Pam came home last night tired and footsore after running two experiments at once. She thinks she can finish the lab work early and do the writing up in the States. Shorten separation. So she’s in Pamela Overdrive. I made dinner and she threw the paper down in disgust, told me about her day. “The probe compound and internal standards diffused out of the water sample into the headspace until an equilibrium between the liquid and gas phases was reached.”
“Uh huh.”
“And that depends on the water solubility and the volatility of the two compounds.”
As she went on I stared at her. What Chemists Say To Spouses/What Spouses Understand. Blah blah blah, Tom, blah blah blah.
She saw the doggie look on my face, smiled. “So how’d the book go?”
“The same.” It’s not fair, really. I can’t understand a word she says when she talks of her work, while for me, on this project at least, she is a crucial sounding board. “I’m thinking of alternating chapters of fiction with essay chapters which discuss the political and economic problems we need to solve.”
“My God.” Wrinkled nose, as if something gone bad in fridge.
“Hey, H.G. Wells did it.”
“Which book?”
“Well—one of the major utopian novels.”
“Still in print?”
“No.”
“Libraries have it?”
“University libraries.”
“So Wells’s science fiction adventures are still in every library and bookstore, while this major utopia with the essays is long gone, and you can’t even remember the title?”
I changed the subject.
Think I might pass on the essays.
Six months, four months. Three months? Go quickly, mysterious experiments. Go well. Please.
* * *
Kevin woke from a dream in which a huge bird was standing on the limpid water of a rapid stream, wings outstretched as it spun on the clear surface, keeping a precarious balance. Foggily he shook his head, grinned at himself. “Sally Tallhawk,” he said, rolling out the syllables. The strategies she had listed while wandering around her sublime campsite filled his thoughts, and feeling charged with energy he decided to visit Jean Aureliano before work and confer.
Jean’s office was on the saddle between Orange Hill and Chapman Hill. Kevin blasted up the trail in fifth gear and skidded into her little terrace. Her office was a low set of rooms built around a tiny central stone garden, with open walls and pagoda corners on the low roof. Kevin had done some work on it. When he walked into her office she looked up from the phone and smiled at him, gestured at him to take a seat. Instead he wandered around looking at the prints on the walls, Chinese landscape paintings in the Ming dynasty style, gold on green and blue. Jean spoke sharply, arguing with someone. She had iron gray hair, cut short in a cap over a solid, handsome head. Big-boned and heavyset, she moved like a dancer and had a black belt in karate. For many years now she had been the most powerful person in El Modena, and one of the most powerful in Orange County, and she still looked it. The smoldering glare of the Hispanic matriarch was currently fixed on whoever was on the other end of the line, and Kevin, glancing at her quickly, was glad it wasn’t him.
“Damn it,” she said, interrupting a tinny whine coming over the phone, “the whole Green alliance is breaking up on the shoals of extremists like you, we’re in the modern world now—no, no, don’t give me that, there’s no going back, all this talk of watershed sovereignty is so much nostalgia, it’s no wonder there’s shrieks of protest from all sides! You’re tearing the party apart and losing us the mandate we’ve had! Politics is the art of the possible, Damaso, and if you set impossible goals then what kind of politician are you? It’s stupid. What?… No. Wrong. Marx can be split into two parts, the historian and the prophet. As a historian he was great and we use his paradigm every day, I don’t contest that, but as a prophet he was wrong from the start! By now anyone who calls themselves a Marxist in that sense has elote for brains.… Damaso, I can’t believe you sometimes. Los pobres, come on, you think you help them with this balkanization?—Chinga yourself!” And then a long string of sulphurous Spanish.
Angrily she hit the phone, cutting off the connection. “What do you want?” she said to Kevin without looking up.
Nervously Kevin told her.
“Yes,” she said. “Alfredo’s great plan. From the crown of creation to the crown of the town. I’ve been keeping track of it and I think you and Doris are doing a good job.”
