Pacific Edge

3

23 March. There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.

Consider the French aristocracy before the revolution—well fed, well clothed, well housed, well educated—brilliant lives. One could say they lived in a little utopia of their own. But we don’t say that, because we know their lives rested on a base of human misery, peasants toiling in ignorance and suffering. And we think of the French aristocracy as parasites, brutal, stupid, tyrannical.

But now the world is a single economy. Global village, made in Thailand! And we stand on little islands of luxury, while the rest—great oceans of abject misery, bitter war, endless hunger. We say, But they are none of our affair! We have our island.

The Swiss have theirs. Mountain island with its banks and its bomb shelters—as fast as some Swiss take refugees in, other Swiss kick others out. Schizoid response, like all the rest of us.

Spent the morning at the Fremdenkontrolle, one office of the police station on Gemeinderstrasse. Clean, hushed. Marble floors and desktops. Polite official. But, he explains slowly in high German so I will understand, the new laws. As you don’t have a job. Tourist visa only. And as you have been here over a year already, this no longer possible is. No Ausweis. Yes, wife can stay till end of employment. Daughter too, yes.

But who’ll take care of her? I wanted to shout. Of course that’s part of the plan. Kick out one and the rest of the family will follow, even if they have work. Efficient.

So we sit at the kitchen table. Pam’s post-doc has seven months to go. She needs to finish—even with it it’ll be hard to find work in the States, with all regulatory agencies under a hiring freeze. She’s thinking about that, I can see. Eight years’ work, and for what. I’ll have to take Liddy, too—Pam can’t work and care for her both. We have a month to get out. Meaning six months apart. The post-docs from China have to do worse than that all the time. But with Liddy so young.

We can protest, I say. Pam shakes her head, mouth bitter. Picks up In’tl Herald Tribune. Southern Club defaulting on all debt. Prediction of twenty-five percent reduction in world population called optimistic by. Civil war in India, in Mexico, in. Deforestation in. World temperature up another degree Centigrade since. Species going extinct—

I’ve already read it.

Pam throws the paper aside, looking beat. Never seen her so grim. Stands to wash dishes. I watch her back and can see she’s crying. Six months.

We are the aristocracy of the world. But this time the revolution will bring down more than the aristocracy. Could be everything. Crumpled newspaper, compartmentalized disaster. Catastrophe by percentage points.

We can avoid it, I swear we can. Must concentrate on that to be able to continue.

When the heart dies, you can’t even grieve.

Tom rolled out of bed feeling old. Antediluvian. Contemporary of the background radiation. Eighty-one years old, actually. Well-propped by geriatric drugs which he abused assiduously, but still. He groaned, limped to the bathroom. Came awake and the great solitude settled on him again.

Standing in the doorway, looking out at the sage sunlight and not seeing a thing. Depression is like that. Sleep disrupted, affect blocked, nothing left but wood under the skin and an urge to cry. The best pills could do was to take the last feeling away and make it all wood. Which was a relief, although depressing in its own way if you considered it.

It was this: when his wife died he had gone crazy. And while he was crazy, he had decided never to become sane again. What was the point? Nothing mattered any more.

Say two strong trees grow together, in a spiraling of trunks. Say one of the trees dies and is cut away. Say the other is left twisted like a corkscrew, an oddity, always turning in an upward reach, stretch, search. Leafy branches bobbing, searching the air for something lost forever.

So the great solitude settled on him. No one to talk to, nothing interesting to do. Even the things he had enjoyed doing alone were not the same, because the solitude in them was not the same as the great solitude. The great solitude had seeped into everything, into the sage sunlight and the rustle of leaves, and it had become the condition of his madness, the definition of it, its heart.

He stood in the doorway, feeling it.

Only now he had been disturbed. A face from the past. Had he really lived that life? Sometimes it was flatly impossible to believe. Surely every morning he woke up an entirely new creature, oppressed by false visions of false pasts. The great solitude provided a continuity of sorts, but perhaps it was just that he had been condemned to wake up every morning in the body of yet another creature under its spell. The Tom Barnard who ran buffeted in the storms of his twenties. Later the canny lawyer chopping away at the law of the land, changing it, replacing it with laws more just, more beautiful. We can escape our memes just as we escaped our genes! they had all cried then. Perhaps they were wrong on both accounts, but the belief of the moment, of that particular incarnation…

A face from a previous incarnation. My name is Bridey Murphy, I can speak Gaelic, I knew a Russian beauty once with raven hair and a wit like the slicer for electron microscopes. Sure you did—Anastasia, right? And he’s your grandson, too, the builder. Sure. A likely story. We can escape our genes, perhaps it was true. If he himself woke a new creature every morning, why expect his daughter’s son to bear any resemblance to any incarnation along the way? We live with strangers. We live with dis-junctures; he had never done any of it; just as likely to have been raising bees in some bombed-out forest, or lying flat on his back in an old folks’ home, choking for breath. Incarnations too, no doubt, following other lines. That he had carved this line to this spot, that the world had spun along to this sage sunlight and the great solitude; impossible to believe. He would never become sane again.

But that face. That tough sharp voice, its undercurrent of scorn. He had liked her, in Singapore, he had thought her… attractive. Exotic. And once he and his young wife had climbed up through the cactus on the back side of Rattlesnake Hill, to watch a sunset and make love in a grove of trees they had helped to plant some incarnations before, in a dream of children. Sylphlike naked woman, standing between trees in the dusk. And jumping across time, a ghost of joy. Like an arrow into wood, thunk. Pale smooth skin, dark rough bark, and in that vision a sudden spark, the ghost of an epiphany.

