The Subprimes (18 page)

“Hey, you—talk?”

She hit the call-back button.

“Hey,” she said. “How did it go?”

“Well, I took a plea deal.”

Gemma wasn't sure what that was. “That doesn't sound like a great idea.”

“I was in a hurry. Ronin's school was calling. There was a weapons issue.”

“Weapons?”

“He had a switchblade comb.”

“A comb?”

Richie grunted. “It became a huge thing. More counseling. The poor kid. How are you?”

“Arthur came by. Took the girls out to dinner.”

“You went?”

“My mom monitored.”

“So, you guys aren't—”

“Back together? Are you serious? He's my—I can't really explain what happened to me with Arthur. I liked him, and I missed the obvious problems: like, he's a sociopath. Please, just let this slide. But no, not together, no chance.”

“That makes me happy,” Richie said.

“That's not the reason for my decision, but fine, be happy.”

“I have to go to meet my ex-wife for lunch tomorrow, but, later, do you want to get a drink or dinner or something?”

She nodded even though he couldn't see her. “Come by the house.”

I
T TAKES ME ONLY FIFTY
minutes to get to Santa Monica, where I'm supposed to meet Anya at a vegan restaurant. She says she has a solution to our problems and she wants to talk to me about it in person. I let the valet take my car and go inside, where Anya is seated by a window, sipping from a mug of roiboos tea. She is still beautiful, and for a moment I imagine she wants us to get back together; she will tell me she acknowledges her role in our marital crisis, is, in fact, contrite about what she has done, and now seeks reunion.

There is no chance of this, of course, and as soon as I approach her and she presents me with a cheek to kiss, I am saddened by the thought that we are now reduced to this. But ours was never a happy marriage. It was mutually assured destruction from the start. Of course, now, I wish we had tried harder, but when we were in the middle of the fighting, the silence, the contempt, there were plenty of moments when I felt I couldn't bear any more of the same.

Separation hasn't been bliss. Anya, not surprisingly, has adjusted much better than me. She's pretty, and, at least until you get to know her, and maybe even after that, for the right type of man, i.e., one who is superficial enough to put looks before everything else, easy to get along with. I always assumed I was that superficial, but it turns out I was wrong about that, as I have been about so much.

Anya is the embodiment of a certain type of reaction to our national orgy of self-centeredness disguised as free market economics: she has withdrawn, totally, into her own self, via yoga and juice cleanses and shaman therapy and the picayune specificity of the foods she will put into her body. It's a response I might belittle but at least it is a response, as opposed to my own inactivity.

Anya's boyfriend, the German architect Florian, lives in an eco-friendly house made of sod somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. The house has been featured in various magazines. It looks like an igloo covered in grass, an abode fit for a Hobbit, but it has become a popular form of architecture for those who profess to care about the environment: many of the über-wealthy are seeking to build such structures on their sanctuary islands.

Florian is smart, practical, physically fit—he bicycles fifty miles a day, wearing an oxygen tank as he pedals—and an epicurean chef who has fed my children molecular gastronomy brownies and sprayed chocolate milk alcohol-free martinis into their mouths. Florian has even bought Ronin a turntable.

Like most fathers in this situation, it drives me a little crazy thinking of Florian with my kids. But there's nothing I can do but subtly remind my children that Florian is a fucking asshole.

I take a seat. I'm hungry after the long drive. For some reason, I am careful not to tell Anya about my plea.

“How are the kids?” I ask.

“Ronin is getting over the comb issue. I could have killed you for causing that—”

“Come on!”

“—and Jinx is still gaga for God. Captain's Club today.”

I look through the menu. It's high-end, hydroponically grown organic produce: kale, squash, spinach, pureed and blended and sprinkled with imported vinegar. I hate this stuff.

I order some roasted yams and a cup of coffee.

“They don't have coffee,” Anya tells me before the waiter can scold me.

“Then some ice water,” I say.

“We have room-temperature water,” the waiter says.

“Fine, water.”

Anya says she is worried, not just about our kids, but also about the planet.

