IT TAKES ME ONLY FIFTY minutes to get to Santa Monica, where I’m supposed to meet Anya at a vegan restaurant. She says she has a solution to our problems and she wants to talk to me about it in person. I let the valet take my car and go inside, where Anya is seated by a window, sipping from a mug of roiboos tea. She is still beautiful, and for a moment I imagine she wants us to get back together; she will tell me she acknowledges her role in our marital crisis, is, in fact, contrite about what she has done, and now seeks reunion.
There is no chance of this, of course, and as soon as I approach her and she presents me with a cheek to kiss, I am saddened by the thought that we are now reduced to this. But ours was never a happy marriage. It was mutually assured destruction from the start. Of course, now, I wish we had tried harder, but when we were in the middle of the fighting, the silence, the contempt, there were plenty of moments when I felt I couldn’t bear any more of the same.
Separation hasn’t been bliss. Anya, not surprisingly, has adjusted much better than me. She’s pretty, and, at least until you get to know her, and maybe even after that, for the right type of man, i.e., one who is superficial enough to put looks before everything else, easy to get along with. I always assumed I was that superficial, but it turns out I was wrong about that, as I have been about so much.
Anya is the embodiment of a certain type of reaction to our national orgy of self-centeredness disguised as free market economics: she has withdrawn, totally, into her own self, via yoga and juice cleanses and shaman therapy and the picayune specificity of the foods she will put into her body. It’s a response I might belittle but at least it is a response, as opposed to my own inactivity.
Anya’s boyfriend, the German architect Florian, lives in an eco-friendly house made of sod somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. The house has been featured in various magazines. It looks like an igloo covered in grass, an abode fit for a Hobbit, but it has become a popular form of architecture for those who profess to care about the environment: many of the über-wealthy are seeking to build such structures on their sanctuary islands.
Florian is smart, practical, physically fit—he bicycles fifty miles a day, wearing an oxygen tank as he pedals—and an epicurean chef who has fed my children molecular gastronomy brownies and sprayed chocolate milk alcohol-free martinis into their mouths. Florian has even bought Ronin a turntable.
Like most fathers in this situation, it drives me a little crazy thinking of Florian with my kids. But there’s nothing I can do but subtly remind my children that Florian is a fucking asshole.
I take a seat. I’m hungry after the long drive. For some reason, I am careful not to tell Anya about my plea.
“How are the kids?” I ask.
“Ronin is getting over the comb issue. I could have killed you for causing that—”
“Come on!”
“—and Jinx is still gaga for God. Captain’s Club today.”
I look through the menu. It’s high-end, hydroponically grown organic produce: kale, squash, spinach, pureed and blended and sprinkled with imported vinegar. I hate this stuff.
I order some roasted yams and a cup of coffee.
“They don’t have coffee,” Anya tells me before the waiter can scold me.
“Then some ice water,” I say.
“We have room-temperature water,” the waiter says.
“Fine, water.”
Anya says she is worried, not just about our kids, but also about the planet.
I agree. Though my worries tend to be more local, I agree that on a planetary level we are in trouble. It’s just such a large problem I don’t ever really try to acknowledge it, comprising, as it does, so many constituent smaller problems like traffic, weather, coyotes, assorted species die-offs, that I seldom have time to work my way up to the actual large problem of we’re all fucked. I think that’s the appeal of the Pastor Rogers of the world, they reassure us that we’re not all fucked because God has a plan. God wouldn’t have put all this shit into the earth if he didn’t want us to abuse the fuck out of it.
“I’m worried,” I say. “But, you know, what am I going to do?”
Anya says she would never expect me to do anything, but in a resigned tone that makes me feel like this is my shortcoming. I let that slide, but too quickly I see where this is going.
Florian, it turns out, has built one of his eco-sod-igloos on an island off Lombok, near Bali. Various developments in and around Bali have become popular sanctuary spots, the higher end of them built and developed by resort firms like Aman and the Soneva Group, and others in descending order of opulence by other scaremongering developers eager to sell into the Chinese and Japanese markets. Florian has secured himself a little sanctuary compound, and he wants Anya to come with him.
“California will be under water,” Anya says, “and what’s above water will be a thousand degrees and so polluted you can’t breathe and the UV will give you cancer in a few minutes. We can’t stay here. You can’t stay here. You know that.”
So Florian has himself a sanctuary. Good for him. “Isn’t Indonesia, like, the highest-population-density place on Earth?”
“Not where Florian’s compound is. An island, average elevation one hundred meters, protected. And here’s the thing. They’ve built these wonderful schools—”
“Oh no,” I stop her. “No. You’re not taking Ronin and Jinx.”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just thinking. You should think.”
My yams arrive. A plate of root vegetables, drizzled with vinegar and some sort of kelp flakes. It looks awful.
“You can’t take my kids to Indonesia, like a million miles away.”
“Sooner or later we all have to go, somewhere, and you don’t have any plans.”
I take a bite of my yams. They are delicious. I realize I’m hungry.
“But this idea everyone has, of escaping. I mean, unless you can escape the actual Earth, I don’t think it’s really a plan. It’s more of a holding action.”
“Life is a holding action,” Anya says.
“But, going away like that, giving up. It’s selfish.”
“Like you’re trying to save the world?” Anya says. “You write for a business magazine that glorifies the greediest oligarchs on Earth.”
“But at least my heart isn’t in it.”
“Your heart isn’t in anything. That’s always been—” She stops herself, wisely deciding she doesn’t want to go down old warpaths.
I swallow yam. “Shouldn’t we be doing something here? To make our world more livable, instead of running away to some resort?” I’m not sure I believe what I’m saying, but the words sound good to me. “We should make a stand, not hide. That’s not even going to work anyway, this whole sanctuary idea. It’s just buying time.”
