“A lot of people are going to need help,” I said as I assumed the thunderbolt position, left heel under my ass, arms over the knees. “Why chose the one who’s closest?”
Heinrich was one of Berkeley’s freelance revolutionaries. He was in his late forties, born too late for campus riots and the Free Speech Movement, but right on time for ninety-second punk rock songs about Reagan nuking the world and polyamorous tangles with patchouli-drenched sex-positive sex bunnies and occasionally their mothers. He was microfamous for a series of pamphlets attempting to rehabilitate Bukharin as an anarchist, but every four years he blinked and voted for the Democratic candidate for president. Heinrich was, of course, in love with me.
“Can you walk?” Lindsey asked him. Yoga had made her strong. She lifted the branch off Heinrich’s leg; he grunted hard, slid out from under it, and picked himself up. “I can,” he said. “I can stand anyway.”
“Walk yourself to Alta Bates before the ER fills up,” I said. “Maybe you have internal bleeding, or a concussion.”
“Don’t say that!” he hissed at me. I smiled. He was superstitious, or at least worried about the possibility that what I articulate in words might soon manifest in reality. I don’t believe in making things too easy for my stalkers.
“You’re a little old to be climbing trees, or playing the Peeping Tom,” Lindsey said. She moved away from Heinrich to reclaim her spot on the grass near me. Heinrich limped after her and announced that he was going to join the class, then tried to twist himself into the asana. It’s a difficult posture when one is in the best of health, and he’d clearly banged himself up.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“Why... there was an earthquake just a minute ago? Don’t you want to go to your home and check for damage?” Heinrich asked.
“Don’t you?” Lindsey asked.
“He’s homeless,” I said. “Sheltered, probably with a storage unit, but homeless, probably for economic reasons that he recasts as political to his friends when he takes advantage of their showers and electrical outlets.” I pushed myself back into my position, mouth sealed shut, nostrils pulling air into me, then expelling it.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore...” said Heinrich. “But I heard something the other night that I thought you’d want to know.” I didn’t move. One shouldn’t even speak while holding an asana. Heinrich had already shattered Lindsey’s concentration. “It’s about Riley.”
Riley was his sole name, because he considered it more efficient to become world famous and win the Google Awareness Lottery than it was to keep his surname. Riley doesn’t need an introduction. What does need an introduction is why Heinrich would bring him up to me — Riley and my father had gone to college together, and there both of them got involved with magick. Riley became a millionaire, and my father became a drug addict who tried to kill — no, sacrifice — me to the spirit of capitalism. That was in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall crumbled. Now Riley’s a billionaire, and my father’s in the grave I put him in. Do you have one of those vocal-activated Internet of Things Assistants in your home? That’s thanks to Riley. He clearly conceptualized of the service as a type of familiar, but Alexa or some other disembodied voice that does your bidding isn’t your familiar, it is his. You just invited it into your home.
I still didn’t move. Let there be a void, I thought, and let Heinrich fill it with his voice.
“He’s building something in the hills,” he said. He gestured broadly to the west, toward the end of Derby Street and the beginning of the Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve. Another silence, another void.
Lindsey, the good girl, said, “He’s not building anything. He owns a company. Someone else is doing the actual work.” She looked to me for a nod of approval, but I didn’t grant her one.
“People have seen him out there,” Heinrich said.
Finally, I was driven to speak. “Have none of your friends anything better to do than follow around people more notorious than you are.” I stood up out of my stance. “Class is over. Do what thou wilt, comrades.” Then to Heinrich I added, “If you try to follow me, I’ll stab you.”
Heinrich smiled. Stalkers know their prey — he got me.
Home was a 1981 Dodge Sportsman RV I usually kept somewhere close to the park. The plates were fake. I had no license, registration, or insurance. Our toilet had long since given up the ghost, but the old Willard Pool building opens the showers twice a week, and the park itself has public restrooms. The public library — where my kid Pan did his schoolwork online under a false name — and the downtown YMCA supply the rest, so long as we stay healthy and climate change doesn’t bring snow to the Bay Area. We owned so little that there was nothing in the few cabinets to spill out onto the floor.
Like a lot of people around here, I’m off the grid. I’m also offline — no e-mail address, burner phones, no social media, no bank account. No health insurance or food stamps either. I’m just extremely lucky when it comes to, for example, scratch-off lottery tickets, and in attracting yoga students who insist on pressing money and prepaid gift cards into my hands. None of this is political; I’m no lifestyle anarchist or chemtrail-and-powerline kook.
I kept a low profile to stay off Riley’s radar. He was the one stalker I didn’t dare make it easy for.
“Hi, Dawn,” Pan said when I walked in. He was stretched out on the bench behind the table, his nose stuck in a volume of Lovecraft stories. A pimply little tween, with knobby knees and wrists, and everything he touched he smeared with a fine layer of grease. Sure, I love him. For a while there, I even loved his father, a Greek guy who flew me to Europe and hid me on his yiayia’s goat farm after I got out of prison. Pan was born on a kitchen table. We’re both used to cramped quarters.
“Panagiotis, let’s get the map and the pendulum. We’re moving.”
That brought him out of his book. “Where?”
“That’s what the pendulum is for.”
“What about... Will?”
I ignored that and got the full-page highway map of the United States and pendulum myself. I nudged his feet off the bench with my hip and took a seat, then spread the map across the table.
“Will this bucket of bolts even survive the freeways?” Pan asked. “How much gas money do we have? I have three books out from the library that I haven’t finished yet.”
“Berkeley does have an excellent library system,” I said. “Be quiet.”
I swung the pendulum over the map, muttering certain words and trying to clear my mind. Pan’s words — “The truck isn’t prepped for cold weather, or hot weather, or, or, or” — intruded, and interfered with the results. The pendulum settled over Berkeley, and when I tried again, it settled over the same spot, as if there were a magnet nailed to the underside of the table. “I suppose a move away from the Hayward Fault is in order...” Pan started to say, but then he just said, “Oh,” and looked at the dark shadow the pendulum cast upon the map.
We were staying here. I should have sent Pan with a few dollars to the CVS or something while I refocused and tried again, but I was nervous to let him out of my sight. Riley hadn’t attempted to contact me during the years I was in prison, or since my release, though I always expected he might reach out. There’s something about being unfathomably rich, so wealthy that “one-percenter” doesn’t cover it, that makes someone a very confident communicator. Not a week goes by in the Bay Area without some billionaire announcing that he wants to write the name of his app across the surface of the moon with a laser, or fund an endowed art history chair to generate new — isms to invest in, or give his favorite thoroughbred mare surgery sufficient to make her bipedal and thus more fuckable. And all this I heard about from people muttering at the supermarket, or glances at the headlines of discarded newspapers.