I agree. Though my worries tend to be more local, I agree that on a planetary level we are in trouble. It's just such a large problem I don't ever really try to acknowledge it, comprising, as it does, so many constituent smaller problems like traffic, weather, coyotes, assorted species die-offs, that I seldom have time to work my way up to the actual large problem of we're all fucked. I think that's the appeal of the Pastor Rogers of the world, they reassure us that we're not all fucked because God has a plan. God wouldn't have put all this shit into the earth if he didn't want us to abuse the fuck out of it.

“I'm worried,” I say. “But, you know, what am I going to do?”

Anya says she would never expect me to do anything, but in a resigned tone that makes me feel like this is my shortcoming. I let that slide, but too quickly I see where this is going.

Florian, it turns out, has built one of his eco-sod-igloos on an island off Lombok, near Bali. Various developments in and around Bali have become popular sanctuary spots, the higher
end of them built and developed by resort firms like Aman and the Soneva Group, and others in descending order of opulence by other scaremongering developers eager to sell into the Chinese and Japanese markets. Florian has secured himself a little sanctuary compound, and he wants Anya to come with him.

“California will be under water,” Anya says, “and what's above water will be a thousand degrees and so polluted you can't breathe and the UV will give you cancer in a few minutes. We can't stay here. You can't stay here. You know that.”

So Florian has himself a sanctuary. Good for him. “Isn't Indonesia, like, the highest-population-density place on Earth?”

“Not where Florian's compound is. An island, average elevation one hundred meters, protected. And here's the thing. They've built these wonderful schools—”

“Oh no,” I stop her. “No. You're not taking Ronin and Jinx.”

“I didn't say that. I'm just thinking. You should think.”

My yams arrive. A plate of root vegetables, drizzled with vinegar and some sort of kelp flakes. It looks awful.

“You can't take my kids to Indonesia, like a million miles away.”

“Sooner or later we all have to go, somewhere, and you don't have any plans.”

I take a bite of my yams. They are delicious. I realize I'm hungry.

“But this idea everyone has, of escaping. I mean, unless you can escape the actual Earth, I don't think it's really a plan. It's more of a holding action.”

“Life is a holding action,” Anya says.

“But, going away like that, giving up. It's selfish.”

“Like you're trying to save the world?” Anya says. “You write for a business magazine that glorifies the greediest oligarchs on Earth.”

“But at least my heart isn't in it.”

“Your heart isn't in anything. That's always been—” She stops herself, wisely deciding she doesn't want to go down old warpaths.

I swallow yam. “Shouldn't we be doing something here? To make our world more livable, instead of running away to some resort?” I'm not sure I believe what I'm saying, but the words sound good to me. “We should make a stand, not hide. That's not even going to work anyway, this whole sanctuary idea. It's just buying time.”

“That doesn't sound bad, buying time,” Anya says. “But anyway, don't be selfish. Your children can have this great life. I'll send you the link to the website for the school they are building. It's a green school. It's beautiful, like a paradise for kids. And I think Ronin could use a change, don't you?”

“No.”

“Will you at least think about it?” Anya says.

“Do you understand what you are asking me? To let my kids go to live on the other side of the world?”

“You'll see them,” Anya says.

“When? Christmas? I suck at Christmas. You know that.”

“You can visit. And you know, you definitely know, that this is their best chance.”

“Best chance for what?”

“For staying alive.”

WE ARE A LITTLE DRUNK,
Gemma and I, standing in the alley behind the Little Red Bar. The red glow of a cocktail sign above us lends Gemma a pinkish tint. I don't know about second or third chances or how I might be able to save my own life, but I still know something about desire and feeling like if I can somehow
make this work, with this person, then who knows what else might work? Every winning streak has to start somewhere.

We kiss at the top of the jog of stairs, where the pavement is gouged and rutted. She is soft-lipped, reluctant at first to part them, but then she opens up and I am intoxicated by desire and hunger and escape. Because for a few moments, while we're making out in a back alley, we are removed from time and the world stops ending, just a little bit.

But as much as I am taken with her looks and confidence and character, what really made me want her was when she told me how much she liked my first book. No matter how much I tell myself I'm a hack, I harbor my old dreams, and it is lovely for a moment or two to have a beautiful woman tell me I'm talented.

“You should keep writing. I mean, writing real stuff,” she says. “Not stupid stories about stupid people like Arthur.”