“That doesn’t sound bad, buying time,” Anya says. “But anyway, don’t be selfish. Your children can have this great life. I’ll send you the link to the website for the school they are building. It’s a green school. It’s beautiful, like a paradise for kids. And I think Ronin could use a change, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Will you at least think about it?” Anya says.
“Do you understand what you are asking me? To let my kids go to live on the other side of the world?”
“You’ll see them,” Anya says.
“When? Christmas? I suck at Christmas. You know that.”
“You can visit. And you know, you definitely know, that this is their best chance.”
“Best chance for what?”
“For staying alive.”
WE ARE A LITTLE DRUNK, Gemma and I, standing in the alley behind the Little Red Bar. The red glow of a cocktail sign above us lends Gemma a pinkish tint. I don’t know about second or third chances or how I might be able to save my own life, but I still know something about desire and feeling like if I can somehow make this work, with this person, then who knows what else might work? Every winning streak has to start somewhere.
We kiss at the top of the jog of stairs, where the pavement is gouged and rutted. She is soft-lipped, reluctant at first to part them, but then she opens up and I am intoxicated by desire and hunger and escape. Because for a few moments, while we’re making out in a back alley, we are removed from time and the world stops ending, just a little bit.
But as much as I am taken with her looks and confidence and character, what really made me want her was when she told me how much she liked my first book. No matter how much I tell myself I’m a hack, I harbor my old dreams, and it is lovely for a moment or two to have a beautiful woman tell me I’m talented.
“You should keep writing. I mean, writing real stuff,” she says. “Not stupid stories about stupid people like Arthur.”
Later, we are walking along the cliffs over the Pacific, down by the bluffs, the twinkling oil rigs offshore looking like distant Christmas ornaments. In just a few years, we’ve mucked up one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world, with casinos and hotels, an elevated skyway. But at night, the glistening lights shine through the marine mist, the neon softened by the moist air.
It feels too soon to take Gemma back to my place.
We stop at a bench and sit down.
“It’s so pretty,” she says. “You can almost forget how it’s all coming to an end.”
“Because it’s incremental, right?” I say. “A little bit each day, a degree or two a year, a few gutted regulations or new laws per term, and it’s not enough for most people to make a stink.”
As I say this, I realize I am changing, I’m feeling it, I’m coming to believe that we have to make a change. But how? Should we start giving out bumper stickers or something?
“It took my husband going to jail for me to realize how insane the whole sanctuary plan was,” says Gemma. “But I woke up. And you?”
“I think I’m waking up.”
We watch the oil rigs flicker in the distance, talismans of our doom.
THE BOY WAS EXCITED BY the preparations, the activity, the sense of purpose among the grown-ups that even the children tried to mimic. Tom had overheard, at a meeting held by the campfire, that they would refuse to vacate. They were tired, Sargam told them, tired of being driven off, of being pushed around, of being told they were not good enough, of being called subprimes.
“We aren’t sub-anything,” she shouted. “We are just as good as anyone who paid their goddamn mortgage or student loans. You don’t judge a person by their credit score.”
The grown-ups cheered. And there had been reporters there, filming Sargam, interviewing members of what they were calling a commune before they were corrected by the residents of Valence. “This ain’t no commune. There wasn’t anyone living in these houses but a bunch of drug addicts, and we ran them off and turned this godforsaken foreclosure-ville into a community. People helping people.”
This wasn’t some Ryanville, they kept saying, where kids were hungry and sleeping in the open. Where they couldn’t get a bath or a hot meal. Where they could be run off by some security tech. Our kids have a school. We have a doctor—he could use some medicine, supplies, equipment. But no one goes hungry. No one is turned away.
The boy would run up behind whoever was being interviewed and jump up and down, and smile and wave, excited to be on TV, thinking maybe some of his old friends back in Riverside, maybe Daniel and Terry, would see him. And he felt proud to be living in a place important enough for TV cameras to be covering it.
More people were arriving, in better trucks and vehicles, sometimes loaded up with gear—generators, schoolbooks, computers, and, one notable afternoon, toys for the kids, skateboards, bikes, soccer goals. That was the best day since Tom had arrived, and he and his friends had spent the next two afternoons inventing a new game called helicopter, involving bikes, skateboards, and a soccer ball. It was a brutal, violent game with numerous collisions and hard falls on the pavement.
They loved it.
Where was all this stuff coming from? Why were TV cameras suddenly here?
He and his friends discussed Valence’s sudden prominence.
“We’re like pirates,” an older boy said, “like outlaws. And so we’re interesting, because there aren’t many folks like us left in the world.”
“Like when there used to be native tribes, those one’s where the women show their tits all the time, and they used to show them on TV.”
“Before they were extinct?” the boy asked.
There were nods. “We’re savages.”
But who was giving the stuff?
“People who support us. People who think what we’re doing is cool.”
The boy thought about that. “Are we going to get extinct?”
The boys shook their heads. “Hell, no. Who wants this place, anyway?”
BUT THAT WAS PRECISELY WHAT was so compelling about the Valence story. It came to represent the battle of the small against the big, the underclass against the overlords, the subprimes versus the primes. Here was a group of dispossessed families who were not only making their little community work—it was quaint how they had their little school, their fields, their communal mealtimes—but was refusing to flee in the face of the largest privately held petrochemical conglomerate in the United States, one of many owned by the Pepper Sisters.
They were led by a telegenic woman who wore a white leather jacket and repeated that this community had been here long before HG Extraction had been granted the land by an act of eminent domain, promising the state a few percentage points of the value of whatever shale oil they extracted. She was mesmerizing as she condemned the Pepper Sisters, the greedy one-percenters, and a government that would give away a thriving community so that it could be turned into a fracking site. She urged the television crews to head up to Placer and see what those sites looked like. Eight square miles of toxic sludge, she said. Look around, this ain’t much, but families can live here, happy families.