They shouldn’t be allowed to take that hill.

Bridey Murphy, the canny lawyer, stirring inside. “God damn it,” he cried, “why didn’t you leave me alone!”

He limped back inside and threw on his clothes. He looked at the cascading sheets on the bed and sat on it and cried. Then he laughed, sitting there on his bed. “Shit,” he said, and put on his shoes.

So he came down out of the hills. Through trees, sunbeams breaking in leaves, scuffing the trail, watching for birds. At Black Star Canyon road he got on his little mountain bike and coasted down to Chapman. Coming through the cleft in the hills he looked to the right, up Crawford Canyon to Rattlesnake Hill. Scrub and cactus, a little grove of live oak, black walnut and sycamore on its round peak. The rest of the hills in view were all built up, exotic trees towering over homes, sure. Height equals money equals power. A miracle any hill was left bare. But OC Water District had owned Rattlesnake Hill before El Modena incorporated, and they were tough. Toughest watermasters in California, and that was saying a lot. So they had kept it clear. But a year or two before, they had deeded it over to the town; they hadn’t needed it to fulfill their task, and the task was all that mattered to them. So now El Modena owned it, and they would have to decide what it was for.

Farther down Chapman he passed Pedro Sanchez, Emilia Deutsch, Sylvia Waters and John Smith. “Hey, Tom Barnard! Tom!” They all yelled at him. Old friends all. “Doesn’t anything ever change down here?” he said to them, braking to a halt. Big smiles, awkward chat. No, nothing ever changed. Or so it seemed. Nothing but him. “I’m off to find Kevin.” “They’re playing a game,” Pedro told him. “Down on Esplanade.” Invitations to come over for dinner, cheery good-byes. He biked off, feeling strange. This had been his town, his community. Years and years.

Down on the Esplanade diamonds a softball game was in progress. The sight of it stopped him, and again the wood in him was pierced by ghost arrows. He had to stop.

There on a rise behind the Lobos dugout lolled Nadezhda Katayev and a tall fat man, laughing at something. He gulped, felt his pulse in him. Out of the habit of talking; a great wash of something like grief passed through him, lifted the wood, buoyed it up. Grief, or…

He pedaled down and joined them. The man was the new town attorney, named Oscar. They were deciding which movie star each ballplayer most resembled. Nadezhda said Ramona looked like Ingrid Bergman, Oscar said she looked like Belinda Brav.

“Nah she’s prettier than that,” Tom murmured, and felt a little creak of surprise when they laughed.

“What about me?” Oscar said to Nadezhda.

“Um… maybe Zero Mostel.”

“You must have had quite an interesting career as a diplomat.”

“What about Kevin?” Tom said.

“Norman Rockwell,” Nadezhda decided. “Hay in his mouth.”

“That’s not a movie star.”

“Same thing.”

“A cross between Lyle Sims and Jim Nabors,” Oscar said.

“No crosses allowed,” Nadezhda ruled. “One of the Little Rascals, anyway.”

Kevin came to bat, swung at the first pitch and hit a sharp line drive to the outfield. By the time they got the ball back in he was standing on third, with a grin splitting his face. You could see every tooth he had.

Nadezhda said, “He’s like a little kid.”

“Nine years old forever,” Tom said, and cupped his hands to yell “Nice hit!” Automatic. Instinctual behavior. Couldn’t stop it. So much for changing your memes.

Kevin saw him and laughed, waved. “Little Rascals for sure,” Nadezhda said.

They watched the game. Oscar lay back on the grass, rubbing one pudgy hand over the cut blades, looking up at clouds. The sea-breeze kept them cool. Fran Kratovil biked by, and seeing Tom she stopped, came over with a look of pleased surprise, greeted him, chatted a while before taking off. Old friends….

Kevin came to bat again, lined another sharp hit. “He’s hitting well,” Tom said.

“Hitting a thousand,” Oscar said.

“Wow.”

“Hitting a thousand?”

They explained the system.

“He has a beautiful swing,” she noted.

“Yes,” Tom said. “That’s a buggy whip swing.”

“Buggy whip?”

“Quick wrists,” Oscar said. “Flat swing, high bat speed. It looks like the bat has to bend to catch up with the rest of the swing.”

“But why a buggy whip?”

Silence. Hesitantly, Tom said, “A buggy whip was a flexible pole, with a switch at the end. So it makes sense—a quick bat would look more like that than like a bull whip, which was like a piece of rope. Funny—I don’t suppose anyone has actually seen a buggy whip for years, but they still have that name for the swing.”

The other team came to bat, and got a rally going. “Ducks on the pond!” someone yelled.

“Ducks on the pond?”

“Runners in scoring position,” Oscar explained. “From hunting.”

“Do hunters shoot ducks when they’re still on the water?”

“Hmm,” Tom said.

Oscar said, “Maybe it means that knocking the runners in is easier than shooting ducks in the air.”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “It’s more a question of potential. RBI time, you know.”

“RBI time!” someone in the dugout yelled.

Then Doris came blasting over a grassy rise and coasted down to them, skidding to a halt.

