by Edan Lepucki
Frida thought that the worse things got, the more women lost what they’d worked so hard to gain. No one cared about voting rights and equal pay because everyone was too busy lighting fires to stay warm and looking for food to stay alive. “It’s like the only thing that matters anymore is upper-body strength,” she complained. “Brute force.” This was before the Millers died, when he told her he could lift the firewood on his own, warned her she’d get a hernia. Frida had been pissed, but, really, what did she have to be angry about? Yes, they had to rely on an antiquated division of labor. And yes, she would be rescued first from a sinking ship. Wasn’t that a relief? “Spare me your white man’s burden,” Frida had said—which reminded him of Micah, in their Postcolonial Sexualities course.
Cal was sure it had been the worst for Bo. He had probably been the last to eat the poison. Someone had to make sure their dosages were correct and that his children, his wife, wouldn’t awake. It must have been terrible. Who wanted to be a man?
Cal looked at Frida across the table. She was scraping at her food with the fork, her focus anywhere but on him. He cleared his throat. “Frida,” he said.
“What?” she asked, and looked up.
“I have no interest in finding out what’s beyond the territory we’ve already explored.” He paused. “All I need, all I want, is right here. With you.”
The only sound was Frida’s fork hitting her plate.
“I hate these beets,” she said.
Though he agreed, Cal shook his head. “You have to finish them,” he said. Already the possibility of their unborn child was exerting its influence. It needed the nutrients.
* * *
Cal had last seen Bo alive six months ago, when the Millers had come to the shed for dinner. It was the beginning of spring, and Cal had again found himself missing the jacarandas in L.A., which had to be blooming soon. Two years earlier, they’d left town before the trees blossomed, and sometimes he imagined the purple flowers pastel against a cloudless sky. He used to love that, and how, come summer, the sticky flowers would carpet the sidewalks.
On that visit with the Millers, though, he felt at home. He didn’t miss anything. The weather was warm, and the sun was a neon peach in a charcoal sky. He had roasted cauliflower, and Frida had steeped jugs of water with lemon balm. Thanks to the garden’s bounty, they’d been getting crafty with their meals. They could have been back in L.A., throwing a dinner party. In the year and a half since they’d met the Millers, they’d learned a lot. They were getting the hang of things; that, or they had let themselves be fooled.
The Millers had brought a tent for sleeping, but Cal remembered waking the next morning to their absence; the family had risen before dawn to be on its way. They probably hadn’t even gone to sleep, Cal thought. He imagined Sandy and Bo alternating security shifts, the chilly wind the only thing keeping their eyes open. He envied and derided their brand of dedication. Breathe out already, he wanted to say.
Still, the families were getting comfortable with each other. Garrett sat on Frida’s lap occasionally, and the couples shared a few inside jokes. Bo and Cal had already gone hunting a handful of times, and Sandy had shown Frida how to forage for mushrooms and berries. She had explained to his wife how to distinguish between the poisonous and the safe.
That night, while Frida helped Sandy tuck the children into the tent, Cal took Bo up on his offer of moonshine. The liquor tasted like Windex, but he drank it anyway because he wanted to feel that old familiar ease in his brain and limbs.
It didn’t take long for Cal to feel a little drunk. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t have asked Bo what was beyond their land. The Millers never spoke of this, even as they approached other topics: the local flora and fauna, visits from August, how to keep animals away from the garden. They were full of advice, and yet continuously evasive. This place of mystery, Cal reminded himself. But he wanted answers.
He could tell Bo was tipsy by the way he lay back on the faded quilt they’d been dining on and propped himself on his elbows. In the daylight, Bo had an alert and serious face, but in the darkness it was hidden, and he simply seemed small, and thus more vulnerable. Frida liked to remind Cal that their neighbor was short, as if this spoke of some deeper lack. “This isn’t a nineteenth-century novel,” Micah had liked to say back at Plank, and Cal thought of that now. Bo could just as well have had a wooden leg, he thought. It would mean nothing.
