THOMAS STOOD on the top floor of the rapidly emptying library, dreading exit, ignoring the announcements about closing, printing several copies of the photo.
Jenny and another girl stand in the shadow of a man wearing only jeans and sunny brown hair hanging past his nipples. His hipbones, distinct above the denim’s low waistline, gleam. A variety of greenery, spiked and reedy and leafed, moves up their legs. Jenny, on his right, rests her hands on the wooden handle of a shovel nearly as tall as she is. On her biceps is a tattoo of a circle, perhaps something more that Thomas can’t make out. To the man’s left, the other woman leans her soft face and long braids against his sculpted shoulders. In the unfocused background sit lopsided structures made of waste, bits of crates printed with half names of brands, deformed soda bottles, slices of tire, all of them thatched with twisted steel and strips of faded cloth.
The accompanying article, dated 1973, concerned a group of people who had departed San Francisco, gone farther north, in a return-to-the-land movement characterized by an emphasis on quiet. While they specifically avoided terms such as “leader,” the twenty-odd individuals—mostly young women—had followed the man in the photo, who called himself Root, to the property just below the border of the Trinity Alps Wilderness, an area rich in conifer diversity and poor in people. The son of a prominent senator, he had washed himself of his family’s reputation and spent their money on three hundred acres.
They spoke only one hour of the day and harvested simple crops, arugula and tomatoes and corn. In what little of an interview the reporter could manage, Root offered few words about their rejection of identity. “We’re no one, just like everybody else,” he said. “And we’re not afraid of it.” Regarding their notions about silence: “It’s not a hard and fast rule. Nobody is upbraided if they need to talk outside the hour of the day we set aside for it. But we find that the lion’s share of verbalization is an unnecessary excess, a vehicle that brings us away from ourselves.”
Jenny, who had begun to call herself Song, spoke only when asked about her home—had she come far to join this? Did her family approve?—and she answered only, “I was born in a place surrounded by water you can’t drink. Can you imagine?”
—
WHEN AN INTERNET SEARCH confirmed the community still existed, Thomas felt the return of obligation. Back in the hotel room, he parted his hair neatly and combed it, took a harsh gulp of the tiny mouthwash. He kept expecting to find an out, to follow a selfish wish, and felt some surprise in the cab en route to the nearest car rental, as he spoke clear directions to the driver, and in the moment after the uniformed employee dropped the keys to a bland sedan into his hand and he crossed the parking lot, humming. He hadn’t driven a car since the stroke, and some part of him had expected a test demanding he raise both hands and make fists. He pushed away his mounting anxiety until the road was already rushing invisibly under him, then transferred it to the pressure on the gas pedal. The indirect route he’d planned, he hoped, would work to collect his confidence. On the Golden Gate, he ignored the way his left hand wilted across the steering wheel and watched the light perform on the bay. North of San Francisco, the land turned first into a near canopy of deep green, then cow-spotted hills that sloped modestly into imposing height.
CLAUDIA WHIRLED AROUND corners and opened and closed closets with a mania that frightened Paulie. It recalled his mother, who had always taken to cleaning after Paulie’s visits to the doctor: all surfaces of the house wet and gleaming so that touching them seemed wrong, the carpets robbed of all the soft steps they’d collected and shampooed to an unnatural sheen, the toilets so bright Paulie had felt guilty using them.
Paulie followed Claudia’s laps, shadowed her bent figure as she opened drawers and bumped them shut with her round hip, sat nearby as she unzipped and rezipped outer pockets on the two neon-pink suitcases she had purchased for the occasion. She told Paulie that when they returned from camping with the fireflies, the two of them were going to find a new place together, and that was why she had begun packing up his things. He felt squeezed watching his cymbals and ladybug cups, their shapes concealed by the seedy headlines of the New York Post, disappear without fanfare into the plain cardboard boxes. But he said nothing, just stuffed his hands in his armpits and returned every smile she flashed him.