Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

I felt shaky when I rose from the table to retrieve Bobby’s year-old letter. When I sat back down, I laid the letter beside the manifesto, the pages touching.

  Modern man lives in a world in which relatively few people make the decisions for everyone. To put up with this, he must be “socialized.” He must be conditioned to follow the rules of authority figures who themselves have been socialized to follow the rules.

  Socialization. Technology. I had to be imagining that words seemed to leap from the manifesto to Bobby’s letter and back.

  Modern man has no dignity, no autonomy. His life is filled with work that has no meaning. His mind is pulverized by the entertainment industry that is the handmaiden of technological society.

  I ran my finger from the manifesto to the nearly identical sentence in Bobby’s letter: Now we have an entertainment industry that is an arm of the technological, political system.

  I could barely breathe but I didn’t stop reading.

  The light pollution produced by massive urbanization does more than blind us to the stars, it takes away humanity’s compass. The noise of civilization makes us deaf to the sound of nature and the call of our own souls.

  I remembered a hike. I was about nine years old, Bobby fifteen. The two of us must have trekked three miles to a still spot in the Yuba. I was hot and tired but what struck me was the silence. The only sounds came from birds, insects, and the rustling trees. We stood listening for I don’t know how long, no words passing between us. “Now you know all that is being lost to the noise of the world,” my brother said.

  Contrary to accepted theory, people do not come to accept repeated lies as the truth. Rather, the endless repetition of official lies produces indifference. People still know truth from lies, but they are too numb to do anything about it, or even care.

  I had tried to imagine my brother’s cabin many times. But now I saw it as it must have been, a miner’s shack for a man who was not a miner but a PhD. No bathroom, no kitchen, dirt floor, walls of rough planks, a kerosene lamp overhead, maybe one on the small table where he might have written those words.

  The phone rang but I didn’t answer it. It was nearly three o’clock when I rose from the heavy oak table where Bobby, Sara, and I had eaten dinner all the years of our childhood. I felt dazed as I put the bomber’s manifesto and my brother’s letter in a manila folder, together. As I was unlocking my car in the front of the house, a strange van pulled up and Lilly got out. “Where are you going?” she demanded. She looked suspicious, and I knew she knew I’d forgotten about her.

  The mother who’d driven Lilly home called out to me from the window of her Suburban. “Are you feeling better?” I nodded, trying to smile as she drove off.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said to Lilly despite the fact that I wore a coat and my keys hung from the door lock of my car.

  We climbed the stairs, Lilly looking grim. I removed my coat and tried to pretend it was any of the Wednesdays of our old life. I asked about her day while I threw together a salad, but Lilly would have none it.

  I sat down next to her. “Where were you going?” she asked. Her hair curled gently around her face but her voice was hard.

  “Nowhere,” I lied. “I was just getting something from the car. But I do have to go out when Julia comes home.”

  “Can I come with you?” She wasn’t asking. She was confirming her suspicions.

  “Not this time,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. I reached to pull her close, but she turned away, jumping up to leave me alone in the kitchen.

  When Julia got home a half hour later, I gave her money for pizza, and put my coat back on. “Watch your sister,” I said, picking up the manila folder. “I have to run an errand in the city.”

  I took the BART train to San Francisco. In the Montgomery station, I picked up the afternoon Examiner with its grisly headline, THREE DEAD IN BERKELEY BOMBING, and tucked it into my coat with the manila folder. I surfaced without an umbrella into a cold, hard rain. Ahead of me, two blocks up Montgomery, was the glass tower that held the law firm of Sterling, Talbot. The rain was drenching my hair and neck, but I barely noticed.

  chapter ten

  I HAD NEVER shown up unexpected at Eric’s office during business hours, though the girls and I occasionally dropped by on weekends when we were in the city. The guard in the lobby would wave us past, and we’d breeze up fourteen floors, through mahogany double doors, past floral displays the Ritz would envy, strolling down the plush corridors as if we owned the place. Now, as I tried to skirt around the firm’s circular reception desk, a woman stepped out from behind it.

