California: A Novel

by Edan Lepucki

  The first thing Cal remembered about Micah was how he sat on the edge of the bare mattress in their dorm room, slumped over like an old man sleeping on the bus. But he wasn’t sleeping, he was reading a small worn paperback. A few years prior, the student body had voted against allowing e-readers on campus—previously the only electronics allowed—which made it almost impossible to access contemporary books. Not that it mattered. On their first date, Cal had told Frida that Plank loved D.W.M.: dead white men.

  Cal never caught the name of the book Micah was reading that first day, because as soon as Cal said hello, tentatively, lugging his suitcase into the high-ceilinged room, Micah had jumped from his pose and tossed the book aside. It fell between the bed and the wall.

  “You’re here!” Micah said. He rushed forward to help Cal with his bags. He was taller than Cal and almost burly. He had a beard, which was rust colored in places, though his hair was dark. He looked older than eighteen. Cal figured he must be from a place like Montana or Maine. Definitely not a city.

  “Micah Ellis,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Cal. Cal Friedman.”

  “You’re Jewish?”

  “My mother is. Was. She’s an atheist.”

  “You took her last name?”

  Cal nodded. “But I see my father, all the time.”

  “No judgment.” Micah held up his hands. “My parents are married, and we don’t practice any religion. Where you from? Did you say? Are you eighteen?” He smiled, almost sheepishly. “I apologize for the questions, I’m somewhat of a taxonomist.”

  At first, Cal thought he’d said “taxidermist.” He pictured this bearded kid in a basement in Maine, stuffing bobcats and bears and, then, Cal himself.

  “I like to classify things,” Micah was saying now, and Cal understood that he had misheard his new roommate. “Where you from?”

  “Cleveland.”

  Micah grinned. “I could have guessed from your accent. Flat, nasal.”

  Cal knew he should be offended, but he wasn’t. “And you?”

  “L.A.”

  “Really? That’s hard to believe.”

  “Why? ’Cause my tits are real?”

  They both laughed.

  Micah had arrived a couple of hours before. The room was large, and at that hour sunlight pooled through the circular window between their dressers. Even now, Cal remembered how golden the light had been at Plank. In the morning, the sun spread across the floor and his desk—he kept his neat, almost bare, whereas Micah’s was always covered with books and pens and dirty dishes. In Cleveland, Cal and his mother used blackout curtains, but at Plank the windows were naked, and he often woke at dawn even if he didn’t have to get up then to work the school’s small farm. A previous generation of Plankers had probably voted against drapes, in the same way they had rejected the Internet and the coed question, the gingham curtains burned in a bonfire one crisp winter night, the boys howling.

  “I like the room,” Cal said, after they’d agreed who would sleep where. “I feel like I’m in a time machine.” What he meant to say was: Plank felt lost in the past. Not stuck, but suspended there, in its beauty and slowness.

  “We’re encased in amber,” Micah had said, and smiled.

  Plank’s student body was made up of thirty male students. All of them lived in a converted farmhouse, though two second-years got to board in the house’s former kitchen, coveted for its wood-burning stove. Cal was the only first-year from the Midwest, and one of the few kids who hadn’t gone to a prep school. Micah hadn’t either, but he’d attended an intense public high school in L.A. where you had to test highly gifted to get in. It closed from lack of funding a year after he graduated. Micah couldn’t milk a cow, as Cal could, but he had already read Plato and Derrida. “The jugness of the jug” was how he explained Heidegger to Cal, as if that explained anything at all.

  It made him laugh now, thinking about the way Plankers used to talk. They’d farm in the mornings, bring the goats out to pasture, and then, with dirt under their fingernails and smelling of animal shit, they’d head into seminar to toss big words back and forth at one another.

  Out here, in the middle of nowhere, the real middle of nowhere, those big ideas offered him solace but not much else. Cal glanced once more at Frida, whose eyes were shut tight against the world, and he wondered what she might say about all the books he and her brother had once devoured. Like any of it could rescue you, she might say.