“Hey, hi, Tom.” She was excited. “I went to the town offices and checked through the planner’s files to see if there were any re-zoning proposals in the works, and there are! There’s one for Rattlesnake Hill!”

“Do you remember what the change was?” Oscar asked.

Doris gave him a look. “Five point four to three point two.”

The two men thought about it.

Nadezhda said, “Is that an important change?”

“Five point four is open space,” Oscar replied. He had rolled onto his side, and was lying on the grass with his massive head propped on one hand. “Three point two is commercial. How much are they proposing to change?”

Doris glared at him, incensed at his evident lack of concern. “Three hundred and twenty acres! It’s the whole Water District lot—land I thought we were going to add to Santiago Creek Park. And damned if they aren’t trying to slip it by in a comprehensive zoning package.”

“It’s stupid for Alfredo to try to slip all this stuff by,” Tom said, thinking about it. “There’s no way it’ll work for long.”

Oscar agreed. For the zoning change alone there would certainly have to be an environmental impact statement, and a rubber stamp town vote at the least—perhaps a contested town vote; and much the same would be true of any increase in the amount of water bought from MWD.

“The smart way to do it,” Tom said, “would be to explain what you had in mind for the hill, and once that was generally approved of, get the necessary legislation through for it.”

“It’s almost as if…” Oscar said.

“As if he needs to do it this way.” Tom nodded. “That’s something to look for. If you can find out why he’s trying to do the groundwork first, you might have found something useful.” He gazed mildly at Doris and Oscar. Oscar rolled back onto his back. Doris gave Oscar a disgusted look, and fired away on her mountain bike.

After the game Oscar returned to work, and Nadezhda asked Tom to show her the hill in question. They went by Kevin and Doris’s house, where Nadezhda was staying, then through the back garden to the bottom slope of the hill. An avocado grove extended up it fifty yards or so. “This is it. Crawford Canyon down there to the left, Rattlesnake Hill above.”

“I thought so. It really is right behind their house.”

Working in the grove was Rafael Jones, another old friend. “Hey, Tom! Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, Rafe.”

“Man, I haven’t seen you in years! What brings you down here?”

Tom pointed a thumb at Nadezhda, and the other two laughed. “Yeah,” Rafael said, “she’s shaking up our house too.” He was part of Kevin and Doris’s household, the senior member and the house farmer; he ran their groves, and the garden. Tom asked him about the avocados and they chatted briefly. Feeling exhausted at the effort, Tom pointed uphill. “We’re off to the top.”

“Okay. Good to see you again, Tom, real good. Come on down and have dinner with us sometime.”

Tom nodded and led Nadezhda up a trail. The irrigated greens gave way abruptly to deer-colored browns. It was May, which in southern California was the equivalent of late summer. Time for golden hills. Hesitantly Tom explained; southern California springtime, when things bloomed, occurred from November through February, corresponding to the rainy season. Summer’s equivalent would be March through May; and the dry brown autumn was June through October. Leaving no good equivalent for winter proper, which was about right.

He really had forgotten how to talk.

Up the trail, wending between scrub oak, black sage, purple sage, matilija poppy, horehound, patches of prickly pear. The sharp smells of the hot shrubs filled the air, dominated by sage. The ground was a loose light-brown dirt, liberally mixed with sandstone pebbles. Tom stopped to search for fossils in the outcrops of sandstone, but didn’t find any. They were there, he told Nadezhda. Shark teeth from giant extinct species, scores of mollusk-like things, and the teeth of a mammal called a desmostylian, which had no close relatives either living or extinct—kind of a cross between a hippo and a walrus. All kinds of fossils up here.

Occasionally they disturbed a pheasant, or a crowd of crows. From time to time they heard the rustling of some small animal getting out of their way. The sun beat on their necks.

First a flat ridge, then up to the hill’s broad top. The wind struck them coolly. They walked to the little grove of black walnut and sycamore and live oak at the hill’s highest point, and sat in the shade of a sycamore, among big brown leaves.

Nadezhda stretched out contentedly. Tom surveyed the scene. The coastal plain was hazy in the late afternoon light. There was Anaheim Stadium, the big hospital in Santa Ana, the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Other than that, treetops. Below them the houses and gardens of El Modena caught the light and basked in it, looking like the town’s namesake in Tuscany.

He asked her about her home, ignoring the ghosts in the grove. (A young couple, in there laughing. Beyond them children, planting foot-high trees.)

She was from Sebastopol in the Crimea, but spoke of India as her home. After many years there, she had moved back to Moscow. “That was hard.”

“India changed you?”

“India changes everyone who visits it, if they stay long enough, and if they stay open to it. So many people—I understood then how it would be possible to overrun the Earth, and soon. I was twenty-four when I first arrived. It gave me a sense of urgency.”

“But then you went back to Moscow.”

“Yes. Moscow is nothing compared to India, ah! And then my government was strange regarding India. Work there and when you came back you found no one was listening to you any more. You were tainted, you see. Made untouchable.” She laughed.

“You did a lot of good work anyway.”

“I could have done more.”

