“Think of it as a place of mystery,” Bo said.
Later, Cal said the Millers were a little nuts. But he liked the rule. “This place of mystery,” he said. “It’s got a ring to it, don’t you think?”
Yes, Frida had to admit. It did.
2
Cal had to hold himself back from touching Frida’s hair as she slept. It lay dark and wavy across the pillow, shinier than the creek at midday. She sighed and turned over, pushing her heel into his calf so hard it almost hurt. Asleep, her mouth a flat thin line, she looked plainer than she was; without her big soulful eyes—how they lit up when she smiled or pried into him when she was serious or upset—her beauty was evident but unremarkable. She looked older than twenty-nine.
The sun hadn’t yet risen, and here he was, staring at his wife, wide awake. He’d give his left nut for a new book or the chatter of a sports-radio jackass. Anything to get through this almost-dawn. At least it wasn’t that cold; someday they might be trapped in here because of a freak snowstorm. And then what?
There was bound to be some bad weather down the line: a drought or relentless, heavy rains. They’d wanted to avoid the kind of storms that had battered the Northwest the year before they left L.A.; those states had barely recovered, and he and Frida had settled here because the climate was milder. So far, they’d been spared really bad weather. But for how long? He turned the question over and over in his mind.
This was one of things he loved about life out here. The space to consider questions. Even if he sometimes longed for mindless diversions, mostly he was grateful for the silence, the time. It reminded him of college, where thinking itself was considered noble, and where there had been nothing to distract from that endeavor. For most of his fellow students, it had been the first break from Devices, but Cal had never owned such things. There were too many links to cancer, his mother said, and she wanted him to feel lost once in a while. Everyone else was dependent on instant answers, on satellites, and this was turning them stupid. He’d written papers about how painful the shift to digital had been, about people’s addiction to the Internet, about how the batteries in dead laptops were leaking into the earth. That last one had been for the Politics of Geography course his mom had designed. Cal had been homeschooled. His mother had taught him everything he knew, until he took the train to a tiny town in California and started college at Plank.
There, they’d stay up all night, considering the nature of being, of meaning. In retrospect, they seemed like such stoners, holding up a flashlight and questioning their perception of it. If they weren’t Americans, they asked, how would they see it? If they weren’t men, if they weren’t privileged…the questions were endless. Most of the time they weren’t high, just serious. Too serious, probably. But they had joked around a lot, too. Especially Micah.
The first thing Cal remembered about Micah was how he sat on the edge of the bare mattress in their dorm room, slumped over like an old man sleeping on the bus. But he wasn’t sleeping, he was reading a small worn paperback. A few years prior, the student body had voted against allowing e-readers on campus—previously the only electronics allowed—which made it almost impossible to access contemporary books. Not that it mattered. On their first date, Cal had told Frida that Plank loved D.W.M.: dead white men.
Cal never caught the name of the book Micah was reading that first day, because as soon as Cal said hello, tentatively, lugging his suitcase into the high-ceilinged room, Micah had jumped from his pose and tossed the book aside. It fell between the bed and the wall.
“You’re here!” Micah said. He rushed forward to help Cal with his bags. He was taller than Cal and almost burly. He had a beard, which was rust colored in places, though his hair was dark. He looked older than eighteen. Cal figured he must be from a place like Montana or Maine. Definitely not a city.
“Micah Ellis,” he said, offering his hand.
“Cal. Cal Friedman.”
“You’re Jewish?”
“My mother is. Was. She’s an atheist.”
“You took her last name?”
Cal nodded. “But I see my father, all the time.”
“No judgment.” Micah held up his hands. “My parents are married, and we don’t practice any religion. Where you from? Did you say? Are you eighteen?” He smiled, almost sheepishly. “I apologize for the questions, I’m somewhat of a taxonomist.”
At first, Cal thought he’d said “taxidermist.” He pictured this bearded kid in a basement in Maine, stuffing bobcats and bears and, then, Cal himself.
“I like to classify things,” Micah was saying now, and Cal understood that he had misheard his new roommate. “Where you from?”
“Cleveland.”
Micah grinned. “I could have guessed from your accent. Flat, nasal.”
Cal knew he should be offended, but he wasn’t. “And you?”
“L.A.”