California: A Novel

by Edan Lepucki

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  For Patrick

  1

  On the map, their destination had been a stretch of green, as if they would be living on a golf course. No freeways nearby, or any roads, really: those had been left to rot years before. Frida had given this place a secret name, the afterlife, and on their journey, when they were forced to hide in abandoned rest stops, or when they’d filled the car with the last of their gasoline, this place had beckoned. In her mind it was a township, and Cal was the mayor. She was the mayor’s wife.

  Of course it was nothing like that. The forest had not been expecting them. If anything, it had tried to throw them out, again and again. But they had stayed, perhaps even prospered. Now Frida could only laugh at the memory of herself, over two years ago: dragging a duffel bag behind her with a groan, her nails bitten to shit, her stomach roiling. Grime like she’d never imagined. Even her knees had smelled.

  She thought it would be easier once they arrived; she should have known better. The work didn’t end then; if anything, it got worse, and for months the exhaustion and fear tick-ticked in her body like a dealer shuffling cards. At night, the darkness gave her a skinned-alive feeling, and she longed for her old childhood bed. For a bed, period.

  She had packed some things to comfort herself: the dead Device, a matchbook from their favorite bar. Cal later called them her artifacts. In a world so disconnected from the past, her attachment to these objects had been her only strategy for remaining sane. It still was.

  She tried not to take them out too often, but Cal had left the house to do some digging, and he wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. Even though the sky was gray, the sun weak, he’d worn his plaid button-down and a bandanna around his neck. They still had a bottle of sunscreen, but it had expired and was as watery as skim milk.

  “Stay inside for a while,” he’d said before he left.

  Frida had linked her arms around his neck. “Where would I go?”

  He kissed her goodbye on the mouth, as he still did, and always would. She was thinking, already, of the artifacts tucked away in an old briefcase, shoved under one of the unused twin cots. It had been a rough morning.

  Cal had latched the door behind him, and once his footsteps receded, she went right for the briefcase. From the small pile of artifacts, she picked up the abacus. She liked to pull the blue beads back and forth across the wires. She counted, she tapped, she closed her eyes. Frida had played with the abacus as a little girl and even then had depended on its calming effect. Her brother Micah, two years younger, had one as well, red beads instead of blue, but one day, when he was about seven, he cut it apart and strung the beads onto a piece of yarn. He’d presented it to their mother as a necklace.

  Frida flicked at the beads. She found herself counting the days yet again. Forty-two.

  “I’m late,” she said aloud, and her voice in the one-room house sounded small and plaintive. The walls seemed to breathe in the words; they would keep the secret until she told Cal.

  “I’m late,” she repeated, and willed her voice to stay steady. She’d have to tell him soon, and like this. She could not be freaked out. She would have to declare it, as she would any fact.

  Frida pulled the last bead across the abacus. It would be pleasurable, she thought, to pluck the wire from the frame and let the beads fall. She would pop one in her mouth and suck on it like a candy. But then she wouldn’t have the abacus.

  She put the thing down and sifted through the briefcase for something better. The other artifacts wouldn’t do. Not the Device, nor the matchbook, nor the ripped shower cap she couldn’t stand to part with. Not her mother’s handwritten cake recipes, already memorized and useless out here. Not the box of antique pencils, nor her bottle of perfume, halfway empty.

  She knew what she wanted.

  Unlike the other objects, the turkey baster had been new. She’d brought it with them precisely because they hadn’t had one in L.A.; it was something different, a simple object to mark a before and an after. She had liked the idea of using it at Thanksgiving, although she hadn’t been sure they’d celebrate that anymore. She didn’t think there would be turkeys here, and she’d been right.

  Thanksgiving. That holiday was so quaint in her memory it felt like something from a storybook: Once upon a time, Goldilocks ate herself silly.

  Frida couldn’t hold herself back any longer and pulled the baster out of the briefcase. It was stored in old Christmas wrapping paper, printed with gingerbread men and mistletoe, and she unwrapped it slowly. She had last looked at the baster a few weeks ago, and she had taken care to put it back properly. It could not be damaged.

  At the store, Frida had so much fun playing with the turkey baster, squeezing its plastic bulb so that the air farted out the glass tip. Frida had wondered if they might use it to try to get pregnant someday: their own ad hoc fertility treatment. It was funny how that had been on her mind even then.

  But, no, Frida thought now, she wasn’t pregnant. Couldn’t be. She’d stop thinking about it.

  The baster had been on sale. The store, like so many others, was going out of business. When the first of them perished, it had seemed impossible. “A chain like that!” people had said. When she was younger, Frida used to go there with her friends to marvel at all the useless necessities: the soy sauce receptacles, the tiny mother-of-pearl spoons, the glass pitchers. Even then, she didn’t know anyone who could afford such things. When she turned thirteen, she spent all of her birthday money on a single cloth napkin. Her mother would have killed her had she known; things weren’t dire then, not yet, but times were tough, and Frida could imagine her mother decrying such waste. Frida had stored the napkin in the pocket of a coat she never wore.

