Golden State (6 page)

The outer office was so oddly quiet that I bypassed the lounge to peek into Claire’s office. She was our principal, as well as my good friend. The secretary was inside with Claire and the gym teacher. Heads down, arms identically crossed, they were gathered around a radio in alarming stillness. Whatever this news was, I didn’t want to hear it. I had the crazy thought that I could just back away unnoticed and return to some previous point where everything was fine.

Claire looked up, saw me, and reached out an arm. “It’s terrible,”
she said, leaving me no choice but to go forward. “There’s been an explosion on Hearst. They think there might have been a bomb.”

“That’s not possible,” I said absurdly, the pounding of my heart telling me that it was, the sound of it as loud as the news. An off-campus office of the university completely destroyed. Less than a mile from where we stood. Three people dead. Almost certainly a bomb. The earmark of the Cal Bomber.

I knew I wasn’t well. I saw it in Claire’s face. She pushed me into a chair, holding my shoulder to keep me from falling, but I’d already fallen. Everything else was just senseless movement.

I heard my voice, high, false, and lying. I had the flu but I could drive myself home. Someone turned off the news. The drama was all mine now. The secretary brought me a cold cloth. Claire said she’d take my class, and find a ride home for Lilly.

I left without my jacket. The weather was brisk, on the verge of rain, and the bite in the air steadied me. I had become a person who panicked at every disaster. I’d go home, drink a glass of juice, and lie down.

Instead I drove to the library on Shattuck and parked in the lot. When I got out of the car, I smelled smoke from the explosion. I was no more than a ten-minute walk from the site.

This time I wouldn’t phone my sister. I’d find what I needed to free my mind on my own. I copied articles from the
Chronicle
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
New York Times
, the
Sacramento Bee
,
Newsweek
, and
Time
. I printed the Cal Bomber’s manifesto.

At home, I shoved the mail off the dining room table onto the floor. I laid out the manifesto, forty pages, single spaced, and started to read it word by word.

It began with a simple thesis.
The past two centuries have been a catastrophe for mankind.
I could, at least partly, agree with that—world wars, genocide, terrorism, environmental damage to the planet. But I soon grasped that the Cal Bomber was focused elsewhere:
Technology has taken man off the land, crowded him into urban areas, separated him from the products of his own labor, left him at the whims of an economy run by and for the elites who manipulate the forces of technology for their own ends.

It was all so nightmarishly familiar. I thought of getting up for water, turning on the news, but I refused to stop reading. When my eyes glanced past a sentence, I brought them back, made myself absorb what I had to absorb, forced myself to look. I took notes.

As hard as life was for primitive man, he was not helpless. He could fight for his self-defense, his food, his mate. He was not alone.

Not alone the way my brother was.

I felt shaky when I rose from the table to retrieve Bobby’s year-old letter. When I sat back down, I laid the letter beside the manifesto, the pages touching.

Modern man lives in a world in which relatively few people make the decisions for everyone. To put up with this, he must be “socialized.” He must be conditioned to follow the rules of authority figures who themselves have been socialized to follow the rules.

Socialization. Technology. I had to be imagining that words seemed to leap from the manifesto to Bobby’s letter and back.

Modern man has no dignity, no autonomy. His life is filled with work that has no meaning. His mind is pulverized by the entertainment industry that is the handmaiden of technological society.

I ran my finger from the manifesto to the nearly identical sentence in Bobby’s letter:
Now we have an entertainment industry that is an arm of the technological, political system.

I could barely breathe but I didn’t stop reading.

The light pollution produced by massive urbanization does more than blind us to the stars, it takes away humanity’s compass. The noise of civilization makes us deaf to the sound of nature and the call of our own souls.

I remembered a hike. I was about nine years old, Bobby fifteen. The two of us must have trekked three miles to a still spot in the Yuba. I was hot and tired but what struck me was the silence. The only sounds came from birds, insects, and the rustling trees. We stood listening for I don’t know how long, no words passing between us. “Now you know all that is being lost to the noise of the world,” my brother said.

