Arcadia (13 page)

In the distance, he hears people shouting, the daily Trippie meeting where all the freaked-out, strung-out, acid-wracked gather to tell their dreams. The hope is that they can be returned to themselves by community and love, though only a few have succeeded. The Trippies arrive every week, an endless stream of the damaged. Each one is given two adult Minders, who keep him safe. Though his conscience pings, Bit is glad he is still too young to work full shifts. He hates minding Trippies, their anger and fear so raw it seems to infect him as well.

Bit walks into the Sheep’s Meadow, the grass verdigris with dew. He puts down his berries and pulls a clump of new clover from the ground and scrubs and scrubs at his face until it feels fresh and the traces of his tears are gone. Goldfinches dart like flying fish from the grass, into the sun, back into the grass troughing and cresting in the wind. At last he feels strong enough to brave the Eatery, the jostle of breakfast. The women will pet him for the berries, he knows. Maybe, even, they will let him take seconds of bread. He cradles the fruit against his bare chest and begins to run again.

He has to go water the Pot Plot. Hannah, busy in the Bakery, had asked him; but before he knows it, he is swept into a work unit. Cole and Ike go off together to the gardens and, with a fluttery feeling in his chest, he wants to tell his best friends to stop, to wait up for him, knowing he can slip out of weeding easily. But Helle has partnered herself with Bit somehow. She is already talking.

. . . can’t work outside, she’s saying, and she slides the neck of her teeshirt over her shoulder; he sees her sun-blistered skin. He wants to lay a hand on it, to feel its feverish heat, but just the pressure of the thin shirt is enough to make her wince. She is not wearing a bra. Let’s do a Newbie shift, yeah? she says. In a lower voice, she says, See if I can score some downers.

Oh, he says. He looks at her slantwise, wondering about the drugs. She sees and says, Why do you hate me now, Bit?

I don’t, he says. I mean, I really like you.

I really like you, too, she says, squeezing his forearm. Her bitten fingernails, her cold hands. You’re the only guy here except for my brothers who isn’t always hitting on me.

There is so much he can say to this that he goes quiet. They walk together in silence toward the Gatehouse and Newbieville, that sprawl of canvas out by the County Road. He thinks of the pot plants on their little island drooping, curling at the edges of the leaves, and has to concentrate on the next step on the soft ground, then the next to keep from breaking into a run.

Because, beyond the oppression of his duty, something under his lungs hums with happiness to be walking beside lovely Helle. His attention has sharpened. Every leaf is in clear focus, the weave of the birdsong both intricate and glassy. In the distance, people are bent over the garden. A man carrying water in a bucket to workers is one of the dozen mutton-chopped cats in Arcadia these days who call themselves Wolf. Wolves come and go: Bears and Foxes and Hawks and Falcons and Jackals roam. The women are Rainbows, Sunshines, Summers, Rains, Meadows, Stars. Every day there are new Crows, new Autumns. It is hard to know everybody. At the movies projected some nights on the Octagonal Barn, vivid underwater explorations narrated by a Frenchman or strange, sad black-and-white flicks (piles of bodies in Auschwitz; an eyeball sliced open), Bit will sometimes look up and see clumps of strangers. He will peer around, panicked, to find some familiar face. There are good Newbies who believe in work and poverty and simple food. And there are others, freeloaders, Trippies and Runaways, people hiding out here, diluting the pure beliefs of the Old Arcadians.

Helle says, So many new people. I wish we had some way to weed them. Constructive criticism doesn’t work if you don’t give a shit about the people around you.

In his surprise, Bit dares to look Helle full in the face. She beams at him, Handy’s magnetic smile, and with her tongue clicks the new retainer she finagled from her time in the Outside. It’s a flesh-colored crab in the cavern of her mouth, endlessly fascinating.

How did you know what I was thinking? he says. He hopes she can’t read minds.

We’re alike, she says. You and me. We notice. What you’re thinking is written all over you. Like, yesterday, at the Photography Tutorial, you were looking really hard at this trail of ants. I could see you start to imagine yourself as one of them. Thinking about dismembering a grasshopper, how huge it was to your tiny size, how you would drag it underground, and then about the darkness down below, all the trails and little caverns and halls, and then what it smells like, what it’s like to live in full-body armor. It seems like everybody is so busy that nobody else notices things like that. Except for you.

