Nicotine (29 page)

They enter Rob's attic space and examine the chimney. It has one porthole for a Franklin stove, sealed up with a pie plate.

“I could open this out into a fireplace,” the contractor says. “I'd just have to reinforce the stack below and cantilever it here.”

“It's too small,” Matt says. “I might want to build an extra chimney on the end of the house. A little bit of self-indulgence after I insulate this place and put in a heat pump.”

They walk downstairs. “You could fit more than one unit on each floor,” the contractor advises Matt. “Make these apartments too big, and you're going to get families in here. Never trust a tenant to stay single. You have to put the squeeze on them from the start.”

“It's not apartments. It's a community center. The first floor is an anarchist café bookstore. Above that we have our yoga classes, baby massage, all that shit. And I live on top. One apartment. The showers are for the yoga studio.”

The contractor is silent. Finally he says, “That could work out pretty nice for you.”

“It's called the Norman Baker Center, after my father. He was born in this house. It's a 501(c)(4) charitable institution.”

“It's going to revitalize this neighborhood right up, you old horn-dog.”

That's Matt's plan. The name might attract donations or other support from his father's cult, reducing his time to break even while freeing up cash for real estate speculation. Ultimately some neighbors may face rent hikes, but one anarchist in particular, if all goes well, will dwell rent-free in more comfortable surroundings than she has ever known. His own generosity moves him to tears, as he knows from hearing the Bread song “It Don't Matter to Me” on the radio on the way over.

PENNY CATCHES THE PATH TRAIN
to midtown Manhattan for her job interviews at the bank. She feels sullen and rebellious, as well as tired. Those emotions keep her face still, her gait steady, her handshake firm, and her answers straightforward. She leaves with an appointment at an assessment center in Piscataway. She will spend the following Thursday and Friday taking IQ tests and vying with coapplicants for imaginary leadership roles.

She arrives home fatigued. She dumps her briefcase by the door
and heads straight to the kitchen. She longs for cigarettes and beer. She compromises on beer.

Barry tells her the news. (Later she hears it from Maureen, Rufus, and Stevie.) “Did you hear Nicotine is being turned into an anarchist community center?”

“What? Are they back?” Her mind flashes to the condition of the house when she last saw it, and she adds, “That's impossible.”

“No, it's some guy we don't know doing it. It's going to be called the Norman Baker Center.”

“The
what
?”

“Don't freak out, it's just some local anarchist who happened to have the same last name as you, probably a hundred years ago. Anyway, there's going to be a bookstore, and a bar, and meeting rooms. The Nicotine guys split, and nobody knows where they went, so it was up for grabs. I think it's great somebody's doing something for the community instead of just looking after their own interests by grabbing free real estate to live in it. You know what I mean? Squatting should be a means to an end, like with CHA, not just a way of saving on rent.”

“Some people
need
to save on rent,” Penny says firmly.

“Those people will always need help, until the revolution makes a clean slate. Giving activists a space to share strategies for effective resistance—that's what will help us in the end. I worked at a bookstore in Arcata for a while. I'm going to talk to that guy. Maybe I can work at the store.”

“If he's putting money into fixing up the house,” Penny says, “maybe it's not going to be a free store.”

PENNY TEXTS ANKA, AND ANKA
invites her to DJD to eat vegan pupusas.

In the kitchen, Sunshine is singing Matt's praises, sight unseen. He already has plans to co-opt the Center for educational events and
films that celebrate energy efficiency—the climate change strategy that will finally make electricity too cheap to meter. (The feedback loop works by depressing demand so that coal-fired power becomes producers' only economically viable option* [*under free market capitalism].)

After dinner, Penny and Anka continue their talk upstairs, sitting on Susannah's bed. Anka says, “Go back to the beginning, as if Sunshine hadn't been in the kitchen. Tell me again.”

“Matt is renovating—”

“
No! No! Bad! Wrong! Not happening!
” They both laugh.