Contrary to accepted theory, people do not come to accept repeated lies as the truth. Rather, the endless repetition of official lies produces indifference. People still know truth from lies, but they are too numb to do anything about it, or even care.

I had tried to imagine my brother’s cabin many times. But now I saw it as it must have been, a miner’s shack for a man who was not a miner but a PhD. No bathroom, no kitchen, dirt floor, walls of rough planks, a kerosene lamp overhead, maybe one on the small table where he might have written those words.

The phone rang but I didn’t answer it. It was nearly three o’clock when I rose from the heavy oak table where Bobby, Sara, and I had eaten dinner all the years of our childhood. I felt dazed as I put the bomber’s manifesto and my brother’s letter in a manila folder, together. As I was unlocking my car in the front of the house, a strange van pulled up and Lilly got out. “Where are you going?” she demanded. She looked suspicious, and I knew she knew I’d forgotten about her.

The mother who’d driven Lilly home called out to me from the window of her Suburban. “Are you feeling better?” I nodded, trying to smile as she drove off.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said to Lilly despite the fact that I wore a coat and my keys hung from the door lock of my car.

We climbed the stairs, Lilly looking grim. I removed my coat and tried to pretend it was any of the Wednesdays of our old life. I asked about her day while I threw together a salad, but Lilly would have none it.

I sat down next to her. “Where were you going?” she asked. Her hair curled gently around her face but her voice was hard.

“Nowhere,” I lied. “I was just getting something from the car. But I do have to go out when Julia comes home.”

“Can I come with you?” She wasn’t asking. She was confirming her suspicions.

“Not this time,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. I reached to pull her close, but she turned away, jumping up to leave me alone in the kitchen.

When Julia got home a half hour later, I gave her money for pizza,
and put my coat back on. “Watch your sister,” I said, picking up the manila folder. “I have to run an errand in the city.”

I took the BART train to San Francisco. In the Montgomery station, I picked up the afternoon
Examiner
with its grisly headline,
THREE DEAD IN BERKELEY BOMBING
, and tucked it into my coat with the manila folder. I surfaced without an umbrella into a cold, hard rain. Ahead of me, two blocks up Montgomery, was the glass tower that held the law firm of Sterling, Talbot. The rain was drenching my hair and neck, but I barely noticed.

chapter ten

I
HAD NEVER
shown up unexpected at Eric’s office during business hours, though the girls and I occasionally dropped by on weekends when we were in the city. The guard in the lobby would wave us past, and we’d breeze up fourteen floors, through mahogany double doors, past floral displays the Ritz would envy, strolling down the plush corridors as if we owned the place. Now, as I tried to skirt around the firm’s circular reception desk, a woman stepped out from behind it.

“May I help you?” Her words were right but her look said a woman with sopping hair and a file folder hidden under her coat had to be stopped, possibly escorted out the door. I explained that I was Eric’s wife, and saw the flicker of surprise in her eyes.

The door to his office was open. He sat at his desk, a mess of papers spread in front of him, speaking to but not looking at the young woman who stood above him. She had long straight hair and wore a sleek, short skirt. The two of them could have been having an affair for all I knew. All those weekends and late hours. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true. Eric wasn’t the one in our marriage who kept secrets.

In his surprise, Eric seemed first pleased to see me, then concerned. He remembered to introduce me to the young associate at his side, an engagement ring weighted with diamonds on her finger.

When she left, Eric shut the door behind her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You didn’t hear the news?”

“What news?” Eric’s voice rose in alarm. “I’ve been holed up in here all day.”

I handed him the newspaper. “I’m terrified my brother did it,” I said, sounding absurd even to myself. “That he’s the Cal Bomber, or that he’s involved in it in some way.” I took the folder out of my coat. “It’s all in here.”

Eric seemed to be containing his skepticism for my benefit. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said as if he were a physician about to examine an X-ray. He carried my folder to the small conference table in the corner.

