Pacific Edge

  “Ah, come on. Here you are down by the creek for lunch. I know you appreciate the way this town has been working, what it stands for. Why else would you be here?”

  “I was born here.”

  “Yah, well…” Kevin sighed. Talking to Jerry was hard. “All the more reason you should want to protect it. It’s a miracle the water district held onto that hill for so long, and now that we’ve got it, it would be a shame to make it look like all the rest of them. Think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it.” He swallowed. “Know what I heard?”

  “What?”

  “I heard Alfredo’s being pressed into trying for this move. Needs to do it.”

  Kevin thought about that as he rode over to see Susan Mayer. Susan was chief scientist at the El Modena Chicken Farm, which supplied much of northern Orange County with chickens. Kevin found her out in the farm’s lab, cursing a gc/mass spec: an athletic woman in her forties, one of the best swimmers in town. “I don’t really have time to talk about it now, Kevin, but I assure you I know just what you’re worried about. Alfredo is a nice man, and good for the town, but sometimes it seems like he should be in Irvine or Anaheim where the stakes are higher.” She wouldn’t say more than that. “Sorry, I’ve got to get to work on this, it looks like we might have an outbreak in one of the coops. We’ll have to wait and see about the hill stuff until we know more anyway, right?”

  Sigh. On to Hiroko, botanist and orchard farmer. Also a landscape gardener, and she was out on a job. Kevin found her and gave her a hand digging up a front yard, and they had a good long talk as they worked. Hiroko had been on the council on and off for about twenty years, and so nothing much in that area excited her any more. But she seemed sympathetic, and skeptical about Alfredo and his big plans, as she put it. Kevin left her feeling good. If they could count on Hiroko, then it would only take one more to have a majority on the council. Susan and Jerry were both possibles, and so …

  He told Doris what Jerry had said about Alfredo needing to make the move. “Hmm,” Doris said. “Okay, I’ll see if pretending I know that for sure will pull anything more out of John.” She was working the hardest of them all, pumping her connections for more news from inside Heartech. Her friend John heard a lot in the financial office of her own firm, Avending, and his friend over in Heartech’s offices knew even more. The next time she talked to him, she said something about Alfredo having to make a move. “Yeah, it’s an outside thing,” John said, “Ann’s sure of it. They’ve always had a source of outside money, she says. That’s why it’s ballooned so fast.”

  Apparently Heartech’s growth had been even more rapid than it appeared to the public. And some of that growth was being absorbed by a hidden backer, so that Heartech would remain within legal company size, and avoid any special audits from the IRS. Or so the rumors had it. “They’re iceberging in the black, Ann says,” John told Doris in low voice.

  “Unbelievable,” Doris said. If it were true, then they would have the best weapon possible to stop any office-building by Heartech. Proving it, however … “But if they build this development they’re going to come under the microscope! No way they can fund it themselves—they’ll either have to apply for government help or have a partner.”

  “True,” John said a week later. “And Doris—I’m sorry to tell you, but…”

  Dear Claire:

  … Yes, I went to Opening Day in Bishop, and provided the usual entertainment for the masses with Sally. Our match was witnessed by Kevin and Doris; the sturdy Doris was either appalled or disgusted, she couldn’t decide which. She had little spare time to scorn the Grand Sport, however, as she and Kevin spent at least part of the weekend recomplicating an old relationship. They were lovers long ago, Nadezhda told me, and currently Doris seems both attracted to and exasperated by Kevin, while he, it seems to me, relies on her rather more than he realizes. They spent a night in Sally’s guest room, and afterwards the currents swirling around under the surface of things would have spun a submarine. This, at the same time that Kevin is enthusiastically exploring the consequences of Ramona the Beauty’s freedom. It’s getting pretty complicated in Elmo.…