“I'm sorry,” Penny says, “but if you had any idea what kind of thing Matt is capable of—”

“He tried to kill Rob! Does he need to be capable of anything else? And now he's taking over the house. He's the scariest violent lunatic I ever saw, even including Jazz, and he's rich, and good-looking, and obviously well connected in local government, if he can get a building permit that fast. We should go to the
police
.” They both laugh again. “I bet he has powder burns on his suit,” she adds. “Jazz would be so fucked.”

“‘Norman Baker Center,'” Penny says. “You know what's going to happen. All the jam-band kids that think my dad was a psychedelic drug wizard are going to show up and be tripping out and sleeping in the yard.”

“Well, as long as they're white,” Anka says. “They won't mar Matt's excellent investment.”

“We should get a loan and buy DJD from CHA before the market takes off.”

“Like CHA even has title. I mean, it's
possible
. But I think they just do classic microfinance. Like three thousand bucks for two years at twenty-five percent, because everybody defaults. That kind of thing. It's not on the scale of—where are you working again?”

“Don't make me say the name of Mom's bank. It's so embarrassing they might give me this job.”

JAZZ RUNS DOWNHILL THROUGH GRAY
badlands. Rob pulls on belts, checks oil, refills coolant. Sorry smokes a cigarette, sitting in the open side door of the minivan. The sun, behind a mountain, leaves the valley in shadow. A coyote crosses between the car and the low wall that divides the Petrified Forest parking lot from the surrounding expanse of talcum-powder-like dust.

Rob follows Jazz down one of the many paths scofflaw tourists have worn into the landscape. It twists and turns. He enters a cool wash with a flat floor made of sand. He looks around in the stillness. A bird pipes thinly. Uphill from him, she lies on the sand. Her arms are stretched out, scars showing pale against tan skin.

“I don't want to go to Oakland,” she says. “I want this. The desert. Crisp, subtle colors and animals that are shy. With this huge, high sky. Not noise and chaos and junk.”

“I can relate.”

“Young people go to cities to show off.”

“Do you know anybody in Taos?”

“I have an old friend who moved there years ago.”

Rob is silent for a long time. With a stick, smooth as driftwood, he scrapes a
J
into the hard sand. “I'm guessing it's a man, and you want to make love to him.”

Still lying motionless on her back, she says, “Yes.”

AT 9:00
P.M
., WHEN SHE
assumes no one will be working, Penny breezes past Nicotine on her bike. The house is sheathed in scaffolding. Romanians are replacing the windows with modern double-glazing. Hondurans are painting the newly installed window frames dark green. As she walks up the front steps, she can see that their foreman is drinking iced coffee. He wipes his sweaty forehead and addresses her in Spanish. Without answering, she reads a brass plaque on the freshly sandblasted brick of the facade: N
ORMAN
B
AKER
C
ENTER
. The plaque is about two feet square
and very shiny. She takes a quick picture of it with her phone. She peers into the former dining room and sees tall built-in bookshelves mounting to the ceiling. The kitchen has acquired a long, curving display case for baked goods. She returns to her bike and rides away fast.

At DJD she finds Anka watching
Homeland
with Sunshine (her program, so not his CO
₂
footprint) on a laptop in the kitchen. “Hey,” she says. “I've got an idea.”

Anka follows her out to the living room and asks, “What's your idea?”

She shows her the plaque. “We go tonight and write ‘Nicotine' on it, and take another picture, and send it to Sorry. Because I haven't told her about this, and I don't know how.”

“What about telling Rob?”

“Fuck Rob.”

Anka regards her gravely and says, “Rob and Jazz didn't do anything wrong. I think you're getting confused.”

“I'm not confused,” Penny says. “I know exactly how I feel. I don't miss Sorry or Jazz, but I miss Rob so bad I could fucking kill him.”

“That's not childish.”

“It's how I feel. It's not my job to tell the story in a way that makes me look good.”

“You might feel better if you did.”

Penny acquires a stark and tragic look, with tears. “So I should cut my losses, and take a write-down, and find another guy where I can get in on the ground floor? No way! Rob was my idea. I'm not ready to settle. I want my day in court!”