  “May I help you?” Her words were right but her look said a woman with sopping hair and a file folder hidden under her coat had to be stopped, possibly escorted out the door. I explained that I was Eric’s wife, and saw the flicker of surprise in her eyes.

  The door to his office was open. He sat at his desk, a mess of papers spread in front of him, speaking to but not looking at the young woman who stood above him. She had long straight hair and wore a sleek, short skirt. The two of them could have been having an affair for all I knew. All those weekends and late hours. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true. Eric wasn’t the one in our marriage who kept secrets.

  In his surprise, Eric seemed first pleased to see me, then concerned. He remembered to introduce me to the young associate at his side, an engagement ring weighted with diamonds on her finger.

  When she left, Eric shut the door behind her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “You didn’t hear the news?”

  “What news?” Eric’s voice rose in alarm. “I’ve been holed up in here all day.”

  I handed him the newspaper. “I’m terrified my brother did it,” I said, sounding absurd even to myself. “That he’s the Cal Bomber, or that he’s involved in it in some way.” I took the folder out of my coat. “It’s all in here.”

  Eric seemed to be containing his skepticism for my benefit. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said as if he were a physician about to examine an X-ray. He carried my folder to the small conference table in the corner.

  Eric brought material home from work that looked like the phone book. He read it the way I did novels, shutting out the world. Now he read what was in the folder the same way.

  I sat next to him at the table, my hand lightly on his thigh, but he could have been alone. I looked out the window. On the street below, people emerged from buildings, pushed up umbrellas, and hurried to wherever they had to go. I didn’t remember walking on the street, how I’d arrived at this building.

  I’ve always been prone to exaggeration: a pimple becomes melanoma, a forgotten anniversary is the end of our marriage. Yet as I waited for him to finish, his mouth growing tight, I knew my husband wasn’t going to tell me what I so desperately wanted to hear.

  Eric didn’t answer the phone when it buzzed. Still in my coat, I circled his office, looking at the framed photos of the kids, the little knickknacks they’d constructed from clay and cardboard. I made it for your paper clips, Daddy. There was a photo I hadn’t seen before. Eric glancing adoringly at a tall, good-looking redhead in a gold-colored dress. It took me a moment to recognize that the woman was me. The picture had been taken at the firm Christmas party, just three months before.

  Eric took off his half glasses, and pinched his nose. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Not at all.”

  I couldn’t move. This wasn’t right. Eric was supposed to argue against overreacting. If he wasn’t going to, I’d say it for him. “In his letter, he told Mom to read some antitechnology book. We know he goes to the library. He’s probably using the Internet, lifting ideas, maybe posting his own. Sara thinks …”

  I stopped. Eric’s eyes were astonished. I saw the hurt in them, and then dawning anger.

  “You’ve talked to Sara about this?”

  Suddenly I was floundering. “I heard something on the news about there bei
ng a Sacramento postmark on a couple of the mail bombs. I called Sara.”

  “When? When did you talk to her?”

  Everything was all wrong. Eric was here to tell me that my latest drama was baseless, that this was not what I thought it was, that it could wait until tomorrow or next week. I wanted this so much that it didn’t occur to me to shade the truth.

  “It was a while ago,” I said.

  “A while ago?”

  I should have taken a moment to think, but I was so frantic for absolution I told him straight out. “After that UCLA professor got killed in January.”

  Eric looked as if he didn’t recognize me. “You had suspicions your brother could be the bomber two months ago? You’ve kept this from me all this time?”