  … Yes, Nadezhda is still here, though she won’t be for long; her ship is in Newport Harbor, and in two or three weeks it will depart, taking her with it. That will be a sad day. We have done a lot together, and it has been a delight. Often she calls to ask if I want to cruise the town, and if I agree I am dragged all over Orange County in a kind of parody of an educational tour. She’s like Ben Franklin on drugs. What are you doing here? Why are you doing it this way and not that? Is it really true that mustard grass was part of the original ground cover on this plain? Couldn’t you use bigger cells? Aren’t you thinking the mayor is pushing things too fast? Is it true what they say about Kevin and Ramona? She peppers them with questions till they reel, then bikes away muttering about slowness, ignorance, sleepwalking. What zombies, she’ll mutter if they’re unresponsive. What sheep! On the other hand, when she runs into people who know what they are doing and enjoy talking about it, she gets them going for hours, and bikes away glowing. Ah, what energy, what ingenuity, what boldness! she will cry, face flushed, eyes bright. And so the people here love her, while at the same time being slightly afraid of her. With her combination of fire and wisdom, of energy and experience, she seems like some higher life form, some next step in evolution. Old but young. Those geriatric drugs must really be something. Maybe I’d better start taking them now.

  Certainly her presence has put the jumper cables to Tom Barnard, who was living a hermit’s life in the hills before her arrival. Now he comes into town pretty regularly. Many people here know him, especially among the older generations, and Nadezhda has worked hard at getting him re-involved in their lives, in her usual energetic fashion. They’re doing a lot of socializing together. Also, we’ve started to get him seriously involved in the struggle over the plans for Rattlesnake Hill.

  Developments (so to speak) in the hill battle abound, as Kevin and Doris try to put Sally’s suggestions into action. They may even drill a spring. This was Sally’s suggestion, and I am sure she was joking, but she played it like a wooden Indian, and they took her seriously. Far be it from me to disabuse them, and explain that a drilled spring (or well, as we call it) will not stop development.

  One night in the midst of this activity Doris came home from work slamming doors and snarling. I had just dropped by their house to talk to Kevin, and found no one home but the kids. I was the only adult there, an unusual situation that neither Doris nor I would have wanted, I am sure.

  However, I asked what was wrong. She shouted her reply; a friend in the financial department of her company, Avending, had told her that Avending was negotiating with Heartech, the mayor’s company, over plans to propose a new complex in El Modena. Here we had been wondering who Alfredo and his partners would get to join them in building this complex, and it was Doris’s own company!

  I tried to make a joke. At least she would be within walking distance of her job, I said. She gave me her Medusa imitation, a very convincing one.

  I’m quitting, she said. I can’t work there anymore.

  Something in the way she said it made me feel mischievous. I wanted to push at this virtue of hers, see how far it extended. I said, first you ought to find out what you can about their plans.

  She stared at me. Do you think so?

  I nodded.

  I’d need some help.

  I’ll help you, I said, surprising both of us.

  So she called her friend in the financial office, and spoke urgently with him for nearly half an hour. And then I found myself accompanying Fierce Doris to her place of employment, Avending of Santa Ana.

  It was a small complex of labs and offices near the freeway. Doris led us in past a security guard, explaining I was a friend.

  Once in her lab I stared around me, amazed! It was the biggest surprise of a pretty surprising night; the office part of the lab was filled with
sculpture! Small pieces, large pieces, abstracts, human and animal figures … made of metals, ceramics, materials I couldn’t identify. What is this? I said.

  You know, we develop materials here, she said. Superconductors and like that. These are throwaways from various experiments.

  You mean they just come out like this? I said stupidly.

  She laughed shortly.

  You sculpt them, I said.

  Yes, that’s right. I’m going to have to get all these home.…

  You could have knocked me over with a feather, or at least a pillow. Who knows what depths these southern tidepools conceal? Any step might plunge you overhead in the brine.…

  Doris went to work on the computer, and soon the printer was ejecting page after page of records. We need to do the rest in John’s office, she said. That’s tricky—I’m in my lab all the time at night, but there’s no reason to be in his office. You’ll have to keep a lookout for security, and the cleaning robots.

  We tiptoed down the corridor into her friend’s office. Again the computer, the print out. I kept watch in the hall while Doris xeroxed pages from a file cabinet. She began to fill boxes.