  There were only two years at Plank. If you were admitted, it was free, but there was no real degree at the end. Most of the boys transferred to one of the Ivy Leagues, went traveling, or fell off the map. Cal’s dad had been the one to show him the application. He ran his small organic farm holistically, which meant the cows were moved often, so as not to wreck the land, and the chickens followed, pecking at the manure, and the vegetables were grown without pesticides. Cal’s dad had always urged his son to learn his trade. “You have skills that this school will nurture.” But did his dad know that beyond working the school’s alfalfa farm, milking its cows, and learning to slaughter the occasional goat, Plank’s students trafficked in the abstract?

  Many Plankers wanted to fight injustice and poverty throughout the world, though certainly not with religion; it seemed like everyone was an atheist or headed there. They’d use their brilliance and tenacity, not God, to make a difference. His first week, Cal heard another student talking about his plans after graduation; the guy had a whole business plan already written, but he wanted to get everyone’s opinions on environmental tariffs and microloans. Cal had never met anyone like that before, a person so open about his ambitions, but at Plank it was common for someone to announce his lofty ideals over a meal or in class or in the lounge at 3:00 a.m. Plankers would change the world. A lot of other colleges had closed in recent years, but Plank was cheap to run, and its endowment was solid because its alumni believed their small but mighty network of graduates would solve the crises that blighted the present. He hadn’t realized it when he was accepted, but after he’d arrived, it was clear: Plank expected something of him. He was not to take his education in vain.

  Cal remembered how, on that first night, the older students cooked and served dinner to the new ones. The second-years had baked bread and cooked a spicy vegetable soup. They wore aprons and belched with abandon. On the walls of the large dining room hung old farming equipment: a hoe, a rusted pickax. Otherwise, the large room was bare and dingy. Already, the older students had made it known that nobody much cared for how things looked. For instance, one of the windows had been shattered in a pickup football game, and instead of replacing the glass, as the president wanted, the boys had voted to duct-tape the damage.

  All of it had been a lesson, Cal thought now. He’d taken none of it for granted. His time at Plank had prepared him for the devastation in L.A. and their life out here. He knew not only how to skin an animal and how to irrigate a field but also how to forgive a room for its ugliness. Frida was sensitive to space; she said the Millers’ place—their place now—was so utilitarian it was like living in a police station. He hadn’t even noticed how ugly the shelves were until she’d pointed them out. Frida probably thought this blindness a flaw, but he considered it a skill.

  Like right now, Cal thought. Frida found the house depressing and dank, and she hated their practical yet dumpy couches. But what he saw, what he felt, was different. Here he was, lying next to Frida, whose body was warm and solid next to his own, and they were okay, they had shelter, they had each other. The other particulars, the lack of windows, the slanting shelves, didn’t matter.

  Frida pushed once more into his calf. She muttered something—it almost sounded like another language, harsh, with a lot of consonants—and then she fell back into a silent sleep. She looked calm and comfortable in this bed, in this life.

  Cal remembered that first dinner at Plank, how the other boys used words he’d never heard of: enframed, signifier, telos, and phronesis. What he’d learned a
bout the world so far was baby food compared with what these guys knew, and that night he took to nodding at the things his classmates said while inside his brain, a tumbleweed skipped. At orientation before the meal, the second-years had taught them to show agreement by raising their fists and knocking on an invisible door. Cal couldn’t see himself ever doing this, not without laughing, at least, but at dinner, there was Micah with his fist up, knocking. As if he’d always known the gesture.

  Micah and another first-year were discussing a German film they both liked. It was about terrorists from the 1970s. Micah’s great-grandmother remembered the nightly news reporting their violence when she was young, although she couldn’t keep track of what they’d opposed. “She couldn’t even remember what war everyone had protested back then,” Micah said. “I told her, ‘Vietnam, Grammie,’ and her eyes lit up, like she’d won a prize. No joke.” Then he mentioned some artist’s rendering of the German terrorists. “The portraits hit me in my core with a hot poker,” he said.