  “No, no,” I protested, “I didn’t keep it from you.” But anyone could see I had. “It wasn’t like that.” I was flailing, desperate to make my betrayal understandable. “I never believed my brother was the bomber. I was afraid that someone might think he was because of his philosophy. I wanted to reach out to him again even though I knew it was hopeless. I wrote him. I thought maybe if I showed him that I cared about his ideas …”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Eric said, dropping his head into his hands. “You’ve been in touch with your brother about this.” When he looked up, I saw darkness in his eyes. “If Bobby turns out to be this guy, the fact that you wrote him now could look like you were tipping him off, trying to help him avoid suspicion.” Eric rubbed his face. “That could mean criminal charges.”

  “But that’s ludicrous. I never heard back from him. And I didn’t say that people might think he was the bomber, just that I was interested in his ideas about technology and the environment. He probably threw the letter away.”

  Eric held up his hands. “I need to know when you first suspected.” He spoke as if we were in court. “The first time you made any sort of link between the Cal Bomber and your brother.”

  I stammered about coming across Bobby’s letter when I was going to write Christmas cards, the same day I’d read about the Cal Bomber in a magazine. That I’d read his letter, but that I hadn’t made any connection.

  He stood, his back to the table, his voice so quiet, so impersonal it made me want to cry. “So that was December.”

  He faced away from me. Neither of us moved in the long silence. “I think we should talk to Stu,” he said finally.

  Stu was our friend, one of the few of my husband’s partners that I actually liked. I told myself that he was going to come down the corridor on his small feet, a short, fat man with a skewed sense of the world, and convince us all we needed was some Italian food.

  He came in smiling, and I had to bend for his kiss. I’d always enjoyed his friendly attraction to me, liked it when he sat with me at firm parties, listening to my stories and laughing at my jokes.

  When he saw Eric, he stopped smiling. Until that moment, I’d held on to the hope that someone bigger, taller, shorter, fatter would take my clammy hand in his dry one and say, Natalie, you’ve let your imagination run away with you. Now I understood. Eric hadn’t asked Stu to come here because he was our friend. Stu headed the firm’s white-collar crime practice. This was not just about my brother. This was about me knowing or not knowing that my brother might be part of something that had led to the death of three people this morning.

  Eric had gotten me a lawyer.

  Stu sat at the conference table, reading the manifesto and the letter that seemed to link Bobby to it. At his desk, Eric looked down at his work, but I doubted he saw anything. I crossed and uncrossed my legs on the brown leather couch I’d helped Eric pick out when he first became a partner at the firm. When Stu finished, he and Eric spoke to each other as if I weren’t there. They spoke in the same way the doctors did as my father lay dying, as if their language shielded them from the pain of that room and the sight of me. They were discussing how best to get this information to federal authorities.

  “I understand that you want to protect me,” I interrupted, looking first to Stu then Eric. “But I’m not turning my only brother over to the FBI on the basis of a single letter containing ideas he copied from the library.” I folded my arms. “I’m sorry, but I won’t do it, not today. I need to think this through, to talk it over with my mother and Sara. Maybe they know something that can help explain it all away. I owe it to my family to give them a chance.”

  Eric turned to Stu. “Can we wait?” he said.

  I was grateful he had not said what he could have. Instead, Stu said it, softly, without accusation. I had waited and now three more people were dead. If I’d come forward sooner, would those people still be alive? I couldn’t bear the thought, any more than I could accept that Bobby had anything to do with their deaths.

  “Natalie,” Stu said gently, his eyes on mine. “I understand how hard this must be for you. But in light of the fact that you were concerned enough that someone might think your brother was the Cal Bomber to talk to your sister and then to write your brother for the first time in years, a letter that could still be in his house, that could be construed as trying to tip him off …” He paused, as if to let this settle in. “I’m advising you, as an attorney, and as your friend, to go forward with your information now.”

  His meaning was clear. In reaching out to my brother, I had damned him.

  I stared at my lap. Stu and Eric understood my silence for the capitulation it was. Stu made his phone calls from the club chair in front of Eric’s desk. Eric looked down at his desk, at Stu, anywhere but at me.