“Thanks,” Kevin said, “but we’ve been trying to do more. We talked to a water lawyer from UC Bishop—”
“Tallhawk?”
“Uh huh.”
“Yeah, she’s a good one. What did she say?”
“Well, she said we were unlikely to stop this development on the water issue alone.”
Jean nodded. “But we’ve got resolution two-oh-two-two to hang onto, there.”
“Yeah. But she gave us some suggestions for other avenues to take, and one of them was to use the various requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act. Oscar said you would know about that and how it was going—you could ask to see their EIS when it comes in.”
“Yeah that’s right, we’ll do that. The problem is that they’ll probably be able to minimize the environmental impact on that little hill, it barely touches Santiago Park, and with all the other hills already built up—” She made a quick gesture at her office.
“Wouldn’t that be a point in our favor?”
“More likely a precedent. But we’ll do what we can about it.”
“Oscar said that if you mobilized the party machinery to fight the proposal…”
“Exactly. We should be able to crush it, and I’ll certainly be trying, believe me.” She stood up, strode around the office, flung open one sliding wall door, stepped half out onto the porch. “Of course if it comes to a referendum you can never be sure. It’s just impossible to tell what the people in this town will vote for and what they won’t. A lot of people would be happy if the town were making more money, and this would do that, so it’s a dangerous thing to bring to a vote. What I’m saying is that it would be a lot safer if we could stop it in the council itself, right there at the zoning. So you and Doris have to keep at the moderates. We all do.”
They discussed Hiroko Washington, Susan Mayer, and Jerry Geiger in turn; Jean knew them intimately from her years as mayor, and her assessment was that their chances of convincing the three were fairly good. None could be counted on for sure, but all were possibilities. “We only need to get two. Keep after it every way you can, and I’ll be doing the same up here.” There was a look on her face—determined, stubborn, ready to fight. As if she were going in for her black belt trial again.
* * *
Reassured, Kevin left her office and coasted down to work. He and Hank and Gabriela were beginning the renovation of Oscar’s house, and the other two were already hard at it, tearing out interior walls. Oscar emerged from his library from time to time to watch them. “You look like you’re having fun,” he observed.
“This is the best part of carpentry!” Gabriela exclaimed as she hammered plaster away from studs, sending white dust flying. “Yar! Ah! Hack!”
“You’re an anarchist, Gabriela.”
“No, I’m a nihilist.”
“I like it too,” Hank said, eyeing a joint in exposed framing. He took an exploratory slam at it.
“Why is that?” Oscar asked.
Hank squinted, stilled. “Well … carpentry is so precise, you always have to be very careful and measured and controlled, and you’re always having to juke with edges that don’t quite meet and make everything look perfect—it’s such a perfectionist thing, even if you’re just covering up so it looks right even though it ain’t—anyway…” He looked around as if tracking a bird that had flown into the room. “Anyway, so you get to the part of the job that is just destructive—”
“Yar!” Bang. “Ha!” Bang. “Hack hack h
ack!” BANG. BANG. BANG.
“I see,” Oscar said.
“It’s like how Russ and his vet friends are always going duck-hunting on the weekends. Same principle.”
“Fucking schizophrenics,” Gabriela said. “I went over there one time and they had some duck they had found while they were hunting, it had busted a wing or something so they brought it home so they could nurse it back to health, had it in a box right next to the bag of all the other ones they’d blasted to smithereens that same day.”
“I understand,” Oscar said. “No one breaks the law as happily as a lawyer.”
“We want to wreck things,” Gabriela said. “Soldiers know all about it. Generals, how do you think generals got to be generals? They just have more of it than the rest of us.”
“Should call you General Gabby, eh?” Hank said.
“Generalissimo Gabrielosima,” she growled, and took a vicious swing at a stud. BANG!
* * *
Around noon Oscar made them all sandwiches, and after lunch he followed Kevin around, poring over the plans Kevin had drawn up for the renovation, and asking him questions. Each answer spawned more questions, and in the days that followed Oscar asked more, until it became a regular cross-examination.
