Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

“Mommy, please don’t cry,” Julia said at my side.

  All I could get out was that I was sorry.

  I was nine when the letter came for Bobby. It sat atop the mail on the kitchen table, where I was downing a peanut butter sandwich with milk. My mother kept glancing from the clock on the stove to the door.

  “It looks like your scores came,” she said when Bobby came through the kitchen door. He was fifteen with schoolbooks under his arm. I had no idea what scores she meant, only that my mother seemed to be restraining some excitement, or fear. Bobby dropped his books, took a swig from my glass, and tousled my hair. I didn’t know if his casualness was real or if it had to do with the way our mother was trying not to behave.

  He was center stage in a drama I didn’t understand, but I studied him so I’d know how to act when my scores came. He opened the envelope, read what was inside without expression.

  “About what I expected,” he said.

  “May I see?” my mother asked.

  “Suit yourself.” He tossed the letter on the table and left with his books. My mother looked at it, and then went after him. When she returned, I watched her do something I’d never seen her or anyone do before. She Scotch-taped Bobby’s scores smack on the refrigerator door. His perfect, flawless scores.

  chapter seven

  AS USUAL, my students returned from Christmas break apparently having forgotten everything they’d ever learned in my class. After four days of this, I could barely stand my own two kids. On the ride home from school, Julia sat up front slumping and complaining while Lilly whined in the backseat. I told them if they wanted dinner, they’d have to put up with a stop at the store, because there was no way we were having pizza. To underscore that I meant business, I took back control of the radio dial from Julia, and hit the preset for the news.

  We all heard the report: Another bomb. Another professor dead.

  He’d been the chairman of the department of chemical engineering at UCLA.

  Earlier that afternoon, he’d opened a package addressed to him and been blown apart at his desk.

  “Who would do something like that?” Julia’s tone was angry, directed at me, as if I somehow had inside knowledge.

  “Does professor mean the same thing as teacher?” Lilly asked from the backseat.

  “No, they’re different,” I said, my look telling Julia not to contradict me. I drove past the grocery parking lot, suddenly too tired to face shopping and making dinner. “Let’s skip the store,” I said.

  Eric was out of town and would be for another week. I ordered pizza and let the kids eat in front of television. I went upstairs and turned on the set at the foot of my bed.

  Channel 4 had footage of the bombing at UCLA and a photo of the victim: a sandy-haired man with a trimmed beard, and a good-natured face too young for his fifty years.

  There was a live news conference with the FBI agent heading the Cal Bomber task force. Although it was too early to definitively pronounce this new attack the work of the Cal Bomber, the agent said it appeared likely. Today’s bomb was of the same type as past bombs connected to that individual. Both this bomb and the one at Stanford in November were sent through the mail.

  “They both bore Sacramento postmarks,” he said. It was if he’d said my name. Blood rushed in my ears. My throat closed.

  It wasn’t a conscious reaction, but I knew this sensation. Odorless and colorless, it bit my fingers and choked off my breath. But for every time my panic told the truth, it lied a thousand more. The nights Eric was late and I was sure he was dead; the moments I was certain someone had snatched one of the kids. But Eric always came home. The kids turned up, the tests came back negative, and every day thousands of people mailed packages from Sacramento. I tried to steady myself, longing for Eric to stride through the door. But he wasn’t even reachable by phone right now. I turned off the set and dialed my sister.

  “The holidays are over and it’s not my birthday,” Sara said when she heard my voice. “So what’s up?”

  “Did you hear? Are you watching the news?” I was speaking as if men with earphones were parked in a van outside the house.

  Sara’s voice carried genuine concern. “No. What’s happened? Are you all right?”

  I told her about the latest bombing. About the UCLA professor who’d been killed. How both this bomb and the one at Stanford had been mailed from Sacramento. “All of a sudden I had this terrifying thought that someone might think it was Bobby,” I said.

