California: A Novel

by Edan Lepucki

  “That’s exactly what we discuss at our meetings,” Toni said. “Are we undermining ourselves with our funny stunts? Or are we working toward the same goal?”

  “And what exactly is that goal?” Frida had asked. They were running faster now, and she could hardly get out the words.

  “Total world domination, of course,” Toni said, and laughed. Then she said, “If people think we’re just a bunch of clowns, we can get away with a lot more. Why do you think those morons let us into that fund-raiser to begin with? They must’ve expected a fucking flash mob.”

  Micah was never in any of the Group’s filmed stunts—playful or otherwise. He claimed he wasn’t holding the camera, either. Frida had watched the clip of the fund-raiser stunt over and over, despite how hard it was to do so, just to make sure her brother wasn’t one of the masked offenders. He wasn’t; she was sure of it. Besides, he’d never lie to her.

  At that, Frida imagined the creek laughing at her. You naïve little idiot, it might say.

  Frida dug her nails into the dirt—it felt strangely satisfying. It was a bad habit, and because of it, her nails were always filthy after doing the laundry. She stood up and returned to the creek’s edge. She held her breath as she pushed a dress under the cold water.

  From the beginning, Frida had liked Toni, who kept her hair in a tight ponytail and wore weird shoes like a revolutionary war general’s: square and buckled. The night she met her, Toni and Micah had come over for tea made with mint from one of Cal’s gardens. Her brother had barely touched his mug when he told Frida to stop watching the fund-raiser video. It was months old by then. “I told you, I’m not in it,” he said. “I’m not an actor, nor am I a director.”

  “But you are a ham,” Cal said.

  “That’s true!” Toni had cried, which made Frida laugh. Her brother needed a woman to put him in his place.

  “I don’t get what you’re after,” Cal said. “That poor fund-raising volunteer has a scar on her face. They said it got infected while healing. You know how hard it is to get antibiotics nowadays, and half the time they don’t even work.”

  “The point is,” Micah said, “people are waking from their numb slumber.”

  “It won’t be long until we do more,” Toni said, and Micah shot her a look.

  “What does that mean?” Cal had asked. Frida remembered he suddenly looked very serious in their candlelit living room. They were sitting on big pillows on the floor, and the large chessboard they used as a table was between them, its brown and beige squares splattered with old wine.

  Two weeks later, one of the gubernatorial candidates was kidnapped. After sixteen days, he was let go, naked except for a paper party hat, at the gate of the Community in Calabasas where he had thrown some rallies. He was unharmed, his campaign people said, but that could not be verified.

  The Calabasas Community wasn’t its own city, not yet, but it had exploited a loophole: it ran its own schools, funded its own police force and firefighters, and anyone hired to protect and work within its borders either had to be related by blood to one of its residents or pass a rigorous application process. But nobody knew how to apply because the details weren’t on its website. Calabasas was apparently pouring money into alternative energies; it’d be the first carbon-neutral and energy-independent Community in California, which would make it even more attractive to prospective residents who were sick of blackouts and high energy bills.

  The politicians understood that these were the constituents who mattered. Hardly anyone outside the Communities voted anymore. It didn’t seem to make a difference. Some people were waiting for the Communities to become their own sovereign states. It was only a matter of time, people said. Micah hated to hear this. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion, he said. They could fight it.

  Cal had simply thrown himself into his gardening projects. He argued that if the rich forsook them, the country might be better off. “Maybe I’ll run for office,” he said, holding up a basket of onions. “I’ll run on a vegetable platform.”

  He was joking, but Frida thought what Cal was doing made sense. He taught people how to grow their own food. This was necessary. After all, his expertise had kept them alive.

  Cal would never let them go hungry, Frida thought now. He’d gotten them this far.

  She lifted the dress out of the creek, and was surprised by how heavy the water had made it. Laying the dress across a rock, she grabbed Cal’s pants, faded and dirty at the knees and still cuffed at the hems. Such a sweet sight, his clothing, wrinkled and wet, removed from his body. Even when things got difficult between them, doing Cal’s laundry made Frida feel a love so tender she could weep.