Sargam rejected, outright, those inquiries that came in from talent agencies and management companies. She talked to reporters, even encouraged other citizens of Valence to speak to the few who made their way out here from Las Vegas, but she would not make herself a hero, wary lest anyone in the community see her as setting herself apart in any way.
She had known it would come to this, and one evening, as she and Darren were talking in their refurbished house, they discussed the community’s options. There was no doubt that HG Extraction, with the full force and weight of the state, would come to move them out. This whole community was but a speed bump between HG and its precious shale oil. It was dirty the way they used eminent domain to take back the land, paying nothing and driving off a few hundred innocent families, but that’s how they operated.
“That’s capitalism,” Sargam said. “That’s the system we got. The big, the rich, the powerful, they can take whatever they want. There is nothing to stop them.”
She was slipping off her jeans and cotton socks, wiping her feet with a washcloth wet in a bowl.
“It’s, like, we’re all of us, the millions, the billions who live in the red, subprimes—God I hate that word—but all of us are waiting for something, someone to stand up to them, to say no, enough. You can’t just take and take,” Darren said.
“You know who we’re waiting for?” Sargam said.
He was standing shirtless in his jeans, resting his butt against the kitchen counter. “Who?”
“We’re who we’ve been waiting for,” Sargam said. “There’s no one but us. You and me. All these good people.”
Darren smiled. “I like that. We are who we’ve been waiting for.”
“It’s been said before, but that’s what we are. There’s no one but us. If we go, all these families are going to go back to living in some Ryanville. Kids hungry. No schools. Dirty. Goddamn, that’s no way for families to live, for good people to live. Look, we gave them—no, they gave themselves a chance here, took a ghost town and made a community. And now these cursed Pepper Sisters, who already have so many billions, who see the whole planet as a gigantic pit mine, they want to take this from us too.”
Sargam sat up then. “It’s not just the shale oil.”
“What?”
“Why they want to run us off so bad. It’s us. They can’t stand the idea that people like us could have found a way to live that’s fair, dignified, outside their system. They need to prove, to every subprime out there dreaming of a way out, that there is no way out, that no such freedom exists, no such dignity. So they have to crush us, drive us out. That’s what matters to them. We can’t go.”
Darren nodded. He knew better than to disagree with Sargam. And he wasn’t going anywhere either.
SARGAM COULD TELL JUST WITH a glance at Vanessa that she had been plucked. The girl was walking with purpose, her gaze intent, even her hips seemed fuller beneath the black sweatpants she was wearing. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, Sargam guessed, but, then, she’d been younger, and it hadn’t been with a boy like that Atticus, a good boy with ready smiles and broad shoulders who doted on Vanessa whenever he thought Bailey wasn’t watching.
“Vanessa, come here, girl,” Sargam said as Vanessa strode by, a basket full of dishes and cups dangling from her narrow fingers.
The sun was so bright some mornings it was like a third person in the conversation, the stinging rays like the hot breath of the eavesdropper. Vanessa held her other hand up over eyes, the blues of which shone through the little pocket of shadow like something precious lost, then found at the back of a dresser drawer.
“How are you and Atticus doing?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“He seems like a good boy, well-spoken and mannered. And the way he dotes on you, it’s wonderful to watch. Reminds me, reminds us all, of something. Well, something maybe we never even had.”
Vanessa was sure she didn’t know what Sargam was talking about.
Sargam was so pretty, with her black hair and amber skin, but she wasn’t pretty in a mean-girl way, but pretty maybe in the way a favorite teacher could be. You wanted her not just to like you, but to protect you.
“Atticus is really nice,” Vanessa said, hoping she wasn’t revealing too much.
“You don’t have to be shy with me. I know you two . . . you know,” Sargam said.
Vanessa averted her blue eyes from Sargam, held her hand lower so that Sargam would not see that she didn’t want to meet her gaze.
“I’m saying,” Sargam said, “that you’re going to need to take some precautions, to take care that you don’t get with child.”
Vanessa blushed, her skin pinkening and then going vermillion around the freckles on her forehead.
“Don’t be bothered, darling,” Sargam said. “I’m not judging you or lecturing you. You’re young, who knows what you can be, what you can do. You don’t need a baby now.”
Vanessa looked away, then the slackness of her features tightened and her expression became pinched. “What am I gonna do, huh? I’m living in this, this, whatever this is, and I don’t have anywhere to go or anything to do, and yeah, maybe I got a guy and I like him and we have some fun, but don’t tell me I’m saving myself for anything or that I got any future or anything like that, because I’ve seen what’s out there.”
Sargam held out her arms and pulled Vanessa toward her. “Girl, I’m not saying don’t have some fun, but I’m telling you to make sure you get some protection. We can get you something, you know, for that.”
Vanessa smiled. “Oh, okay, for that. I’ll come by later.”
“No, tell that boy of yours, Atticus, to come by; he should be taking some responsibility.”
IT’S GONNA BE A WAR, thought Tom. We’ve got hundreds of men, strong ones, like my dad, and they will fight and fight and fight for us because we’re right. The boy was walking along the rows of sedge and onion, beneath the stumpy juts of dried cypress, and up a hill to where all the other boys would gather in the afternoon. Tom considered what a battle might mean. He had seen movies and TV shows, the bombed-out cities, the bundled-up old women pushing carts, the girl running naked down a dirt road, the soldiers wearing night-vision goggles searching through a house for the terrorist, and he had trouble transposing that to this little elbow of the world and to the people he knew. They had no tanks, no airplanes, no bombs, there was just his dad and Sargam and Atticus and a few more men and boys who would be armed with nothing more than righteousness, and was that really enough?
