California(93)

Fuck it, Cal thought. The meek didn’t inherit a thing. “Why would the Group want boys from Plank?” he asked. “So what if we can grow food and talk about Kant? That’s hardly what makes someone want to join the Group. It doesn’t compute.”

Dave laughed. “Wow, really? That’s like saying you don’t see how so many radicals could come out of Berkeley in the 1960s. These things happen. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the Group was coming to Plank long before you got there, and long after you left.”

Sailor nodded. “Why do you think it was still open when so many other schools were shutting down?”

“But not everyone there was a terrorist,” Cal said.

“Of course not,” Sailor said. “I’m not a terrorist, either.”

“But you’re in the Group,” Cal said.

“It’s not a gym membership,” Dave said. “It’s not like they give you an ID card when you join.”

“Who knows what we are now anyway?” Sailor said.

“What does that mean?” Cal said.

“Back at Plank,” Dave said, “Catie told us about a frontier that needed to be tamed. She said the Pirates were mercenary killers who needed to be stopped.”

“And that appealed to you, even though you’d be connected to the Group? You knew what they’d done, you just said so.”

“Eventually we got to meet Micah, work with him,” Dave said.

Cal said, “I wouldn’t have pinned you for a killer, Sailor.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Sailor said. “I did what was right.”

Cal remembered what Frida had told him. If it had been Pirates that Micah had killed, wasn’t that a good thing? Not killed, but beheaded.

“We helped get this place settled,” Sailor said.

“What about the people who were here before you guys showed up?”

“They mean well,” Dave said.

“Do they know what’s going on? That you’re part of the Group?”

Someone was coming in on the walkie-talkie. “All clear?” Dave said, and waited for the person to say, “Affirmative.”

“Ask Mikey,” Dave said to Cal.

“Most people on the Land live simple, happy lives,” Sailor said. “They do their chores and make food together. It’s a peaceful place.”

“Are they mistaken?” Cal asked.

Dave shook his head. “Of course not. It’s just that their lifestyle needs to be supported by a select few of us. We’re active, so they can be passive.”

“‘Active’?” Cal said.

“Ask Mikey,” Sailor said again. “He’ll explain.”

“We don’t know that, Sail,” Dave said. “Break.”



A few hours later, after Cal had assiduously studied the hand-drawn maps Sailor had given him, he headed for the Forms. Dave had insisted he wear a scarf. “Before dawn is when it gets the coldest, and if you get stuck, you might be out here for a while.”

“The trick is to compare what’s in front of you with what you remember from the diagrams,” Sailor said before they parted ways.

“Do you have that kind of mind?” Dave asked.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Cal said, and clicked the light on the helmet he’d been given.

Beneath the moon, the Forms had been eerie, but in the funnel of light they were sinister. The objects within them had been wrested from their original purpose, and they were now misunderstood, lost. It must have been a huge sacrifice, Cal thought, for the residents of the Land to give up these things in the name of protection.

He noticed an empty picture frame and then the boomerang shape of a rocking-chair leg. A doll speared with barbed wire. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that they were just objects. He forced himself to look again, and closely. “Commit all this to memory,” Dave had said before leaving him alone.

Cal had no exact purpose except to walk through this maze with an alert mind. He had his pistol and the walkie-talkie, and Dave would find him should he need help. The goal, really, was to just get used to the Forms, to learn them as he would streets in a strange city.

He walked slowly, careful of the glass at the outskirts. The easiest way to understand the layout of the Forms was to imagine a series of spirals. He studied each Form as he passed, memorizing its contents. The door of a washing machine; a plastic air-freshener plug-in; a shopping basket missing its handles. Just objects. Collected by people, reused by them.

Not many had seen the maps. Sailor had unrolled them solemnly, said, “These are closely guarded,” and hovered as Cal read them. Cal understood that the others—the ones not in the Group—were hemmed in by these Forms. They couldn’t leave easily, not without people finding out. Not that they wanted to leave. They lived a good life here, and that was all anyone could hope for nowadays.

Cal stopped walking and turned off the lamp on his helmet. The miner’s cone of light disappeared. His eyes should get used to the dark, as an animal’s did, and as his own had, back when he and Frida were holed up in the shed. He imagined the Form next to him exhaling, relieved to be back in the safety of darkness, and Cal felt a kinship with the thing.

In L.A., when Cal could no longer improve the world by growing food, he had resolved to escape the wretchedness, take Frida to the edge of the world, and start over. And when he discovered the Millers had killed themselves, Cal had buried their bodies and resolved to retreat once more from ugliness, from the familiar wretchedness that seemed to follow them. How impossible, though, to turn one’s back on all the horrors in the world; there had to be another way to live.