California: A Novel (17 page)

Frida was glad when Anika told them they were almost finished. She wanted Cal.

Fifteen minutes later, she sat in their room, eating a bowl of mushy carrots, waiting for him. The group had invited her to eat with them in the dining room, but she’d declined. She knew Cal would rush to the bedroom when he was finished.

“You’re here,” he said as he entered. His shirt was dirty, his hair wet with sweat. He looked at her bowl of food. “Can I have some of that? I’m starving.”

“What did they do to you?” she asked, moving onto the bed so she could sit behind him.

He’d been with a crew of about four others, dismantling the wall of bricks by the Bath. They needed to break it apart without damaging the bricks, and it was hard work.

“They’re going to reuse them?” Frida asked.

Cal nodded and took a bite of food. The carrots were cold and bland, and he wrinkled his nose as he chewed. After he’d swallowed, he said, “They need a new outdoor oven.” For the last few weeks there’d been a lot of debate about the oven, as it meant taking apart an original structure. “But I guess functionality trumps nostalgia.” He held up his hands, their palms dyed reddish brown, his fingers chapped. “All I know is that job was a bitch.”

She pouted and kissed the back of his neck.

“Aren’t you being sweet,” he said, turning around.

“Is that hard to believe?”

He raised an eyebrow and tried to hand the bowl back to her. She shook her head. “You eat it. I’ve been around food all day.”

“Was it fun?” he asked.

“It was. They might let me bake bread.”

“Really? That’s great.”

Did she hear a snag of mournfulness in his voice? Maybe he was thinking of the bread she used to bake him when they had first started dating, and the pizza bagels he’d beg for. “One of those and a blow job, pretty please,” he’d said once, when she asked him what he wanted for his birthday. Or maybe it wasn’t quite as precious as all that. Maybe Cal knew, as she did, that once she started making bread for the Land, she’d never want to leave.

He set the bowl on the floor and then sat facing her on the bed. He put a hand on either side of her skull, cupping it. Frida had once seen an old man do that to a pregnant woman at a bus stop. Frida didn’t shake Cal off but let the weight of his palms rest there; maybe the brick dye would chalk off in her hair.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I cut my finger today.”

She held out her index finger to show him, and he let her head fall so that he could take her hand. He kissed the wound.

“Poor thing,” he said, and kissed her finger again, and then her wrist.

“Can you believe we’re here?” she said then, her stomach growing warm. Even now, Cal could make her core heat up like she was the center of the earth.

“I can’t,” he said, her finger in his fist.

She moved toward him, and the smell of his sweat hit her. That, and the unfamiliar dust of the Land. She liked the surprise of this new smell; she wanted it. She bit her lip.

Cal pushed her gently onto the bed and breathed into her neck, pushing his body against hers. In moments he had scooted her dress above her waist. The leggings she wore beneath belonged to Fatima, and Frida was afraid he’d say something, but he didn’t, he just grabbed at the elastic waistband with an urgency she hadn’t seen from him in a while. Maybe he liked the unfamiliarity. His eyes were closed; was he imagining someone else’s body beneath his own?

She put a hand on his chest and said his name. He opened his eyes. She pushed him off of her. “Look at me,” she said, and began pulling off his shirt. Despite the strange room, and the awful uncomfortable bed, and the secrets they’d kept from each other, Frida felt her desire for Cal expand and expand.

They didn’t bother with foreplay much anymore, those courtship niceties of kissing and petting before they were totally naked. If Cal was going to kiss her deeply, or put one of her breasts in his mouth, Frida wanted him inside of her as he did so. They were married, they were efficient: they’d done this dance dozens of times before, they both knew the song.

As they moved together, it felt better than it ever had.
This,
she thought. She wanted to call out, but she bit her wrist instead, her whole body pushing. Cal had kept his eyes open, he was watching her, he was witnessing the pleasure she felt, and she knew he felt it, too.

“My…,” she said, but she couldn’t finish the sentence, whatever it was going to be, she didn’t know.

Cal nodded. “My…,” he whispered back.