“Have you searched for others? Who the hell is out there?”
Bo didn’t respond, and in the dark, Cal couldn’t see whether he intended to. So he went on. “There have to be more of us. Why haven’t they shown themselves?” He paused. “Why haven’t they killed us and stolen our shit?” He and Frida asked themselves this all the time. Besides a lunatic who had jumped in front of their car on their way through the Central Valley, they hadn’t been bothered by a soul since leaving L.A. Where were all the marauders—the Pirates—that everyone in L.A. was so frightened of? It couldn’t just be luck that had kept Frida and Cal safe.
“Why do you assume they’re bad people?” Bo asked.
Cal laughed. “I’ve seen movies.”
“They trade with August, they keep to themselves.”
“But why?” Cal asked. “What do you know?”
Cal heard the slosh of the liquor in Bo’s Mason jar, and a strong gulp, as if the man were preparing for a long story. Cal waited.
“When Sandy and I first came out here—years ago—we went on an exploratory mission. We were still living in the shed, and we secured it with this big bicycle lock before we left. Not that it would really keep anyone out, but we figured it was more important to know the area, dangerous or not.”
“Were there Pirates back then?”
Bo sighed. “We were curious, like you.”
Cal wondered why Bo was being so shifty. He thought he could see that Bo had his eyes on the tent, where their wives were hushing the children. He seemed suddenly anxious that Sandy might hear them. Would she contest his version of events? Maybe she had another story to tell.
“We walked due west for days,” Bo said, “and found no one, nothing. Nothing human, at least. Then we retraced our steps, and when we reached the shed, we went in the opposite direction.”
Bo paused, and Cal forced himself to remain silent, to wait him out.
“On the second day,” Bo began, as if he were reading from the Bible, “traveling east, we found a sign.” He paused, as if this should mean something. As though this was a well-practiced script. Cal had no idea what he meant. Was it a simple octagonal stop sign or the Virgin Mary, burned into a rock?
“There were large spikes coming out of the ground.”
“What do you mean, ‘spikes’?” Cal imagined a line of them, like at the exit of a parking lot. Severe tire damage, he thought.
“They were huge,” Bo said. As he and Sandy approached, they saw that the spikes weren’t smooth and uniform. They were made up of cast-off objects—car parts, old clothing, plastic—and wrapped in barbed wire, their tips sharp and jagged. They were twice as tall as Bo, and they leaned, as if into a strong wind. “They were menacing. Their presence meant, Turn around. Go away.”
Bo and Sandy only wove their way around a few. There were a hundred of them, easily, but if they’d had the time—and the courage, Cal thought—they could have discerned a route through them. Not all of them were spaced closely together. If you knew how, you could get in and out.
“You know all those contested nuclear waste sites?” Bo asked.
Cal nodded. When he was a kid, there’d been endless debates about where to store radioactive waste. He remembered politicians winning votes by promising to fight the proposed projects—not that they could. The fear of another Chernobyl or Fukushima or Tarapur wasn’t as strong as the need to put the radioactive material somewhere. Plank’s campus hadn’t been too far from a disputed site.
Cal took another sip of the liquor, and it burned down his throat. “What does this have to do
with nuclear waste?”
Bo explained that experts in the previous century had designed different ways to warn of a site’s danger, so that anyone might understand them: the foreigner, the illiterate, the alien. Large spikes had been one suggestion. In a thousand years, the message had to be clear, so that people understood what had been left there. “For the future,” Bo said, and a thread of ice inched down Cal’s spine. The future had arrived.
But the government had ultimately opted for something predictable; they’d plastered the sites with multiple signs bearing scientific information and stamped with the traditional nuclear symbol. Some said that future generations might take the image for an angel if they didn’t know better. “Tough shit for them, I guess,” Bo said.
“So these spikes you and Sandy saw? It wasn’t a nuclear waste site?” Cal asked, confused.