  “How so?” Cal had asked. He supposed he wanted to try to participate in the conversation, in this weird little world; it had to happen eventually, or he’d go nuts. But afterward he wished he had left Micah be, that he hadn’t said anything. Or he wished he didn’t remember the moment now, almost a decade later.

  The sun was about to rise, Cal could feel it. Maybe Frida felt it, too; maybe in her sleep, the day was calling her forth. But Micah’s answer was still there, in Cal’s head.

  “‘How so’?” Micah echoed. “The pictures are fucking brilliant. Those terrorists are rendered mysterious and grim. That dark gray blurriness…they’re painted from actual photographs, you know that, right? Part of me always wishes they weren’t blurry, but that’s what makes them magnetic. And even as I’m magnetized, I feel a dispassion. Sure, that’s a dead body, you might say, but unless you know the history, the context, does it even matter?”

  Cal was too embarrassed to admit that he’d never heard of the artist or seen the paintings, so he just nodded and waited for someone else to say something.

  In that space, Micah spoke again. This time, his voice was gentle, softer, almost like he was waking a sleeping child. “Violence is beautiful, in a way.”

  He smiled a big lusty grin, and Cal felt like he’d been socked in the stomach.

  “What is it, California?” Micah said. “Don’t you agree with me?”

  Cal had been so stunned by Micah’s answer he barely registered the nickname.

  “That’s your full name?” a kid across the table said. “California?”

  “Awesome!” someone else said.

  “Isn’t it though?” Micah said. “His mother’s a hippie.”

  “Hippies don’t exist anymore,” another Planker said.

  “Apparently they do,” Micah said.

  “No,” Cal heard himself say. “It’s Calvin. My name is Calvin.”

  At this, Micah groaned. “God, Cal, we almost had them! Couldn’t you go along with it?” Then he roared with laughter, and someone else said, “Fuck off, man, fuck off,” laughing, too, knocking his fist. Cal didn’t say a thing. Back home, he’d never been the talkative type, but he wasn’t shy. At Plank, he was quickly earning a reputation for being reticent and thoughtful. What a fraud.

  After that, people sometimes called him California. It was a female name, it seemed, for the guys said it to him sweetly, like they were talking to a beautiful woman in a dark jukebox bar. Someone needed to be the girl, if only for a moment.

  Micah’s little trick with his name, Cal thought, was proof that he was a liar.

  A little light began to seep under the front door. In no time the whole thing would be framed with sunlight. Bo hadn’t built the best door, and in the winter they had to hang a thick rug over it to keep out the cold and, at the height of the summer, netting to keep out flies. These few weeks were the only time the door worked just as it was, letting in a breeze and those rays of sunlight.

  Frida rolled back into him and grumbled more dream-babble into his neck. She slept so deeply, she was probably in L.A. now, ordering a latte. That dream often teased her, and she awoke upset. At least she wasn’t having the nightmares anymore, the ones about Micah. “Him leaving” was how she put it.

  At his funeral, someone should have included Micah’s prankster nature in a eulogy, but no one did, no surprise. Not that his lying was a bad thing. Micah never carried a lie for long—what he enjoyed most was revealing his trickery.

  Why was Cal thinking about Micah? About Plank? Time moved forward, but the mind was restless and stubborn, and it skipped to wherever it pleased, often to the past: backward, always backward. He wished he had an empty journal to scribble in. If he did, he’d get all this down. But he needed the pages he had left for practical purposes.

  He looked at Frida once more. Her face was calm and blank, her mouth open now, the same expression she used to make when putting on mascara. Lines had begun to form around her eyes, and he was happy their only mirror was the rearview, taken from their car at the last moment. If they had a better one, she’d certainly complain about the smallest wrinkle, hold her face back with her hands, as his mother had done. “My face-lift,” she’d say.

