Nicotine (30 page)

“I'm in a different state of mind now.”

“
Totally
different head. That's why you just ‘made love' to me while you were planning how to get to Taos and ditch me.”

“I thought you were familiar with nonmonogamy.”

“At least make him do something
.
Like, tell him you're coming to Santa Fe, and see if he volunteers to drive down.”

“I don't think he'd do that.”

“So what makes you think he still loves you, for fuck's sake?”

“He doesn't love me! I left him for having a small dick and not letting me smoke! He probably
hates
me. Forget it. I'm going to go get a cigarette from Sorry.”

“You quit.”

“But if I started again, it would give me such a good excuse not to visit a doctrinaire nonsmoker.”

“Stay in bed with me, and I'll take you to Taos.”

Jazz gets up, opens the door, and steps outside. Without a word,
Sorry shows her Penny's photo of the brass plaque. Jazz pulls her into the room. They show Rob.

AROUND ELEVEN THE NEXT DAY,
they drive into Santa Fe. They window-shop, carrying large coffees from 7-Eleven. “Norman Baker Center,” Rob says out of nowhere.

“You're like a Furby,” Sorry says. “Remember that toy that says random shit like it's tripping?”

“Eight years I worked on that house. Eight years.”

“Spare us your lamentations.” Jazz points at a Zuni necklace in a window. “What's that stone? It's really beautiful.”

“It's from a mine. You have no right to wear that stuff unless you work in a mine.”

“Look at that painting.”

“Where is that?”

“That's Taos pueblo, man.”

Rob looks closer. “We could go to Taos.”

Sorry enters Jazz's friend's address in Google Earth. Her phone shows them the precise route from where they are standing, in front of an antique shop in downtown Santa Fe, to what appears to be the summit of a mountain. They microwave burritos at the 7-Eleven for lunch and depart.

The phone directs them to a dirt track opposite a youth hostel on bluffs above the Rio Grande. The minivan slips and slides as it climbs the hill. It stumbles down the other side over largish rocks. It slips up the next hill and down another one. Wireless LANs are out of reach. Even the cell signal is weak. The road courses along the bottom of a valley, in the streambed. They reach a potential turnoff, and Sorry says, “This phone has no clue where we are. But we need to bear right.”

Rob turns right. The minivan lurches over the lip of the creek bank and lands on a broad gravel road. “This must be new,” he says.
He turns left (he is entering the road at a right angle, so he has to go left to bear right) and bounces, now at a healthy pace of ten to fifteen miles an hour, over washboard-like waves of crushed blue granite.

On a hilltop, the phone gets a cell signal. “Only six more miles,” Sorry announces.

“He better be cute,” Rob says.

“More to the point, he better be home,” Sorry says.

“People out here don't lock their doors,” Jazz says. “It's just a way to guarantee they'll get broken.”

“You squatter
slag,
” Sorry says.

Rob slows the minivan for a blind curve. “Any neighbors?”

“Not on Google Earth.”

Rob sees wapiti. He stops to watch them browse in the streambed. He puts his hand on the ignition key, but he doesn't turn it off. He shifts back into drive and rolls again, and the wapiti raise their heads. “This is beautiful. What do people eat when they're stuck out here for weeks?”

“Survivalist apocalypse chow, like wheat berries and mandarin oranges in cans. But don't get your hopes up! He might be home.”

Half an hour later, the driveway ends in a tight loop. They examine the bluff in front of them, confused. Finally Sorry says, “I see it!” She jumps out of the minivan and runs toward the front door, which stands almost parallel to the visitors' line of sight. The house lies partially embedded in the mountainside, tucked halfway under the rock face like a cliff dwelling. Its facade is rock with lichens and saxifrage. The copper roof is painted dull brown. The outlines of the house are hard to see, even from close up.

“It's weird he built a camouflaged house like this with a driveway visible from space,” Rob says.

“He's not a survivalist,” Jazz says. She rings the doorbell. She knocks. She yells, “Anybody home?”

Sorry walks back to Rob. Facing the front door, she says to him conspiratorially, “There's no car.”

“And no garage,” Rob says. “The road looks brand-new. He must have built this place with mules.”

“The house is open,” Jazz says. She goes inside.

The furniture is improvised from planks resting on stacks of hardback books still in their dust jackets and shrink-wrap, mostly in foreign languages. All are by the same author: Barrett Cartwright.

