California: A Novel

by Edan Lepucki

  “Micah?”

  “When the Plank boys first joined us, I asked them about the farmhouse. I don’t like nostalgia, it’s useless thinking, but I found myself missing those years, wanting to bring some of that time back. Not that I could ever do that, not really.”

  “I can’t blame you for trying,” Cal said. “It was beautiful there.”

  Micah closed his eyes, and for a moment Cal saw him as his old roommate. Micah’s cluttered desk and unmade bed, the socks he’d wear two days in a row before changing into a new pair. They’d stay up so late some nights, reading, drinking, talking—about what? T-ball. Adorno. Whose grandparents were weirder. What if they’d been born in 1472. Or 1981. Or 2015. Or tomorrow: “Abort me, Mama” was all Micah would say about that hypothetical. After nights like those, they’d be yanked awake just an hour or two later by sunlight pouring into the room. One time, Micah groaned and threw a sneaker at the window; the shoe bounced off the glass, thankfully. Neither put up a sheet to cover the light or even discussed it. That wasn’t how they did things at Plank.

  “Come on,” Micah said now, opening his eyes. “I want to show you something.”

  Micah began walking toward the stage, and Cal followed. He no longer felt restless; he was calm, as if he’d slept deeply all night long.

  “Where’s Peter?” Cal asked.

  “In bed,” Micah said, without turning.

  When Micah reached the door behind the pulpit, he lifted his pant leg and pulled a ring of keys from his boot.

  “Better than a knife,” Micah said, and turned to open the door.

  The door had just one locked knob, but when Micah opened it, there was a second door, also locked.

  “Two doors?” Cal said. “Wow.”

  Micah wrestled with the lock. “Came like this. It’s mostly for show. Nothing that can’t be bulldozed or blown up.”

  “You should know,” Cal said. “Or, no, I guess not.”

  “Touché,” Micah said. “But just because I wasn’t killed by a bomb doesn’t mean I don’t know how to make one. Remember how the guys and I used to blow up the empty feed containers?”

  “You totally freaked out the livestock.”

  Micah hooted. “That’s about all. They weren’t very powerful explosives.”

  Cal had to step out of the antechamber so there was room for Micah to pull open the door.

  “Here we go,” Micah said, and Cal peered over Micah’s head to see a short, narrow staircase, carpeted with what looked like Astroturf after one too many minigolf games.

  Cal wasn’t sure what to expect. Were they headed to the war room? He imagined more maps, maybe a wall of weapons—machetes, machine guns, and sparkling, sharp daggers. Bombs. Bricks of gold.

  Micah Ellis as James Bond? Oh come on, Cal, he thought.

  He took the stairs two at a time, just as Micah did, arms winged, hands not holding anything.

  As Cal took in the room he caught himself feeling grateful. No Bond here.

  There were books. Real ones, with spines that cracked, pages that you could fold over, underline, tear out, even. Most were hardcover; Cal hadn’t seen those in years, not since he’d graduated from Plank. There was no way Micah would have shown this to Frida.

  “Awesome, right?” Micah said.

  Pushed against the opposite wall was a ratty couch made of crushed velvet so green it was yellow. Chartreuse, that was the word Frida would use. At one end of this couch someone had flung two gingham pillows, badly sewn, probably stuffed with the feathers of a sad, small bird.

  On the table in front of the couch was a pile of comic books. Cal thought it was a series his father had collected.

  Above them was a skylight, the glass still intact, the weak dawn light streaming through. The steeple’s spire was visible through the glass.

  “They put that in when they were rehabbing this place,” Micah said, gesturing above. “It used to lead to the steeple, but now you can’t access it that way. Not much forethought for authenticity, but at least it’s warm in here.”

  “You’re lucky the bell’s not there anymore,” Cal said. “Someone would want to climb up to ring it.” A little boy, he thought. “You come up here a lot?” he asked.

