Drop City

of transformation, of _mutation,__ and he was caught up in it himself.
    He was there, with Norm, sitting kneecap to kneecap over the embers of the fire, drinking Red Zinger tea out of a chipped ceramic mug and trying to read every nuance and foresee every impediment, when the sky began to lighten in the east. Everybody else had gone to bed, even Mendocino Bill, who'd spent the better part of a dimly lit hour rasping away over the need--no, the _duty__--to hire a lawyer and fight this thing, but Norm said he was done paying lawyers, done paying taxes, done with the straight world once and for all. “Look at that,” Norm said, waving his mug at the sky, “like God's big rheostat, huh?” And then he was on his feet, brushing at the seat of his overalls. “Time to file it away for tonight. We've got six days maybe, if we're lucky. Logistics, man, I'm talking logistics here. A lot to do.”
    But now it was raining, a steady, gray, vertical assault of water in its natural state, unexpected, unheralded, wet. Marco woke to the sound and smell of it, and discovered that the roof was leaking. He'd never bothered to test it with a hose--it kept the dew off, and that was enough, and who would have thought it would be raining in June? He'd split the shakes himself, but he'd had no tar paper--or tar, for that matter--and the plywood he used had been left to the elements so long it was honeycombed with rot. Lying there in his sodden sleeping bag, he felt angry with himself at first, and then just foolish, until finally he realized how futile the whole business was: this was a treehouse, that was all, the sort of thing a twelve-year-old might have thrown together as a lark. He'd just been playing around here. He could do better. Of course he could.
    He breathed in and out, watched his expelled breath hang in the air like its own little meteorological event, listened to the incessant drip of the rain.
    At least Star was dry. He tried to picture her curled up on one of the couches in the big house, listening to records and gossiping with Merry and Lydia and whoever else had come in out of the wet, or maybe in the kitchen, whipping up a little dish of veggie rice or pasta for forty. She was a good cook, good with spices. She could do Indian, and he loved Indian. And she must have been in the big house, because she wasn't here. Clearly. Nothing here but an abandoned longhair in a wet sleeping bag.
    She'd complained of a headache the night before, and he assumed she'd gone back to the treehouse to crash, but when he climbed up the ladder in the stone soup of dawn, the sleeping bag was empty. And so he further assumed she'd spent the night in the big house, as she sometimes did, in the room Merry and Maya had partitioned with a pair of faded Navajo blankets strung across a length of clothesline. Marco had been in there once or twice--this was an open society, after all, and theoretically there was no private space--but it made him uncomfortable. The room smelled of women, tasted of them, of their perfumes and balms, their scented candles and incense and the things they wore close to their bodies, and it was orderly when the rest of the house was in disarray. And dark, dark and candlelit, even in the middle of the day, with sheets of cardboard and posters nailed up over the windows. Norm called it the seraglio. The big orange tom, no fool, liked to nest there among the bedclothes and have his ears rubbed.
    Did he miss her after one night? Did he resent the fact that she hadn't slept beside him? Was he worried? Jealous? Possessive? He didn't know. But he peeled himself out of the clammy sleeping bag, stepped into his jeans and climbed barefoot down the ladder to cross the muddy yard to the big house and find out.
    He went round back so as not to track mud through the house, and came up the rear steps thinking about boots--he was going to need a new pair, a pair of work boots from the Army and Navy store, if he expected to survive a winter up north--and he paused a moment to rinse his muddy feet in the fan of water shearing off the eaves. Inside, the teapot was going and the windows were steamed over. It wasn't cold, not really, but he found he was shivering as he pushed open the door on a wall of cooked air and a complex admixture of scents: fresh-baked bread, coffee, basil, vegetable stock simmering in a bright scoured pot on the stove.
    Star was there, leaning over the pot, her child's hands cupped beneath a load of chopped celery.