  A cleaning robot hummed down the hall toward us. Feverishly I disarranged an office between us and it, hoping to slow it down. I didn’t get out in time, and it bumped into me coming in the doorway. “Excuse me,” it said. “Cleaning.”

  “Quite all right. Could you please clean this office?”

  “Excuse me. Cleaning.” It entered the office and uttered a little click, no doubt dismayed at the mess I had just made. I dashed past it, back to Doris.

  She was done xeroxing, and about two hours later she was done printing out. We carried box after box into the parking lot, finishing just ahead of the cleaning robot’s entrance.

  Outside we had a bicycle built for two, with a big trailer attached behind. We piled that trailer so high with boxes that when we got on the bike, it was as if it were set in cement. There we were, absconding with Avending’s entire history, and we couldn’t move an inch. Both of us jumped up and down on the pedals; no movement. What would security say when they saw us? Thieves, escaping at zero miles an hour.

  I had to get off and apply the Atomic Drop to the trailer to get us started, and then run around and leap into my saddle, to hop furiously on a pedal that moved like an hour hand. Unfortunately the right turn we took onto the street killed our momentum. It was necessary to apply three Atomic Drops in succession to get us moving again. After that it was a matter of acceleration. Once we got up to about five miles an hour, we found we could maintain it pretty well.

  The next day Doris quit her job. Now she is getting Tom to help her go through the records she stole. It is unclear whether they will be of use, but Tom thinks it is possible the two companies have illegal sources of capital, or will obtain them to help finance the complex. Worth looking for, he says. And something in the records made him suggest that Hong Kong might be implicated. So our raid is justified. Fierce Doris strikes again!

  She gave me one of her sculptures, in thanks for my help. Big slabs of a blue-green ceramic alloy: a female figure, tossing aloft a bird, a raptor in its first downstroke. A wonderful sense of movement. We stared at it, both embarrassed to speechlessness.

  Have you been sculpting long? I asked.

  A few years.

  What inspired you to begin?

  Well—I was running experiments on certain materials under pressure, and when they came out of the kiln, they looked funny. I kept seeing things in them, you know, like you see shapes in clouds. So I started to help bring the shapes out.

  I’ll put this in my atrium when they’re done working, I said.

  … Work on my house continues apace. Right now it looks like the Parthenon: roofless and blown apart. They assure me it will begin to coalesce soon, and I hope so, because some strange things have happened when I am home alone, and perhaps when the house is finished they will stop happening.

  … Of course I still feel disoriented—unprotected, in the midst of growing a new shell, of building a new life. But the old life in Chicago seems more and more like a dream to me—a very long and vivid dream, admittedly—but a dream still, and like a dream it is growing less intense and less easy to remember as I drift further away. Strange, this life, isn’t it? We think, nothing could ever get more real than this! Then this becomes nothing more than a darting fragmentary complex of pure mentation, while a new reality, more real than ever! steps in to obscure all previous candidates. I never get used to it. Well—write soon, please—I miss you—xx oo—

  Your Oscar

  6

  Been on plane four hours now. Liddy finally asleep. Tapping on lap keyboard. Might as well distract myself.

  Strategies for changing history. Invent the history leading out of this world (please) into the world of the book. Causes of utopian process gaining upper hand.

  Words scroll up and disappear forever, like days.

  Lincoln not assassinated, no, no, we know it didn’t happen that way, we know we can’t take that road. Not useful. Someone appears to lead us, no! No Great Man theory here. No individual can save us. Together or not at all.

  Together or nothing. Ah, Pamela—

  Some group. In power or out. Act together. Say lawyers, the law? Still can’t escape the feeling that there’s where a difference could be made, despite my own experience. Remake the law of the land. Say a whole class of Harvard Law School, class of ’12 goes out to fill posts of all kinds, government, World Bank, IMF, Pentagon. Save the twenty-first century. Plausible? No. A story. But at least it’s possible, I mean we could do it! Nothing stopping us but inertia, ideology. Lack of imagination! Teachers, religious leaders … but there are few politically active people in any group. And to agree on a whole program of action, all of them. How implausible can something be before it’s useless? It’s conspiracy theory, really. We don’t need that either.