“I take it this is Barrett Cartwright's house,” Rob says.

“It's his writing studio,” Jazz says. “He's never here. He told me he keeps it stocked with food in case he ever feels like writing.”

“You make no sense to me at all.
None
. I thought you wanted to see him.”

“I did. But it's not my life's dream.”

Sorry stands in the humming glow at the open door of the fridge and says, “There's at least four cases of cider in here.”

“He must have put in the road when he put in electricity,” Jazz says, distributing bottles to herself and her friends.

Intending to wash her hands, Sorry opens the tap over the kitchen sink, but nothing comes out. “Did you ever see
Avanti Popolo
?” she asks. “Israeli film about this Egyptian Shakespearean actor who survives in the desert by drinking vodka he gets from these dead Swedish blue helmets. Actually I can't remember whether he survives—”

“No.”

“I hope your boy Barrett has water here somewhere.”

“Relax,” Rob says. “We're a day's walk from Taos.”

He explores the house. After he turns on the main water supply in the pantry, the tap spurts clear and cold. He turns on the boiler.

SORRY TAKES A WALK THE
next morning before breakfast. Over steel-cut oatmeal with molasses, she proposes they found a farming commune and stay at Cartwright's house forever. She removes the
sixteenth cigarette from her second-to-last pack of American Spirits, taps it on the table, and goes outside to smoke.

Rob suggests one week. Jazz agrees, saying that the water (tank on the roof) and food (pantry) supply are not infinite. Even the four-plus cases of cider suggest a single man-month. Three guests for a week leaves her friend a week's grace before he has to go shopping. Sorry comes back inside and proposes they stay five days, explaining that in emergencies she can get by on five cigarettes a day.

AT THAT VERY MOMENT, AN
online gaming buddy of Matt's who works in the NYPD's “Real Time Crime Center” data-mining and crime anticipation unit (cf.
Minority Report
) agrees to locate Jazz's cell phone.

His first attempt fails. On World of Warcraft's internal chat software, he writes,
No dice. Prob burner phone.

PKK pond scum,
Matt replies,
but hella hot, if I catch up she will be so raped.

THAT DAY, SORRY SMOKES FIVE
cigarettes.

She intuits that using up her cigarettes is going to make her unhappy. She doesn't want to leave Cartwright's house.

On the second day, she smokes four, and two on day three, leaving her with fifteen.

Day five: three. Day six: three. Day seven: three. Day eight: none.

Day nine, she feels the return of her mania. She wonders whether it might be a reverse placebo effect, but the colors seem so vivid, the sky so vast and blue; Cartwright's work so gripping, her own unwritten poetry so
good
.

She walks the hills on the hottest days alone. One day she climbs a small but steep and jagged peak, and standing on the top, she takes off her shirt and says to the sun, “Sunlight. Fill my heart.” Thereupon
sunlight fills her heart (inexplicable process defying prose description). On her return she gives the six remaining cigarettes to Rob. “Keep these for me,” she says. “If Cartwright materializes, I'm really going to want them.”

He rolls one between two fingers and says, “I don't know how you can smoke these anyway. They're way past stale.”

“It's the dry heat. It's like they're always burning. I can sniff them and get a rush.”

He sniffs one. “I could have one right now without getting addicted. There's nowhere to buy more.”

“That's not how it works. You're addicted forever. You'd just go back into withdrawal.”

He sighs.

UPHILL FROM THE HOUSE LIES
a sort of roofless cistern, a steep-sided reservoir about twenty feet by thirty, of unknown depth. “That's our backup drinking water,” Rob protests when Jazz suggests going swimming. She points out the little fishes and the turtle. In the shimmering heat of the afternoons they all swim, pawing away mats of algae.

At the full moon, Jazz goes out alone, naked, to swim at night in the cold. She sees two wide-set eyes on the bank, watching her, shining bloodred, and in the morning she finds mountain lion tracks. Each is as big as her fist, like a dog track without claws.

“Let's get the fuck out of here,” she tells the others the next morning. “I was almost eaten alive by a mountain lion.”

At the news, Sorry lights American Spirit number negative six.

THAT VERY SAME SECOND, MATT'S
friend in the NYPD concludes his series of attempts to find Jazz.
Sorry dude she's underground,
he messages Matt.
Clear blue sky.

“NOTE, OR NO NOTE?” JAZZ
says, regarding the dining table.

