In 1889 the county of Orange was carved out of Los Angeles County. With the help of some money slipped to legislators in Sacramento, the border was set at Coyote Creek rather than the San Gabriel River, so that when it came time to choose the county seat, Santa Ana was more central and was chosen over Anaheim. Anaheim’s citizens were very upset.
So the little towns grew, and the farms around them. Despite all the feverish land speculation and real estate development going on, the actual number of people involved was not great. The largest towns, Santa Ana and Anaheim, had populations of only a few thousand, and the newer towns were much smaller than that. Between each town were miles of open land, covered by farmland or the old range, head high in mustard. The roads were few, the little rail systems even fewer. Under the constant sun there was an ease to life that drew people from the east, but in small waves that grew very slowly in size. Publicists based in Los Angeles trumpeted the virtues of southern California; it was America’s own Mediterranean, the golden land by the sea. The new orange groves contributed to that image, and orange growing was sold as a middle-class agriculture, more socially and aesthetically pleasing than the giant isolated wheat and corn farms of the Midwest. And perhaps it was so, at first; though many a man found himself working his grove and another job as well, to pay the grove off.
An American life of Mediterranean ease: perhaps. Perhaps. But there were disasters, too. There were floods; once it rained every day for a month, and the entire plain, from the mountains to the sea, was covered with water. All the new adobe buildings of Anaheim were melted back to mud. And once there was an outbreak of smallpox that finished off the last of the Indians at San Juan Capistrano, which remained as a silent remnant of the mission past. And the crops failed often; brought in from afar and usually planted in monocultural style, the grapes, the walnuts, and even the oranges suffered from blights that killed thousands and thousands of plants.
But by and large it was a peaceful life here, at the Victorian end of the frontier. Under the hot sun Americans from the East arrived and started up new lives, and most were happy with the results. The years passed and new settlers kept arriving and starting little towns; but it was a big land and they were accommodated without much change or sign of their arrival; they disappeared into the groves, and life went on.
The new century arrived, and the sun-drenched life by the sea fell into a pattern that it seemed would never end. In 1905 the young Walter Johnson, pitching for Fullerton High School, struck out all twenty-seven batters in a game with Santa Ana High. In 1911 Barney Oldfield raced his car with a plane, and won. In 1912 Glenn Martin flew a plane he had built himself from Newport to Catalina, the longest flight over water ever. In fact you could say that Martin began the aeronautics industry in Orange County, by building a plane in a barn. But no one could guess what would come of that kind of ingenuity, that pleasure taken in the possibilities of the mechanical. At that time it, like life itself, seemed a marvelous game, played in the midst of a prosperous, sunny peace.
And all that—and all that—and all of that—
All that went away.
47
Back in OC Jim can’t shake a feeling of uneasiness. It’s as if somewhere the program and the magnetic field keeping him on his particular track have been disarranged, fallen into some awful loop that keeps repeating over and over.
And in fact he falls into the habit of tracking about for several hours each day, all his free time spent in a big circle pattern on the freeways, Newport to Riverside to San Gabriel to San Diego to Santa Ana to Trabuco to Garden Grove to Newport, and so on. While he stares out the window looking down at his hometown. Around and around the freeways he goes, stuck in a loop program that resembles a debugging search pattern caught by a bug itself. Software going bad.
Once he stops to cruise through South Coast Plaza.
Twelve department stores: Bullock’s, Penney, Saks, Sears, KlothesAG, J. Magnin’s, I. Magnin’s, Ward’s, Palazzo, Robinson’s, Buffum’s, Neiman-Marcus.
Three hundred smaller shops, restaurants, video theaters, game parlors, galleries…
A poem is a laundry list.
You wear your culture all over you.
Chrome, and thick pile carpets.
Mirrors everywhere, replicating the displays to infinity.
Is that an eye I see in there?
Escalators, elevators, half-floors of glass, fountains.
Lots of plants. Most are real, from the tropics. Hothouse blooms.
Spectrum bends, rack after rack after (mirrored) rack.
Entering Bullock’s, Magnin’s, Saks: thirteen counters of perfume each.
Perfume! Earrings, scarves, necklaces, nylons, stationery, chrome columns, blouse racks, sportswear, shoes—
You complete the list (every day).
Jim walks through this place untracked, his uneasiness bouncing back from every mirror, every glossy leaf and fabric. The memory of his night in Egypt is overlaid on his sight like the head’s-up display of a fighter pilot’s helmet. IR images in a faint green wash: of beggars in Cairo, too poor even to live in the jammed miserable tenements around them. How many people could live in a structure like SCP? The luxury surrounding him, he thinks, is a deliberate, bald-faced denial of the reality of the world. A group hallucination shared by everyone in America.
Jim wanders this maze, past the sleepwalkers and the security police, until he has to sit down. Disoriented, dizzy, he might even be sick. Some mall kids hanging out by the video rental window stare at him curiously, suspecting an OD. They’re right about that, Jim thinks dully. I have ODed on South Coast Plaza. The kids stand there hoping for some theatrics. Jim disappoints them by getting up and walking out under his own power. His damaged autopilot gets him through the maze of escalators and entry levels to the parking lot, to his car.
He calls Arthur. “Please, Arthur, give me some work. Is anything ready to go?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact there is. Can you do it tonight?”
“Yes.” And Jim feels immense relief that he can act on this feeling of revulsion.
That night he joins Arthur enthusiastically as they stay up all night to arrange a successful strike against Airspace Technology Corporation, which makes parts for the orbiting nuclear reactors that provide the old space-based chemical lasers with their power. Off to the rendezvous at Lewis and Greentree, in the little warehouse parking lot; the same men load the boxes into Arthur’s car; and they’re off to San Juan Hot Springs Industrial Park. Despite security precautions that include fence-top heat-seeking missiles, the strike succeeds; in Airspace Tech’s main production plant, all that was composite has fallen apart.…
But the next morning, back in his ap, exhausted to emptiness, Jim has to admit that the operation hasn’t changed all that much for him. He’s still sitting in his little ap under the freeway looking around. Nothing in it soothes him. He’s heard his music too often. He’s read all the books. The orange crate labels mock him. He’s looked at the maps till he knows them by heart, he’s seen all the videos, he’s scanned every program in the history of the world. His home is a trap, the complex and massively articulated trap of his self. He has to escape; he looks around the dusty disorderly room, with its treasured shaft of nine A.M. sunlight, and wonders how he ever stood it.
The phone rings. It’s Hana. “How are you?” she says.
“Okay! Hey, I’m glad you called! You want to come down to my place for dinner tonight?”