There is a swimming feeling in Bit, to be read as casually as a paragraph.

They have arrived at Newbieville. Lisa holds a clipboard while Scott takes down the names of the people who have shown up this morning. They are the usual suspects: Trippies with their leathery faces and wild auras, a pregnant mother with two hungry-looking children, a young couple necking on an orange towel. Lisa’s face looks weary; there are blue marks under her eyes.

Here you are, she calls to Bit and Helle, and turns and calls out two names from the board: Armand Hammer and Penelope Connor. One is young, a beefy Runaway with a nail through his infected septum. Every few seconds, he sniffs in what’s oozing from the sore and winces. The other is a Naturist, a sixty-year-old woman with firm breasts and gray streaks in her bush.

Lisa says cheerfully, Congratulations. You have proved to us that you are willing and able to do the work we ask of you and have spent the required month in Newbieville. Now you are welcome to join our Community.

There is sparse applause from the tents and cots. The jittery boy and the old woman stand. They carry their things in cardboard boxes, some clothes, books, a few letters, not much.

Job’s easy today, kids, Lisa says to Bit and Helle. You know what to do.

Welcome to Arcadia, Bit says. Helle repeats it, absentmindedly, scanning the Newbies. She chews the tail of one of her dreadlocks, disappointed with what she sees. Bit takes Penelope’s box from her, and the old woman ruffles his hair. Sweet little guy, she says. When she stretches, he tries very hard not to look at her strangely beautiful chest.

They walk in silence down the hill toward the stream behind Ersatz Arcadia, and Bit has to tell Penelope to watch out for a poison sumac she’s just about to brush: he has a bad image of the tender skin of her buttocks breaking out into white blisters. The closer they come to the Naturist encampment, the more flesh they see, pink and tan and white lines everywhere. By the middle of the lima bean patch, all the bodies bending over to weed are nude.

Two women, very large and pink, very small and grayish, run out of the Quonset and hug Penelope. They take the box from Bit and escort the newest Arcadian inside. Toodles! she calls back at Bit. He wonders how long she’ll last. The Naturists have the highest turnover rate: the winter wind snakes through their Quonset, and its metal is very cold. He thinks maybe he’ll see her again, then doubts it.

On the way back up the hill, Helle says, How come the Naturists are never the people you
want
to see naked? Bit and Armand Hammer laugh.

The laugh burns away Armand’s shyness, and he says to Helle, I know it’s trite and all, but it’s awesome to be here. I was in a squat in Portland and I saw this one-hour special on Arcadia? And it was, like, heaven. All singing and working in the fields and people free to do what they want, and Handy so eloquent. And the mansion! My parents have a shitty duplex in Pittsburgh. When do you ever get to live in a mansion? Plus, the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen.

He’s ogling Helle openly now, the acne-scarred boy. Bit is surprised how much he wants to punch him in the throat; Bit, who would be broken with a flick of Armand’s wrist.

They stop outside the Runaway Quonset. On a brown-stained mattress three Runaways sit, a fat girl braiding the hair of a boy with the triangular face of a fox, a topless girl with delicate wrists. The topless girl smiles to see Armand gawking at her, and it startles Bit, as it always does, to see perfect teeth in the mouth of a person his age. Many Runaways, mostly suburban kids, had orthodontia, while the kids of the Old Arcadians often have twisted teeth, sometimes set two deep.

Helle says, flatly, Here’s your new home, Armand Hammer. Then she laughs, feeling his ridiculous name leave her mouth.

What’s this? Armand says.

It’s where you stay, Bit says, trying to not enjoy the crumpling of the other boy’s face. I know you were looking forward to Arcadia House, but we’re too crowded. You can try to get a cot in one of the other camps. Singleton Tents, Swingers’ Tents if that’s your thing, Naturists. If you get enough people for a family unit, you can apply for a bus or van from the Motor Pool and park it in Ersatz Arcadia. Then, if the Council approves of you, you can move up to the House when there’s a place.

Yeah, right, says the topless girl. I’ve been here two months and nobody even lets us go anywhere up there but the Eatery.

That’s a lie, Helle says flatly. The topless girl looks her up and down and mutters something that sounds like
skinny cunt
.