  “I do,” Micah said, sitting down, “but not as much as I’d like.” He sighed and picked up a pillow. “It’s silly, which is why it’s a secret. It means too much to me to share.”

  “That’s selfish.”

  Micah shrugged. “Sounds about right for me, don’t you think?”

  Cal laughed and walked to the bookcase. He resisted the urge to run his finger along the spines, but he read some of the titles. The Prince. The Pleasure of the Text. The Waste Land. Bridget Jones’s Diary. A Bereavement.

  “A Bereavement? Franzen’s posthumous novel?” Cal asked.

  “Some are from Plank.”

  “And the others?” Cal asked.

  “The comics, they’re from Burke’s grandpa.” He paused. “He has no idea I took them and put them here.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “Again, sounds about right.”

  Cal sat next to Micah and grabbed the comic book. On its cover the superhero wore a mask and suit, its red and blue bisected with black lines, meant to look like spiderwebbing. He was climbing the side of a building.

  “My dad used to read these.”

  “I know, Cal. We were roommates, remember? You used to go on and on about your dad.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just that you didn’t live with the guy, so of course he was godly.”

  Cal put down the comic.

  “Sorry,” Micah said.

  It was the first time, as far as Cal could recall, that Micah had apologized. For anything.

  “Micah,” Cal said. There was opportunity here to find out the whole story. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, the moment both he and Frida needed. “If Frida’s pregnant, what are we going to do? Will we be sent away?”

  Micah groaned. “You and Peter…”

  “Me and Peter what?”

  “You won’t let up. You want to know my plan.”

  “Do you have one?”

  Micah raised an eyebrow. “In a way, yes. But it doesn’t have anything to do with your baby. Who may or may not exist.”

  “He does.”

  “‘He’?”

  Cal took a deep breath. “I know the Land is opposed to expansion, to children.”

  “It makes sense, you know it does.”

  “Does it?”

  “The Land was a mess when we first got here. There were children, but they weren’t doing that well. Almost all of them were underweight. One had a skin infection that needed to be treated. Right after I got here, one girl died of a fever. A fever, Cal. Can you imagine? Almost all of them were still too young to contribute anything, and the adults spent a lot of time looking after them, and they couldn’t get as much work done, couldn’t make preparations for their own survival. That endangered the whole community. Plus, the older ones would be teenagers in a few years, and who knows what would happen then? They might not follow rules or do their jobs. Or they might decide to leave the Land and jeopardize everything.” He paused. “Pines wanted children, and I could provide them with that. The kids are safe, and so are we. Everyone here agreed to the policy.”

  “And will that policy remain? The Land’s different now.”

  “What I did wasn’t an act of cruelty,” Micah said.

  “You can’t send my child away.”

  “You’re right, Frida wouldn’t let me.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Cal said.

  Micah said nothing.

  “Haven’t you considered passing all this on?” Cal waved a hand through the air. He meant the room, he realized. It was everything to his friend. Even after all that had happened, Micah was his friend.

  “An heir?”

  “Your word, not mine,” Cal said.

  Micah was trying not to smile.
“You don’t understand.”

  “Then make me,” Cal said. “This morning meeting is just ten minutes in. Plenty of time left for you to tell me your crackpot ideas. Just like in our salad days, right?”

  Cal expected him to laugh, but Micah had turned inward. When he looked up again, there was something fierce in his eyes, and Cal saw a man who was capable of murder, of beheading, of who knew what else.

  “You think I’m just a shill for Pines,” Micah said. “I wouldn’t blame you, if you thought that. I mean, we work with them, so if you wanted to put it that way, you could.”

  “Do you put it that way?”

  “Depends on who’s asking.”

  Micah began to speak in a rush. It was as if Cal had merely reached over and turned a volume knob behind his brother-in-law’s ear, as if Micah had been talking all this time, and Cal just hadn’t heard him.