“He's your intellectual property,” Anka says, laughing.

AFTER DARK, THEY RIDE OVER
to Nicotine with a thick black marker.

“Whoa,” Anka says when she sees the scaffolding. She creeps toward the porch, marker in hand.

Penny says, “Stop.”

“Why?”

“Look up. Look at the light fixtures.”

Anka looks up. Surveillance cameras.

In the ceiling of the porch, where lightbulbs ought to be, transparent bowls studded with (fake) cameras. Anka retreats. They ride away.

Up in Susannah's old room, Penny sends Sorry the earlier picture of the plaque by daylight, headed “NICOTINE. Not a joke.”

SORRY SEES IT A BIT
later. Feeling bored, she is reviewing recent messages, sitting on the white molded plastic chair outside a motel room in eastern New Mexico, smoking a cigarette. She calls Penny and says, “What the fuck? Hey, Penny. We're in New Mexico. Explain.”

“There's not a lot to say. Nicotine has been squatted by Matt and a bunch of construction workers.”

“It really looks
real
. You're not putting me on, right? Is there a Norman Baker Center somewhere else? Shit. You mean
Matt
Matt? We have to fight this.”

“Good luck. Everybody loves it. It's going to be an anarchist community center with a café bookstore and meeting rooms and a yoga studio. It's going to anchor political empowerment and economic development in the whole neighborhood. Anka and I are already discussing our real estate investments.”

“Seriously, what does it mean?”

“It means Matt's into power. He gets a big kick out of power. Ask Jazz. Power excites him.”

“I can't believe he got it cleaned up so fast.”

“You'd be amazed the things people will do for money. I, for instance, just accepted a job offer from my mom's bank.”

“So are we safe if we come back? Matt's going to be the fucking king of anarchy!”

“Of course you'll be safe. What could give him more pleasure than watching you sip latte in his café? Maybe he'll let Rob bus tables.”

“Jersey City is dead to me now,” Sorry says. “That was it. Did anybody tell you where we're headed? Oakland.”

“What's in Oakland?”

“Bicycles.”

“I'm not going to ask whose idea that was.”

“From there I might go to Venezuela.”

“Go there with dollars. You can sell them for incredible amounts on the black market.”

“Tell me all about it. But not on the phone.”

“Deal. Are Rob and Jazz around?”

“They're in the room, doing that thing they always do way too long. I'm like, cut to the chase, people! But Jazz wants us to drop her off in Taos.”

“Wait—what thing they do?”

“You didn't know?”

“Anka said, but I didn't believe—I mean, she said Matt flipped out because he saw them in bed, and I thought it was just Matt.”

“It was not Matt. It was the love weasels.”

Penny has been working very hard at emptying her brain. She does not want this new information filling it up again.

“How come he didn't tell me?” she cries. “I never knew!”

“They're joined at the hip. They're driving me crazy.”

She turns off the phone. Her eyes drip cold tears on her hot face.

INSIDE THE MOTEL ROOM, ROB
is saying to Jazz, “You are aware that if you go all the way to Taos to ‘make love' to a guy you haven't seen in forever, you're actually ‘fucking' him.”

“I'm not going there to fuck him. I'm going to see how I feel about him.”

“And when you land on his doorstep, he's going to know exactly what method you plan to use. Nobody travels that distance to talk. They have these things called telephones now. You're laying yourself open to get hurt. Can't I worry about you sometimes?”

“Why?”

“What are you going to do if he cooperates? I mean, after he makes love to you and says, ‘Have a nice life'? Walk out in the desert with the gun? You're making it way too easy for him. All he has to do is let you have your way, and you're turning it into a love story before you even see him. Do you have any idea what a fox you are? He's not going to say no. It used to be at least you had some anatomical standards. So yeah, I worry.”

“I really loved this guy, and he was a nonsmoker with a nonhuge dick—a nonstarter.”

“How many of those do you know? Do you have a list you're working off?”