Bit sees Helle expanding the way Astrid expands when she’s angry, and he takes her loosely by the wrist. He says, as calmly as he can, You can use the Library, and you’re supposed to be going up in the mornings for the State Lessons. And you can go to all the lectures and slide shows and concerts you want in the Proscenium or the Octagonal Barn.

But the topless girl rolls onto her belly and says into the mattress, If I wanted to learn things, I’d still be in school.

Whatever, says the fox-faced boy, it’s all bullshit. Handy goes on about equality and subverting the hegemony, but Arcadia’s no different from anywhere else. You all are up on your hill. We’re down here in the mud. I’ve been here for a year and a half. If that’s nonhierarchical, or even fucking respectful, I’ll eat my own ass.

I don’t see you working, you little shit, Helle says. Try
working
once in a while and maybe you’ll deserve respect.

The boy slowly stands up, and Armand drops his junk on the ground, folding his arms, stepping before him.

But all the fox-boy says is, All right. Okay. Make you a deal. First time I see Handy out busting his ass like the rest of y’all, I’ll be glad to work myself. Until then, I do what he does.

The boy settles back between the plump legs of the girl on the mattress and touches the bare back of the other girl with a long, slow stroke. Both girls giggle.

Helle blanches and strides away.

Bit would like to explain more to Armand, but the other boy is savagely kicking his box of shit into the Runaway Quonset, muttering, I want to live in the mansion, I fucking came here for the mansion. Bit escapes under a volley of catcalls and sneers from the mattress, and catches up to Helle in Ersatz Arcadia.

She is crying, and Bit says, aching for her, Helle. Oh, don’t. They’re not worth it. That guy was an idiot.

Helle passes a forearm over her eyes. She gives a shaky laugh, and the new, harder Helle slides over the old one again. In the face of this complicated girl, Bit feels the straightforward pull of the Pot Plot: there, at least, he knows what he has gotten into, and why.

Yeah, she says. I know. But, she says, a new sour look on her face; what sucks is that he’s also a little
right,
Bit.

It is hot for a June midafternoon. The scent of Verda’s rosehip tea fills the air; her anise cookies are sweet in his mouth. Beside him, on the rug faded into ashy roses, Eustace, the white dog, snaps at his own privates and looks a question at Bit. Bit rubs Eustace’s head, and the dog sighs back to sleep. Bit frames his mother and Verda in the viewfinder of his camera, their heads on opposite sides of the table, loose wisps sparking with light from the window. Hannah is intent on Verda, who has gone distant, the recorder spinning at her elbow.

They were deeply strange people, she says in her anchorite’s rasp. They called themselves Divinists, because they believed that people could become perfect, therefore divine. They believed that intercourse was a gift from God and had great quantities of it with everyone in the community. To avoid the consequences, namely babies and love, they had a rotational schedule: every night, a new woman with a new man, and the men had to release themselves into their handkerchiefs.

Bit shrivels inside himself a little. Verda looks at him. You will forgive me, Ridley, for my bluntness, she says in her grand and distant way.

She says, But then their leader, John Noland, my great-grandfather, decided it was time to reproduce. He had gone to a Shaker community and saw that they were in danger of dying out, and didn’t wish that upon his people. And so they instituted a program called Eugeniculture. The most spiritual men and the most spiritual young women were allowed to mate, after a very thorough matching. Of course because the most spiritual men were old men, and nobody was more spiritual than John Noland, out of forty-eight babies born, twenty-three were his. One of them was my grandmother Martha Sutton. Her mother, Minerva, was, at the time, a bare thirteen years old.

Verda smiles wearily. One finds that when children are involved in these things, she says, the cracks in the system become clear. Babies that belonged to individual mothers, the claim on the fathers. There was some romantic love going on, verboten of course, and the breeding program interfered with the heart. And, of course, the parents had to watch as their twelve- and thirteen-year-old daughters slept with old men. Word spread to the outside, newspapers had fiery editorials, and John Noland was chased out of Summerton by the townspeople. He fled to Canada. There was nothing binding the community. The center could not hold.

Hannah’s face is shining. Bit clicks another photo of her, and then one of Verda, reflected again and again in the tarnished silver tea set on the table. Verda says, My dear Hannah. I have to stop. I am very tired, and I need to be alone.