California(22)

“We walked due west for days,” Bo said, “and found no one, nothing. Nothing human, at least. Then we retraced our steps, and when we reached the shed, we went in the opposite direction.”

Bo paused, and Cal forced himself to remain silent, to wait him out.

“On the second day,” Bo began, as if he were reading from the Bible, “traveling east, we found a sign.” He paused, as if this should mean something. As though this was a well-practiced script. Cal had no idea what he meant. Was it a simple octagonal stop sign or the Virgin Mary, burned into a rock?

“There were large spikes coming out of the ground.”

“What do you mean, ‘spikes’?” Cal imagined a line of them, like at the exit of a parking lot. Severe tire damage, he thought.

“They were huge,” Bo said. As he and Sandy approached, they saw that the spikes weren’t smooth and uniform. They were made up of cast-off objects—car parts, old clothing, plastic—and wrapped in barbed wire, their tips sharp and jagged. They were twice as tall as Bo, and they leaned, as if into a strong wind. “They were menacing. Their presence meant, Turn around. Go away.”

Bo and Sandy only wove their way around a few. There were a hundred of them, easily, but if they’d had the time—and the courage, Cal thought—they could have discerned a route through them. Not all of them were spaced closely together. If you knew how, you could get in and out.

“You know all those contested nuclear waste sites?” Bo asked.

Cal nodded. When he was a kid, there’d been endless debates about where to store radioactive waste. He remembered politicians winning votes by promising to fight the proposed projects—not that they could. The fear of another Chernobyl or Fukushima or Tarapur wasn’t as strong as the need to put the radioactive material somewhere. Plank’s campus hadn’t been too far from a disputed site.

Cal took another sip of the liquor, and it burned down his throat. “What does this have to do with nuclear waste?”

Bo explained that experts in the previous century had designed different ways to warn of a site’s danger, so that anyone might understand them: the foreigner, the illiterate, the alien. Large spikes had been one suggestion. In a thousand years, the message had to be clear, so that people understood what had been left there. “For the future,” Bo said, and a thread of ice inched down Cal’s spine. The future had arrived.

But the government had ultimately opted for something predictable; they’d plastered the sites with multiple signs bearing scientific information and stamped with the traditional nuclear symbol. Some said that future generations might take the image for an angel if they didn’t know better. “Tough shit for them, I guess,” Bo said.

“So these spikes you and Sandy saw? It wasn’t a nuclear waste site?” Cal asked, confused.

Bo shook his head. “Doubt it—but they reminded me of one. As if they’d been made in homage to a rejected vision.”

“So if the government didn’t build them, who did?”

“I don’t know,” Bo said. “But they weren’t that old. We found footprints, barely faded, and someone had dropped a leather belt, buckled very small. They must have been using it as a stirrup.”

“So what did you do?”

Bo seemed surprised by this question, as if its answer were obvious. They went back to the shed, he said, and began building the house.

“Why did you build so far from the shed?”

Bo laughed. “We conceived of the shed as a hidden shelter, should we need secondary protection. Safer that way.”

“Is there reason to be afraid?” Cal asked. “You still haven’t told me much.”

“I’m getting to that,” he said.

The first time August approached in his chariot, Bo and Sandy assumed he was from the Spikes, as they’d begun to call them, and Bo stepped out of their house with his rifle. It wasn’t exactly a house just yet, only its skeleton.

“August was here to trade. He wouldn’t say much about where he was from, only that he was a middle man. He told me he liked to make sure everyone was getting along all right, that no one was sick.” Bo paused. “He said the people who’d built the Spikes simply wanted to be left alone. They’re separatists, and they don’t allow their community to go beyond the border.” The border, it seemed, was the Spikes; they’d built them long ago.

Bo told Cal he would have liked to get more information, but August was already off the buggy, showing Sandy his various goods. She wanted the shovel.

“It was like a shopping center for her,” Bo said, and Cal thought, Shopping center. The phrasing had to be a clue to where Bo was from; that kind of information was always lodged in speech.

Bo’s story made Cal think immediately of the Communities. Gated, under surveillance, exclusive to everyone but the very rich. Back in L.A. Frida had often wondered aloud what they were like inside; before the Internet became too expensive and then stopped working altogether, she’d scoured it for information, for stupid gossipy facts. No smoking allowed! All the houses look the same! Some catered to Christians (mostly evangelicals), a few to Jews, while others didn’t mention religion at all. All of them, though, claimed to have working electricity; clean, paved streets; excellent schools; and secure borders. If you lived behind those gates, the oil crisis was merely a nuisance. If you had money, you had everything.