California: A Novel (30 page)

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.

Bombs. He wanted to plant bombs, simple ones, ones that had the capacity to maim anyone within fifty feet of their explosions. They would kill anyone closer. He’d been building them for a few months. “That’s when Sailor and Dave were brought into the plan,” he said. “They have experience with explosives from their Group training, and I guess Dave was somewhat of a pyro at Plank, worse than I was. And I knew they’d follow me. They still believe in what’s right.”

Getting the stuff into Pines would be risky, Micah admitted. “But Toni’s not fucking around. She wouldn’t do anything stupid to get us caught. And there’s a guy with her now. I corresponded with him back when we were students at Plank, actually. Toni said he could get us in places.” It took a moment for Cal to understand that the “us” meant the bombs, and Micah meant to plant them. “Not only at company headquarters,” Micah said, “and the head citizen office, that kind of thing. But also less-rarefied locations. There’s a market about a mile from the checkpoint we use.” Micah shook his head. “They hardly eat real food there, did you know? It’s mostly weird energy bars, supplements, powdery drinks. It’s why our lettuce is so beloved there.” He smiled. “At their markets, they’ve got this spot, where people pick up their carts. It’d be perfect.”

Cal didn’t answer. What Micah was saying scared him, but it also sounded silly, a boy’s plan, straight out of a comic book. And yet, boys were capable of terrible things.

It would take a long time, Micah continued, to get the plan in place. And once the bombs were built and delivered to Pines, they could not be set off immediately, either. Being careful was a kind of grace, he said. “We need to hurt them, shake them up.”

“You want them to feel unsafe?” Cal asked.

“Not just feel it—be it.”

“Micah. Listen to yourself. If Pines is rendered unsafe, wouldn’t that kill your trade agreements? Won’t they get more paranoid and further secure their borders?”

“We’re counting on that,” he said. “That’s when those of us inside will act.”

“It sounds like Toni will have already played her role.”

Micah shook his head. “You know there’s a whole underclass at Pines? Not just Pines, but most Communities. Someone has to scrape gum off the park benches, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be some executive’s son. Most workers have been raised within the Community, bred to do service at a place called C.A.P., Center at Pines. The kids who grow up there are called Hats, sometimes Hatters. The Communities think it’s safer than letting in temporary laborers from the outside who might bring in disease and troubles of their own. The Hatters live okay, but they don’t have rights, not really. They’re safe as long as they shut their mouths and do their work.”

“Sounds like a coup waiting to happen.”

“Maybe, but you wouldn’t believe how happy most of the Hatters are. They might sort through garbage for a living, but they’re eating regularly, they’ve got access to health care, and they’re given a small apartment with electricity and running water. It’s more than you can say for life here.” He smiled. “But not everyone there will remain content.”

“Are you talking about the kids you gave up? You sent them to Pines to be part of an uprising?”

Micah held up his hand, as if Cal weren’t listening, or not properly. “One of the kids, Randy, will be sixteen this year. He’s bright, and strong.”

“What’s he going to do for you?”

“For now, he’s just listening to conversations, gathering information. He’s training as a security guard, so he has access. He reminds me of August in some ways. I think he can lead his peers.”

“This is a long game, then, I take it.”

“Toni keeps reminding me to be patient. If we do it right, Pines will fall apart: bombings, civil unrest, the whole nine yards. And once there’s utter chaos behind its walls, Pines will be more vulnerable to attacks from the outside. That’s a bonus. The Pirates will have a ball terrorizing those borders again.”

“I thought you got rid of the Pirates.”

“I told you,” Micah said, “nothing is permanent. Once the bombings happen and the Pirate threat returns, those rich bastards will really be in trouble.” He smiled. “It’ll be just like any old American city.”

“But if that happens,” Cal said, “everything around here will fall apart, too. You need Pines, Micah.”

“Not forever, I don’t,” he said. “You think I want to stay on the Land until I die? We do this, and the Group realizes I won’t be put out to pasture.”

“I thought you were in charge.”

He nearly snarled. “I was inside the inner circle—or I thought I was. When the suicide-bombing plan was devised, I saw it as an important step in the Group’s mission to change the status quo.”

“And because you wanted to be deified.”

He raised an eyebrow. He shook his head. “I wanted to inspire our members and make people afraid of what we could do. And I wanted to be independent, see what needed to be done outside of the Group’s reach.”

“But the other leaders wanted you out,” Cal said.

“I didn’t see it until it was too late, when I was quote-unquote ‘dead,’ and the relationship between the Communities and the Group became clear to me.”

Micah’s posture was so straight, he looked like a kid about to get measured at the doctor’s. He seemed pathetic, and that shocked Cal. This was a first.

“Don’t pity me,” Micah said suddenly, as if he could read it on Cal’s face. “Only a select few were in on my little stunt and know I’m alive. Most people in the Group are still committed to what matters, as I am.” He smiled. “We’ll take back the cause. We can go back to L.A. and reclaim the Echo Park encampment. Or we can settle somewhere else until we’re able to infiltrate another Community. Being a colonist is surprisingly easy, let me tell you.”

“And Peter’s in on this plan of yours?”

“Peter’s from the Land, so his loyalties are muddled. But he’s starting to get it. Especially when August, Sailor, and Dave are on my side, too.”

“What about me and Frida? What about our baby?”

Micah sighed, his head in his hands. “I need you for debate, California.”

“This isn’t the academic decathlon. I don’t want to talk you through your terrorist fantasies. Which probably won’t work, and if they do, well, then, we’re fucked. My kid is fucked.”

“So what do you want?”

“I want to stay here. With my family. I’ll gladly be a shill.”

Micah said nothing, and Cal noted there was no sign of surprise on his face. Of course he knew what Cal wanted.

“Promise me,” Cal said.

“Promise you what?”

“That my child will be okay. That you’ll protect him and that you’ll look out for your sister.”

Micah said nothing at first, and then, “In some ways, Frida is all I have left.”

Cal waited. He needed more.

“You know I’ll keep her safe,” Micah said finally.

It was enough of a promise for Cal. For now.

Cal nodded to the bookcase. “I want to take the Kant to my bedroom. I’ll smuggle it under my shirt if I have to.”

Micah laughed in his face. “Hell, no.”

Cal laughed, too. He could picture the title page, a mimeograph of the original. He could smell the book’s interior: like almonds and wood chips, the glue sweet as warm milk. He closed his eyes for a moment and imagined that scent. And then he thought of the Forms in the dark, how he’d understood them, how he had anticipated each one before he passed it, as if he’d known them all his life. He would need to keep himself here. He would need to help Micah, but not the way Micah wanted him to.