The grown-ups talked about nonviolent resistance. But he was a boy, and caught up in the excitement of conflict and the thrill of potential combat. He had been watching the preparations, the supplies laid in, the gas masks and chemical suits, the food and water that were being stored in every home as Sargam warned they would soon be cut off from the outside world. The boy found in this great excitement and understood that he was seeing things that he would never have seen back in Riverside. Like every boy, he was in a hurry to jump his boyhood self and land squarely in manhood. This great upheaval set to occur seemed to provide precisely that possibility. All that time riding in the rear passenger seat of the battered Flex when Tom felt he had not grown or learned a damn thing, and here he was, on the cusp of real, live war.
He saw Emmett and Yuri and Vito and Ted and Juan, seated in a circle under the shade of a skinny pilitas sage. They had with them the usual writst-rockets and baseball bats. Yuri, the luckiest among them, was the owner of a Crossman pump-action pellet gun. Tom sat down. They shared what they knew, what their parents had been doing, preparing in their own small ways for how they envisioned the cataclysm would go down. They agreed to meet up by the shade tree every afternoon of the war, and they talked about what they would do if they came upon an enemy soldier in their midst.
This last question was the most vexing: What would the enemy look like? Would they be American soldiers? Or cops? Or security techs? Or some combination?
“What did it matter?” the boys said. “When has a uniform ever been good news?”
But armed only with slingshots and BB guns, how would they be able to tangle with Kevlar-coated gladiators sent to uproot them?
Yuri had the answer. They would turn their weaknesses into their strengths. He talked to them about “gorilla warfare,” about insurgency, about how a few kids with slingshots had driven the United States out of Iraq—or something like that—and though he didn’t know the correct spelling of the term, what he was proposing was radical. Boys with rocks against men with guns, drones, gas, and grenades.
He proposed they gather here, and use their size and the knowledge of the trails leading to various parts of Valence to stage strikes against the enemy, sneak attacks using wrist-rockets, rocks, and a pellet gun that would stun and weaken the enemy, would—he searched for the word.
“Immoralize him!”
The boys liked the sound of Gorilla Warfare.
They would be the Gorillas.
The soldiers would never even see them, swinging through branches down trails they didn’t even know existed, until the Gorillas were upon them, teeth gnashing, claws grasping, tearing their hearts out.
They had to gather equipment, water, food, knives, rocks, enough to survive out here for weeks if they had to, so that while their parents were engaging the enemy from the front, they would be attacking where he was weakest, in the rear.
The Gorillas!
THERE WOULD BE NO ACTUAL winning, Sargam knew, there would only be a moment that might look like winning that had to be fixed in people’s minds. Eventually, the weight of the forces coming to bear against Valence would be too great. There was no way that a few hundred families in a forgotten property development who happened to be situated above a few million tons of shale could triumph over centuries of capitalism.
The media were gathering, eager for a showdown between the telegenic warrior momma of the have-nots and Pastor Roger and the Pepper Sisters. Pastor Roger was on all the networks, intoning in his soft, mellifluous voice the spiritual mission of the Pepper Sisters, and the socialist, progressive dystopia that would ensue if Valence was allowed to continue eking out its existence.
“People helping people?” Pastor Roger would ask. “I don’t hear any inch of room in there for God. This is secularism run amok, the gravest threat to God’s fabric since Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden themselves.”
His position was simple: we can’t have a socialist enclave in the middle of America, a town of God-hating progressives who don’t believe in private property or the individual’s right to exploit that property.
“Where would it end?” Pastor Roger solemnly queried. “Could the socialist dictator come to your house and tell you how to arrange your furniture, tell you not to build a modest six-thousand-square-foot home on your blessed plot, tell you to put illegal solar panels on your roof?”
This was a holy battle, Pastor Roger preached, prophesying that as soon as the legal system allowed, the Pepper Sisters would begin moving their extraction equipment into Valence and break ground on what would be a vastly profitable shale oil field. “Isn’t that what God intends? And I will be atop the first truck, blessing the drill bits.”
While Pastor Roger always appeared in his climate-controlled studio in his vast domed football stadium, Sargam did her interviews standing against white Sheetrock or framed by the vegetables growing behind the tract rows. When asked what gave her and the people of Valence the right to violate a court order and stand in the way of American energy independence—which had been achieved, by the way, a decade ago; the U.S. was now the world’s leading energy exporter—she would respond that she was only doing what the folks of Valence wanted. “We’ve been running for so long,” she said, “in ragged vehicles, sleeping under overpasses, on the side of roads, told to move on from every faucet and tap and bathroom, and denied every service, and so we finally find a place and we make a home of it—”
An interviewer cuts in. “As subprimes, you had no choice but—”
“We don’t use that term here,” Sargam said. “We don’t judge a person by his or her credit score. We’ve made our home here, using that simple credo, and we don’t need credit or cell phones or the Internet, not if we have each other, and that’s what the one percenters can’t stand, that a fulfilling life is possible without any of that stuff. But it is, and we are living it.”
She came across as thoughtful and pretty, and despite the media’s attempts to ferret out her “story,” there was no story to be found. She had simply appeared, as if from nowhere, in her white leathers on a motorcycle. There was no record or photographic image of her from before, no credit history at all, which further fueled Pastor Roger’s rants about Sargam—the foreign name itself was suspect—being some sort of sleeper progressive, a socialist plant from abroad who would undermine America’s strength by denying her energy independence.
“I’ve lived and seen enough to know,” Sargam would say when pressed about her past.
To her people, she projected a steady confidence. They would prevail, this was not a last stand, but rather a beginning of a new way of living. If all those millions could just see what a difference people helping people made, then they all had a chance. If that seed could be sown, then anything was possible. But lying quietly on her bedroll, with Darren snoring beside her, she would consider the most likely outcome: an army of security techs, a battalion of bulldozers, and a squadron of drones driving them off, and in the fog of tear gas there might be nothing for television viewers to see, beyond a demolished, abandoned exurb. She knew she must never show this fear or doubt but convey complete faith that the great arc of history would bend toward something like freedom.