  But on her last visit, at twenty-six, she was no longer that same stupid little girl, or so she told herself. The place had been ransacked. Frida still remembered the starkness of the floodlights; they ran on a generator in the corner, illuminating the remaining coves of products, which were jumbled together in plastic bins. The register was by the entrance, and the girl who worked there accepted gold only, and not jewelry—it had to be melted down already.

  Frida couldn’t conjure the girl’s face anymore, but she did remember her eyeliner. How had she gotten her hands on eyeliner? Perhaps it was an old stick of her mother’s, gone to crayon at the back of the medicine cabinet. She could have sold it, if she wanted to, but she hadn’t. The girl was barely eighteen, more likely sixteen. The place shut down a week later, didn’t even make it to Christmas.

  By the following spring, Frida was celebrating her twenty-seventh birthday in an empty apartment, their belongings packed and ready by the door. She’d wanted to spend one more in L.A.; she’d been born there, after all. Cal couldn’t argue with that.

  Frida held the baster by its plastic bulb, lifting it above her head. She imagined the store had probably gone feral soon after they left, like the rest of the businesses at that stupid outdoor mall. The Grove, it was called. Maybe in these two years it had sprouted some trees, finally earned its name. The famous trolley, rusted, its bell looted. The fountain, which had once lured tourists and toddlers to its edge, was probably dry; that, or sludgy with poison.


  But what about the girl? Maybe she had been brave and stupid enough to head for the wilderness with only a bag full of tiny sherry glasses and cloth napkins to keep her company. Maybe a turkey baster, too.

  Back in L.A., Frida had kept the baster a secret from Cal because she’d spent gold on it, gold they were saving for their journey. They’d saved for almost a year to get enough money for gas and other supplies. She had purchased something frivolous, and she knew it. She was still that same little girl, hoarding her treasure. She hadn’t changed at all.

  Once they were leaving, she kept the baster a secret because she was afraid Cal would say they couldn’t bring it with them. They could only fit so much in the car, and before it ran out of gas, they would have to abandon it, carry their possessions the rest of the way. There was so much to carry, they had ended up making multiple trips with their stuff, and then they drove the car in the opposite direction until it sputtered dead, so they couldn’t be followed. It was a small miracle that they found their possessions again, piled where they’d left them, unharmed.

  Frida had smuggled the baster, like she had most of the artifacts. Cal eventually discovered her other things, but she’d still managed to keep the baster hidden.

  She’d initially intended on using it in the afterlife, in whatever way it was most needed. And then, one day, she realized she wouldn’t. Occasionally she toyed with the idea of snapping off the tag, which was attached to a string at the base of the bulb. At least it wasn’t one of those plastic threads; she used to hate those, how they would leave holes in clothing and require scissors to remove. Those doodads were probably the whole reason America had gone to hell, the plastic seeping poisons, filling up landfills. What foolishness. But she loved the turkey baster precisely because it still had its tag. She loved its newness: the pure glass of the cylinder, its fragility, and the plastic butter-yellow bulb still chalky to the touch. It inhaled and exhaled air like that first time. She had to keep it hidden. It belonged only to her, and the secret of it had become as precious as the object itself.

  Frida was tucking the briefcase under the bed when Cal stepped back into the house, ducking to get through the oddly small door. She liked how tall her husband was, and his narrow shoulders made him look even taller: stretched. Every morning he combed his short reddish hair with his fingers; it was so fine that little knots formed at the back of his head as he slept, and he hated it. Frida loved that, and she loved how every morning he woke with crescent-moon bags under his golden-hazel eyes, no matter how well rested he was.

  A fine veil of soil covered his shirt and face, and he’d untied the bandanna from his neck so that he could wipe the sweat from his brow. The room filled with the sweet stink of him. Their feet had started to smell—not the vinegary scent that had cursed Frida in L.A., but something fungal and rotting, a bag of dying vegetables. Cal had said they smelled homeless, and she agreed. That’s when they brought out their last Dove bar and their tube of antifungal cream. They didn’t discuss what would happen when they ran out. Their homemade soap, made from Douglas fir and the fat of vermin, smelled great but didn’t actually work.

  “How are the traps?” Frida asked.

  Cal shrugged and went toward the thermos. They drank coffee once every two months, a treat, and the rest of the time they filled the thermos with water from the well. On the morning after a coffee day, the water absorbed some of the bitterness that still coated the thermos. If the world didn’t end, and they moved back home, she would sell it to the cafés, get rich off coffee-water.

  Cal filled his cup and drank it in one gulp, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down his neck. That Adam’s apple. He had once explained to Frida how Plato believed that the soul’s parts—its reason, its passion—were located all over the human body. Frida liked to imagine Cal’s soul, a sliver of it, residing in his slender neck, the jagged cliff that signified he was a man. He could never pull off drag with an Adam’s apple like that.