“Don't leave him a note,” Sorry says. “Let him wonder.”

They bump nine miles down the new gravel driveway. At the bottom, where it hits the main road, there is a fence, a ditch, and a new, high, solid gate, very much locked. The security system involves a camera pointing outward and, on the uphill side, a post with a keypad. They turn around, drive back two miles, and use Google to find the shortest route to Taos. It directs them back the way they came in.

Rob says there's something symbolic about benefiting from the time lag between information and reality.

Jazz says Google is a palimpsest—not a menacing medium that never forgets, but a return to the days when parchment was precious, before paper became common and disposable. It is a library that maintains all of human knowledge, eternally safe from fire and decay. “Got to have our Internet pieties down cold if we want to survive in the Bay Area,” she adds, putting her feet out the window.

Dusty wind swirls in the minivan as it creeps downward through dry valleys to Taos, where they stop for sodas.

THE FIRST MEETING OF THE
Committee to Retake Nicotine is well attended. On a Tuesday night at eight, thirty people crowd into the DJD living room, with eight on the DJD itself.

Anka describes the night Jazz shot the bucket monster. She carefully avoids prejudicial labels such as “asshole,” relating the events as accurately as she can.

“I'm confused,” a young man says. “Isn't Matt Baker the guy who cleaned up Nicotine to open it to the community?”

“Let her finish what she's saying,” a woman says. “I saw about this house on Facebook, and I'd definitely be interested in living there.”

Anka keeps her speech short, around three minutes. She closes with a plea for solidarity. No one, she says, should be allowed to drive residents from CHA homes.

When she is done speaking, Sunshine raises his hand. He presents arguments for eminent domain.

(1) The Center will attract visitors and new community members, growing the community and raising its profile. (2) Nicotine was the largest house in the CHA community, with the largest rooms—a natural community center—yet it was entirely in private hands, although it lacked a coherent activist agenda. (3) Rob may have brought it on himself. (4) Trashed by its residents, Nicotine is being restored by the Center's donor free of charge. (5) Sunshine's own increasingly popular climate change events have outgrown DJD's facilities—particularly the DJD itself, which is showing significant wear and tear—and for several years he has [resented] (he uses a different word) Nicotine's having a very large living room that goes unused because it smells like an ashtray. (6) Once that room is aired out, there will be space for an indoor day care center with yard access on the ground floor—unless the bookstore is planned to be really huge, which Sunshine doubts. (7) On social media, there have been rumors that the second-floor yoga studio will have a changing room and showers.

Because the community's few toddlers currently gather in a Children's Garden consisting of picnic tables in a vacant lot that has broken bottles and rusty scrap poking up out of the ground, several women stand up to applaud. A Stayfree resident proposes that Stayfree spearhead the cooperative day care center at the Baker Center. Another suggests teaching the children to bake so they can pay their rent in kind—in cake pops for the café!

There is happy laughter, along with a murmuring groundswell of approval for the yoga initiative.

Penny sits passively on the floor. She imagines telling the room about her relationship with Norman Baker. She imagines warning them against trusting Matt, as though Anka had not said enough. She imagines inspiring them to retake Nicotine the way she wants it
retaken. Each time her hand begins to creep into the air, an adrenaline rush raises her heart rate, and she lowers it. Her interest in the topic is too strong. It's crippling.

She is tired out from doing the recommended preliminary reading for her upcoming assignment as a global commodities market analyst trainee. She is already in regular contact with her supervisor. Her mother receives glowing reports. She brings intense concentration to the books and PDFs, with the continual sensation that if she didn't, she would be staring at her phone for eighteen hours a day, ritually conjuring thoughts of Rob while ritually banning thoughts of Matt.

It can't be done. The two men are linked now by irreversible violence.

In fact her daily time investment in ritual phone staring is a mere two hours. She feels done for and double-crossed, and she has seldom been more productive. Still, when the topic is Nicotine, her default mode is vacancy. She concentrates on her new job. Her feelings are down deep inside her head where they started out.

OVER THE NEXT WEEK, SUNSHINE
conducts what he calls an “open mouth strike” against the Nicotine residents and Penny. He impugns their motives. To maintain plausible deniability, he avoids social media. In person, he intimates to friends that the Blue Bloc's intervention in the
#climbit
action may have led to Susannah's injuries. He insinuates that the Blue Bloc may include police informants. “Why were no charges filed against Penny and Sorry? Why wasn't Jazz at the Freedom Tower?” he asks, rhetorically.