It was not much, she knew, to stake people’s lives on. But she had also seen the eyes of the men and women who worked with her every day, and she had read, correctly, their desire to flee no more. This was the rock they chose to stand on.
ARTHUR MACK WOKE HIS DAUGHTERS with kisses and nose rubs against their soft cheeks. The girls slept together on a queen-size four-poster, and when they opened their eyes, their first thought was how happy they were to see their father, and their second was what exactly was he doing in their Gam’s house?
“Let’s go, girls,” he whispered. “Do you want waffles? Do you want to meet Pastor Roger?”
“Um, I dunno,” said Ginny.
“I’m sleepy,” said Franny.
“Let’s just go and have a quick breakfast and meet with Pastor Roger, and that’ll be all nicey nice, right?”
“Does Mom know?”
“Shhhh”—he held a finger up to his lips—“let her sleep.”
He gathered up both girls and a down comforter. “You girls can sleep in the car, on the way to the waffles.”
This didn’t seem to the girls a good idea, or in keeping with the recent pattern of their days, but they were tired and he was their father.
“Don’t you guys want to be a family again?” Arthur asked.
They agreed. It was what they wanted.
“So let’s do that, and that starts with us leaving right now.”
He had them padding out the door and down the stone path to Adelaide before Gemma had even stirred. She heard whispers and little feet against the path and thought it sounded strange, and then she sat up with a start, tossed her bedding aside, and was out the front door in time to see Arthur’s taillights heading down the street.
I SIT WITH RONIN AT the dining table, his algebra book open between us, a dozen sheets of blank scratch paper, pencils, and erasers spread out on the table in the cone of yellow light as we both ponder the mysteries of polynomials. We are supposed to reduce (–18×2n)2 (–1/6mn3), sets of numbers and letters so alien-looking and -sounding it hurts my eyes and mouth to look and say them. But the only chance Ronin has of passing seventh grade, I realize, is if I sit down with him and both of us, inch by bloody inch, advance up the Omaha Beach of middle school algebra. It is a first time for both of us. I myself was so stoned in seventh grade that I doubt I grasped this material, but that was in my youth, before the waves of numerically literate Asians, both at home and overseas, became the officer corps of capitalism. Now, the only hope our children have of achieving a life of 750-plus credit scores is to be able to go polynomial-to-polynomial with those East Asian kids. Of course, if Enhanced Quantitatives were doing what the state was paying them to do, I wouldn’t be sitting here, struggling to wrap my middle-aged brain around these strings of hostile numbers and letters.
Ronin shows me what he knows so far. How to simplify inside the brackets, then find like terms, push those together, remember the order of operations, then exponents, but no, I think, this has to be wrong. Shouldn’t exponents be first? Or is it brackets? I flip through the textbook, looking for the correct order.
“That can’t be right.”
Ronin sulks beside me.
I worry I am undermining his self-confidence. Am I being too harsh? If I were more confident myself, then wouldn’t I be able to gently nudge him to the correct simplifications? Where is his Danish mother and her numerically hyperliterate architect boyfriend? Why aren’t they helping Ronin with his math?
“PEMDAS.” Ronin sounds this alien word out slowly.
“Is he Greek?” I ask.
“No, it’s ‘Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,’” he says, recalling a mnemonic that he has obviously heard repeatedly in his EQ sessions. “Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, um, something, Addition, Subtraction.”
“Division?” I say.
“That’s it!”
And we set to work with our simplifying. Reducing (–18×2n)2 (–1/6mn3) to 54m5n4 is a pleasing and logical operation that makes us both happy. We each do a dozen of these problems, and both come to the same answers eleven out of the twelve times we try. We are making something work, together.
“This isn’t so hard, is it?” I ask.
Ronin is concentrating, and I imagine that he is making a breakthrough, right here, at our dining table. Why, we may have the makings of an Ivy Leaguer after all.
“I fucking HATE THIS,” he says, and puts his head down on his arms.
But no matter, we have completed one night’s homework. He is now only fourteen assignments behind.
I’m looking out the dining room window at the empty swimming pool, the pale blue bottom still somehow inviting despite the fact that we haven’t had water in it in half a decade. But Ronin remembers swimming in that pool, though Jinx probably doesn’t, and how happy it had once made us.
At one point, after we take a break for a few minutes between the algebra and the algebra, I ask Ronin what he thinks about Anya’s idea, about going to Lombok with his mother and Florian.
“I dunno,” he says, not looking up from his phone.
“But you understand it, right? What this means?”
“I guess,” he says.
“Your mom wants you and Jinx to go to sanctuary,” I say.
“I’d go with you,” he says.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him. “I think the sanctuary idea is idiotic.”
“Sanctuary doesn’t sound so bad,” he says. “But I don’t want to go with Florian. I think that guy’s kind of a dick.”
That’s my boy, I think.
We get back to work trying to solve the really tough problems.
AT NINE A.M. THE NEXT morning a policewoman arrives and serves with me an emergency court order of child custody. Anya has gone to family court and won immediate full custody of Ronin and Jinx. The family court judge, apparently, agreed that I was a threat to the safety of my children, based on my pleading guilty to Endangerment of a Minor. She informs me that Anya, accompanied by a police officer and social worker, will be at my house in an hour to collect my children and their possessions.
I know if I let them go I will never see them again.
I tell them to pack an overnight bag.
My phone rings. It’s Gemma.
“Hey there,” I say. “Not a great moment right now.”
“Tell me about it,” she says. And she tells me her husband has kidnapped her children.
“What an amazing coincidence,” I say, “because I’m about to kidnap mine.”
