Drop City

here.”
    And then they were walking off into the deep pit of the night that pulled all the light down into it like a black hole, and she was feeling her barefoot way, Ronnie's hand locked on hers like a magnet. Across the field and into the trees, and now her eyes began to adjust and she could see that there was a moon, a softness of light poured softly over every blade and leaf, pale stripes limning the dark trunks and a ghost-lit carpet spread uniformly over the ground from one corner of the night to the other. An owl hooted in the distance. The air had a taste to it, clean and cool, like a draught of water. “So where're you taking me, anyway?”
    Ronnie worked his fingers between hers, gave her hand a squeeze. “Just up here, by that rock--see that rock?”
    Up ahead was a big knuckle of extruded sandstone, glowing faintly in the moonlight, a landmark you could see from the kitchen window. In daylight, it was the haunt of lizards--and Jiminy, who liked to use it as a backrest when he was reading or meditating or whatever he did off by himself. The sight of the rock--the knowledge of it, its _familiarity__--saddened her. She was going to miss this place.
    Ronnie let go of her hand and ducked into the shadows, and she heard him shifting things around in the dark, a rustle of twigs and then the sigh of plastic. “I got reds,” he said. “What do you want, two?”
    She felt the touch of his hand, the faintest tactile apprehension of the two smooth weightless capsules. She chased them down with a gulp of sweet wine. In the distance, the glow of the fire painted the sky and she could hear the music starting up with a thump of tambourines and the rudimentary chord progressions of Sky Dog's guitar, or maybe it was Dale Murray's. They were dancing back there, dancing for joy, for wisdom, for peace. Star didn't feel like dancing anymore. She didn't feel like anything--she was numb, neutral, and all she wanted now was sleep. But then Ronnie ran a hand up her leg and rose from the shadows to press his mouth to hers, and she wanted to tell him no, wanted to tell him to go back to Lydia, wanted to tell him it was over between them except in the purest brotherly and sisterly sense and that being from home didn't mean anything anymore--that was what she wanted to tell him. But she didn't.

Drop City
    15
    It never rained in June, not in California, because California had a monsoon climate and the climate dictated its own terms--rain in winter, drought in summer. That was the way it was. That was the way it had always been. “You can make book on it,” Norm would crow to the new arrivals from the east coast, “not a drop's going to fall between April and November. You want to live outdoors? You want to throw away your clothes? You want to party like the Chumash? Go right ahead, be my guest, because this isn't New Jersey or Buffalo or Pittsburgh, P. A.--this is _California.__” Marco had spent the driest summer and wettest winter of his life in San Francisco, trying to make a go of it in a big rambling old Victorian with a leaky roof and thirteen bickering communards, and he thought he'd got a grasp on the weather at least. Still, when he woke the morning after the solstice celebration, he woke to rain.
    He hadn't slept well. Or much. Star had drifted away from him when the bonfire was at its height, and she hadn't come back. At the time, he'd hardly noticed. He'd had a couple of beers, and he was batting Alaska around like a shuttlecock with Norm and Alfredo, up over the net and back again, reach low for the implausible shot, leap high, _whack!__ Everything was up in the air at that point, people gathering in stunned and angry groups _(The Nazi sons of bitches, this is still America, isn't it?),__ trying to feed on this new dream, this dream of starting over, of building something from the ground up like the pioneers they all secretly believed they were, and so what if they suffered? So what if it was cold? Did Roger Williams worry about physical comfort when he went off to found Rhode Island? Or Captain John Smith when he set sail for the swamps of Virginia? One by one they stripped off some garment or charm or totem and flung it into the fire, all the while pledging allegiance to the new ideal, to freedom absolute, to Alaska. It was an adolescent fantasy--the fantasy of owning your own island, your own country, making up the rules as you went along--but it was irresistible too. Marco could see it on every face, a look