  Sara could dominate a conversation with her silence. I waited anxiously for her to tell me what I needed to hear. What she did was laugh.

  “I think you’ve finally lost your mind,” she said.

  I considered the possibility that I’d gone overboard, feeling suddenly silly that I might have.

  “I can’t imagine anyone accusing Bobby of anything other than bad grooming,” Sara said. “He hardly ever leaves his little lean-to. If Mom didn’t send him money for shoes, he’d be going around barefoot.”

  “I know,” I said. “I can go ages without thinking about Bobby, but a part of me is always afraid for him.”

  “Like a severed limb,” Sara said. “Your body always knows it’s missing.”

  I told her about finally reading Bobby’s letter. “He’s obsessed with technology, as if microwave ovens and cordless phones were a plot against mankind. It’s like he’s become one of those people who wear tinfoil on their head.” I stopped for breath. “Then there’s all this terrible news about the Cal Bomber blowing people up because he’s against technology.”

  “Antitechnology is a movement, Natalie. It’s tied up with ecoterrorism. You might not have heard about it, most people probably haven’t, but it’s out there.” My sister spoke knowingly, but without condescension. “You can buy the Cal Bomber’s manifesto at a bookstore. I read it when it was published in the newspaper last year. Some of it makes a lot of sense.”

  I didn’t know why I was so surprised. Maybe it was because until the Stanford bombing, I’d paid zero attention to the Cal Bomber.

  “The manifesto reads like it was written by more than one person, some fringe group of the environmental movement,” Sara said. “Bobby might agree with them in principle. He might read their literature. Maybe he goes to the library and reads their Internet postings. But anyone who spends two seconds with Bobby would know he’s not capable of joining any group. The most he is ever going to do is rant and rave in a letter to his mommy. It’s sad, but true.”

  My sister and I shared little but this sadness that bound us. “It’s not like he has a phone and we can call him,” I said. “We don’t even know where he lives.”

  “That’s the way he wants it. He’s dug his hole and he’s living in it.”

  “He needs help, Sara.”

  “I know that,” Sara said. “But he doesn’t want our help. He’s made that clear.”

  “Maybe we should make one more push. We could fly out there, rent a car, and try to find him,” I said. “Show him how much we care.”

  “Sure, like he has friends in town who’d point the way? Or maybe we could just hang around the post office all day, every day for a month or so until he collected his mail and then pounce on him.”

  I didn’t answer. There was no need. It was always like this with Bobby, the same circular impossibility. He did not respond to the only way we had of reaching him, a postal box. He had long ago let go of us, and yet we still clung to him.

  *

  HAD ERIC been home, instead of away on yet another business trip, I would have fallen asleep, resting my hand over the rise of his shoulder, my fingers warmed by the T-shirt he wore to bed in winter. I would not have gotten out of bed, not drunk a glass of wine. I would not have written to Bobby.

  I pictured my brother as he looked when I last saw him six years ago, thin, wild-haired, and broken. I would write nothing personal, nothing sentimental, and make no demands. I would reach out to him on his own fragile terms and give him no reason to stop reading
.

  I wrote that I’d been thinking about the letter he’d sent our mother, the one about the impact of technology on mankind and the environment. I said that I’d like to start a written conversation about it, to deepen my own thinking. I enclosed a fifty-dollar check for postage and whatever else he might need. I ended with love, Natalie.

  I mailed the letter in the morning, but I knew Bobby would never answer it. I doubted he’d even open it.

  chapter eight

  I NEVER WANTED to have the smartest baby in the nursery. I’d seen what the burden of a gifted mind had done to my brother. Julia talked in sentences at a year old. At eighteen months, she awoke shrieking every night, pleading with me not to hurt her. Eric was away on a trial that wouldn’t end. I took Julia to the pediatrician.

  “She’s a brilliant child with nightmares to match,” she said as if it were no big deal.

