“Please,” he said, and put a hand on her back. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
When she was breathing normally, he took her hand, and they walked forward. Cal had once told her that the act that takes longer to achieve is often the more valuable one. The dinner cooked from scratch, the dress stitched by hand. The march into the unknown.
The closer they got, the more the Spikes resembled what Bo had described: they were at least fifteen feet tall, sometimes twenty or thirty, and each one was unique. They seemed to be made of metal, or at least pieces of them were, because they reflected the sunlight. They glinted in some places, maybe even sparkled. Some curved over like dying flowers, while others shot straight out of the ground—Frida had no idea how they were supported. They weren’t smooth, as she had first thought, but bulky, uneven, and rough. She thought of the word corrugated.
The first one they saw up close was wrapped in chain-link fence and barbed wire, and it held all kinds of junk: a car bumper; a child’s easel; an old plastic bottle, sinking into itself like a rotted bell pepper; and a walker for the elderly, tennis balls still stuck to its feet, gray instead of Day-Glo. The Spikes weren’t spaced evenly apart as Frida had first assumed, and she thought she could see them inching closer and closer together the farther they walked. Did these beasts form a wall, a maze? How did anyone get out, let alone in?
“Are you sure you don’t want to turn around?” Cal whispered.
“Of course I’m sure.”
She knew what August had said, that the people who had built these things weren’t afraid to use violence, but she nonetheless had the urge to keep going. The Spikes were ominous, casting shadows, their tips sharp, their edges serrated, but they were also beautiful. They changed the landscape, rendered it unfamiliar, even as they served their first purpose of protection from outsiders. She and Cal had ventured onto an unfamiliar planet, into an unidentified galaxy. Or they themselves had shrunk; they were ants walking among blades of grass.
Cal was holding her close, as if she might slide her bare hands across their barbed surfaces and perforate herself.
“I’m not stupid,” she said. “Or fragile.”
He smiled. “But you are pregnant.”
If she was honest with herself, she could admit that Cal’s gesture of protection turned her on a little. She had a passing vision of them getting naked right here, in the shadows of these terrible, stunning things. The Spikes were so breathtaking, somebody should.
Beneath the rusted wire of the next one, Frida saw junk she hadn’t thought about in years: a lawn mower, a car battery, a stapler, a New Hampshire license plate, LIVE FREE OR DIE crimped and rusted along the last word. Die.
She wondered most at the stapler. Why that, of all objects? It was so small and ineffectual, but it could have been made into something else. A doorstop even, or a blunt object to throw at enemies. Its placement suggested wealth or profligacy, and, she had to admit, that was turning her on, too. In the last few years she had learned to sew up holes in her socks and underwear—to darn, for God’s sake—and she was itching to waste something. Maybe these people understood that need and celebrated it.
She squeezed Cal’s hand, and he squeezed back. She could tell he felt the same excitement, because he pulled her forward. “Come on,” he said, his voice louder.
The Spikes reminded Frida a little of the Watts Towers: the sculptured junk, the imperfections. She had been only once, but Micah had begun going there regularly after he’d graduated from Plank. After some prodding on her part, he’d admitted that he went with friends from the Group. This was early on, before the Group had even hijacked the fund-raiser.
They stepped around another Spike. This one looked like it had been covered in papier-maché before being wrapped with wire. It resembled an unfinished and nefarious pi?ata—instead of candies it would spill empty, yeasty wine bottles, splintering table legs, an old espresso machine. Once, in L.A., Frida had seen a barista apply red lipstick using the reflective surface of her coffee machine as a mirror. It had made Frida’s day, the way objects could be remade, given a new and unexpected purpose.
“Micah would have loved these,” she said.