Bo shook his head. “Doubt it—but they reminded me of one. As if they’d been made in homage to a rejected vision.”
“So if the government didn’t build them, who did?”
“I don’t know,” Bo said. “But they weren’t that old. We found footprints, barely faded, and someone had dropped a leather belt, buckled very small. They must have been using it as a stirrup.”
“So what did you do?”
Bo seemed surprised by this question, as if its answer were obvious. They went back to the shed, he said, and began building the house.
“Why did you build so far from the shed?”
Bo laughed. “We conceived of the shed as a hidden shelter, should we need secondary protection. Safer that way.”
“Is there reason to be afraid?” Cal asked. “You still haven’t told me much.”
“I’m getting to that,” he said.
The first time August approached in his chariot, Bo and Sandy assumed he was from the Spikes, as they’d begun to call them, and Bo stepped out of their house with his rifle. It wasn’t exactly a house just yet, only its skeleton.
“August was here to trade. He wouldn’t say much about where he was from, only that he was a middle man. He told me he liked to make sure everyone was getting along all right, that no one was sick.” Bo paused. “He said the people who’d built the Spikes simply wanted to be left alone. They’re separatists, and they don’t allow their community to go beyond the border.” The border, it seemed, was the Spikes; they’d built them long ago.
Bo told Cal he would have liked to get more information, but August was already off the buggy, showing Sandy his various goods. She wanted the shovel.
“It was like a shopping center for her,” Bo said, and Cal thought, Shopping center. The phrasing had to be a clue to where Bo was from; that kind of information was always lodged in speech.
Bo’s story made Cal think immediately of the Communities. Gated, under surveillance, exclusive to everyone but the very rich. Back in L.A. Frida had often wondered aloud what they were like inside; before the Internet became too expensive and then stopped working altogether, she’d scoured it for information, for stupid gossipy facts. No smoking allowed! All the houses look the same! Some catered to Christians (mostly evangelicals), a few to Jews, while others didn’t mention religion at all. All of them, though, claimed to have working electricity; clean, paved streets; excellent schools; and secure borders. If you lived behind those gates, the oil crisis was merely a nuisance. If you had money, you had everything.
Cal had just shrugged at Frida’s interest, didn’t want to encourage her curiosity. Not like Micah, who loved to discuss them. The Communities made him murderously angry. They pissed off Cal, too, but he tried not to think of a world he couldn’t enter.
“Did you ask August how many Spike People there are?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
After Cal’s conversation with Bo, when the work of survival was backbreaking and difficult and the night a stinging kind of cold, Cal thought he and Frida might like being among the Spike People. Sometimes he felt the loneliness wrap around them like a net, especially once the Millers had died and they were living in their house. It was then that he wished to be allowed inside those spiky borders.
But he knew better. At the end of his story, Bo had leaned forward. “It’s better to stay put, Calvin.” His voice was stern, and then it turned ragged, almost desperate. “They’re not afraid to use violence. That’s what August told me. You stay put, Cal. You understand me?”
Cal said nothing. Frida and Sandy were headed toward them, their voices getting louder, closer. “Don’t tell your wife about this,” Bo whispered.
“Why not?”
“No need to worry her,” Bo said, which had made sense at the time.
So Cal had never told Frida what he knew, maybe only because he had promised to keep quiet. He didn’t want to scare her, but now she knew so little that she might do something rash. She didn’t realize that they had to stay put in order to remain safe. Their curiosity would get them killed. How could he tell her that, without revealing all that he’d kept from her?
Cal realized now that Bo had known all along that he and his family would die soon. That’s why it was easy to pass on the secret. Maybe it was a parting gift.
After the Millers had poisoned themselves, Frida and Cal spent a lot of time trying to understand their motives. But they kept coming up empty-handed. Had one of them been sick? Had they felt a sudden exhaustion with this life? Was someone after them? They only had questions.