  Bobby was living in Oregon at the time, working as a janitor. He didn’t have a phone but we exchanged letters. Mine were humdrum and tinged with self-pity. I was a new mother with a toddler who never slept and a husband who worked all the time. Bobby wrote diatribes. He ranted for pages about a mechanistic civilization that robbed even the earth we trod on of dignity and the educational system that made this outrage possible. I thought it was my fault that I couldn’t grasp what he was saying.

  Once, he confided that he was lonely, that he’d seen even morons and the grossly obese with girlfriends, and didn’t understand why it was so hard for him. At least this was something I understood, something I could offer in return. I wrote back that it was hard for everyone and to give it time.

  Then mysteriously, he was back in California, staying at our family’s cabin in Gold Run. He was so much closer, yet he wouldn’t connect the phone or answer my letters.

  “He’s exhausted,” my mother said. “He needs time to rest.”

  My father shrugged. “It’s his business if he wants to act like a weirdo.” It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone in my family suggest Bobby was strange. I didn’t like it. It made me side with my mother.

  “He has no patience for your bourgeois life,” Sara said as if she couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t contacting her either, but she took it in stride.

  I bought him a book for his birthday, Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea. He’d mentioned once in a letter wanting a copy.

  It came back in the mail, return to sender scrawled on it. I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. I couldn’t let that go. I put Julia in her car seat and drove two hours to Gold Run.

  The cabin looked uninhabited, the curtains drawn. I knocked, not knowing what I’d say when, or if, he answered. When there was no response, I tried my key. The door was bolted from the inside. I pounded on it, yelling that it was me. Julia in my arms, I walked through foliage and weeds, rapping on the windows, pleading with him to let me in.

  I panicked. What if he was hurt? “I’m calling the fire department,” I yelled.

  A curtain at the window moved. I caught a glimpse of a face, gaunt and unshaven. I jumped.

  “Bobby,” I said, my heart making a racket in my chest.

  The door opened a crack. An eye squinted against the light. “Bobby,” I repeated. I shifted Julia into my other arm. His gaze dropped to her, stayed there.

  “Go away,” he said. “Now.”

  I didn’t know his voice. I was already stepping back, my baby in my arms. He slammed the door in my face. I put Julia in the car and drove away.

  I wrote to him again. What have I done? I’ll leave you alone if you tell me what I’ve done.

  He wrote back immediately. I was so frightened when the letter arrived that I let it sit an hour before I opened it. I sensed it was reckless of me to read it, alone in the house with a sleepless child, but I could not wait until Eric returned from his trip.

  There were two pages scrawled in red ink. The letter did not begin Dear Natalie. It just started, as if in midthought. He said that there was nothing between us. That he’d felt a fond protectiveness for me when I was small, but that, too, had been a burden. His own childhood was miserable, he admitted, but at least he’d been wanted. By contrast, I was an afterthought to the family, an accident like dust blowing into a window left open, an unloved girl with a crush on her big brother. There was a time when he’d had hopes for me. I was smarter than Sara. More caring, more truthful than our parents. He had been proud of me when I went to Paris, when I lived in a little room with no water and read Camus and Sartre, cleaning houses to support myself. But I did less than nothing with all that. I’d come home, married a lawyer, and become a breeder.

  He wrote that if he’d had any inkling of who Eric was, he never would’ve consented to come to Julia’s christening. He said I’d remade myself into the servant of a man whose job was to defend the corporations that pillaged the poor. I had become the Frau who irons the brown shirt, polishes the black boot.

  My hands shook, and for a moment that was all that interested me, a pair of shaking hands, clutching rustling paper. I dropped the pages on the floor.

  I wanted to tear them up, throw them away, but I forced myself to keep them because I was sure they couldn’t have said what I thought they said. I picked the pages off the floor, shoved them in the envelope, and placed it far back in a drawer in the dining room buffet.

  When Eric returned, I didn’t tell him about Bobby’s letter or going to the family cabin. The first day he was back, we went shopping and bought an expensive stroller for Julia. I’d wanted these things. A safe car, a sturdy stroller, a pretty crib, a perfect nursery for my baby girl, her outfits folded lovingly in her white bureau, the little dresses hung on tiny hangers.