Eric brought material home from work that looked like the phone book. He read it the way I did novels, shutting out the world. Now he read what was in the folder the same way.

I sat next to him at the table, my hand lightly on his thigh, but he could have been alone. I looked out the window. On the street below, people emerged from buildings, pushed up umbrellas, and hurried to wherever they had to go. I didn’t remember walking on the street, how I’d arrived at this building.

I’ve always been prone to exaggeration: a pimple becomes melanoma, a forgotten anniversary is the end of our marriage. Yet as I waited for him to finish, his mouth growing tight, I knew my husband wasn’t going to tell me what I so desperately wanted to hear.

Eric didn’t answer the phone when it buzzed. Still in my coat, I circled his office, looking at the framed photos of the kids, the little knickknacks they’d constructed from clay and cardboard.
I made it for your paper clips, Daddy.
There was a photo I hadn’t seen before. Eric glancing adoringly at a tall, good-looking redhead in a gold-colored dress. It took me a moment to recognize that the woman was me. The picture had been taken at the firm Christmas party, just three months before.

Eric took off his half glasses, and pinched his nose. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Not at all.”

I couldn’t move. This wasn’t right. Eric was supposed to argue against overreacting. If he wasn’t going to, I’d say it for him. “In his letter, he told Mom to read some antitechnology book. We know he goes
to the library. He’s probably using the Internet, lifting ideas, maybe posting his own. Sara thinks . . .”

I stopped. Eric’s eyes were astonished. I saw the hurt in them, and then dawning anger.

“You’ve talked to Sara about this?”

Suddenly I was floundering. “I heard something on the news about there being a Sacramento postmark on a couple of the mail bombs. I called Sara.”

“When? When did you talk to her?”

Everything was all wrong. Eric was here to tell me that my latest drama was baseless, that this was not what I thought it was, that it could wait until tomorrow or next week. I wanted this so much that it didn’t occur to me to shade the truth.

“It was a while ago,” I said.

“A
while
ago?”

I should have taken a moment to think, but I was so frantic for absolution I told him straight out. “After that UCLA professor got killed in January.”

Eric looked as if he didn’t recognize me. “You had suspicions your brother could be the bomber two months ago? You’ve kept this from me all this time?”

“No, no,” I protested, “I didn’t keep it from you.” But anyone could see I had. “It wasn’t like that.” I was flailing, desperate to make my betrayal understandable. “I never
believed
my brother was the bomber. I was afraid that someone might think he was because of his philosophy. I wanted to reach out to him again even though I knew it was hopeless. I wrote him. I thought maybe if I showed him that I cared about his ideas . . .”

“Oh, Jesus,” Eric said, dropping his head into his hands. “You’ve been in touch with your brother about this.” When he looked up, I saw darkness in his eyes. “If Bobby turns out to be this guy, the fact that you wrote him now could look like you were tipping him off, trying to help him avoid suspicion.” Eric rubbed his face. “That could mean criminal charges.”

“But that’s ludicrous. I never heard back from him. And I didn’t say
that people might think he was the bomber, just that I was interested in his ideas about technology and the environment. He probably threw the letter away.”

Eric held up his hands. “I need to know when you first suspected.” He spoke as if we were in court. “The first time you made any sort of link between the Cal Bomber and your brother.”

I stammered about coming across Bobby’s letter when I was going to write Christmas cards, the same day I’d read about the Cal Bomber in a magazine. That I’d read his letter, but that I hadn’t made any connection.

He stood, his back to the table, his voice so quiet, so impersonal it made me want to cry. “So that was December.”

He faced away from me. Neither of us moved in the long silence. “I think we should talk to Stu,” he said finally.

Stu was our friend, one of the few of my husband’s partners that I actually liked. I told myself that he was going to come down the corridor on his small feet, a short, fat man with a skewed sense of the world, and convince us all we needed was some Italian food.

He came in smiling, and I had to bend for his kiss. I’d always enjoyed his friendly attraction to me, liked it when he sat with me at firm parties, listening to my stories and laughing at my jokes.