  “I go about once or twice a year. August goes on his own the other times, as often as he can. Aside from bringing them information, we also trade fresh produce and cow’s milk, that kind of thing. You knew that. Sometimes we bring them fish from the stream or barrels of our soil, which I guess is really something else. If you asked anyone on the Land, they’d tell you that Pines loves what we have to offer—the shit we make is artisanal.”

  “So—what then? August walks into Pines with a bucket of dirt?”

  “I wish. The journey is hard, with the state the roads are in, but it’s not impossible once you know the trouble spots. We take the bus. Did you see it, on your trek here?”

  Cal nodded. He remembered the pristine school bus.

  “We have permits, which are updated at each visit, contingent upon our behavior, our information. There are more people allowed into the Communities than you think. It’s pretty easy to fill out the paperwork.” He waited for Cal to say something, perhaps to express surprise, but Cal said nothing.

  “Communities have to communicate with one another,” Micah continued. “It’s obvious, I guess, but I never thought about it until someone explained it to me. It’s more efficient for these guys to work together. Sometimes, at least.”

  Cal only spoke because he could tell Micah wanted questions to answer. “Work together on what?” he asked.

  “For starters, shipments from outside arrive at one Community, and they need to be distributed to another. People need their coffee from the cartels in Mexico, right? It’s cheaper for a shipment to be delivered to one Community, and then have it exported from there. Easier to negotiate prices.”

  A grin crept across Micah’s face, and Cal could tell he was just getting warmed up.

  “Communities are all about being private and secure, but in reality their borders are more porous. As long as you don’t draw attention to yourself, you’re good. Our bus looks like the ones all over Pines, so when it arrives, people are happy to look the other way. Most residents don’t want to see outsiders. At all.”

  “Is what you have to offer to Pines really so valuable that they let you come and go as you please?”

  Micah raised an eyebrow. He tapped his wrist, as if there were a watch on it. “Think about it, Cal. What do the Communities have to offer their citizens?”

  Cal shrugged. “Jacuzzi tubs? Air-conditioning? Schools?”

  Micah shook his head. “Yes, but all that shit represents one thing.”

  “Money.”

  Micah sighed, impatient. “Again, true. But money can’t be depended on anymore. We’ve seen that, again and again.”

  “What then?”

  Micah smiled. “Safety, Cal. What the people behind those gates want, and what they’re willing to give up anything for, is safety. They want to sleep knowing that their house won’t get robbed. They want to meet a friend at a wine bar without worrying that some maniac will blow himself up as they catch up over a bottle of Riesling.”

  That had happened in San Francisco not long after Micah’s bombing at the mall: a man strapped with explosives walked into a restaurant in the Financial District, and ten seconds later everyone was dead. A week after that one, Palo Alto’s Community announced it would be adding a new luxury neighborhood that would offer twenty-four-hour patrolling guards. A Community in Marin took another tactic and capped its membership at three thousand. The bigger the population, they argued, the harder it was to vet its members and remain safe. New members would pay a premium to live in a small and secure village with like-minded neighbors.

  “Was the Group behind the other bombings?” Cal asked.

  “The one in San Francisco was orchestrated by an allied organization,” Micah said. “The others, I was led to believe, were copycats.”

  “What about now? What have you been led to believe now?”

  “The Community that’s safe is successful,” Micah said. “That’s their value. The safest Community can raise its membership fees and dictate prices when trading with other Communities. Once or twice, a rich Community has bought out another, less successful one.”

  “And you provide safety?”

  Micah smiled.

  “Do you, Micah?”

  “I have my eyes and ears open—you already know that. I tell the guys at Pines who’s out there and what they need to worry about. I report that there’s a young healthy couple from L.A. living in the woods, but they’re harmless. Or that there’s a man and his teenage wife ten miles from here, that they’re weird but too stupid to be a threat. The Land provides a travel barrier between Pines and the small outcropping of settlements to the south.” He paused. “Since we got here, the Pirates have ceased wreaking havoc in the area, and they no longer skulk around the edges of Pines. That was bad for business.”

