California(16)
“Tell him what?” he asked, and she caught her reflection in his glasses. She looked drawn and tired. Jesus, what was she doing? Endangering the life of her child? Oh, Frida, she told herself. Relax.
They were standing on the other side of the carriage now. She put her palm on the mare. She felt a peace emanating from the center of her body. A mellow.
“I was much less tired looking when Cal and I met.”
She wanted to complain about their stupid fight, tell someone, but from August’s pause she could tell he wouldn’t care to hear any of that. She’d wait him out.
“How did you two meet?” he finally asked.
His question was innocuous—maybe he wasn’t really interested in the answer—but now she would have to talk about Micah.
“Through my brother,” she said. “They were roommates in college.” But Plank wasn’t just any college, and that would need explaining, too.
“Your brother. Huh.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Older or younger?”
“He’s dead.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, and that was probably obvious to August, who, for a moment, remained silent.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She didn’t want to answer, but she knew she would, and that she’d tell him everything.
“He was a suicide bomber,” she said.
“Shit.”
She could tell he was truly surprised. Perhaps August had been a vagabond at the edge of civilization for so long that, for him, history was news.
It was true: Micah had strapped dynamite to his chest and blown himself up. He had killed thirty-one people and injured many others. Everything else about him was merely postscript, and the same probably went for Frida. She was the sister of a suicide bomber, the guy who blew himself up at the Hollywood and Highland mall, the man who had yelled, “Listen!” before pushing the button that set off the timer, which set off the explosion.
“He was the first to do it in L.A.,” she said, “which made him…notable.”
After Micah, she explained, people were killed at the supermarket, at all the other malls, at gas stations. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago, Memphis. The good cities, all of them rendered violent and terrifying by men and women who martyred themselves in the name of—what?
“I thought I got over it,” she said.
“But you didn’t,”
“Right, I didn’t. Not really. I put on a brave face, you know? For my parents.”
“Understandable,” he said.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him.” She paused. “Cal brought him up this morning. That’s why he’s on my mind, I guess.”
Maybe now she’d tell August about her possible pregnancy. He’d be especially nice, maybe offer her some free stuff. Or he might be mad she’d taken the Vicodin. Cal certainly would be.
The pills were doing their job. Her nose was tingling, and the space above her upper lip had started to itch. Her tongue felt a little thick, and so did the air. Things seemed so calm; it was as if the whole world had slowed.
She thought she could sense her parents, Hilda and Dada, nearby, as if they’d just gone into the house to get something.
After Micah died, Hilda wouldn’t come out of her bedroom. She started to stink, and her hair hung in greasy strips around her sagging face. She kept refreshing the news pages, trolling for articles about Micah. She would leave anonymous comments, sometimes trashing her own son, calling him evil, sometimes celebrating what he’d done. She used all kinds of usernames, played all kinds of roles, became other people, told Frida it helped somehow. Dada didn’t go into the room very often, and Frida had to take care of everything. Two years later, her father had called her the traitor, for planning to leave L.A., for planning to leave them. He wouldn’t forgive her for abandoning the family. He had already forgiven Micah.
August cleared his throat, and Frida shook herself back to the present. She realized she hadn’t said anything for some time.
“Sorry.”
“I read somewhere about Iran, back in the day,” August said. “They had these backpacks. For kids, you know? Decorated with pictures of suicide bombers like they were SpongeBob. Remember that old cartoon?”
Frida shook her head. “My brother was in the Group.”
August squinted, like he was trying to figure out what that meant. Then he said, “Was he one of those pissed-off students?”
So August hadn’t been gone so long; he knew what the Group was. According to Micah, the L.A. contingent had emerged a year after the earthquake, mostly college students who had been left with insurmountable debt and no way to pay it back. Nobody knew about them back then, or they did, but they didn’t care. In the beginning, the Group was concerned that the city was still in shambles: collapsed houses and condemned schools everywhere, and the 101 severed in two at the 110. The Group couldn’t believe the rich were complaining that their own neighborhoods weren’t getting fixed fast enough, especially when it seemed like the only areas of the city that functioned at all were the affluent ones. A few of the founders were interested in politically motivated performance art; it was a means to get attention, they argued, a more interesting way to express their dissatisfaction. That was the theory, at least. Half a year later, the first Community opened, and people still hadn’t heard of the Group. It had taken a long time for anyone to notice them.