Good-bye, house. Can't say I'll miss you much. Now another family would move in — the Marshalls, or whatever their name had been — and begin their own lives here. It wasn't anything to do with him any more. It should feel different than this, shouldn't it? But then again, if there had been any real memories left here — any good ones, that was — it would. He had enough of his mother's final weeks to last a lifetime. It had been another excellent reason to sell the place, more compelling even than the money.
I never really felt at home even in the old house, he thought. Or when I lived with Cat. So what's wrong with me? He climbed behind the wheel and began to back the trailer down the driveway and out into the street, turning the wheel hard to avoid taking the fender off a pickup truck that some idiot had parked a full yard and a half away from the curb. Mrs. Kraley had come out to her fence to watch him go, the hose's spray making a rainbow in the air next to her impassive face. He waved to her cheerfully, just for old time's sake. She didn't disappoint him by waving back.
Theo drove slowly down Highway 280, and not only because of the awkwardness of the trailer behind his mother's small, underpowered car. It was a beautiful late summer day at the end of the millennium, after all, and he was tired of listening to himself bitch. It might be nice to savor the moment a bit, instead. Things were a bit bleak, sure, but if he looked at it the right way, he could decide he had finally reached that oh-so-elusive bottom and was about to start climbing back up. He would have felt more certain about it with an attractive, intelligent woman in the passenger seat, sharing his new start, but as Mick and Keith had so accurately stated, you couldn't always get what you wanted.
Fifteen miles south of San Francisco he saw the first watch-out-for-deer sign, a leaping black silhouette of a stag blazoned on the yellow diamond like a medieval coat of arms. It gave him a genuinely good feeling, even though he knew from friends that most of the people who lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains thought of their local deer as something like big rats, destroying gardens and trampling newly sodded lawns.
Theo didn't care. The idea of living somewhere that wild deer lived was exciting, and he certainly wasn't going to be planting a lawn. He turned up the car radio and punched buttons until he found something loud and thumpingly exultant, some piece of jolly stupidity from AC/DC. On his right, combs of fog curled across the mountaintop like white claws, wet air from the ocean turning to mist as it passed over the cold crest, but the sky above the freeway was cloudless and the road was vivid with sunshine.
It was funny how the day seemed to wither away as you drove up into the hills, as though the time was somehow different here in the grip of the mountains. The clock in the dashboard of his mother's Toyota said it was still only 3:30, and there were stretches of road where the sky flared bright blue overhead, but in the shadows of the trees it seemed almost twilight.
He had only been to the cabin once before, on the day the real estate agent had shown it to him, and the smaller roads on either side of Skyline were often poorly marked. He made the exact same mistake he had made coming for the first visit, mistaking one winding road for another, but recovered much more quickly this time — the first error had left him completely lost and he had been forced to call the agent and let her guide him back to the right road by cell phone, a process apparently as difficult as remote brain surgery.
He was over the top and onto the coast side of the mountains before four o'clock, although he was still far removed from any views of the ocean as he turned off a narrow, meandering road named Mariposa and onto the unmarked strip of alligatored asphalt that served as a private driveway for the cabin and two or three other houses scattered back in the woods among the redwoods, firs, and red-skinned manzanita. The sun was still above the tree line, but as he reached the end of the drive it was blocked by a tall stand of evergreens behind the cabin that left it and the bumpy, weed-cluttered yard plunged in shadow and for a moment made Theo regret his decision. He stopped the car and got out, stood listening to the silence, the flat, unanswered echo of the car door closing.
It's what you wanted, right? No distractions. A place to think about things, to put things back together.
The key was hung on a nail as the realtor had promised, tucked out of sight on the rickety fence that pointlessly separated the overgrown chaos of the cabin's front yard from the overgrown chaos of the back, a tangle of weeds and grasses on all sides that flowed smoothly away into the trees and continued largely unabated to the hillcrest and beyond — right out to the ocean, for all he knew. It was weird to have left his mother's trim, orderly neighborhood a short while ago and find himself here, with no neighbors he could see or even hear unless they took it on themselves to start shooting off machine guns in their backyards.
He'd heard there actually were people like that up here in the mountains. Theo could only hope it was more the exception than the rule. It had taken him nearly half an hour to drive from Skyline, the main road. How long would it take police or an ambulance to get here?
You wanted it, man. He could almost hear Johnny's voice. Shit, stop whining.
The inside of the cabin raised his spirits a little. It was small, really just one room plus a small bathroom and smaller closet, but as nicely appointed as he remembered it, with an efficient little kitchen area, a stone fireplace, and polished wood floors everywhere except the sunken, carpeted area in the center of the room. No television, and he doubted that the small one he had brought from his mother's would get much in the way of reception out here with its tiny little aerial, but if he really started to get desperate he could always get a satellite dish. He had a one-year lease, which meant he had plenty of time to figure out what he did and did not need, in lots of different ways.
The bed was on a platform raised more than head-high in one corner of the room, almost a little separate loft with its own built-in ladder, leaving room underneath it for a bookcase and a comfortable-looking armchair, both of which the absentee owner had preferred to leave in the cabin. Theo had been happy to accept. One of the large windows displayed a tangle of trees just outside and looked like it would get good sunshine during the middle of the day. He had a brief, cheerful vision of himself sitting there, reading Moby-Dick or something else he'd been promising himself he'd get to for years — what was that Pynchon book that Cat had kept bugging him about? Crying in Lot 49, something like that? Hell, why not? He'd read that too. A couple of trips a week down to the flats to get groceries, occasional stops at the bookstore. He'd read, play guitar, maybe get back to writing songs again like Johnny had suggested. Take long motorcycle rides through the hills, cruise down to the beach now and then or even up the coast all the way to San Francisco, just to fill up the culture tanks a bit. Take it all real slow. Think about what he'd lost over the last few years and where he might find it again.
Feeling better, he started carrying boxes in from the car.
It has many names, this fabled metropolis — Avallone, Cibola, Tír na nOg, to mention but a few, and doubtless dozens more I never heard, because I spoke only the common language of the place (of which I shall say more later) although there are many other tongues also spoken there. I myself named it New Erewhon, after Samuel Butler's famous creation, but that was only a human conceit (as I suspect is true with the other names as well). Its inhabitants, and those who live in the vast countryside that surrounds it, call it only "the City," because it is the only one, and dominates all around it as no earthly city ever could…