California: A Novel (9 page)

Before she fell into a friendship with Toni, Frida didn’t know all that much about the Group; her brother would occasionally divulge a tidbit here and there, but that was it. Like everyone else, Frida remembered the Group for being responsible for a few pranks, which they posted online immediately afterward or streamed live. The Group may have been founded by disgruntled students who wanted to rid the world of corruption, but that didn’t mean they knew how to get the public on their side; in those first few years, it was only the playful element that became visible to outsiders, making the Group’s organized outrage hard to interpret. “Think of it as two different branches of the same tree” was how Toni put it. “The drama club dorks on one, and the more socially minded theorists on the other. How we ended up on the same tree is kind of puzzling. But then again, both branches want to disturb the status quo, make people pay attention. It’s just a question of how to do that.” She paused. “The performance art folks were helpful in getting our name out there, and they have some ideas we can still use, but they’re so naïve, not to mention unfocused. The truth is, the Group is growing up, getting more serious.” She paused again. “To use the tree metaphor again: the artsy branch will eventually break off.”

When Micah joined, the world had still only seen the pranks, the playful stuff. Dada called the Group an avant-garde theater troupe, and, at first, that was kind of true. They were famous for getting a thousand bicyclists to merge onto the 405 at rush hour. That had really fucked with whatever traffic was still left on that ruin of a freeway, but only for an hour or so. A pocket of the Group was made up of dancers, actors, and artists, and they’d done a few big performances in the middle of open trials and city council meetings.

Right after he graduated from Plank, Micah told Frida that he was moving into a loft with other members. “The Group?” she’d repeated, and asked if he’d also gotten into acrobatics and fire-breathing when she wasn’t looking.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said.

“It just doesn’t seem like your thing,” she said.

Micah had shaken his head. “You don’t know anything about me.”

That had stung a little, and still did. If she knew anyone, it was her little brother.

When had that stopped being true?

Frida pulled her hands out of the creek water, and the cold iced up her fingers. She crab-walked to a patch of dirt and placed her palms flat on the ground until the groan of cold subsided.

The other, more serious branch of the Group had always been there, but it wasn’t until after Micah joined that it began to grow stronger. Or at least that’s when she noticed the shift, maybe because she started paying attention to their activities. Not long after Micah graduated from Plank, a few members of the Group had donned ski masks and hijacked a political fund-raising dinner. Those in attendance were said to be members of a nearby Community who wanted to close the roads surrounding their newly built compound. Someone from the Group ran a knife across a woman’s cheek, scarring her, and another had bashed a man’s head into one of the fake-orchid centerpieces. The Group had been protesting “corporate sponsorship of candidates,” according to the signs they showed to the camera. When Frida asked Micah about how it related to the bike prank, or to the juggling of doll heads, he shrugged and said he didn’t know a thing.

To Cal, it made sense that the Group appealed to Micah. “He’s interested in social justice, or so he says,” Cal remarked when she brought it up with him. “And he can also be dramatic, you know how he loves elaborate pranks.”

Once she and Toni had been running together for a few weeks, Frida got up the courage to ask her the same questions.

“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.”