Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  “Try. It’s like syrup.” She smiled.

  I put the chunk of dried sap in my mouth. It tasted like caramel. We walked farther on the dirt path and the landscape cleared. Trees became sparse, leaving space for desert plants—dry shrubs and wild sage bushes. Red rocks and boulders climbed to the top of a mountain. We were in a canyon within another canyon. A rocky desert rose in the middle of the hills and suddenly Los Angeles became visible from all sides: the dreamy, distant ocean; the valleys, hills, and desert plains as far as the eye could see. The rustic farmhouses in the area were unfenced and unlocked, their yards continuations of the canyon’s soil. It was more like a communal garden. Open gates, open doors, open windows. Chickens running onto the dirt path. Lazy dogs on strolls without leashes. I was happy to be there.

  “Should we buy some pot?” Deva asked as we ventured toward a cluster of multicolored trailer homes and cabins stacked next to one another. A purple Victorian manor towered above them. We were in a commune. A tanned gray-haired woman with bloodshot eyes and messy hair came out from the manor.

  “Are you here for the scream therapy session?” She greeted us with a foreign accent and a sarcastic smirk.

  “Hi, Heide. No. We just want to say hi to Bob,” Deva replied.

  “You are here for root chakra unblocking session?” the woman asked, sneering.

  “We’re here to visit Bob,” Deva stated again.

  Heide took a swig from an iron flask and growled, “What do you want from him?”

  “We are just here to say a quick hello—”

  “The last time a girl came for a ‘quick hello’ he got her pregnant.”

  “I’m sorry.” Deva frowned. “But it wasn’t me.”

  “Bob’s in the yoga room,” the woman finally said. “If you find him tell him he’s an asshole. Tell him I didn’t bring Brunhilda to school today because it was his turn.”

  She staggered away cussing in Dutch.

  A barefoot man with a roll of toilet paper in his hand came out of an outdoor toilet and smiled at us.

  “Right on, sisters,” he said, and walked away.

  The commune’s sewers were open air and there was no escaping the smell. Deva took my hand and led me through the property. Some of the sheds had multicolored tin roofs. Hoses were linked to one another, creating an extended watering system for a few dying plants. Deva’s hand was small inside mine. It was hard to imagine she could guide me through anything.

  “Very peace and love, that Heide, right?”

  I giggled.

  “She smokes too much pot and gets paranoid.”

  The yoga cottage had a bamboo ceiling and a dirt floor with mats rolled out next to a gong and a broken beehive. A man in ragged patchwork overalls and long dreadlocks that were desperately hanging on to his balding skull lay on the ground in a fetal position—hands tucked under his belly.

  “Fuck you, Mom! Fuck you, Mom! Fuck you, Mom! You’re not my mom! You are not my mom! You are not my mom!” he screamed.

  Deva glanced over and whispered in my ear, “He was adopted.”

  She turned to him and cleared her throat so he would notice us. “Hi Bob. Is this a bad time?”

  Bob rolled out of his fetal position and looked up. His face was bright red and he was drenched in sweat. Snot poured out his nose. He seemed happy to see us.

  “Deva!”

  Beneath the overalls he was bare-chested except for bead necklaces and body hair. He wiped his dirty hands on his knees.

  “I’m sorry, sisters…I was just doing some screaming. Getting out some mother stuff, you know. Heide’s been driving me nuts and it’s always related: wife stuff, mother stuff. It’s all the same.”

  “She seemed pretty upset. Said to tell you you’re an asshole,” Deva ventured, turning to me for support.

  “Yes. Definitely upset,” I added. “It was your turn to bring Brunhilda to school.”

  The veins on Bob’s forehead began to pulsate again with rage.

  “She’s just jealous because I get more—” He made a raspberry sound with his lips and did a freestyle dance to shake anger off his legs. “Well I’ve been luckier in our open-relationship deal. It’s because I’m friendlier and better-looking.”