  I never told anyone about Bobby’s letter. Not even my parents. Telling the story would have made it real. Eventually I threw the letter away without ever looking at it again.

  We were a young American family. When we took Julia for a walk, people smiling and fussing over her, I felt there was nothing wrong with me or the stroller we had bought.

  chapter nine

  BOBBY ONCE TOLD ME that when he was working trying to solve a math problem, he could not stop thinking about it. He analyzed it day and night, took it apart in his head, and started over. I was different. I could lose myself in the everyday. I could push things out of my mind.

  The first morning in March, Lilly bounded into my bedroom in her flannel nightgown. “Rabbit, rabbit,” she shouted. She climbed into bed with me, the only brown-eyed one of the four of us. “Now you have to say it,” she said.

  I put my arms around her, and said it. Rabbit, rabbit.

  At work, I had an easy morning. Once my students were safely in art class, I headed for the teachers’ lounge. Our lounge wasn’t much, just a small room in the back of the office with a couch we had to share with sick kids, a small Formica table, a sink, a coffeepot, and—on a good day—a box of Girl Scout cookies in the refrigerator.

  The outer office was so oddly quiet that I bypassed the lounge to peek into Claire’s office. She was our principal, as well as my good friend. The secretary was inside with Claire and the gym teacher. Heads down, arms identically crossed, they were gathered around a radio in alarming stillness. Whatever this news was, I didn’t want to hear it. I had the crazy thought that I could just back away unnoticed and return to some previous point where everything was fine.

  Claire looked up, saw me, and reached out an arm. “It’s terrible,” she said, leaving me no choice but to go forward. “There’s been an explosion on Hearst. They think there might have been a bomb.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said absurdly, the pounding of my heart telling me that it was, the sound of it as loud as the news. An off-campus office of the university completely destroyed. Less than a mile from where we stood. Three people dead. Almost certainly a bomb. The earmark of the Cal Bomber.

  I knew I wasn’t well. I saw it in Claire’s face. She pushed me into a chair, holding my shoulder to keep me from falling, but I’
d already fallen. Everything else was just senseless movement.

  I heard my voice, high, false, and lying. I had the flu but I could drive myself home. Someone turned off the news. The drama was all mine now. The secretary brought me a cold cloth. Claire said she’d take my class, and find a ride home for Lilly.

  I left without my jacket. The weather was brisk, on the verge of rain, and the bite in the air steadied me. I had become a person who panicked at every disaster. I’d go home, drink a glass of juice, and lie down.

  Instead I drove to the library on Shattuck and parked in the lot. When I got out of the car, I smelled smoke from the explosion. I was no more than a ten-minute walk from the site.

  This time I wouldn’t phone my sister. I’d find what I needed to free my mind on my own. I copied articles from the Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Sacramento Bee, Newsweek, and Time. I printed the Cal Bomber’s manifesto.

  At home, I shoved the mail off the dining room table onto the floor. I laid out the manifesto, forty pages, single spaced, and started to read it word by word.

  It began with a simple thesis. The past two centuries have been a catastrophe for mankind. I could, at least partly, agree with that—world wars, genocide, terrorism, environmental damage to the planet. But I soon grasped that the Cal Bomber was focused elsewhere: Technology has taken man off the land, crowded him into urban areas, separated him from the products of his own labor, left him at the whims of an economy run by and for the elites who manipulate the forces of technology for their own ends.

  It was all so nightmarishly familiar. I thought of getting up for water, turning on the news, but I refused to stop reading. When my eyes glanced past a sentence, I brought them back, made myself absorb what I had to absorb, forced myself to look. I took notes.

  As hard as life was for primitive man, he was not helpless. He could fight for his self-defense, his food, his mate. He was not alone.

  Not alone the way my brother was.