  The Group never took responsibility for that first kidnapping. It was obvious they were behind the stunt, though, and for an entire month Frida and her family didn’t hear from Micah. Her parents had no idea what was going on, but they were too busy struggling with Dada’s diminishing career and the cost of living to worry too much about him. Besides, he’d never been great at keeping in touch with them; and when he did swing by, he’d bring liquor and a crate of potatoes, and they’d be delighted, tripping over themselves with gratitude.

  “They probably think he’s doing summer stock,” Cal joked.

  Four weeks into Micah’s disappearance, Frida had walked to the east side for answers. She didn’t dare drive; the lines at the gas station were long, and it would’ve taken a week’s worth of wages to pay for the trip. Besides, she didn’t want Cal to know what she was up to. To this day, she’d kept it a secret.

  She had turned onto Echo Park and walked a block when a man had approached her, empty-handed but imposing. “Can I help you?” he’d asked.

  “I’m a friend of Toni’s,” she said, and the man looked at her closely before nodding. He whistled once, loudly, and suddenly there was her brother’s girlfriend, calling from the window above.

  Toni lived on the second floor of a ramshackle duplex that overlooked Echo Park’s now-drained lake. The lake’s old bridge was gone, maybe burned for firewood, as were the pedal boats. Frida had been born too late to see the lotus flowers, which had once floated across the water’s surface.

  “Where is he?” Frida had asked Toni as soon as they were face-to-face. “Is he okay?”

  Of course Toni wouldn’t tell her anything, at least not there, not with other Group members in the living room behind her and hanging around on the porch below.

  Looking back, Frida realized the Group had established a nascent encampment, even then. Everyone on that block was a member of the Group. That guy who had whistled for Toni was protecting their space. Already they were patrolling that part of town. Already they’d put people to work to improve their surroundings. Frida had nodded to the women in the empty lake who were picking up debris with yellow dishwashing gloves on their hands. She wondered if they were the same women who flirted with her brother. Toni had only smiled at the view. “We’re all about beautification.” Then she said Frida should go.

  The next day, Micah showed up at Frida and Cal’s door with a party blower in his mouth. He blew into the mouthpiece, and the striped plastic unfurled into a straight line with a crunch that made Frida’s stomach tighten.

  “You aren’t dead,” she said, and let him inside.

  She did not give him the satisfaction of asking about the kidnapping.

  That had been a rough time, Frida thought now, not even counting the collapsing economy, the nights without power or heat. Thank God for the weather in L.A. and the tiny apartment she and Cal had moved into; they kept each other warm. It was rough because of Micah’s secretive life, and her parents’ ignorance—their denial—of it; because of Cal’s disdainful remarks about her brother, whom she felt a compulsive need to defend, and because of Toni and Micah’s arguments: the damage of those fights trailed them like a pack of hungry dogs. And then Canter’s closed, and Frida couldn’t bake anymore. And then she and Cal had even less money. The day she brought home loaves of stale bread for the
last time, her hairnet balled in her back pocket like some useless currency, she’d thought it couldn’t get much worse.

  But it could, and it did.

  Frida pulled Cal’s pants out of the water. Without thinking, she stuffed them into the laundry bag. It was stupid—she still needed to do the socks—but she suddenly wanted to be back home. A dark puddle spread across the bag, as if it had been wounded.

  She didn’t want to fight with Cal anymore.

  Hilda used to say that anger was a choice. Frida could make the choice not to be angry with her husband, even if he was keeping secrets. She’d lied to him about August, hadn’t she? Cal thought August knew about the pregnancy, but he didn’t. Now he knew about Micah, and she had promised Cal she’d never tell anyone out here about her brother. She had broken that promise, and so easily. It made her sick.

  She didn’t want conflict to eat them from the inside out, as it had done to Micah and Toni. After a while, Cal had refused to spend time with them as a couple, so painful was it to watch them avoid each other’s gazes, to use the other for sport.