Later, we are walking along the cliffs over the Pacific, down by the bluffs, the twinkling oil rigs offshore looking like distant Christmas ornaments. In just a few years, we've mucked up one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world, with casinos and hotels, an elevated skyway. But at night, the glistening lights shine through the marine mist, the neon softened by the moist air.

It feels too soon to take Gemma back to my place.

We stop at a bench and sit down.

“It's so pretty,” she says. “You can almost forget how it's all coming to an end.”

“Because it's incremental, right?” I say. “A little bit each day, a degree or two a year, a few gutted regulations or new laws per term, and it's not enough for most people to make a stink.”

As I say this, I realize I am changing, I'm feeling it, I'm coming to believe that we have to make a change. But how? Should we start giving out bumper stickers or something?

“It took my husband going to jail for me to realize how insane the whole sanctuary plan was,” says Gemma. “But I woke up. And you?”

“I think I'm waking up.”

We watch the oil rigs flicker in the distance, talismans of our doom.

THE BOY WAS EXCITED BY
the preparations, the activity, the sense of purpose among the grown-ups that even the children tried to mimic. Tom had overheard, at a meeting held by the campfire, that they would refuse to vacate. They were tired, Sargam told them, tired of being driven off, of being pushed around, of being told they were not good enough, of being called subprimes.

“We aren't sub-anything,” she shouted. “We are just as good as anyone who paid their goddamn mortgage or student loans. You don't judge a person by their credit score.”

The grown-ups cheered. And there had been reporters there, filming Sargam, interviewing members of what they were calling a commune before they were corrected by the residents of Valence. “This ain't no commune. There wasn't anyone living in these houses but a bunch of drug addicts, and we ran them off and turned this godforsaken foreclosure-ville into a community. People helping people.”

This wasn't some Ryanville, they kept saying, where kids were hungry and sleeping in the open. Where they couldn't get a bath or a hot meal. Where they could be run off by some security tech. Our kids have a school. We have a doctor—he could use some medicine, supplies, equipment. But no one goes hungry. No one is turned away.

The boy would run up behind whoever was being interviewed
and jump up and down, and smile and wave, excited to be on TV, thinking maybe some of his old friends back in Riverside, maybe Daniel and Terry, would see him. And he felt proud to be living in a place important enough for TV cameras to be covering it.

More people were arriving, in better trucks and vehicles, sometimes loaded up with gear—generators, schoolbooks, computers, and, one notable afternoon, toys for the kids, skateboards, bikes, soccer goals. That was the best day since Tom had arrived, and he and his friends had spent the next two afternoons inventing a new game called helicopter, involving bikes, skateboards, and a soccer ball. It was a brutal, violent game with numerous collisions and hard falls on the pavement.

They loved it.

Where was all this stuff coming from? Why were TV cameras suddenly here?

He and his friends discussed Valence's sudden prominence.

“We're like pirates,” an older boy said, “like outlaws. And so we're interesting, because there aren't many folks like us left in the world.”

“Like when there used to be native tribes, those one's where the women show their tits all the time, and they used to show them on TV.”

“Before they were extinct?” the boy asked.

There were nods. “We're savages.”

But who was giving the stuff?

“People who support us. People who think what we're doing is cool.”

The boy thought about that. “Are we going to get extinct?”

The boys shook their heads. “Hell, no. Who wants this place, anyway?”

BUT THAT WAS PRECISELY WHAT
was so compelling about the Valence story. It came to represent the battle of the small against the big, the underclass against the overlords, the subprimes versus the primes. Here was a group of dispossessed families who were not only making their little community work—it was quaint how they had their little school, their fields, their communal mealtimes—but was refusing to flee in the face of the largest privately held petrochemical conglomerate in the United States, one of many owned by the Pepper Sisters.

They were led by a telegenic woman who wore a white leather jacket and repeated that this community had been here long before HG Extraction had been granted the land by an act of eminent domain, promising the state a few percentage points of the value of whatever shale oil they extracted. She was mesmerizing as she condemned the Pepper Sisters, the greedy one-percenters, and a government that would give away a thriving community so that it could be turned into a fracking site. She urged the television crews to head up to Placer and see what those sites looked like. Eight square miles of toxic sludge, she said. Look around, this ain't much, but families can live here, happy families.