“What don’t you like about these old places you work on?”
“Well, they’re pretty poorly built. And, well, they’re dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah, they’re just boxes. Inert. They don’t do anything, except protect you from wind and rain. Hell, you can do that with a box.”
“And you like the new houses because they’re alive?”
“Yeah. And the whole system is so neat, so … ingenious. Like this cloudgel.” He pulled at a long roll of clear fabric, stretched it between his fists, let it contract. “You put panels of this stuff in the roof or walls, and if the temperature inside the room is low, then the cloudgel is clear, and sunlight is let in. At around seventy degrees it begins to cloud up, and at eighty it’s white, and reflecting sun away. So it thermostats, just like clouds over the land. It’s so neat.”
“Spaceship technology, right?”
“Yeah. Apply it here, along with the other stuff, and you can make a really efficient little farm of a house. Stick in a nervous system of sensors for the house computer, run a tube down into the earth for cool air, use the sunlight for heat and to grow plants and fish, sling a couple of photovotaic cells on the roof for power, put in an Emerson tank—you know, depending on how far you want to go with it, you can get it to provide most of your daily needs. In any case you’re saving lots of money.”
“But what about styling? How do you keep it from looking like a lab?”
“Easy! Lot of panels and open space, porches, atriums, French windows—you know, a lot of areas where it’s hard to say if you’re inside or out. That’s what I like, anyway.” He tapped one of the sketches scattered on the kitchen table. “There’s this architect in Costa Mesa putting homes on water, they float on a little pond that stabilizes the temp and allows them to rotate the house in relation to the sun, and do a lot of aquaculture—”
“You row across to it?”
“Nah, there’s a bridge.”
“Maybe I want one of those.”
“Please.”
“But what about food? Why a farmhouse?”
“Why not? Don’t you like food?”
“It’s obvious I like food. But why grow it in my house? To me it seems no more than fashion.”
“Of course it’s a fashion. House styles always are. But it makes so much sense, given the materials at hand. Extra heat is going to be generated in the south-facing rooms, especially in this part of the country. And the house computer has the capacity for millions of times more work than you’ve given it so far. Why not put that heat and attention to work? See here, three small rooms on the south front, so you can vary temperatures and crops, and control infestations better.”
“I want no bugs in my house.”
“Nobody does, but that’s greenhouses for you. Besides the computer is actually pretty good at controlling them. Then look, a pool in a central skylighted atrium. Panels adjustable so the skylight can be opened to make it a real atrium.”
“I have no central atrium.”
“Not yet, but look, we’re just gonna knock a little hole in your ceiling here—”
“We’re going to knock a giant fucking hole in your ceiling!” Gabriela said as she walked by. “Don’t let him fool you. You ain’t gonna have a roof any bigger’n a cat’s forehead by the time we’re done.”
“Ignore her. See, cloudgel skylight over a pool.”
“I don’t know if I like the idea of water in my house.”
“Well, it’s a good idea, because it’s so stable thermally. And you can grow fish and provide a good bit of your protein.”
“I detest fishing.”
“The computer does it. First thing you know they’re fillets in your fridge. Chinese carp is the usual staple.”
“I don’t like the idea of eating my house guests.”
From the next room: “He don’t like the idea of a computer than can kill occupants!”
“Good point.”
“You get used to it. Then here, we’ll enclose the area under the old carport, make it a breakfast room and part of the greenhouse, keep that peach tree in one wall, it’ll be great. I love that kind of room.”
“Is that why you like this work? To create rooms like that?”
“I like making the whole house. Changing bad to good. Man, I go into some of those old condo complexes, and my God—six hundred square feet, little tiny white-walled rooms with cottage cheese ceilings, cheap carpet over plywood floors, no light—they were like rats in a cage! Little white prison cells, I can’t believe people lived like that! I mean they were more prosperous than that, weren’t they? Couldn’t they have done better?”