  Whether he was better-looking was questionable. Certainly friendlier.

  “Thing is, I don’t think she knows about the open-relationship part of it,” Deva said.

  Bob let out a full-bodied laugh and opened his arms wide. He wrapped himself around Deva’s small torso with an intense hug and hummed.

  “Mmmm. Good to see you, soul sister.”

  Deva laughed awkwardly, muffled by his embrace.

  Bob turned to me as she made her way out of his arms.

  “This is Eugenia, my Italian friend from school.”

  “Italian? Wow, that’s far-out. What brings you out here?”

  “Umm…my parents.”

  “Whoa! Crazy.”

  His reaction puzzled me. He seemed baffled, as if I had just told him I was a wandering orphan. Or maybe that would have surprised him less.

  “Yeah I know. Crazy.” I went along with it.

  “It’s awesome to meet you.” He sighed, staring into my eyes, trying to gauge the amount of past lives we had shared. Then he hugged me tight and I was enveloped by a potent aroma of sage and armpits. One of his bejeweled dreadlocks pushed into my mouth. It tasted bitter.

  “Mmmm.” He sighed again, stroking my back. “You’re an old soul, I can tell.”

  I let out an awkward giggle and looked over at Deva, who rolled her eyes, signaling that I shouldn’t mind him.

  “I guess I am…from ancient Rome.”

  “That’s right, man. The fucking Otto-Roman Empire.”

  Deva didn’t flinch, so I didn’t correct him.

  Bob was the founder of the commune—one of the longest-standing co-op experiments in Topanga. His place had been around since the seventies. Originally it had been a kind of playground for Deva and her twin brother. Their father was always hanging out there, but when the kids grew up he had a falling-out with Bob and stopped coming around. Not that it mattered. “Everyone has their journey,” Bob explained. At his commune people came and went. Everyone brought with them a learning experience and left anything from musical instruments to spaceship installations to “their virginity.” Bob roared laughing when he said that.

  We walked back to the purple “mother house.” It looked like a lurid squat with mattresses on the floor. The dining-room window opened onto a terrace that was held together by a mud-and-cement paste. A baby-elephant-size statue of Ganesh with a giant crystal in his lap overlooked the commune grounds below. Rusty bicycles, Buddha and Saint Francis statues, and generators spread out to the far end of the terrace. The back wall was decorated with Osho meditation posters and a psychedelic mural of a baby emerging from an alien’s womb.

  “This is the children’s play area,” Bob explained.

  He offered us hot chai, then packed a bubbler pipe with weed.

  “Are you still working with your dad?” he asked Deva, exhaling in her face.

  She looked away and shrugged her shoulders. “On and off on music stuff.”

  Bob nodded his head like an old sage. “So much anger in his heart…”

  Deva sipped on her tea and didn’t reply.

  “He should come and do some screaming. I’d rather him scream in a safe place than at home with you—”

  Deva’s neck burst into red patches. “We came to get weed,” she cut him short, then batted her eyelashes. “Can I get some of that Vicodin too? It helps with the pain.”

  She pointed to the cast around her elbow.

  “It’s your second cast this year. You need to start watching your step, you skinny girl, or you’ll crack all your bones,” Bob said. He furrowed his brow and went to a cabinet on the terrace. He opened a drawer and extracted pills and weed. Deva snatched them from his hand, gave him a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, and kissed his cheek.

 
; In that moment a little girl with dirty hair and wearing an extra-large T-shirt covered in paint peeked her head out the kitchen window.

  “Da-ad!” she whined. “I’m hungry. There’s nothing to eat.”

  “It was Mom’s grocery day. She was supposed to go to the farmers’ market. We have to get food for the main house!”

  “She said you had funny friendships with the fruit sellers and she doesn’t want to go. She said to tell you.”