  “You’ve cleaned up the wilderness? Just by being here?”

  Micah took the comic book out of Cal’s hands and placed it back on the pile. “I’ve done stuff that would make your stomach turn.”

  Cal didn’t doubt it. He waited for Micah to speak again.

  “We cleaned up the Pirate problem.”

  “How?”

  “We trained the boys we got from Plank. We needed to get this area under control. It would surprise you what Plankers can do. Sailor, for instance? He looks like a teenage girl, but if some sack of shit’s been raping and pillaging, he’ll kill that fucker without hesitation.”

  “So you obliterated the Pirates? For good?”

  “I wouldn’t use that phrase, ‘for good,’” Micah said. “Nothing’s permanent anymore, is it? The boys and I utilized a combination of force and negotiation to solve the Pirate problem. Now they stay away from Pines, and they leave us be. Most of the people who were here on the Land when we arrived just want to be taken care of, and I gave them that.”

  “It must be strange working with Pines,” Cal said. “How do you stomach it, after all you worked for in L.A.?”

  “It’s complicated,” Micah replied.

  “Is it?”

  “Do you realize that the Communities benefited from the violence the Group enacted in L.A.? They could show their citizens, and their potential citizens, that they could protect them from all that.”

  “They were safe from maniacs like you,” Cal said.

  “Exactly,” Micah said, but the calculating look in his eyes had been replaced with anger.

  “We had contacts in Calabasas and in Laguna Niguel who kept the right people aware of our intentions. They knew what I was about to do.”

  “And you? Did you know the whole time that the Group was doing all the dirty work for the Communities? That the Group is the shill?”

  “Or I was the shill.” Micah shook his head, and from the expression on his face it looked like he’d eaten something rotten. “From early on, the Communities were pouring money into our organization. I had no idea.”

  “Did the Communities start the Group?”

  “No way. I can’t believe that. But somewhere along the way, they got entangled.”

  “‘They got entangled’? Not we?”

  “You keep asking if we
’re part of the Group.”

  “Are you?”

  “We’d like our contacts to think so. As far as they know, we’re doing what we’re asked to make Pines safer, and in return the Group continues to be funded. The encampment is growing, and so is the Group.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “That wasn’t the heart of it, Cal. Never was. I wouldn’t be surprised if our encampments were eventually turned into Communities. The Group isn’t what it used to be. I still believe the Communities should be destroyed. Safety is a right for everyone.”

  Cal felt himself nodding. He agreed, and so would Frida.

  “Toni is one of our main contacts in Pines.”

  “Toni? Has she been there the whole time? I thought she left the Group a long time ago.”

  Micah shook his head. “She isn’t really in the Group. Though she is to those who need to believe it. She makes sure our permits are renewed and that our information reaches the right people. She cultivates relationships for us. And she can slip something to us into, say, Frida’s beloved baking box.”

  “Crate. Baking crate.”

  Cal was picturing Toni. How she used to argue with Micah, yell at him, give him the finger, in front of other people, her posture stiff as a war general’s. Toni would do anything, if it meant enough to her.

  “I still love Toni,” Micah said.

  “I thought she couldn’t hold your attention.”

  “I was a kid then,” he said. “Now…I get it.”

  Cal raised an eyebrow.

  “The point is,” Micah said, “someday, we might turn on Pines. The Group wants to be their little bitch, sure, but that’s not all of us. I’m forming my own Group, don’t you see? Let the old members get complacent. Everyone does, eventually.”

  Cal blushed. He was slumped against the couch as if there were a ball game on. He’d been sitting like this ever since Micah had taken the comic book from him and had been fighting the urge to stand up again and pull one of the books from the shelves. He had his eyes on a slim blue volume of Kant. He remembered it from the Plank reading room.

  Now he sat up straight.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You mean what are we going to do,” Micah said.