  Micah was the one to diagnose Toni with her “Jealousy Problem.” It might have been a problem, but it didn’t mean her feelings were unfounded. Toni had described to Frida what it was like to watch him with the other women in the Group. She didn’t like the way they brought him little treats; once a girl named Leanne had stolen a bag of Jordan almonds for him. “For his long hours,” Toni said, rolling her eyes. He’d eaten them in their bed as Toni tried to sleep. “I prayed he’d crack a molar.” She didn’t like the way the girls were so eager to volunteer their time for him: they’d gladly transcribe, email, or post links to go viral. And at the meetings, she said, it had gotten too much to bear. “They come earlier to get a seat in the inner circle,” she said. Apparently, metal folding chairs were set up in concentric circles like tree rings with the meeting leaders standing in the center.

  The Group met in an abandoned Taco Bell. They were squatting in it, and they’d move to a new space soon enough. Toni wouldn’t say where the restaurant was, though how many could there be in Echo Park? Cal thought they were getting more careful, and from what Toni said, it sounded like it. Frida wondered when the other members would ask Toni to stop running with outsiders.

  The Group had removed the restaurant’s bolted-in booths and tables for their meeting space; only a select few ever saw what was behind the counter in the defunct kitchen. “They’re building things in there,” Toni said once, at the very end of a run, and Frida noted that she’d moved from we to they. Frida hoped to get more information from her, but soon Toni was back to talking about the girls. She was tired of watching the proceedings from the Siberia of the outer circle, she said, and she refused to arrive early. “Whenever Micah takes the floor, the younger girls, especially the new ones, lean forward, as if they’re having trouble hearing him.”

  Micah had grown so secretive about the Group that he would have killed Toni for telling Frida all this. Cal either wasn’t interested or he was derisive, and even if Frida had wanted to join the Group, Micah would have denied her entry. She had fallen in love with a man who had dismissed her brother’s passion, and for that, Micah withheld everything from her.

  One day Toni showed up at Frida’s place and said she was done with the meetings.

  “What happened?” Frida asked.

  Toni said she’d stood to suggest an all-female delegation. She thought that might help things; let the older members tell the younger women how the system worked. She tried to present it as a way to strengthen bonds. No one seemed interested. Before Toni could even sit down, Leanne stood to ask Micah if he wanted her to mop the floors after the meeting.

  Toni said she didn’t mean to plunge her sharp, rusty bobby pin into the bitch’s arm, it just happened.

  After that, Toni was still a member, still involved, just not on a weekly basis. Or so Frida assumed, until the Group blew up the entrance to the county hospital. No one could prove they’d done it, but it was obvious to Frida it had been their work. The hospital had begun to charge for entrance into the emergency room—cash or gold only—and a man had died of dehydration in the parking lot. The Group had allegedly thrown a Molotov cocktail through the sliding glass doors. The man taking money at the entrance had been killed, and a nurse lost her hand.

  Two days later, during a run, Frida asked Toni about their last stunt. “What the hell, you guys?”

  Toni sped up. “I’m over it. The Group is Micah’s thing.” She didn’t want to talk about it. She was no longer a member. Just like that.

  Micah also wouldn’t explain. “We’ve moved in a new direction” was all he’d say.

  Not long after, Toni was supposed to meet her for a run, but when Frida opened the door, Micah was there. He’d shaved his head, and beneath a sharp stubble of hair, his scalp stunned white.

  “Where’s Toni?” Frida asked.

  “She’s gone,” he said. He was very calm.

  “Where did she go?”

  “She left.”

  Frida thought he meant she’d simply moved out, but, no, she was gone. Frida never saw or heard from her again. Everyone guessed she had gone back to her grandmother in Washington after all. Sometimes, even now, Frida thought of Toni in one of the Communities. She was running down a smooth, paved road. There were cameras on every corner and uniformed guards, and she felt safe and clean. She probably had a baby.

  Frida pulled the pants out of the bag again and shook them so they hung straight. She walked over to the big rock and lay them flat across its surface. It wasn’t time to go yet. She wasn’t finished.

