-drive through Whyling until the end
-continue straight (a mile or so?), look for the boulder, turn right
-keep going, going, going—look for an Airstream with soap on it—that’s ME!!
He looked up from the directions. Everything was dry, endlessly flat, the sky as colorless as the earth below. “It’s like Mad Max,” Sab said. He put his hand on her lap and squeezed, as if reassuring her that all was going according to plan, though he’d done no planning himself. They drove on, passed a scatter of RVs and trailers, tents clumped in groups and tents standing alone, then, about twenty yards ahead, saw a white boulder the size of a small car, the message THIS IS HELLO CITY painted across in black, blocky letters. A blond guy in pigtails, shirtless and in flip-flops, stood beside it, holding a peacock by a leash, its jewel-blue tail sweeping the dirt as it paced back and forth.
“Poor bird,” Excel said.
“It’s okay,” Sab said, making the turn. “I don’t think they can fly anyway.”
Another mile and they found the Airstream, a pink bar of soap painted on its side. In front of the trailer was a sitting area with a wicker couch and two matching chairs, a small firepit in the middle, all of it on a stretch of bright fake grass. They pulled up and parked, and a woman in a fedora and lacy tank top stepped out. She looked a little like Sab but more Japanese, was maybe about ten years older. “Lucia,” Sab said. She walked over to her but Excel stayed by the car, watched as they hugged and swayed. He’d never seen a reunion before, the actual moment when family came together after so much time apart. He felt out of place and intrusive, so he looked away, pretended that there was something in the distance that caught his eye.
He heard his name, turned and looked back. “I don’t know you,” Lucia said, still holding Sab, “but welcome home.”
“HELLO CITY WAS MEANT FOR BATTLE,” LUCIA SAID, THEN POPPED open a bottle of champagne. After World War II, the US government acquired the land to use as training ground for air combat, but the plan went nowhere and the military moved out, leaving behind four hundred acres of unwanted desert. In the mid-eighties, groups of ex-hippies and the occasional former felon began arriving, living in vans and tents on whatever bit of land they claimed for themselves. Those people were still there, but the current population—almost two hundred, the last time anyone counted—was a mix of artists and retirees, a contingent of midwestern and northeastern seniors, even a couple of legitimate tech millionaires who’d made all the money they needed, then bailed out of capitalist society to live free and be left alone. Now, the only proof of a former military presence was the few dozen helicopter landing pads dotting the land, concrete circles with a yellow H painted in the center.
“H for ‘helipad’?” Excel said.
Lucia shook her head. “H for ‘hello,’” she said, then poured champagne into three tin cups and toasted their arrival.
She served dinner on the patio, sandwiches and salad on orange metal plates. “Fig and prosciutto on sourdough with massaged kale tossed in beet pesto,” she said. “Hope that’s okay?”
Sab said it was perfect and Excel agreed, though he’d never had figs, prosciutto, massaged kale, beets, or pesto in his life. “Neat plate,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “Those are Sven’s.”
“Sven?”
“My ex. The Swedish bastard. The reason I’m here.” They’d met three years before in an L.A. yoga class (“My clinically depressed law school dropout period,” Lucia said), and after two months together, Sven convinced her to move to Hello City, challenged her to live her truest, freest life. “And I thought, screw it, why not?” she said. “So we moved here, learned to make organic soap, and a year later he gets ants in his pants and starts applying to law school behind my back, when he knew that it was law school that triggered my depression in the first place. Would’ve been so much easier if he’d just slept around instead. So anyway, Sven the Liar gets into Yale, gives me a half-ass invite to go with him so long as I’m willing to get my own place off campus. So I said screw you, kept the trailer and the plates, and here I am, off-the-grid businesswoman and owner of Pink Bubble Organic Soap.” She poured herself another cup of champagne, got up from the couch, and put an arm around Sab. “And now my favorite cousin is here with me.” She looked over at Excel. “What about you? Why are you here?”
He took an extra-big bite of the sandwich and chewed slowly, biding his time for the right response; there was no single defining reason he could nail down, no specific incident he could recount to explain why he’d come. Life, he thought, is that a good answer? What came to him instead was a feeling, something between a sharpness and a deepening ache. It was his leg, he realized, the spot behind the knee where Maxima had kicked him. Though it hurt in that moment, it had been fine the entire drive down. Maybe it was all the hours sitting, or maybe the cool desert air, but the pain was clear to him now.
“I’m here for her,” he finally said. He reached for Sab’s hand, held it until the throbbing in his leg subsided.
They finished eating, and just before they gathered their dishes Lucia told them to look up, and Excel saw a sky he’d never seen—the blackest black with folds of the darkest blue, streaked with light that he learned wasn’t just stars but whole galaxies. “Whoa,” Sab said, and Excel said, “Yeah,” though what he actually felt was amazement, followed by an unexpected stupidity. How could he not already know such skies existed? The best he’d seen before was from the roof of his apartment building, lit by a pair of Target signs, and the planes flying away from San Francisco International Airport, their tiny red and green lights flickering in the dark, reminders that he’d never really been anywhere before.
After dinner, Lucia took them to a converted school bus, which sat on a small patch of dirt ten minutes beyond the Airstream. Lucia owned it, had been renting it out for the past year, mostly to weekend tourists wanting to experience Hello City. “Lookie-loos and gawkers,” she said, “so obnoxious.” This was where Sab and Excel would live now, for two hundred dollars a month. The bus was narrow and shorter than the average school bus, about eight paces from end to end—but Excel’s whole life had been spent in the crammed box of the La Villa Aurelia apartment, so the space seemed livable enough. The bus had been gutted, refloored with green linoleum, and furnished with a two-person table, a short bookcase, a green metal trunk for storage, a minifridge. All that remained was the steering wheel and the rearview mirror above.
“Home sweet home,” Lucia said, then stepped out of the bus.
In the back, sectioned off behind a shower curtain patterned with raindrops, was a mattress and box spring. “Our bedroom,” Sab said. They lay down and kissed, held each other, too tired for anything more.
“What do you think,” Sab said.
“About what?”
“This place.”
He’d only ever lived in Colma. He didn’t know how to figure out if a place was right for him or not. “What do you think?” He waited for an answer, heard only breathing.
“Where else would we go,” she finally said.
EXCEL WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, THE COLDEST HE’D EVER BEEN. His ears, his face, the back of Sab’s neck when he kissed it—any part of them not under the blanket felt like it had been chilling in a refrigerator. Puffs of breath appeared every time he exhaled, and the ceiling of the bus looked like a long slick of ice, shiny and Arctic blue, like the inner dome of an igloo, or the walls inside one of those ice hotels he’d seen on the Travel Channel, in Finland or Norway, one of those countries he knew, without question, he’d never see.