He had lifted her hips toward him, and they were right on the edge of the glorious cliff when she closed her eyes, and her mind flashed to the moment the knife cut into the skin of her finger. Maybe it had felt good, the blade breaking the skin the way a boat parts water. Maybe it had been beautiful and clean like that. Cal was pulling her body around his own.

Suddenly she saw them yesterday. Micah was moving from the kitchen into the dining room, their first meal in there, and she couldn’t stop looking at him. That long beard, and that raw patch of scalp on his head she didn’t yet know about. Someone must have rubbed alcohol there first, right, before they sliced that piece of him away?

Her brother was sitting at the table before that bowl of soup and then the knife was cutting through her finger, the blade smooth and sharp, and Cal was now heavy atop her, groaning. He was saying her name, and she felt a pang of pleasure so bright it almost blinded her insides. She saw the coyote, it was standing there in the dining room as they ate quietly, its mouth dripping with viscera, and she shot her eyes open.
Look at Cal,
she told herself. The pleasure was receding like a tide. She had to bring it back. Cal kissed her, and she held him to her lips, as if he could suck out the images in her mind. But he couldn’t.

“My…,” Cal whispered as he came, but Frida said nothing.

Afterward, still naked, they lay on the bed, breathing hard. After a moment, Cal sat up and began sifting through the bedsheets for his clothes.

“I need my stuff,” he said. This morning he’d had enough of being the Official Pussy Inspector and broke down and asked Sailor (not Micah, Frida noticed) for a shirt. Sailor had actually pulled his own T-shirt over his head and handed it to Cal. “We’ll trade,” he said. Cal had been wearing Sailor’s slightly tight shirt ever since. It puckered at the armpits.

“Why don’t you just let my brother give you some clothes? They’d fit you better.”

“We have to go back home, Frida,” he said, placing a hand on her hip.

“You mean to pick up more of our things?” She felt her body tense beneath his touch.

“For now,” he replied, moving his hand. “But we can’t just not make a decision.”

“They’re the ones voting,” she said.

“But we have a choice, too.”

She was silent.

“Today, in the kitchen,” Cal said, “did you get an idea of where they’re getting all their food from? I mean, did you get to look at their gardens? Where are they storing everything? Did they have any out-of-season fruit or”—his voice tipped—“anything canned?”

“I wasn’t on a recon mission, Cal.” She sat up. “God, could you please just let me have a few days to be here? With other people. With my brother?” She closed her eyes quickly; no doubt Cal had noticed that Micah had left Sailor to take care of them this morning.

“Don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to argue.”

He moved into a squatting position on the mattress. He was still naked, and it made her laugh. He almost tipped over, then righted himself, like a surfer.

“What are you doing?”

“Look out the window with me,” he said.

They both perched on the scratchy mattress, hands against the wall and headboard for balance. Cal pulled the cheesecloth from the window, ripping it off its staples.

“Cal!” Frida whispered, but she couldn’t help but laugh again.

They looked through the square of window. The scent of animal shit—or was that human shit?—wafted into the room. The air outside was cool, but, judging from how sweaty Cal had been after Labor, she knew it had to be warm in the sun by now. Frida leaned back and stuck her arm through the window. She put her palm against the side of the building, which was hot to the touch and rough as a pier and gritty with dirt.

Their room was on the north side of the Hotel, and from the window they could see beyond the main street to the areas Sailor and others had alluded to since their arrival, but which Frida hadn’t yet been curious about. Until now. The space was wide open as a meadow. It was mostly free of trees, except at the edge, where things grew wild and uninviting; a Spike rose menacingly above this patch of untended land and, next to it, another lookout Tower. Someone must be on duty, Frida thought. She wondered if they ever trained their binoculars in the other direction, toward the Land’s inhabitants.

To the left was the showering and laundry area, where clothing hung like prayer flags on multiple lines stretched between four trees. Frida watched as a man walked naked from one of the shower stalls to the lines. He grabbed a pair of pants hanging there and put them on.

Across the field was a structure that looked as if it had been recently constructed, perhaps out of materials collaged from various ghost-town buildings and whatever else the Land could get its hands on: the wood was both old and new looking and placed side by side; the planks gave the building stripes. The roof was made of corrugated metal and held secure with tires and wire, like their shed had been. The doors were tall and wide, like a barn’s, and a man came walking out with a goat on a rope. Along the outside of the building were animal pens.