  History changed by a popular book, a utopia, everyone reads it and it has ideas, or vague pokes in the direction of ideas, it changes their thinking, everyone starts working for a better world—

  Getting desperate. Marcuse: one of the worst signs of our danger is we can’t imagine the route from here to utopia. No way to get there.

  Take the first step and you’re there. Process, dynamism, the way is the life. We must imagine the way. Our imagination is stronger than theirs! Take the first step and you’re on the road.

  And so? In my book?

  Stare at empty screen. My daughter sighs in her sleep. Her sleeping face. It’s a matter of touch, and if you can’t touch the one you love—can’t see her—

  We’re thirty-five thousand feet above the earth. People are watching a movie. The blue curve of the world, such a big place, so much bigger than we ever think, until something takes us.…

  Words scroll up and disappear forever, like

  * * *

  The night of Hank’s Mars party they rode into the hills in a big group, bike lamps bobbing like a string of fireflies. The Lobos formed the core of the party, then Oscar was along, and Tom and Nadezhda, weaving dangerously on a bicycle built for two. They came to the end of the paved road near Black Star Canyon and left the bikes behind. Hank’s backpack clinked as he led them up the dark trail. Oscar stumbled in the forest twilight: “Humanity lands on the fabled red planet, and we celebrate this feat by wandering in the dark like savages. It’s 2001 run backwards. Ow!”

  The air was warm. The sage and low gnarled oaks covering the canyon walls clattered and shooshed in irregular gusts of wind. A Santa Ana wind was arriving, sweeping down from the north, compressing over the San Jacintos, warming and losing moisture until it burst out of the canyons hot and dry. “Santa Ana!” Tom said, sniffing. He explained to Nadezhda, touched the back of her hand and she jumped. “Static electricity. It’s a good sign.”

  An electric shock with every touch.

  After a half hour’s climb they came to Black Star Hot Springs, a series of small
pools in a narrow meadow. Sycamore, live oak, and black walnut stood crowded on the flat canyon floor, surrounding the pools. Near the largest pool was a small cabin and pavilion. Hank had rented it from the town for the night, and he unlocked the door and turned on a lamp inside. Yellow window squares illuminated the steam bubbling off the pool’s surface. Stiff live oak leaves clacked together. Branch rubbed on branch, adding ghostly creaks to the susurrous of leaf sound.

  “Yow—it’s hot tonight.”

  The large pool was two down from the source of the spring. Concrete steps and an underwater concrete bench had been built into it, and the rest of the bottom was a hard gritty sandstone not much different from the concrete in texture. The pool was about twenty feet across, and varied between three and five feet in depth. In short, a perfect hot springs pool.

  Hank, Jody, Mike and Oscar put food and drink into the cabin’s refrigerator. The rest shed their clothes and stepped into the pool. Abrupt splashes, squeals of pain, hoots of delight. The water was the temperature of a hot bath, deliciously warm once past the initial shock of it.

  Oscar appeared at the pool’s edge, a big white blob in the dim light. “Watch out,” Kevin said. Oscar threw his massive head back; in the darkness he seemed three times the size of a man, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, big-bellied, thick-legged. His friends stared despite themselves. Suddenly he crouched, threw his arms wide, mimed jumping out over them. Just the way he shifted on his feet and whipped his head around implied the whole action of running forward and leaping up, landing in a giant cannonball dive. “No, no! The pool! You’ll crack the bottom!” He pawed the ground with a bare foot, shook his black curls ferociously, took a little run back, then forward to the pool’s edge, then back again, arms outstretched like a surfer’s, tilting with the absurd rhinocerine grace Kevin and Doris had seen in Bishop. Hank and Jody and Mike came out of the cabin to see what the ruckus was about, and with a last great wind-up Oscar took off, into the air like a great white whale, suspended in a ball several feet above them. Then KERPLOP, and an enormous splash.