I WISH I HAD WASHED my car, or, better yet, had it detailed before my getaway. I hastily cleared the backseat of old manuscripts and gum wrappers and shopping bags, dumped the kids’ backpacks and suitcases into the trunk, leaving space for Gemma’s rolling suitcase. I stuffed a few T-shirts and jeans into a backpack, along with my computer. By the time I arrived at Gemma’s mother’s house, Gemma was already waiting for me, her mother standing behind her with arms folded, studying me with the same scrutiny she probably wished she had given Arthur Mack. I’m not sure if Gemma had told her that, viewed from a certain perspective, I was essentially doing to my wife a version of what Gemma’s husband was doing to her. But, bottom line, neither one of us wants to lose our kids. So off we go, driving past the whale carcasses and sitting in three hours of eastbound 10 traffic before we finally leave L.A. County and for a few miles there are up to the startling speed of forty-five miles per hour. I’m amazed the old Prius still has that in her.
It had been easy to convince Jinx to hit the road: we were going to see Pastor Roger. Ronin was delighted by the prospect of missing a few days of school. I sold this like an adventure. We were going east, into the desert, in search of some missing kids. What could be more fun than that?
Arthur had called Gemma, telling her that he had taken the kids for the good of the family.
“Okay, Arthur, I’m not sure I’m following your logic,” Gemma said, “but I am going to find you and castrate you for this.”
“Ooooh, I love it when you talk dirty.” What was alarming was that he actually meant that.
“Where are you taking them, Arthur?”
“The same place I want you to come. We have to go see Pastor Roger. I want the girls, and you and me, all of us, to sit down with him. He’s so together, such a dignified person—”
“You’re taking our girls to see a televangelist? That’s why you’ve taken them?”
“He’s so much more than that. He just has this way of making me—everyone—feel okay about themselves. So that I feel like things can work out. I mean, between you and me, between us, we can all be together. He can do that for us.”
“You nitwit, I’m never going to be with you.”
“We’ll see what Pastor Roger has to say about that. I’m going to see him now.”
“Where are you taking them?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“To Valence?” she asked. She had been watching the news and knew that Pastor Roger had set up camp near the besieged squatter town.
“Damn it,” Arthur said. “Will you at least sit down with Pastor Roger when we get there?”
Gemma hung up.
THE HIGHWAY CROWDS AGAIN AS we near the Nevada border, with hundreds of vehicles pulled off the gray-top into makeshift roadside Ryanvilles, families atop sleeping bags and on beach chairs watching the traffic stream by. There are signs, soaped and water-colored onto rear windows: “People Helping People”; or simply, “SARGAM!” Jinx and Ronin gaze at the masses of families, boys and girls like them, only these are subprimes. I have to resist the impulse to warn Ronin: You see what happens if you don’t do your algebra. Whatever happened to these folks, I tell myself, was bad luck, not bad math.
Gemma has been quiet, thoughtful, but careful to engage Jinx and Ronin in conversation. I admire her selflessness in getting beyond her own worries and concerns at this moment as she tries to paint this journey as some kind of rescue adventure.
“We’re on a mission,” says Ronin.
Jinx thinks this over, asks Gemma, “Do you want to get divorced? Or does your husband?”
I’m worried about where this is going.
“I don’t feel like I have a choice,” Gemma says.
“Divorce is a sin,” says Jinx, “so I think you should reconsider. My father and mother committed the sin of divorce, and adultery, and numerous other sins, and if they don’t repent, they will suffer.”
“Now, Jinx, remember we talked about how that is one point of view—”
“I’m stating gospel,” Jinx insists.
“Jinx, my husband, he committed numerous sins—”
“I know who your husband is,” says Jinx, “Pastor Roger has mentioned him from the platform, he’s a hero.”
“I don’t think so,” says Gemma. “He cheated people. He cheated me. He committed many sins.”
Jinx ponders this. “What sins?”
Gemma thinks for a moment. “Adultery; um, greed; um, sorcery, isn’t that one?”
Jinx nods. “Sorcery is a sin.”
“Idolatry?” I suggest.
Gemma looks at me, shrugs. “Sure. Idolatry.”
Jinx thinks this over. “‘So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you.’”
Gemma smiles back at Jinx. “Thank you, Jinx, that’s what we need to do.”
I hand my credit card to a police officer who swipes it, reads the score, and returns my card. “Welcome to Nevada.”
I HAVE TWENTY-SIX TEXT MESSAGES from Anya, nineteen kik-toks, and three voice mails that I ignore.
WHEN WE STOP AT A Del Taco south of Jean, and Jinx and Ronin are eating U.S.-farmed kangaroo-meat tacos in their own red-benched booth, I thank Gemma for being so patient with Jinx.
“She’s adorable,” says Gemma.
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Don’t be so hard on your kids.”
“I hate my kids,” I say.
Gemma sips her coffee. “I can’t imagine how you lost custody.”
“You know what I mean. I just—I don’t hate them—I just don’t know how to fix them, and I hate that.”
“You don’t fix them,” Gemma says. “You just keep them from fucking up too much.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Look, I’m glad you’re coming with me to look for my kids, but you know that your own situation, in terms of keeping your kids, it’s sort of hopeless, right?”
“I like to think of myself as living in denial,” I say.
I know how this looks: a father convicted for recklessly endangering minors who then kidnaps his own children is unlikely to come off favorably in family court. The way I see it, I don’t have any choice, it’s either lose my kids now or lose them later. And I’ll take later.
“But you’re just putting off the inevitable,” she says.
“Isn’t that all any of us are doing?” I ask.