  “I know you think the traps are ridiculous,” he said when he was finished drinking.

  “I don’t. You’ve built dozens of snares before, and they’ve worked. Why would I question you on traps?”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “It’s not like I rolled my eyes,” she said, approaching him. Cal did stink. She handed him a towel from the shelf of supplies and told him to wipe off.

  He gestured to the holes out the open door. “These traps will be bigger than usual, I know. But those gophers are stupid. They’re bound to run in there.”

  “But, babe, this isn’t Robinson Crusoe. Do you even know how to build a trap?”

  He removed his shirt, so he could clean off his pits. “I did it as a kid,” he said.

  Frida sighed. “For fun or for real?”

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  “You’re lucky you’re so clever,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

  He’d been working so hard out there. Maybe the holes he was digging would also keep them safe from the bigger beasts: the coyotes, the bears, and the wolves, which they sometimes heard howling at night.

  Cal had been designing the traps in his journal for a few days, the physics and all that. He said they had worked on his father’s land when he was a kid, and they would work now. Frida wasn’t sure what gopher meat would taste like, but Cal said, “Protein is protein,” and they couldn’t be picky. They’d eaten a snake once—Bo Miller had cooked it for them—and occasionally they craved that, especially in winter, after days of turnips and potatoes.

  Frida took the towel from him. “I know you’re dying for meat,” she said. “I’ve heard gophers taste like steak.”

  He sighed. “If I could just stop wanting it...”

  “If only,” she said.

  He was already on his way out again. Back to work.

  “Wait,” she said. Would she tell him now? Forty-two days, she thought.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “August’s supposed to come this week. Should we see if he’s got soap?”

  “He never has soap.”

  That was true. For over a year, August had been a fixture in the afterlife, something to mark the time by. He arrived once a month on his mule-drawn buggy with goods to trade and information to gather. He wanted to know how they were feeling, and he liked to share notes about the weather, too. Once Frida had a cold, and he’d asked her what color her snot was.

  “Clear,” she’d told him.

  He’d smiled and said, “It’s going to be real cold tonight, so bundle up.”

  Frida had once traded August an acorn squash for a dented tin of evaporated milk and, another time, her old cashmere sweater for a knife, recently sharpened. As he handed it to her, blade down, he’d said, “For cooking, or weaponry.” A statement, not a question, for it was understood that all tools in the wilderness needed to be versatile.

  August was a thin black guy, probably ten years older than they were, just shy of forty, and he wore the never-quite-faded desperation of a former addict. “A tendency toward the vampiric” was how Cal had once put it. August even called himself a junkie, and he was: he traded junk for other junk. He liked to say he was the last black man on earth, and he might have been; around here, all jokes looped back to sour.

  “I want to try planting some garlic,” Cal said. “Maybe he has some.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s that look again. What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. Go digging.”

  “Whatever it is you’re worrying about, just don’t.”

  She said she’d try not to.

  Cal waved at her from the doorway.

  “Breathe!” he called out behind him.

  Frida exhaled. How could he tell?

  He’d been saying that for as long as she could remember. He’d said it a lot during those first few months out here. He had kept her calm. Occasionally, his own nervousness about their survival spiked, and the air around him tightened, but most of the time, he seeme
d almost peaceful. It was as if he’d just returned from a monastery, his eyes gentle and open to the world, its good and its evil, the fair and unfair. Meanwhile, she could not even remember to breathe. It had taken everything to keep herself from saying, We’ll die out here, won’t we?

  Back then, she and Cal were living in the shed, and they thought they might be there for good. Neither knew that they’d eventually have a house to move into.

  They’d stumbled upon the shed, searching for a good spot to settle, and its presence had saved them. The truth was, they had been clueless, some might even say reckless, about their plan. They were headed for open space, and that was all. “I just want to go away,” Cal had first said to her. “I can’t stand how awful everything is here.”

  Because she understood, Frida hadn’t asked him to elaborate. He could have meant L.A.’s chewed-up streets or its shuttered stores and its sagging houses. All those dead lawns. Or maybe he meant the closed movie theaters and restaurants, and the parks growing wild in their abandonment. Or its people starving on the sidewalks, covered in piss and crying out. Or its crime; the murder rate increased every year, and the petty theft was as ubiquitous as the annoying gargle of leaf blowers had once been. The city wasn’t just sick, it was dying, and Cal had been right, it was awful.

  The shed had been a sound-enough structure: the walls, floor, and ceiling made of wooden planks, a roof covered by six tires, held together with baling wire. Cal had said, “Let’s move in,” to which Frida had replied, “Yeah, sure, nice outhouse.” But she knew this shed was better than anything the two of them would be able to build on their own. Cal had done construction on his father’s farm and, a little later on, in college, but he’d never built a home.

  “I can do it,” he’d told her as they moved their stuff into the shed. He said they could sleep there as they built an expansion. “I can do it with your help.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” Frida answered. “You and me, alone.”