Cal remembered how, on that first night, the older students cooked and served dinner to the new ones. The second-years had baked bread and cooked a spicy vegetable soup. They wore aprons and belched with abandon. On the walls of the large dining room hung old farming equipment: a hoe, a rusted pickax. Otherwise, the large room was bare and dingy. Already, the older students had made it known that nobody much cared for how things looked. For instance, one of the windows had been shattered in a pickup football game, and instead of replacing the glass, as the president wanted, the boys had voted to duct-tape the damage.
All of it had been a lesson, Cal thought now. He’d taken none of it for granted. His time at Plank had prepared him for the devastation in L.A. and their life out here. He knew not only how to skin an animal and how to irrigate a field but also how to forgive a room for its ugliness. Frida was sensitive to space; she said the Millers’ place—their place now—was so utilitarian it was like living in a police station. He hadn’t even noticed how ugly the shelves were until she’d pointed them out. Frida probably thought this blindness a flaw, but he considered it a skill.
Like right now, Cal thought. Frida found the house depressing and dank, and she hated their practical yet dumpy couches. But what he saw, what he felt, was different. Here he was, lying next to Frida, whose body was warm and solid next to his own, and they were okay, they had shelter, they had each other. The other particulars, the lack of windows, the slanting shelves, didn’t matter.
Frida pushed once more into his calf. She muttered something—it almost sounded like another language, harsh, with a lot of consonants—and then she fell back into a silent sleep. She looked calm and comfortable in this bed, in this life.
Cal remembered that first dinner at Plank, how the other boys used words he’d never heard of: enframed, signifier, telos, and phronesis. What he’d learned about the world so far was baby food compared with what these guys knew, and that night he took to nodding at the things his classmates said while inside his brain, a tumbleweed skipped. At orientation before the meal, the second-years had taught them to show agreement by raising their fists and knocking on an invisible door. Cal couldn’t see himself ever doing this, not without laughing, at least, but at dinner, there was Micah with his fist up, knocking. As if he’d always known the gesture.
Micah and another first-year were discussing a German film they both liked. It was about terrorists from the 1970s. Micah’s great-grandmother remembered the nightly news reporting their violence when she was young, although she couldn’t keep track of what they’d opposed. “She couldn’t even remember what war everyone had protested back then,” Micah said. “I told her, ‘Vietnam, Grammie,’ and her eyes lit up, like she’d won a prize. No joke.” Then he mentioned some artist’s rendering of the German terrorists. “The portraits hit me in my core with a hot poker,” he said.
“How so?” Cal had asked. He supposed he wanted to try to participate in the conversation, in this weird little world; it had to happen eventually, or he’d go nuts. But afterward he wished he had left Micah be, that he hadn’t said anything. Or he wished he didn’t remember the moment now, almost a decade later.
The sun was about to rise, Cal could feel it. Maybe Frida felt it, too; maybe in her sleep, the day was calling her forth. But Micah’s answer was still there, in Cal’s head.
“‘How so’?” Micah echoed. “The pictures are fucking brilliant. Those terrorists are rendered mysterious and grim. That dark gray blurriness…they’re painted from actual photographs, you know that, right? Part of me always wishes they weren’t blurry, but that’s what makes them magnetic. And even as I’m magnetized, I feel a dispassion. Sure, that’s a dead body, you might say, but unless you know the history, the context, does it even matter?”
Cal was too embarrassed to admit that he’d never heard of the artist or seen the paintings, so he just nodded and waited for someone else to say something.
In that space, Micah spoke again. This time, his voice was gentle, softer, almost like he was waking a sleeping child. “Violence is beautiful, in a way.”
He smiled a big lusty grin, and Cal felt like he’d been socked in the stomach.
“What is it, California?” Micah said. “Don’t you agree with me?”
Cal had been so stunned by Micah’s answer he barely registered the nickname.
“That’s your full name?” a kid across the table said. “California?”
“Awesome!” someone else said.
“Isn’t it though?” Micah said. “His mother’s a hippie.”
“Hippies don’t exist anymore,” another Planker said.
“Apparently they do,” Micah said.
“No,” Cal heard himself say. “It’s Calvin. My name is Calvin.”
At this, Micah groaned. “God, Cal, we almost had them! Couldn’t you go along with it?” Then he roared with laughter, and someone else said, “Fuck off, man, fuck off,” laughing, too, knocking his fist. Cal didn’t say a thing. Back home, he’d never been the talkative type, but he wasn’t shy. At Plank, he was quickly earning a reputation for being reticent and thoughtful. What a fraud.