The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,146

things were clearer to him when he came here, and now he would explain these essential truths to Scott, show him the larger picture.

“Think of this moment we’re living in, this craziness, from the perspective of history. California history,” Goller began. “We grew up in the same kind of places, really. Me in Fullerton, and you in Whittier.” Their homes had been parked on the same plain of scattered orchards and cow patches southeast of Los Angeles, and they had gone to schools that were big rivals back when there were “still enough big German and American kids around to make up a good football team.” California was a paradise of open land and sea breezes, the sliver of Eden between the desert and the sea. This was the California of Scott’s and Ian Goller’s birth, a place of quiet, neat settlements separated by the geometry of melons and cabbages growing in fields, by the repetition of citrus groves, the scent of orange trees blooming. “That beautiful place was our playground. It was a place where anything was possible, where the open spaces matched how we felt about ourselves. How we saw the future.” This paradise was gone, Goller said; the orchards had been plowed over to make room for new neighborhoods, rows of houses that became more ramshackle, more faded from one decade to the next. In the years since he’d been a DA, Ian Goller had been forced to see the decay of his hometown up close. There were too many people here now, a crush of bodies on the sidewalks and too many cars on the highways, people crowded into houses and apartment buildings in Santa Ana, in Anaheim, cities that used to be good places to live. The landmarks of Scott’s youth, the burger stands and the diners, were now covered with the grimy stains of time and something else, an alien presence. There was more trash on the streets than ever. Who threw trash on the streets when Scott and Ian were boys? No one. Everything had been corrupted and despoiled. But most people simply didn’t care. They allowed these multitudes to fill the state. Outsiders, most of them uneducated, people without prospects in their own country. And when those multitudes produced, with a kind of mathematical inevitability, the inmates that filled the jails and prisons, too many Californians averted their eyes and pretended it wasn’t happening. Worse, the defenders of these people twisted everything, and demonized American families like Scott’s for having the good sense to live behind the gates that protected them from the criminal anarchy outside. These people were now cheering the idea that his family would be investigated.

Scott had been looking at the oak surface of the table, and at times directly into the eyes of Ian Goller as he spoke, and had failed to notice that at some point in Goller’s talk Maureen had entered the room with Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, who was holding a sleeping Samantha. They had been drawn in by the sound of the stranger’s voice, with Maureen at first amused by the incongruity of Goller’s black suit on a hot July day, and by the way he slipped into a geeky trance as he spoke. His motives soon became perfectly clear to Maureen, and in another set of circumstances she would have asked him to leave. I don’t like to hear that meanness, that intolerance, she might have said. But these were not normal times, and she found herself a bit taken in by the emotional pull of his argument. I don’t really understand anything anymore. I am surrounded by mysteries and apparitions: like the presence of this man in black. This man is telling me what to feel as much as he’s telling me what to think. It was not the immigrants she thought of as alien, as much as the L.A. reporters who had parked themselves on her lawn, and who now staked out the front gate to the Estates. They were a disorderly and insistent clan of microphone men and women, of camera-holders and question-shouters, and they reminded her of the City of Los Angeles proper, and her first days in the metropolis. She had come to California expecting something altogether different than what she had first encountered, as a single woman in her twenties in an L.A. neighborhood called Mid-City, an ugly place of wide thoroughfares and gray liquor stores and bunkered apartment buildings with underground garages that were rape traps. She carried