Susannah's friends fume. When they see Anka or Penny, they don't say hi.

Susannah's circle includes all the youngest and prettiest women in the CHA community. Their clout is massive.

Sunshine doesn't bad-mouth Nicotine to anyone who lives at Tranquility. His strict honor code tells him it would be wrong to render Penny homeless. As for rendering Anka homeless, he figures it's only a matter of time anyway, since she's living at DJD provisionally, on Susannah's furniture, and no one is talking to her. She's going to get lonely and move out. Her work on HIV doesn't fit the house's profile anyway.

THE SECOND MEETING AT DJD
is sparsely attended: Anka, Penny, Rufus, Maureen, Stevie, and Barry—that is, Anka and all the Tranquility residents except Jacob. The DJD residents go about their business, upstairs or in the kitchen.

“This is the perfect issue for Tranquility,” Anka says. “We have native people being driven from their homes by an entrepreneur. This isn't like normal gentrification, where it's just renters being priced out. Rob and Jazz built that house. They own it. It was a ruin before Rob moved in.”

“But it was in that guy's family,” Maureen says. “So he's naturally more attuned to the spirit of the house. The genius loci, you know, the sense of place? That's where his roots are. It's part of his childhood.”

“He let it fall down, and now he's tearing it up. He doesn't care about that house! He's putting in new flooring and wallpaper, and repainting everything! It's going to be
unrecognizable
. How is that like having roots? To him, that house is just one more investment. He's probably getting primed to sell it.”

Stevie says, “Anybody who would sell his own heritage doesn't deserve to inherit it.”

Penny doesn't say anything, but she feels proud of her housemates.

The committee reaches consensus that Rob and Jazz are indigenous
to Nicotine and that Matt's financial commitment cancels out his hereditary claims.

But no one has a practicable suggestion for what to do about it. Sabotage plans keep running up against the (dummy) surveillance cameras, while plans to betray Matt to various authorities founder on the uncertain legal status of the CHA houses and/or Jazz's gun. The committee agrees to reconvene.

THE THIRD MEETING IS HELD
at Tranquility. Penny finds herself alone with Jacob. Having skipped the first two meetings, he is now curious about the movement. He asks Penny to fill him in. She tells him everything she knows about Matt's plans.

In response he lauds Matt's work on the house, which frankly was a dump, with the toilet in the kitchen and a room full of buckets of you-know-what, come on, admit it, that's so weird it's almost sick. He never met Rob but you have to admit—

Penny says she doesn't have to admit anything, and breaks the meeting off.

SHE SITS AT THE KITCHEN
table on Saturday morning with her chin in her hand, spinning a nickel on its edge. She does her best not to think about anything but commodities, because her competing thoughts, when she has them, tell her she is sad and stupid.

Her campaign against Jazz's thing with Matt, for instance—that was real bright. She got what she was after. They broke up! Nice work, Penny! What happened then was so obviously bound to happen, she feels like she did it herself. Drove Rob and Jazz into each other's arms. Scared them into leaving town together. Why the big blind spot? What made her think Matt would ever submit calmly to frustration?

She recalls her not-so-long-ago insight that even her father
deferred to him. At the time she thought it meant Norm was weak. Now she feels—like a stomachache—how presumptuous she was to think Matt might be thwarted and threatened and placated and rendered harmless in due order like a normal person.

When she thinks of him now, she imagines a stone idol that must be propitiated by regular sacrifice. She sees herself throwing marigold petals on the Matt statue and rubbing its feet with ghee. Nothing can hurt it. No knife can penetrate its stony power. “I hate you,” she says aloud.

She opens her laptop and writes to her friend Fon in Terre Haute.

Hey Fon, how's it hanging? So much for a life of crime! I got a JOB. At Mom's bank. FUCK! And that man I'm IN LOVE WITH is in WHERE THE FUCK, I DON'T KNOW. He had no reason to leave town or stop talking to me, unless you count my fucking brother trying to kill him. West Coast? With two of his housemates. One's fat as a tick, not an issue, the other is this armed and dangerous love goddess

She regards the draft e-mail. She realizes she may not be doing anyone a favor by sending it over the Internet. “Armed and dangerous.” Not good.

She considers G-chatting with Fon, or calling her. She remembers the dictation software in her phone that understands her every word.