  We left father and daughter to their arguing and took off through the sheds. The commune thinned out as we headed into the woods, the shiny tin homes disappearing behind us. We entered the forest and headed down to the opposite bank of a small stream. A string of Christmas lights hung between oak branches. They turned on and off like summer fireflies. It was suddenly warm again after the cool sunset moment. The sea breeze stopped blowing and everything ceased from its day’s work. The riverbank was fringed with tangled blackberry shrubs that blocked our path, but Deva pushed them away until we reached an open meadow. In the middle of the tall grass stood an isolated stone cabin with an outdoor bathtub and firewood stacked by its side.

  It was Bob’s eco-cabin, Deva explained. He rented it to European tourists who wanted to live like hippies. “You get to sleep with mice in darkness and have to pay for it too.” She laughed. We leaned against the door and went inside. There was a table with one leg shorter than the others; bookshelves stacked with canned food, wine, and meditation manuals; a cot and a ladder to an upper-level bed area. I pulled a bottle of cheap Merlot from the shelf. We opened a pack of Doritos and drank gulps of wine.

  “Gross!” Deva laughed, spitting out the last sip. Outside we lit candles and filled up the bathtub. The air was crisp. Creatures scuttled through the woods, but we were not afraid because we were already drunk and Deva was a country girl from Topanga who knew how to battle beasts, she said. She took off her sweatshirt and the thin cotton tank top beneath it. Her breasts were small and covered in freckles like the rest of her body. Her nipples were hard and bright red like small apples. I took my clothes off too, revealing my summer tan and brown breasts. She looked at them.

  “Nudist,” she said. “How scandalous.”

  We left our underwear on and dipped our toes in the hot water, shivering and giggling at the unlikely domestic scene. A normal bathtub in the middle of a field. We lowered ourselves gingerly in the boiling water, screamed ouch at our burning asses.

  Deva moved her cast around the tub expertly like she was used to a permanent disability, accustomed to working around something that was broken or bruised.

  “What if we get caught?” I asked.

  “Bob only wishes. What would you do if you were a balding fifty-year-old dude with a crazy wife and you found two beautiful naked girls in a bathtub in the middle of a field?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “He’s a character, Bob, huh? He’s been here since forever. He gets all kinds of chic lady clients from Hollywood to do treatments with him. That’s why Heide is jealous.”

  “What kind of treatments?”

  “Scream therapy, laugh therapy, whatever therapy.”

  Deva cackled, took a big sip of wine, then reached for the plastic bag with the Vicodin pills in the back pocket of her jeans.

  She took out three and handed me one. She chugged the pills with the wine and lowered her head into the water.

  I leaned back and looked up at the sky. It was pitch-black now and filled with stars, not the fuzzy ones from the Valley—the ones I’d seen with Arash, which were trying so hard to shine through the pollution—but real, sparkling stars like the ones from cartoons, from a time when things were better in the world. I turned the faucet on with my toes. The trickling sound contained us, creating an illusion of privacy. Our legs touched under the hot water. Deva’s makeup was smudged. She stared into space. I saw her leave her body a little at a time from the wine and pills until she was gone.

  “We’re in the middle of nature,” she slurred.

  “In a field,” I tried to slur back, but I was too sober and she was so far away already.

  I drank more wine, trying to catch up.

  Deva laughed, abandoning herself to the wave that was taking her over. She seemed to want to hop on any current that took her away from the present moment—even if the present moment was perfectly fine.

  My stomach growled. I needed food. I lifted my body back up in the tub and suddenly remembered it was the night I’d invited Henry and his mother for saltimbocca. They were probably waiting for me at the house already. The thought of veal chunks made me instantly queasy and when the Vicodin finally kicked in, my body started to go numb and I let the thought drown.

  We stayed there, half asleep from Vicodin, feeling our bodies move in waves. Our legs entwined, toes dripping outside the tub’s edge and slipping back in when they got too cold. Time passed. We added more hot water, mumbling, forgetting what we had just said. The only thing that kept us on earth was the stars above, reminding us we were beneath them and therefore, by force of gravity, on the ground. Everything inside me turned warm and fuzzy. When Deva spoke, she leaned forward and her body twisted in a beautiful spiral. The candlelight made her face soft, but when she laughed, a strange presence shadowed her features.