  Cal wanted Frida to be pregnant. And Frida wanted that, too, if she was honest with herself. It felt like a dare, the biggest, most important risk of all. Micah would think so. Before the Group ruined him, when his mind was still open, fluorescent as plankton, he might’ve written her a letter that said, Go ahead, believe in it. Don’t get all afraid on me.

  “I’m not afraid,” she said aloud.

  The way her voice sounded in the morning air made her turn around. Was it some desire for a reply? No one was there, just the trees. This didn’t surprise her, but she did feel disappointed, as if she’d been stood up. But by whom? The creek rushed along, oblivious, and across the water, the forest waited. She and Sandy used to go foraging there, but they always stopped before getting in too deep, before the land became alien.

  In a moment, she had the mesh bag full of Cal’s socks, and she was crossing the creek. The trees seemed to step aside, to let her into the darkness. After you, they whispered. She walked farther, in a direction she’d never gone. But there was a path here, slightly overgrown, and she saw the track marks of August’s carriage. She knew he carried a scythe to cut away brush as he traveled; it was as if he had cleared the way for her.

  She draped a single sock on the branch of a tree. The fabric was gray and thin, and it had once belonged to Bo. Now it was a crumb that would lead her back. Hilda and Dada and Micah would be a fairy tale to her baby, but for Frida, this world here, the afterlife, was the fairy tale. If she wasn’t careful, Frida would be eaten by a witch at the end of her journey.

  In a few moments, August’s tracks led to a narrow trail, thick redwoods on either side. Frida paused, hands clenching the bag of socks. She sighed. “I’m not afraid,” she said again, as if to remind herself. She placed a red sock on a branch and kept walking.

  Every few minutes or so, she left a piece of clothing for herself to find on her way back. And she would find her way back. The longer she walked, the more her chest tightened. She’d felt like this before, driving lost in L.A., her Navigator and her Device dead. She’d pass through a rough neighborhood hoping to find something familiar so she could breathe again, blink again, though, by the end, every neighborhood that wasn’t a Community was rough. She was alert in that same way now. She had to pay attention, or she might get turned around, never find the thread of the route. The clothing wouldn’t be any help if she hea
ded in the wrong direction. She had created a system: colored clothes meant turn right, black and white ones meant turn left, and gray, head straight. She kept her eyes on landmarks: The tiny stream. The vines choking a thick trunk. A lone crocus.

  After she had walked for about an hour, she saw something white up ahead. She quickened her pace, even as she wanted to turn around.

  It was a bathtub, with claw feet like a beast’s. The inside was rusted out and filled with brown rainwater, green algae floating on its surface. Something jagged snagged Frida’s throat, and she swallowed it down. Here was evidence of other people. A person had abandoned this here.

  What was she doing? She had to pee, and she only had two pairs of socks left. If Cal came to find her at the creek, maybe to talk, he would worry. And then, later, he’d be so angry. She had to turn around before she came upon other objects. Before someone stepped in her path with a weapon.

  But first, she hiked up her dress and squatted next to the tub. She pulled down her leggings and peed. There was an atavistic relief to this, and her eyes watered from the pleasure. The end of the world couldn’t take this tiny joy away from her. She was a dog, marking her territory.

  Frida was here.

  As she stood, pulling up her leggings, her dress falling back to her ankles, a sound caught her attention. Something like a crunch, like someone stepping on fallen leaves. She froze, that jagged thing rising in her throat once more. “Hello?” she whispered.

  No answer.

  Relax, she told herself, it’s nothing. Couldn’t be. But still, she thought she felt a presence not far from where she stood. Something, someone, was watching her, its breath shaping the molecules between them. She was breathing in that same air.

  She stepped away from the bathtub. She would hurry back to the creek and then return to Cal. Nothing had happened; she was safe.

  From behind a tree, another crunch. The sound came from her left, and she turned.

  A coyote. It was standing there, watching her. It didn’t look like the starving ones that used to skulk around L.A., desperate for a cat to eat, some garbage scraps. This one was well fed, big, with coarse brownish-gray fur that looked prickly to the touch. If Frida didn’t know any better, she might think she’d run into a strange dog, tall and eerie eyed. It was so still.