Oscar shrugged. “I suppose they could have.”
“But they didn’t! Now I go into one of those places and blast some space and light into them, do the whole program and in the end you can house just about as many people, but the feel of living there is completely different.”
Oscar said, “You have to believe that you can live in a more communal situation without going crazy. You have to be willing to share space.”
“I always make sure everyone has a room of their own, that’s important to me.”
“But the rest of it—kitchens, living rooms, all that. Social organization has to change for you to be able to redo those big places.”
“So it’s like Doris says—it’s a matter of values.”
“Yes, I think that’s right.”
“Well, I like our values. Seeing homes as organisms—there’s an elegance to that, and if you can still make it beautiful…”
“It’s a work of art.”
“Yes, but a work of art that you live in. If you live in a work of art, it does something to you. It…” Kevin shook his head, unable to express it. “It gives you a good feeling.”
From the next room Gabriela hooted. “It gives you a good feeling?”
Oscar called to her, “The aestheticization of la vie quotidienne!”
“Oh, now I get it! Just what I was going to say!”
Hank appeared in the doorway, saw and two-by-four in his hands. “It’s Chinese, really. Their little gardens, and the sliding panels and the indoor-outdoor, and the communal thing and the domestic life as art—they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”
“That’s true,” Kevin said. “I love Chinese landscaping.”
But now Hank was entranced by the two-by-four in his hand. “Uh oh, I appear to have sawed this one a little sigogglin.” He made a face, hitched up his pants, walked back out under the carport.
* * *
One time after the day’s work they bought some dumpies of beer and went up onto Rattlesnake Hill to look for endangered species. This was Kevin’s idea, and they gave him a hard time about it, b
ut he held fast. “Look, it’s one of the best ways to stop the whole thing dead in its tracks, all right? There were some horned lizards down in the Newport Hills stopped a whole freeway a few years back. So we should try it.”
And so they did, hiking up from Kevin and Doris’s, and stopping often to inspect plants along the way. Jody was their botanist, and she brought along Ramona for a back-up. It was a hot afternoon, and they stopped often to consult with the beer.
“What’s this tree, I don’t remember seeing a tree quite like that.”
It was a short twisted thing, with smooth gray bark runnelled by vertical lines. Big shiny leaves hid clumps of berries. “That’s a mulefat tree,” Jody said.
“How the hell did a tree get a name like that?”
“Maybe it burns well.”
“Did they burn mule fat?”
“I don’t think so. Pass that dumpie over.”
Kevin wandered around as the rest sat to observe the mulefat tree. “What about this?” he said, pointing to a shrub with threadlike needles bushing everywhere on it.
“Sage!” they all yelled at him. “Purple sage,” Jody amended. “We’ll also see black sage and regular gray sage.”
“About as endangered as dirt,” Hank said.
“Okay, okay. Come on, you guys, we’ve got the whole hill to go over.”
So they got up and continued the search. Kevin led them, and Jody identified a lot of plants. Gabby and Hank and Oscar and Ramona drank a lot of beer. A shrubby tree with oval flat leaves was a laurel sumac. A shrub with long stiff needles poking in every direction was Spanish broom. “Make it bigger and it’s a foxtail pine,” Hank said. Ramona identified about half the plants they ran across: mantilija poppy with its tiny leaves; horehound, a plain shrub; periwinkle with its broad leaves and purple flowers, a fine ground cover on the hill’s north side; a tree that looked like a Torrey pine but was actually a Coulter pine; and on the crown of the hill, in the grove Tom had helped plant so long ago, a pair of fine black walnuts, with the bark looking broken, and the small green leaves in neat rows.
On the west side of the hill there were some steep ravines leading down into Crawford Canyon, and they clambered up and down, scrabbling for footholds in the loose sandstone and the sandy dirt. “What about this cactus?” Kevin said, pointing.
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