“Is that where August’s mare lives?” Frida asked.

“I assume.”

“Where is he, you think?”

Cal shrugged. “You should ask Micah. He’d tell you.”

“I doubt it.”

“See if you can get him alone.”

“I want him to come to me. He’s been so cavalier about seeing me, after all this time. He just left us with Sailor this morning.” Frida felt the tears coming, and she tried to laugh them away. “Jeez, I guess the hormones have arrived.”

Cal leaned into her. “You deserve to spend time with him, Frida. He’s your brother. Just ask him.”

“I’ll try.”

It felt good, Frida thought, to be talking like this. They were plotting again; they were on the same side. They had returned to each other. They were something the world could understand. This had been how she’d imagined it, when Cal had first asked her to leave L.A.

Over the next two days, Frida began to get a handle on things. The lingo, for one. Residents on the Land didn’t work; they
labored.
They didn’t garden; they
farmed.
And those Spikes that surrounded them? They were called
Forms.

Learning these terms gave Frida a thrill. It was easy, like learning pig Latin or the gibberish she used with her friends as a girl. Her new Land friends couldn’t keep her out of conversations for very long—not that they were doing it on purpose; it was just the way they spoke about their world. The vocabulary was so simple, it was impossible not to start using it.

Frida was officially out of her half coma. After all, the Vote wasn’t far off. Not that she and Cal had talked about that. He was too busy asking Micah question after question to notice that his wife was campaigning.

If anyone noticed what Frida was up to, it would be her brother. Nothing ever got past him, never had. He’d always seemed to see her for what she was.

Was that still true? There was something weird about Micah now, and not only that he was alive when she’d been grieving him for the past five years. He didn’t participate in Morning Labor, for instance, nor did he seem to have a security shift, as far as Frida could tell. At dawn, when everyone else was headed to work, he disappeared with a handful of others, all of them men, Frida noted, including Peter. (
His cabal of yes-men,
she imagined Cal saying, but she didn’t dare bring this up with him.)

No, Micah was odd because he could send people away with a distracted wave without seeming like an asshole and because he hadn’t yet asked after Hilda and Dada, not really. He hadn’t yet asked to be alone with her, didn’t seem interested. As if it hadn’t occurred to him.

Then, on their fifth day on the Land, Micah came into the kitchen at the end of Morning Labor. “Want to go on a walk?” he asked her. Just like that. A few minutes earlier, her fellow cooks had told her that housekeeping had been sent to clean out Sue’s stable, which meant August would be returning soon. He was a few days behind schedule, though no one had any idea why. Or they did, but they weren’t telling Frida.

When Micah walked into the kitchen, the group got giddy. Not Fatima, who, Frida knew, spent a lot of time with Micah. But the others, even Anika, seemed to speed up their movements and speak louder, come into focus, into high definition.

“Can Frida leave early?” Micah asked Anika, who nodded and took Frida’s knife out of her hand. Strands of purple cabbage hung like party streamers from the blade.

“Leave it to me,” Anika said. “I’ll clean it up.” This was not the same woman who had gotten all huffy about the beans on Frida’s first shift.

They left through the back door. Construction on the new outdoor oven would begin soon, perhaps beautifying this dry lot of soil behind the Hotel. Until then, there were only the outhouse and a large fire pit dug into the dirt. The day before, Anika and Burke had used the pit to roast rabbit; the animals had been caught in rusted-out traps that almost everyone was worried about. Burke claimed that the contraptions wouldn’t last through the year, and Fatima had accused him of being an alarmist.

Morning Labor ended at lunch, but Frida had recently learned that some people spent the afternoons rotating through optional jobs like hunting, foraging, trapping, and composting. There was also construction of the Forms. Frida had wanted to join that group, but Sailor said it was by invitation only. He told her they could help with plumbing, if she wanted, which meant getting rid of human waste: cleaning bedpans, digging new latrines. “Everyone’s favorite,” he said. If not, she should just take it easy. He said most people had their afternoons off. “We value leisure time here,” he said, “and the boredom of a slow life.”