By the time August found them living at the Millers’ place, he didn’t ask many questions. He had wanted to know where the others were, and when Cal said, “They ate poison,” the man simply nodded and went on with his sales pitch, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“You don’t look surprised,” Cal had said to him, when Frida ran inside to grab something to trade. “About the Millers, I mean.”
August merely raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not implying anything,” Cal said quickly.
“I didn’t think you were,” August said. “But, no, I’m not surprised. Bo got the poison from me. He traded me his gun for it. He asked for assistance, and I gave it.”
“Are you one of the Spike People?”
“What?” But then August understood. “Bo told you.”
“Why don’t they come here?”
“They believe in containment.”
“Cut the cultspeak. I want to know.”
It killed Cal not to have the full picture. How could he live in ignorance after he’d used every argument he had, every fact available to him, to convince Frida to leave L.A.? He’d told her there was a better world beyond than the one they knew. It was untouched; it had to be. A year before they left, another flu epidemic had hit the Northeast, and the population had been cut in half. (At least there was an upside of the oil crisis, people said; disease couldn’t afford to travel very far anymore.) The storm that killed his parents in Ohio had been followed by bigger and worse ones, and before the Internet went dead entirely, Cal read that only a third of the population in the Midwest and the South remained. “Anyone who’s left is staying put,” he told her. That was true in L.A., where people hung on to what was familiar. The city was rotting, it couldn’t be denied, but at least it was their city. And even if people wanted to leave, the state of the roads and the rising price of gasoline kept most from doing it. Soon, the oil would run out. Kaput.
“What about the Pirates?” Frida had asked, many times. There were stories about people who had tried to leave town only to be murdered as soon as they crossed the city limits. Rumor had it that Pirates collected victims’ teeth and hair and recycled them into household goods. Women were raped, people said. Men tortured. Cal didn’t know what to tell Frida, except that there was no proof that the Pirates really existed. He’d researched it, asked around, and came up with only more gossip, more fear. First he told her they had to be a myth. Then he promised her they’d drive fast and that they’d only stop to refuel once they were safely in the woods.
“And I have the g
un,” he’d said. Someone who worked with Frida had sold it to them a few months prior.
On their way, Cal and Frida had been vigilant, but there had been no trouble. A miracle, Frida said at the time. They’d seen no one but that one harmless man, and Cal’s theory turned out to be right: everyone left was either hibernating in the cities, waiting out hard times as if they’d ever end, or they were safe in the Communities. Or they lived out in the middle of nowhere and didn’t want to cause trouble. Could that be the whole story, though?
“It’s safe if you mind your own business,” August had said suddenly to Cal. “Don’t kid yourself—they can’t be bothered with you.”
Before Cal could speak, Frida had returned, and August was back to hawking his wares as if nothing had happened in her absence. Cal would not ask August any more questions.
* * *
All these months later, he’d pretended he wasn’t curious about August and the territory the man canvassed. Cal had hoped Frida would follow his lead, keep her head down, and focus on survival, on being happy in whatever way they could. Didn’t she understand that safety was most important? Especially now, if there was going to be a baby.
He looked once more at his wife sitting across the table from him. Her plate was still full.
“Eat,” he said.
She didn’t reply, but she took a bite. Relief spun through him like a cure. She’d listened to him for once.
Cal knew it was settled: he would protect their family, whatever it took. He wouldn’t say a word to Frida about what August and Bo had told him. He couldn’t.
5
At dawn, Frida slipped out of the house before Cal could stir. She was headed to the creek to do laundry, a chore that now felt like a hobby.
By the time they’d gone to bed the night before, she no longer felt the Vicodin, but she still couldn’t recall a single fragment of dream. This morning it was like her entire nervous system was wrapped in layers of gauze. She felt empty. At fifteen, she’d smoke until she hallucinated, and the next day, she would awake sharp as fangs. Now she was older, and her body had grown too used to being sober. It couldn’t handle having fun, not like it used to.