  At the same time, I understood that I wasn’t just any person in trouble. I was in my husband’s office on the fourteenth floor of the oldest and most prestigious law firm in San Francisco with a former assistant U.S. attorney at my side. Once the FBI knocked on his door, who would Bobby have?

  Eric phoned home to check on the girls while Stu coached me on how to answer the agents’ questions. The FBI arrived within the hour, two men in nice suits; they could have been on television. I looked at my watch. It was seven thirty.

  We sat in the gilded conference room of the law firm whose clients included the university where that morning a bomb had blown three people apart. We had clear demands: My name must be kept from the public. I insisted they guarantee that the government would not seek the death penalty if it turned out Bobby was guilty. They all but swore to the first, and led us to believe they could do the second.

  I answered their questions as narrowly as Stu had coached me. I did not mention my conversation with Sara or my correspondence with Bobby. I assured the agents that my brother would never do such a thing, that I was certain he was innocent, and that his mental health was fragile. I had come to them because three people had died this morning. I had to do whatever I could to make sure the real people responsible were found.

  “Bobby is the most gentle soul I’ve ever known,” I said, my eyes pleading. “If he ever learned I’d talked to you, he’d be devastated.” I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t help it.

  They said it was unlikely that my brother was the man they were looking for. But no matter what, he would never know I talked to them. They gave us their word.

  *

  IT WAS after nine when Eric and I got in his car and headed home. We drove in silence. I glanced at him a few times, but he never looked back. How many parties had we driven home from deconstructing the evening down to the canapés? Now he had nothing to say to me, and I had said enough around that conference table to last a lifetime.

  He dropped me at my car at the BART station. “I’m going to the store,” he said. “We need a few things.”

  I nodded. It was his way of saying that he didn’t want to go home right now.

  “Where have you been?” Julia demanded when I got back to the house, her arms folded sternly against her chest.

  It was ten o’clock. My seven-year-old was still in her clothes watching television. My teenager looked as if she wanted to send me to my room. My husband hadn’t come home with
me.

  “You were gone like six hours,” Julia said. She was so exasperated with me, so frightened, she seemed ready to cry.

  I said I was sorry, that it couldn’t have been helped.

  “There was a bomb in Berkeley,” Lilly said.

  “I know, honey,” I said. “But it can’t hurt us.” I shut off the television, and told the girls to get ready for bed. The next day either Eric or I would have to drive them to school. Eric and I would have to go back to our jobs, pretending that nothing was wrong. As sure as I was that they’d realize he was innocent, I couldn’t bear the thought that my mother and Sara—and oh God, Bobby—might learn that I’d gone to the FBI about him.

  I went to Lilly’s room. She wanted a bedtime story, and I told her a lie, a story in which everything turned out all right in the end.

  *

  I SAT ON the edge of my bed, still unmade from this morning, and rewound the day. If only I’d stayed in the classroom, I might not have heard the news. I might never have gone to Eric’s office. What had I done?

  I went downstairs and filled a glass with red wine from an open bottle in the refrigerator. The glass slipped from my hand and shattered against the floor. I got on my knees to pick up the shards, and cut my finger. I bandaged it, mopped the entire floor. Then I sat at the pine table and waited for Eric.

  He came home at twelve thirty carrying a single plastic grocery bag from Safeway.

  “It smells like a winery in here,” he said. I watched him unpack his groceries, a gallon of milk we didn’t need, a box of wheat crackers, a twelve-pack of double-A batteries, and a bag of apples.

  “Please don’t ignore me,” I said.

  “I’ve been driving,” he said, still not looking at me. “Just driving.” He slumped into a chair. Years of bending toward others had made him slightly stooped. He didn’t look like the same man I’d interrupted at work this afternoon.

  “What I can’t understand,” he said, “is why, in all this time, you never mentioned any of this to me.” He spread his hands to show his incomprehension in the face of my betrayal. “I know the life story of every kid in your class, Natalie.”