nodded and led Nadezhda up a trail. The irrigated greens gave way abruptly to deer-colored browns. It was May, which in southern California was the equivalent of late summer. Time for golden hills. Hesitantly Tom explained; southern California springtime, when things bloomed, occurred from November through February, corresponding to the rainy season. Summer’s equivalent would be March through May; and the dry brown autumn was June through October. Leaving no good equivalent for winter proper, which was about right.
He really had forgotten how to talk.
Up the trail, wending between scrub oak, black sage, purple sage, matilija poppy, horehound, patches of prickly pear. The sharp smells of the hot shrubs filled the air, dominated by sage. The ground was a loose light-brown dirt, liberally mixed with sandstone pebbles. Tom stopped to search for fossils in the outcrops of sandstone, but didn’t find any. They were there, he told Nadezhda. Shark teeth from giant extinct species, scores of mollusk-like things, and the teeth of a mammal called a desmostylian, which had no close relatives either living or extinct—kind of a cross between a hippo and a walrus. All kinds of fossils up here.
Occasionally they disturbed a pheasant, or a crowd of crows. From time to time they heard the rustling of some small animal getting out of their way. The sun beat on their necks.
First a flat ridge, then up to the hill’s broad top. The wind struck them coolly. They walked to the little grove of black walnut and sycamore and live oak at the hill’s highest point, and sat in the shade of a sycamore, among big brown leaves.
Nadezhda stretched out contentedly. Tom surveyed the scene. The coastal plain was hazy in the late afternoon light. There was Anaheim Stadium, the big hospital in Santa Ana, the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Other than that, treetops. Below them the houses and gardens of El Modena caught the light and basked in it, looking like the town’s namesake in Tuscany.
He asked her about her home, ignoring the ghosts in the grove. (A young couple, in there laughing. Beyond them children, planting foot-high trees.)
She was from Sebastopol in the Crimea, but spoke of India as her home. After many years there, she had moved back to Moscow. “That was hard.”
“India changed you?”
“India changes everyone who visits it, if they stay long enough, and if they st
ay open to it. So many people—I understood then how it would be possible to overrun the Earth, and soon. I was twenty-four when I first arrived. It gave me a sense of urgency.”
“But then you went back to Moscow.”
“Yes. Moscow is nothing compared to India, ah! And then my government was strange regarding India. Work there and when you came back you found no one was listening to you any more. You were tainted, you see. Made untouchable.” She laughed.
“You did a lot of good work anyway.”
“I could have done more.”
They sat and felt the sun. Nadezhda poked a twig through dead leaves. Tom watched her hands. Narrow, long-fingered. He felt thick, old, melancholy. Be here now, he thought, be here now. So hard. Nadezhda glanced at him. She mentioned Singapore, and it came back to him again, stronger than ever. She had been one of the leaders of the conference. They had had drinks together, walked the crowded, hot, color-filled streets of Singapore, arguing conversion strategies just as fast as they could talk. He described the memory as best he could, and she laughed. It was the same laugh. She had a kind of Asian face, hawk-nosed and imperious. Cossack blood. The steppes, Turkestan, the giant spaces of central Asia. Slender, fashionable, she had dressed in Singapore with liberal flourishes of Indian jewelry and clothing. Still did. Of course now she sailed with Indians again.
He asked about her life since then.
“It has not been so very interesting to tell. For many years I lived and worked in Moscow.” Her first husband had been assigned to Kazakhstan and she had done regional economic studies, until he was killed in the riots of a brief local insurgency. Back to Moscow, then to India again, where she met her second husband, a Georgian working there. To Kiev, back to Moscow. Second husband died of a heart attack, while they were on vacation. Scuba diving in the Black Sea.
Children?
A son in Moscow, two daughters in Kiev. “And you?”
“My daughter and her husband, Kevin’s folks, are in space, working on solar collectors. Have been for years. My son died when he was young, in a car accident.”
Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 7