  If Frida really was pregnant, what would they do? He imagined cutting the umbilical cord with his Swiss army knife. He knew Frida would want to go find others; they weren’t the Millers, she’d say, and that was true. Families couldn’t exist in a vacuum, or not theirs, at least.

  Or could they?

  He felt her hand on his thigh.

  “Hey you,” she whispered. For a second Cal wondered if she’d been faking sleep all this time.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

  “Poor thing.”

  “Any lattes last night?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Ugh. Don’t dangle that in front of me. Not this morning.”

  Frida yawned and sat up. She was wearing the oversize T-shirt she preferred to sleep in until it got too cold. The shirt had once been white and was delicate as tissue. A small hole had opened at her right shoulder blade, as if her bone had been sharp enough to rip through the fabric. Cal poked his finger through and touched her skin. Cal figured the shirt had once belonged to her father, but he had never asked. To bring it up now would only rattle her. She’d been wearing it since they’d starting sleeping together, and he loved how her nipples showed through the front.

  Frida yawned once more and climbed onto his stomach, so that she was straddling him.

  “You look good,” Cal said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  He reached for her breasts, cupped one in each palm. She smiled.

  “Good morning to you,” she said. She nodded to his crotch. “And to you.”

  He laughed, running his hands to her waist. “You know what I like best about this place?”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “No one can hear me fucking your brains out.”

  Frida blushed. He wanted her so badly. He loved that he could say this to her, that she wanted him to say it, and that nothing had ever felt so natural.

  She had her hand on him now. She leaned forward, and he could smell her musky breath. “Sorry,” she said. “Morning breath?”

  He grabbed her jaw and kissed her. “Yum,” he said, and pulled for her T-shirt.

  Afterward, once they were lying side by side, Cal got to thinking again of that first night at Plank, about Micah. The beauty of violence, all that nonsense, Micah’s grave voice, as if he were imparting something vital to his new roommate.

  Stupid Cal, he thought. Get that out of your head.

  “Helloooo?” Frida was saying. With two fingers she flicked his dick lightly.

  “Sorry,” Cal said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing…I just can’t get a painting out of my head.”

  He couldn’t tell her much more. After he’d graduated and was living in L.A., he’d tried searching fo
r the pictures online. There had been one artist, near the end of the last century, who drew from photographs. Cal couldn’t remember his name; he didn’t want to remember it. The portraits were gray and deliberately blurry, just as Micah had described them. They were haunting, but they weren’t magnetic or beautiful. Not to him.

  “A painting?” Frida said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “More than one. They’re of”—he didn’t want to say the word, but he had to; there wasn’t a way around it—“they’re of terrorists. From Germany. In the 1970s.” He paused. “We were into them at Plank,” he said.

  He thought his voice sounded innocent, like he was just talking about some random artist, but Frida sat up immediately. She was pulling on her T-shirt.

  “Why are you thinking about that?” she said.

  So she knew he was talking about Micah. Micah must have talked about those paintings with her, too.

  They tried not to bring up her brother. They’d agreed to never tell anyone out here about him, and even between them, both his death and his life were difficult subjects, so thorny they could cut themselves on his name.

  If Cal told her Micah had liked the paintings back when they were at Plank, she’d freak out. In the world according to Frida, her brother had been a precocious boy and then a brilliant man, faultless until the Group got ahold of him. According to her, Micah never would have said such a thing before he became involved with them.

  “It’s nothing,” Cal said now. He tried to pull Frida back, but she was already slipping out of his grasp. She crawled over him to get out of the bed. He couldn’t help but look at her nipples. There they were.

  “Babe,” he said, sitting up. “Why are you so mad?”

  “Please, don’t,” she said. She put on her pants.

  “I’m going to the well,” she said. She was already pulling on a sweater, her boots.

  “Frida—”

  But she was opening the door, the morning light spilling into the house, falling across all its dusty surfaces, its sad furniture. It was ugly; Frida had been right.