They sat and felt the sun. Nadezhda poked a twig through dead leaves. Tom watched her hands. Narrow, long-fingered. He felt thick, old, melancholy. Be here now, he thought, be here now. So hard. Nadezhda glanced at him. She mentioned Singapore, and it came back to him again, stronger than ever. She had been one of the leaders of the conference. They had had drinks together, walked the crowded, hot, color-filled streets of Singapore, arguing conversion strategies just as fast as they could talk. He described the memory as best he could, and she laughed. It was the same laugh. She had a kind of Asian face, hawk-nosed and imperious. Cossack blood. The steppes, Turkestan, the giant spaces of central Asia. Slender, fashionable, she had dressed in Singapore with liberal flourishes of Indian jewelry and clothing. Still did. Of course now she sailed with Indians again.

He asked about her life since then.

“It has not been so very interesting to tell. For many years I lived and worked in Moscow.” Her first husband had been assigned to Kazakhstan and she had done regional economic studies, until he was killed in the riots of a brief local insurgency. Back to Moscow, then to India again, where she met her second husband, a Georgian working there. To Kiev, back to Moscow. Second husband died of a heart attack, while they were on vacation. Scuba diving in the Black Sea.

Children?

A son in Moscow, two daughters in Kiev. “And you?”

“My daughter and her husband, Kevin’s folks, are in space, working on solar collectors. Have been for years. My son died when he was young, in a car accident.”

“Ah.”

“Kevin’s sister is in Bangladesh. Jill.”

“I have five grandchildren now, and a sixth is coming in a month.” She laughed. “I don’t see them enough.”

Tom grunted. He hadn’t seen Jill in a year, his daughter in five. People moved around too much, and thought that TV phones made up for it. He looked up at the sun, blinking through leaves. So she had had two husbands die on her. And here she was laughing in the sunlight, making patterns with dead leaves and twigs, like a girl. Life was strange.

Back down the hill, in the sunset’s apricot light. Tuscany in California. Kevin and Doris’s house glowed in its garden, the clear panels and domes gleaming like a lamp lighting the surrounding trees. They went inside and joined the chaos of dinnertime. The kids dashed around shrieking. Sixteen people lived in the building, and at dinner time it seemed most of them were kids. Actually only five. Rafael and Andrea were clearly delighted to see him; they had worked together on El Modena’s town charter, and yet it had been years…. They embarrassed Tom by getting out the good china and trying to get the whole house down to the table. Tomas, however, wouldn’t leave his work screen. Tom knew Yoshi and Bob, they had been teachers when Kevin was in school. And he was acquainted with Sylvia and Sam, Donna and Cindy. But what a crowd! Even before the great solitude had descended, he couldn’t have lived in such a constant gathering. Of course it was a big place, and they seldom got together like this. But still…

After dinner Tom poured cups of coffee for him and Nadezhda, and they went out to the atrium, where chairs were set around the fishpond. Overhead the skylight’s cloudgel fluttered a bit in the breeze, and from the kitchen voices chattered, dishes clattered. The atrium was dark and cool, the cloudgel clear enough to reveal the stars. The open end of the old horseshoe shape of the apartment complex gave them a view west, and they were just enough up the side of the hill that the lights from the town bobbed below, like the lamps of night fishermen on a sea. They sipped coffee.

Doris rushed in, slammed the door, stomped off to the kitchen. “Where’s my dinner?” she shouted.

About fifteen minutes later Kevin came in, looking pleased. He had been flying with Ramona, he said, and they had gone out to dinner afterward.

Doris brought him right back to earth with her news of the zoning proposal. “It’s definitely Rattlesnake Hill they’re after.”

“You’re kidding,” Kevin said feebly. He collapsed onto one of the atrium chairs. “That bastard.”

“We’re going to have a fight on our hands,” Doris predicted grimly.

“We knew that already.”

“It’s worse now.”

“Okay, okay, it’s worse now. Great.”

“I’m just trying to be realistic.”

“I know, I know.” They went into the kitchen still discussing it. “Who the fuck ate everything?” Doris roared.

Nadezhda laughed, said quietly to Tom, “Sometimes I am thinking perhaps my Doris would not be unhappy if those two got back together.”

“Back together?”

“Oh yes. They have had their moments, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Nothing very much. And a long time ago. When they first moved into this house, apparently. They almost moved into a room together, but then they didn’t. And then Doris came over to work for me for a time. She told me about it then, when she was really feeling it. Then when she returned things were not working out so much, I guess. But I think she is still a bit in love with him.”

Tom considered it. “I guess I hadn’t noticed.” How could he, up in the hills? “She does watch him a lot.”

“But then there is this Ramona.”

“Yeah, that’s what Kevin just said. But I thought she lived with Alfredo.”

Nadezhda filled him in on the latest. Telling him about the affairs of his own townspeople, and with a buoyant, lively curiosity. With pleasure. And she made it all so… suddenly he wanted to feel like she did, he wanted that engagement with things.

“Ah,” he said, confused at himself. Hawk-nosed Asian beauty, gossiping to him in the dark atrium….

They sat and watched stars bouncing on the other side of the cloudgel. Time passed.

“Will you be staying here tonight?” she asked.

The house had several spare rooms, but Tom shook his head. “It’s an easy ride home, and I prefer sleeping there.”

“Of course. But if you’ll excuse me, I think I will be going to bed.”

“Sure, sure. Don’t mind me. I’ll be setting off in a while.”

“Thanks for taking me up on the hill. It’s a good place, it should be left alone.”

“We’ll see. I was glad to go up there again myself.”