  16

  In November my father announced that I would be taking time off school. “We need help on set. In the wardrobe department. Your kind of thing,” he said.

  “What about classes?”

  “It’s okay. Max said it’s extracurricular. Colleges like it when students show interest in other things.”

  “I think it’s only extracurricular if you do it after school.”

  “They’ll never know the difference. When did you become so uptight?”

  My father was hunched over his long oak desk, trying to fix the rental camera they were using to film the auditions. He raised his eyebrows and glanced at a bulky screenplay by his elbow, then picked it up and dropped it in my hands.

  “We’re shooting on Monday. We’re missing a bunch of outfits. Read it, cross-check the actors’ sizes, find the rest.”

  He stuck his nose back into the camera. The doorbell rang twice. Actors paced around every room, memorizing lines. Some sat in front of the electric fireplace in the living room, staring at the modest flames. Before transforming our house into a production office, my father remembered my grandmother’s last words of advice at the airport on her way back to Rome: “There is always a fake fire burning at the Forresters’ and they’re the richest family in LA. Don’t forget to get an electric fireplace.”

  Phones kept ringing, but nobody picked up. Max circled the backyard screaming in Spanish on a portable phone.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Absolutely nothing.” My father smiled.

  “Why is Max screaming?”

  “His money was held up, but it’s fine. We’ve mortgaged our house in Rome.” He finally lifted his eyes to meet mine. “Everything is under control.”

  “What do you mean, you mortgaged our house in Rome?”

  The actors all stopped mumbling and looked at me.

  My father put a hand over my mouth to hush me. He sprung open the door to the backyard and dragged me outside, the broken camera dangling from his fingertips.

  “Could you not talk like that in front of the actors? You’re scaring them! Max’s money is on its way. As soon as it clears he’ll pay back the bank, and we’ll pay off the mortgage on our house in Rome.”

  We stepped back inside. My mother passed in front of us with a tray of homemade biscotti and espressos for the actors. She winked at me and said there was a surprise waiting for me on my bed.

  On my way there, I noticed a pile of loose mail on the floor by the front door. There was a letter for me from the University of Southern California. It was written and signed by the head of the Literature Department saying they had read and enjoyed my essay in the “Bad Sex” issue of the literary journal and invite
d me to consider their creative writing program. They strongly encouraged me to apply the following year, the letter said. It was the first time anyone “strongly encouraged” me to do anything. I folded the letter and hid it inside a drawer in a closet where nobody would find it.

  —

  In our bedroom my brother stood behind a camera filming an actress with crispy hair that looked like a wig.

  “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to feel,” the woman said.

  “You are supposed to feel like you feel when you want to leave a place to go back home. You worry it might be haunted, but you’re not terrified yet.”

  “Look, honey, if I feel a place is haunted, I cry.”

  My brother shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, fine. Cry.”

  The woman repeated her lines with emphasis and burst into tears—a woman of fifty taking directions from a thirteen-year-old kid. In a corner of the room, a male figure hunched inside my wardrobe, rummaging through my clothes. I recognized the skinny legs. It was Henry.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I work here,” he replied in a passive-aggressive tone.

  “You work here? Since when?”

  “Since you flaked on me and never showed up at the saltimbocca dinner you organized for my mom. By the way, she was seriously hurt. She wants to start cooking classes now. It’s hell at home. Thanks.”

  “I’m sorry I spaced on dinner. I called you. You never—”

  “You called me, yes. Three days after we came to your house.”

  “Hey, hey! Can you guys take this somewhere else? I’m trying to get in character,” the actress with the fried hair butted in.

  Henry crawled out of my wardrobe, grabbed me by the elbow, and walked me out of the bedroom and into the bathroom.