A steady backbeat pestered Rachel as she came out of her dream, but it was just an echo of last night, of Nathan pressing replay, hour after hour, on “No You Girls,” until the jangly guitars and flat bass drum etched a groove in the LP of her mind, so that when she woke to strange sunlight in an empty bed that Franz Ferdinand riff still played in her head.
She filled her cigarette-tattered lungs with fresh air and got herself moving. In the living room, Gary was sprawled on an IKEA couch, mouth open beneath his Sonny Bono mustache, eerily silent. Rachel pushed on to the bathroom and had a good long pee, then went at her face with water, gargling desperately to get some kind of moisture back. Mornings like this, she really felt her age. By the time she turned off the water, someone had decided they hadn’t heard enough last night, and had cranked the song again:
No you girls never know
How you make a boy feel
Gary was up now, stretching by the window, and in the kitchenette Layla was filling a coffee filter. She’d already made up her face in signature goth—Siouxsie Sioux eyes and a merlot smile just for Rachel. “You’re gonna want a cup.”
“Thanks,” Rachel said as she joined Gary at the window. Together, they gazed at the San Francisco Bay. The fog was just lifting, and sunlight from the east broke over the Berkeley hills. The condo they’d occupied for the night was in a modest complex on the edge of Tiburon, and it had been Peter’s idea to party in the land of the undeservedly rich. He apparently did this sometimes, came up with unexpected places to hang out and party and talk. The only perk to being a real estate agent, Peter told her last night between kisses, was the lockbox key. He claimed he hadn’t paid rent in over a year, and every night he had a new place to sleep.
“In case you’re wondering, Peter drove Nathan back to town,” Layla said, handing her a steaming cup. “They’ll meet us at the Roxy tonight.”
“Where’d they go?”
A shrug. “I don’t ask.”
That was Layla for you, a uniquely incurious human being. Rachel had even called her that in her report—uniquely incurious. Gary turned from the window. “Where’s my coffee?”
“Suzie’s drinking it.”
“Shit,” he said, and stomped over to the kitchenette.
Layla grinned and stood with Rachel, both sipping coffee. Off to the left, the open water was clotted with boats, little yachts and unfurled sails, dot-com money luxuriating under the Pacific sun.
“Bet you couldn’t imagine this a year ago,” Layla said.
Rachel cupped her hands around her drink, taking in the warmth. “This?”
“Partying until four in the morning with a bunch of kids like us.”
Rachel was in her late thirties, but to twenty-four-year-old Layla she might as well have been sixty. “You’d be surprised the kinds of things you can imagine when you’re signing divorce papers.”
Layla grunted; they’d discussed Rachel’s life in East Coast suburbia, as well as her abusive ex-husband. Nothing more needed to be said.
“Where’s Peter from?” Rachel eventually asked.
Layla kept her eyes on the boats and said, “Yugoslavia, right?”
“There is no Yugoslavia anymore. Is he Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian? Montenegrin?”
Layla shrugged, perhaps to cover for her ignorance of Balkan geography, then looked squarely at Rachel. “It’s not a question I ask because I’m not a nativist. I wouldn’t ask where you came from.”
“Because you know. I grew up in Boston, got myself into a shitty marriage, and spent most of my adult life in D.C. Gary’s from Sacramento. You grew up in West Virginia until the mines closed and your parents died of cancer. Isn’t it weird we don’t know anything about Peter?”
Layla let out a sotto voce laugh. “You tell me. Aren’t you fucking him?”
The question embarrassed Rachel, though it shouldn’t have. Both Layla and Gary had seen her and Peter necking last night, then heading to the bedroom, and why wouldn’t these two old farts have gone all the way?
She’d hung with Layla and her friends for nearly a month in her search for the deep-underground movements that were rumored to exist up and down the West Coast. But there had been little progress—like most angry ideologues they were more talk and drink than anything resembling action. She was preparing to ease out of their orbit until, only two nights ago at the Roxy, Layla had dragged in a graying, Slavic-accented man carrying a thick tome on the fall of the Roman Empire. He’d just returned from a trip to Europe, and his cultural touchstones were closer to Rachel’s own than they were to Layla’s—Jimmy Carter, Fantasy Island, the Cold War, and Chernobyl. Peter Kožul was a surprise, because Layla and Gary and Nathan believed that anyone old enough to be their parents had been too warped by the Old World to ever be woke. But Peter—he was different. He’d grown up in communist Yugoslavia, and when he opened his mouth he spoke in the revolutionary vitriol that was their bread and butter. When Rachel asked which part of Yugoslavia he’d come from, he’d simply said, “My country is a country that no longer exists,” then kissed her again.
“Where’d you first meet him?” Rachel asked, trying not to sound like she cared.
“Discussion group. Antifa.”
Though she knew very well, she said, “Anti-what?”
“Anti-fascist. It’s a European thing, fighting against fascists in the streets. With fists. Like the black bloc, but we don’t hide our faces. Good thing to import.”
Rachel nodded into her cup.
“You want to know where he’s from,” Layla said. “I just want to know how he got so fucking smart.” She shook her head. Not quite a swoon, but almost.
They turned back to find Gary sitting at the kitchen island, his head on his crossed arms, asleep.