She walked up the stairs to the second floor, then around the inner balcony to the southeast curve of the horseshoe, where the best guestroom was. Tom watched her disappear, thinking nothing. Feelings fluttered into him like moths banging into a light. Creak of wood. So long since he had done any of this! It was strange, strange. Long ago it had been like this, as if he slept years every night, and woke up in a new world every morning. That voice, laughing on the streets of Singapore—was it really them? Had it happened to him? Impossible, really. It must be. And yet… a disjuncture, again—between what he felt to be true, and what he knew to be fact. All those incarnations made his life.

He stood slowly. Tired. It would be a long ride home, but suddenly he wanted to be there. Needed to be there.

The next couple of weeks were warm and humid, and there was a dull feeling of tension in the air, as if more and more static electricity were building, as if any day a Santa Ana wind would come pouring over the hills and blow them all into the sea.

Tom didn’t come back down into town, and eventually Nadezhda got in the habit of going to see him. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn’t. When she found him at home they talked, in fits and starts; when he wasn’t there she worked in his garden. Once she saw him slipping away as she hiked up the last stretch of trail, and realized he was having trouble adjusting to so much company. She stopped going, and spent her days with Doris or Kevin or Oscar, or Rafael and Andrea, or her other housemates. And then one evening Tom showed up at the house, to have a cup of coffee after dinner. Ready to talk for an hour or two, then slip away.

Kevin and Ramona fell into a pattern of a different sort; they got together in the late afternoon after work, every few days, to go flying, and then perhaps have dinner. While in the air they talked over the day’s work, or something equally inconsequential. Out of nowhere, it seemed, Kevin had found an instinct for avoiding certain topics—for letting Ramona choose what to talk about, and then following along. It was a sort of tact he had never had; he hadn’t cared enough, he hadn’t been paying enough attention to the people he was with. But on these flights he was really paying attention, with the same dreamlike intensity he had felt on their first flight. Every excursion aloft was a whole and distinct adventure, the most important part of his day by far. Just to soar around the sky like that, to feel the wind lift them like a gull… to see the land, lying below like a gift on a plate!

And there was something wonderful about working so hard in tandem, harnessed to the same chain, legs pumping in the same rhythm. The physicality of it, the things they learned about each other’s characters while at the edge of physical endurance—the constant reminder of their bodies, of their animal reality… add that to their softball games, and the swim workouts they sometimes joined in the mornings, and there wasn’t much they didn’t know about each other, as animals.

And so Kevin paid attention. And they pumped madly in the seats of the Ultralite, and soared through the air. And pointed out the sights below, and talked about nothing but the present moment. “Look at that flock of crows,” Kevin would say, pointing at a cloud of black-dot birds below.

“Gangsters,” Ramona would reply.

“No, no! I really like crows!” She would laugh. “I do, don’t you? They’re such powerful flyers, they don’t look pretty but they do it with such efficiency.”

“Fullbacks of the air.”

“Exactly!” There were thousands of crows in Orange County, living in great flocks off the fruit of the groves. “I like their croaky voices and the sheen on their wings, and that smart look in their eye when they watch you”—he was discovering all this in himself only at the moment he spoke it, so that it felt marvelous to speak, to discover—“and the way they hop sideways all shaggy and awkward. I really love them!”

And Ramona would laugh harder at each declaration. And Kevin would never speak of other things, knowing it was what she wanted. And she would fly them around the sky, more graceful than the crows, as graceful as the gulls, and the sweat would dry white on their skins as they worked like dervishes in the sky. And Kevin’s heart… well, it was full. Brimming. But he had an instinct, now, telling him what to do. Telling him to bide his time.

Thus the most important part of his life, these days, was taking place two or three hundred feet in the air. Of course he was concerned about the workings of the town council, and it took up a fair amount of time, but from week to week he didn’t worry about it much. They were waiting for Alfredo to make his next move, and doing what they could to find out more about his intentions. Doris had a friend in the financial offices of her company, who had a friend in a similar job with Heartech, and she was digging carefully there to find out what the rumors were in Alfredo’s base of operations. There were rumors of a move, in fact. Perhaps they could get more details out of this friend of a friend; Doris was excited by the possibility, and put a lot of work into it, talking, acting innocent and ignorant, asking questions over lunches.

Then the re-zoning proposal appeared on the agenda, and it included the re-zoning of the old OCWD tract. Doris and Kevin walked into the council meeting like hunters settling into a blind.

It was a much more modest affair than the inaugural meeting; the people who had to be there were there, and that was it. The long room was mostly empty and dark, with all the light and people crowded into the business end of things. Alfredo ran the meeting through its paces with his usual efficiency, only lightly peppering things with jokes and asides. Then he came to item twelve. “Okay, let’s get to the big stuff—re-zoning proposals.”

Petitioners in the audience laughed as if that were another of his jokes. Kevin hunched forward in his seat, put his elbows on the table.

Doris, seeing the way Kevin’s hands were clenched, decided she had better do the talking. “What about this change for the Crawford Canyon lots, Alfredo?”

“They’re the lots that OCWD used to own. And the land up above it, across from Orange Hill.”

“That’s called Rattlesnake Hill,” she said sharply.

“Not on the maps.”

“Why a zoning change? That land was supposed to be added to Santiago Park.”

“No, nothing’s been decided about that land, actually.”

“If you go back to the minutes of the meeting where those Crawford Canyon condos were condemned, I think you’ll find that was the plan.”

“I don’t recall what was discussed then, but nothing was ever done about it.”

“Going from five point four to three point two is a big change,” Jerry Geiger noted.