WE STOP IN LAS VEGAS for the night, the city a shimmering upward-jutting glow stick of white light in the hazy evening. We’re all road weary, our backs aching, our asses sore from riding too long on my old car’s sagging suspension. I haven’t been to Vegas in a few years, since a story about Steve Wynn’s plan to build a full-scale replica of the Roman Coliseum and stage actual gladiator fights—men versus men, men versus lions, lions versus bears, lions versus robots, robots versus men, robots versus robots. It wasn’t opposition from environmental and animal rights groups that stopped him, it was the latest spin of the boom-and-bust cycle that undid the plan—at least in Vegas. He built a grand Coliseum in Macao that draws 120,000 Chinese two nights a week to watch fights between men and various wild animals. Chinese convicts are offered the chance to fight for their freedom in these battles.
Vegas has never recovered from the cyclical housing busts, and the whole strip itself has the sickly luster of a grandly renovated McMansion, now a decade out of fashion. The great slot boxes and shopping malls and fountains and fake Paris are all still standing and as gaudily lit and trying-to-beckon as ever, but the true high rollers have long ago forsworn Vegas to gamble instead in the deregulated casinos of Coney Island, on the East Coast, and Santa Monica, on the West Coast. Why fly across country when better action is a few miles away by helicopter?
But the old glitter and heat still excite, though the fountains of the Bellagio no longer spout and the pools at Caesars are empty, Vegas itself having exhausted the central Nevada aquafier a few years back. But for Jinx and Ronin, this skrim of unreality somehow reminds them of theme-park visits and boardwalk afternoons.
“Let’s just camp here for the night,” I say.
Gemma is reluctant. She wants to continue her pursuit. But I point out that Pastor Roger isn’t going anywhere. He’s vowed to liberate Valence, and he’s waiting to bless the newest Pepper Sisters creation, the 480-foot-high, 125-foot-long, 22,000-ton Joshua Extractor, essentially a deep-sea rig on sixteen-foot-wide treads that requires an additional six lanes of highway on every road it travels. The beast, now lumbering toward Valence, has been giddily featured on the Today show as America’s latest and greatest weapon in the war for energy independence. A one-stop shale-oil extractor that reduces the number of employees on a fracking site from forty-eight to a mere half-dozen who sit in a climate-controlled bridge high atop the vehicle.
“With the Joshua, all the foreman—that’s what he’s called, or is he a captain, like on a ship?—all he has to do is drive up and then drop the bit, flip a switch, and then start drilling,” the host marveled.
“It’s that easy!”
“And then he can pump two hundred and forty thousand gallons of water a second into that hole.”
“That’s a lot of water!”
WE TAKE A COUPLE OF rooms at Caesars, one for me and the kids and the other for Gemma. My relationship with Gemma is either progressing at surprising speed—our third date and we’re already in Vegas!—or is, in reality, a highly awkward courtship, unfolding, as it is, around both a kidnapping and an attempt to thwart a kidnapper. After I send the kids down to the buffet—“Lobster Served 21 Ways”—I head over to Gemma’s, where she lets me in while holding a handset to her ear.
“The kids called my mom,” Gemma whispers to me.
“No, you don’t need to come out here, Mom,” she says into the phone. “No, I’m with Richie . . . yes, and his kids . . . no, he’s not a child molester . . . no, I haven’t gone from an embezzler to a molester . . . yes, that would actually be going down in the world, I suppose, but that’s literally the first nice thing you’ve ever said about Arthur, and you say it now? Good-bye, Mom.”
“That sounded like a real vote of confidence from her,” I say.
“Don’t worry. She’ll actually like you. She never could stand Arthur.”
She’s taken a shower and is in a white terry-cloth robe. I walk over and stand by the windows, looking down at the abandoned courtyard. The huge circular centerpiece pool, with a fountain in the middle—one of about a dozen spread inside Caesars’ grounds—used to be full of muscular boys and curvy girls holding large brightly colored drinks shaped like bongs and old dudes swimming lazily between them. Now the pools are bone dry, save for one tiny lap pool about a half-mile away across the compound. They might as well frack here, I think.
“Have you heard from your wife?” Gemma asks.
“Ex-wife,” I say. “And, yeah, or, actually, I have received about fifty texts and kiks, but I’m not reading or listening.”
I cross the green carpeting, past a velvet upholstered club chair and a coffee table with the top about the size of a CD case. “I don’t want to talk about our problems.”
“Without those, we are nothing,” Gemma says.
“Let’s make tonight about us,” I say. “Oh, and my kids, who will be back upstairs in about twenty minutes. And I’m sure I’ll be hearing from various attorneys who are involved in various legal actions in which I am a defendant very shortly. But besides that, and the fact that your felonious ex-husband has kidnapped your children—who are recovering from a bear attack, was it?—we should be able to free our minds and have totally uninhibited, empty-headed animal-like sex.”
I pull her toward me, taking her in my arms, the thick bathrobe making her seem more substantial than she is. She smells of shower steam and sweet soap, the scent coming off her cheeks and sticking in my nose so that whenever I inhale, there she is. Every kiss is with intent, I believe, the desire to push further, to climb into this person, to ravage her, to unload on her, and that is why even in my advancing years, it still causes an adolescent rush, an eruption of ego so that I can fool myself, tongue touching Gemma’s tongue, hands inside her robe, on soft breasts, pinching nipples, eliciting moans, hands moving down the robe, toward her uncovered mons, the soft scratch of her pubes, I can fool myself in these seconds, because of the thrill of our kiss, that I am somehow still this bitchin’ awesome dude that I never was and certainly never will be again. Making out with a girl for the first, or second, or third time, it makes every rock-and-roll song dead-on accurate, every guitar chord of every rock anthem suddenly hits you square and reminds you how absolutely right Pete Townshend is on every verse, even after decades of crappy TV show sound tracks and car commercials. Because it cuts through—this feeling of being with a new girl—it cuts right through to slice open the closed universe and make everything possible again.