“It sure is!” Kevin said loudly. “It means you could do major commercial building. What’s the story, Alfredo?”

“The planning commission wanted to be able to consider that land as a possibility for various projects, isn’t that right, Mary?”

Mary looked down at her notes. “Three point two is a general purpose classification.”

“Meaning you could do almost anything up there!” Kevin exclaimed.

He was losing his temper already. Doris scowled at him, tried to take back their side of the argument. “It’s actually commercial zoning, isn’t it, Mary?”

“It allows commercial development, yes, but doesn’t mandate it—”

Face red with emotion, Kevin said, “That is the last empty hill in El Modena!”

“Well,” Alfredo said calmly. “No need to get upset. I know it’s more or less in your backyard, but still, for the good of the town—”

“Where I live has nothing to do with it!” Kevin exclaimed, sliding his chair back as if he might stand. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

A shocked silence, a titter. Doris elbowed Kevin in the side and then stepped hard on his foot. He glanced at her, startled.

“Don’t you need an EIS for a change like that?” she said quickly.

“Zoning changes in themselves don’t require impact statements,” Alfredo said.

“Oscar, is that right?” Doris asked.

Oscar nodded slowly, doing his sleeping Buddha routine. “They are not required, but they can be requested.”

“Well I request one!” Kevin said. “Anything could be done up there!”

“I second the request,” Doris said. “Meanwhile, I want to have some things on record. Who made this re-zoning proposal, and why?”

An odd, expectant silence. Finally Alfredo said, gently, “As Kevin pointed out, this land includes one of the last empty hilltops in the area. As such, the land is extremely valuable. Extremely valuable. When we condemned those condos under the hill, I thought it was so we would be able to put the land to use that would better serve the whole town. That’s what I said at the time. Now, if the land is made part of Santiago Park, that’s nice for the park, and for the people living in the immediate area—”

Kevin’s chair scraped the floor.

“We all live in the immediate area,” Doris said, smacking her knee into Kevin’s and wishing she had a cattle prod.

“Okay, okay,” Alfredo said. “Some people are closer than others, but we’re all in the neighorhood. And that’s the point. That land is valuable to all of us, and Matt and I think all of us are concerned to see that it is used in the best way possible for the good of the town.”

“Do you have a specific plan for it?” Jerry Geiger asked suddenly.

“Well, no. We only want the possibility to be there.”

“Does this explain the request to buy more water from MWD?” Jerry asked, looking interested.

“Well, if we had the water…” Alfredo said, and Matt picked up the thought:

“If we had the water and the land was zoned for commercial use, then we could begin to look seriously at how to make use of the situation.”

“You haven’t looked seriously up till this point,” Jerry said, sounding sardonic—though with Jerry it was hard to be sure.

“No, no. We’ve talked ideas, sure. But…”

Alfredo said, “Of course nothing can done unless the infrastructural possibility is there. But that’s what our job is, to make sure the possibilities are there.”

“Possibilities for what?” Kevin said, his voice rising. Doris attempted to step on his foot again, but he moved it. “First you’re thinking about upping the water from MWD, supposedly because it saves us money. Then we’re given a zoning change with no explanation, and when we ask for an explanation we get vague statements about possibilities. I want to know what exactly you have in mind, Alfredo, and why you’re going about all this in such an underhanded manner.”

For a split second Alfredo glared at him. Then he turned away and said in a relaxed, humorous voice, “To repeat this proposal, made before the full council in the course of a normal council meeting, we are interested in re-zoning these lots so that we can then discuss using them in some way. Currently they are zoned five point four, which is open land and only open land—”

“That’s what they should be zoned!” Kevin said, nearly shouting.

“That’s your opinion, Kevin, but I don’t believe it’s generally shared, and I have the right to express my belief by proposing a change of this sort. Don’t you agree?”

Kevin waved a hand in disgust. “You can propose all you want, but until you explain what you mean to do you haven’t made a full proposal. You’ve only just tried to slip one by. The question is, what do you have in mind to do on that land? And you haven’t answered it.”

Doris tightened the corners of her mouth so she wouldn’t smile. There was something to be said for the mad dog approach, after all. Kevin’s bluntness had taken Alfredo aback, if only for a moment. He was searching for an answer, and everyone could see it.

Finally Alfredo said, “I haven’t answered that question because there is no answer to it. We have no specific plans for that land. We only want to make it possible to think about it with some expectation that the thought could bear fruit. It’s useless to think about it unless we zone the land in a way that would make development legal. That’s what we’re proposing to do.”

“We want an EIS,” Doris said. “It’s obvious we’ll need one, since as you say the re-zoning would mean a great deal for that land. Can we vote on that?”

They voted on it, and found they were unanimously in favor of an environmental impact statement on the proposed zoning change. “Of course,” Alfredo said easily. “These are facts we need to know.”

But the look he gave them as they got up at the end of the meeting, Doris thought, was not a friendly one. Not friendly at all. She couldn’t help smiling back. They had gotten to him.

Not long after that the Lobos had their first game of the season with the Vanguards, and from the moment Kevin stepped into the batter’s box and looked out at Alfredo standing on the pitcher’s mound, he could see that Alfredo was going to pitch him tough. The council meetings, Kevin and Ramona’s flights over the town—if Alfredo had not seen them himself, he had surely heard of them, and what did he think of that? Kevin had his suspicions…. Even the fact that Kevin was still batting a thousand, a perfect seventeen for seventeen—oh, yes. Alfredo had his reasons, all right.