After, we are lying on the scratchy metallic green bed cover. For a few moments, as I pull Gemma close to me and she lies with her cheek against my shoulder, our fears and concerns are at bay. But they come rushing back—I can almost feel the instant a jolt through Gemma’s body reconnects her worry circuits: her kids are still out there, somewhere, with her idiot criminal of a husband.
Where are my own children?
I pull on trousers, shirt, shoes, and head down the hall to the elevator and then downstairs, kikking Ronin as I go.
They’ve forsworn the buffet—the lines are still too long—and instead opted for the shorter line at Shake Shack. When I find them, they are at a table, finishing up their burgers. Ronin is on the phone. I join them, pull up a chair, pick up a leftover french fry.
“Who is he talking to?” I ask Jinx.
“Mom,” she says.
“No, oh no, don’t tell her where we are,” I stage-whisper to Ronin.
“Too late,” Jinx says. “He already did.”
“You seem happy about that,” I say.
“I’m neutral. Between you and Mom? I have to be.”
I nod. “Yes, but you know”—I lower my voice so that Anya can’t hear me—“but you know that your mom wants to take you to Indonesia. I’ll never see you again.”
Ronin holds the phone out to me. “Mom wants to talk to you.”
I wave my hands. “No, no.”
But it’s too late, he’s put the phone to my ear. “Richie?”
“Hello, Anya.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Um, a road trip.”
“You are violating a court order.”
“That was a cheap shot. Behind my back?”
“It’s the best thing for the kids to get away.”
“It’s not going to happen.”
“Oh yes it is,” Anya says. “You are so going to regret this. I will find you and—”
“Don’t threaten me,” I say. “I’m beyond that. I’m—”
“You’re right. I’m not going to threaten you. But I will have my children.”
I disconnect and hand the phone back to Ronin. “What did you say?”
“I told her we were in Vegas,” Ronin says.
“Did you tell her which hotel?”
He shakes his head.
“Good boy. Okay, we need to get a little rest and then we’re back on the road.”
THAT NIGHT, I’M ANXIOUS FOR my kids to go to sleep so I can go back over and reconnect with Gemma. Jinx senses my impatience and has chosen this evening to begin what she promises will be a life of meticulous flossing. She’s carefully sliding the string alongside each tooth, and then rinsing each time.
“Jinx, you have to go to bed,” I say.
She ignores me, continuing to floss.
Finally she finishes, and then she starts brushing. She brushes with the same metronomic persistence as she has flossed, and this seems to take even longer.
“Jesus, Jinx, can you fucking hurry up?”
She rinses, puts down her toothbrush, and frowns at me. “Don’t curse at me. And DON’T take the Lord’s name.”
“Whatever, Jinx,” I say. “You know, you’re turning into a bully about all this God stuff.”
“Well, you’re rude and abusive.”
“Abusive?”
“You shouldn’t use profanity with children. That’s abusive.”
“It’s just words, Jinx. Actions are what matter.”
“Pastor Roger says—”
“Jesus, will you shut up about Pastor Roger? He’s a charlatan. A complete fraud. He’s someone morons believe in.”
“Who are you to tell me what to believe?”
“I’m your father,” I tell her. “I can give you my opinion. Now go to bed.”
“No.”
“Will you go to bed?”
“No. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“Look, Jinx, it’s been a long day, you need some sleep. We all do.”
“I want to see Mommy,” she says, and a few tears pop from her eyes.
“You can’t, not right now.”
She starts bawling.
I know what I should do is go and comfort her, but instead I become angrier. “Damnit, Jinx, you need to toughen up here. You can’t be a baby now. Okay?”
“Noooo.”
“Toughen up!” I take her by the shoulders, not roughly, I don’t think, but I want to focus her, to bring her back. At contact, she starts howling, as if I have injured her.
Ronin, who has been lying on a rollaway, listening to music, sits up and removes his headphones. “Dad? What are you doing?”
“I barely touched her,” I say.
Ronin runs over and takes Jinx in his arms. “Leave us alone!” Now he’s shouting. “Why can’t you be like a normal dad? Like everyone else? Why do you have to be such a freak?”
“I’m not, I wasn’t doing—” I am on the defensive. “I’m sorry, I just lost my cool. It’s this whole Pastor Roger thing. I know he’s a big deal to Jinx, but I, well, I see him very differently. In fact, he’s suing me.”
“And I hope he WINS!” Jinx says.
I’m an awful father. I acknowledge as much to my children, reciting a litany of my failings in a soothing and relaxing voice, intending to put them to sleep. There was the time I was caught smoking marijuana at a back-to-school night, the time I used profanities toward Jinx’s second-grade teacher, the time I started an e-mail chain trying to get Jinx’s elementary school principal fired, the time I got drunk and fell asleep in the front yard at the birthday party of one of Ronin’s friends, the time Anya and I got into a fight during a parent-teacher conference and the teacher called security, the time the police came when I was teaching Ronin how to ride a bike because my neighbors thought they were watching an act of child abuse, the time I made Ronin play touch football on the street and the police gave me a summons. There are so many times, and my children find it relaxing to hear me string together my apologies and confessions of guilt, as if they find it reassuring that all our problems, all our family’s shortcomings, are the sins of the father.
And when I put it like that, I’m thinking, after both my children are finally asleep, their faces reflecting the desert-night Vegas-strip neon sheen streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, maybe I am a flop of a dad. Maybe Anya taking them away is truly for the best. I’m a mess, a middle-aged stoner who has been lucky making a living—until now, anyway—but a mess of a parent, a shitty role model, and have I conceived of a plan to escape the imminent end? Absolutely not.
I sneak over to Gemma’s and for a few minutes again it’s like a drug, this fondling and cuddling and intercourse with a beautiful new woman, and I am kept from my own fears and worries and we steal a few hours’ real sleep before our fears resurface and we wake, dress, and flee.