And he was a good pitcher. Now softball is a hitter’s game, and a pitcher isn’t going to strike a batter out; but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing he can do but serve it up. If the pitcher hits the back of the square of carpet that marks the strike zone with a high-arced pitch, it becomes damned difficult to hit the ball hard. Alfredo was good at this kind of pitch. And he had honed the psychological factor, he had the look of a power pitcher, that Don Drysdale sneer of confident disdain, saying you can’t hit me. This was a ludicrous look for a softball pitcher to have, given the nature of the game, but somehow on Alfredo it had its effect.

So he stared in at Kevin with that contemptuous grin, seeming both not to recognize him and to personally mark him out at the same time. Then he threw up a pitch so high that Kevin immediately decided not to swing at it.

Unfortunately it landed right in the middle of the carpet. Strike one. And in their league batters got only two strikes, so Kevin was only a pitch away from striking out.

Alfredo’s sneer grew wider than ever, and his next pitch was ridiculously high. Kevin judged it would fall short, and held up. He was right by no more than an inch, whew! One and one.

Unfazed, Alfredo threw up another pitch just like the previous one, only a touch deeper, and with a sudden jolt of panic Kevin judged it would be a strike. He swung hard, and was more surprised than anyone when he saw the ball flying deep into right-center field, rocketed by the desperation of Kevin’s swing. Whew! He ran to second and smiled at his teammates, who were cheering loudly from the dugout. Alfredo, of course, did not turn around to look at him. Kevin laughed at his back.

In subsequent innings Alfredo walked Kevin twice. He was ridden hard for this failure by Kevin’s teammates, and he got noticeably sharper as he urged on his own teammates. Meanwhile the rest of the Lobos were hitting him unusually well also. So it was not a good game for Alfredo, and the Lobos were ahead 9-4 when the Vanguards came up for the last time. Alfredo himself led off, and hit a single up the middle. He stood on first shouting to his teammates, clapping with an excess of energy.

The next batter, Julie Hanson, hit a hard line drive over Kevin’s head. Kevin went to cover third, and then he was in that weird moment when things were happening all around him and he was very much a part of it, but not doing a thing: watching Mike race over and cut the ball off, seeing Alfredo barrel around second on his way to third, seeing Mike throw the ball hard toward him. He straddled the base to take the throw on one bounce. The ball tailed off to the right and he jumped out to stop it, and at the same moment he caught it boom! Alfredo slammed into him, knocking him head over heels into foul territory.

Dazed, Kevin shook his head. He was on hands and knees. The ball was still in his glove. He looked over at Fred Spaulding, who had his thumb up in the out sign. People were converging on them from all directions, shouting loudly. Alfredo was standing on third base, yelling angrily himself—something about Fred’s umpiring. A crowd was gathering, and someone helped Kevin to his feet.

He took the ball from his glove and walked over to Alfredo, who eyed him warily. Without planning to he flipped the ball against Alfredo’s chest, where it thunked and fell to the ground. “You’re out,” he said harshly, hearing his voice in a way he usually didn’t.

He turned to walk away, was suddenly jerked around by the arm. He saw it was Alfredo and instantly lashed out with a fist, hitting Alfredo under the ear at about the same time that Alfredo’s right struck him in the mouth. He fell, and then he and Alfredo and several others were in a chaotic clump of wrestling bodies, Alfredo screaming abuse, Kevin cursing and trying to get an arm free to swing again, Fred shouting at them to stop it and Mike and Doris and Ramona doing the same, and there were hands all over him pulling him away, restraining him. He found himself held by a bunch of hands; he could have broken free of them, but they were friends’ hands for the most part, recognizable as such by feel alone. Across a stretch of grass Alfredo was similarly held. Alfredo glared furiously across the gap, shouting something at Fred. Nothing anyone said was comprehensible, it was as if he stood under an invisible bell jar that cut off all meaning, but in the cacophony he suddenly heard Ramona shriek “What do you think you’re doing!” He took his eyes from Alfredo for an instant, afraid she meant him. But Ramona was transfixing Alfredo with a fierce look, it was him she was yelling at. Kevin wondered where he’d hit him. His right knuckles were throbbing.

“Fuck that!” Alfredo was shouting at Fred, “Fuck that! He was in the baseline, what’m I supposed to do? It’s perfectly legal, it happens all the time!”

This was true.

“He’s the one that started something,” Alfredo shouted. “What the fuck is this?”

“Oh shut up, Alfredo,” Ramona interjected. “You know perfectly well you started it.”

Alfredo spared only a second to glare at her, but it was a cold, cold glare. He turned back to Fred: “Well? Are you going to do your job?”

A bunch of people from both teams began shouting accusations again. Fred pulled a whistle from under his shirt and whistled them down. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I’m going to stop the game and give you both defeats if you don’t get back to your dugouts! Come on, this is stupid. Move it!” He walked over to the clump of Lobos holding Kevin, and said, “Kevin, you’re out of the game. This whole thing is your fault.”

Loud contradictions from Kevin’s teammates.

“—when you’re in the baseline!” Fred carried over them. “The runner has the right to the baseline, and fielders have no complaint if they get run into while standing in it. So there was no call to throw the ball at him. Go sit it out. There’s only a couple outs to go anyway, and I want to get this game finished so the next one can begin! Move it!”

Kevin found himself being pulled back toward the dugout. He was sitting on the bench. His throat was sore—had he been shouting too? Must have been.

Ramona was sitting next to him, hand on his arm. Suddenly he was aware of that touch, of a strong hand, trembling slightly, supporting him. She was on his side. Publicly. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.

She took her hand away, and now it was his body that was quivering. Perhaps it had been his all along.

“That bastard,” she said, with feeling. She stared across at Alfredo, who stood in his dugout still shouting at Fred.

Kevin could only swallow and nod.

After the game—which the Lobos held on to win—Kevin walked away a bit dazed, and considerably embarrassed. To be kicked out of a softball game, my Lord. It happened occasionally, especially between certain rival teams who tended to drink beer during the game. But it was rare.

He heard Alfredo’s voice all the way across the field, and turned to look for him, surprised by the intensity of his dislike. That little figure over on the hillside, surrounded by its friends… a bundling, a node of everything he despised. If only he could have gotten in one more punch, he would have flattened him—

“Hi, Kev.”

He jumped, afraid his thoughts could be read on his face. “Hi, Ramona.”

“Pretty exciting game.”

“Yeah.”

“Here, come with me. I have to teach the afternoon class, but it ends early and then we can go flying.”

“Sure.” Kevin had been planning to return to work too, but they were finishing the Campbell house, and Hank and Gabriela could take care of clean-up for the afternoon.

They biked over to the high school, and Kevin showered in the gym. The old room brought back a lot of memories. His mouth hurt, the upper lip was swelling on one side. He combed his hair, futile task, and went up to Ramona’s class. She was already into a lecture, and Kevin said hi to the kids and sat in the back.

The lecture had to do with population biology, the basic equations that determined population flux in a contained environment. The equations were nonlinear, and gave a rough model for what could be seen in the outside world, populations of a given species rising and falling in a stable but unpredictable, non-repeating cycle. This concept was counter-intuitive and Ramona took a long time explaining it, using examples and moving into a conversational style, with lots of questions from the students.

Their lab took up the whole top floor of one building, and the afternoon light poured in all the western windows and shattered blue in Ramona’s black hair. She brought Kevin into the discussion and he talked about the variety of biologic systems used in modern architecture, settling on the example of Chinese carp in an atrium pool. These fish were among the steadiest in terms of numbers, but the equations still held when describing fluctuations in their population, and they were put to immediate use in deciding the size of the pool, the number of fish to be harvested, and so on.

Still, the nonlinearity of the equations, the tendency for populations to suddenly jump up or down, confused some of the students. Kevin could understand this, as it always struck him as a mystery as well.

Ramona dragged out a Lorenz waterwheel to give them a concrete example. This was a simple waterwheel with twelve buckets around its rim, and it could turn in either direction. When the water was turned on from a hose hung above the wheel, the slowest stream of water wouldn’t move the wheel at all; slowly the top bucket filled and then water dribbled over its side to the tub below. At a moderate flow the top bucket filled and tilted off to one side, and after that the wheel turned in a stately circle, buckets emptying on the bottom and partially filling under the hose. This was what they all expected, this was what common sense and experience from the outside world would suggest was normal. Thus it was even more of a surprise when Ramona turned up the water from the hose, and the wheel began to turn rapidly in one direction, slow down, speed up, reverse direction—

The class gasped at the first reversal, laughed, chattered. The wheel moved erratically, buckets sometimes filling to the brim, sometimes flashing under the hose. Chaotic movement, created by the simplest of inputs. Ramona moved from wheel to blackboard, working through the equations that described this oddity, which was actually quite common in nature. Then she set the students to exercises to demonstrate the issue for themselves, and they crowded around computer screens to see the results of their work in spectacularly colored displays.

Kevin sat at the back and watched her work. Despite her ease and laughter there was something objective, even formal in her manner. The kids were relaxed but respectful around her, and if they horsed around excessively a laser glance from her dark eyes would be enough to put them back to the task. Remembering their own days in high school—in the very same room—Kevin had to laugh: she had been a hell-raiser then. Maybe that was an advantage, now that it was her job to keep control. Station to station, running each student through the work, making sure they understood, moving on with instructions for further experiments onscreen…. It was clear she was a good teacher, and that was a pleasure to see. It was important for a teacher to have a certain distance, she should be liked and admired but also at a distance, a strong personality presenting a strong and coherent portrait of the world. This is the way the world is! the strong teacher says in every phrase and glance; not to downplay the complexity of the world, but to present a clear and distinct single view of it, which students could then work against in building their own views. It wasn’t so important that the teacher present all sides of a case, or pretend to neutrality in controversial issues. Over the years the multiplicity of teachers that every student got would take care of that. What was more important was that a teacher advocate a vivid, powerful set of ideas, to be a force, to make an impact. Population biology was still a seething mass of theoretical controversy, for instance, but Ramona argued the case for her beliefs as firmly as if speaking to a dissertation committee judging her—outlining other opinions, but then countering them with the ones she believed in. And the students listened. Kevin too.

Then class was done, and they were out in the late afternoon’s honey light. The color of high school swim team workouts. “Come on, we just have enough time to tour El Toro before dinner. I’ve got to make the meal tonight, you can help.”

“Sure.” They were going to have to gain altitude fast to catch up to Kevin.