sucks to be well-known, Pip. And yet everyone wants to be well-known, it’s what the whole world is made of now, this wanting to be well-known.
If I told you, when I was seven years old my mother showed me her genitals, what would you do with this information?
Reading this message in the morning, and immediately doubting that Wolf had actually entrusted her with a shameful secret, she’d searched andreas wolf mother genitals seven years old and found only seven quality matches, all random. Among them was “72 Interesting Facts About Adolf Hitler.” She wrote back:
I would say holy shit and keep it to myself. Because I think you might be overdoing the self-pitying famous-person thing. Maybe you’ve forgotten how it sucks to have nobody be interested in you and not have any power. People will believe you if you expose my secret. But if I expose yours, they’ll just say I fabricated your email for some sick reason, because I’m a girl. We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.
Afternoons in Bolivia must have been Wolf’s time for emailing, because his reply came back quickly, the security of umpteen extra servers notwithstanding.
I’m sorry that I sounded self-pitying—I was trying to sound tragic!
It’s true I’m male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won’t accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it’s like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.
I hope you’ll come down and join us. You might find out you have more kinds of power than you think you do.
This reply discouraged her. Already the agreeable flirtation was slipping into German abstraction. While the cake layers were baking, she replied:
Mr. Appropriately Named Wolf!
No doubt due to my psychology, the messed-up state of which many people in my life can now attest to, I’m feeling more like the smaller animal that accepts its nature and just wants to be eaten. All I can picture about your Project is lots of better-adjusted people happily realizing their potential. Unless you have a spare $130000 lying around, so I can pay off my student loans, and unless you feel like writing to my (single, isolated, depressed) mother and convincing her to do without me indefinitely, I’m afraid I won’t be finding out about these amazing other powers of mine.
Sincerely, Pip
The email had stunk of self-pity, but she’d sent it anyway, and then mentally replayed her latest rejections by men while she frosted the cake with puttylike vegan icing and packed her knapsack for the trip to Felton.
Because of heavy traffic, the bus didn’t stop long enough in San Jose for her to get off. Bladder ache radiated throughout her abdomen as the bus proceeded up Route 17 and over the Santa Cruz Mountains. Around Scotts Valley, the dear fog appeared, and suddenly the season was different, the hour less determinate. Most evenings in June, a great paw of Pacific fog reached into Santa Cruz, over the wooden roller coaster, along the stagnant San Lorenzo, up through the wide streets where surfers lived, and into the redwoods on the hills. By morning the ocean’s outward breath condensed in dew so heavy that it ran in gutters. And this was one Santa Cruz, this ghostly gray late-rising place. When the ocean inhaled again, midmorning, it left behind the other Santa Cruz, the optimistic one, the sunny one; but the great paw lurked offshore all day. Toward sunset, like a depression following euphoria, it rolled back in and muted human sound, closed down vistas, made everything very local, and seemed to amplify the barking of the sea lions on the underpinnings of the pier. You could hear them from miles away, their arp, arp, arp a homing call to family members still out diving in the fog.
By the time the bus pulled off Front Street and into the station, the streetlights had come on, tricked by atmospherics. Pip hobbled to the station’s ladies’ room and into an unoccupied stall, dropped her knapsack on the dirty floor, put the cake box on top of it, and yanked down her jeans. While various muscles were unclenching, her device beeped with an incoming message.
The internship lasts three months, with an option for renewal. Your stipend should cover your loan payments. And maybe it would do your mother good to be without you a little while.
I’m sorry you’re feeling bad and powerless. Sometimes a change of scene can help with that.
I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator’s jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.
She was scrutinizing the last paragraph, trying to discern a veiled threat or promise in it, when her knapsack made a small comment, a kind of dry sigh. It was slumping under the weight of the cake box. Before she could stem the flow of her pee and lunge for the box, it fell to the floor and opened itself, dumping the cake facedown onto tiles smeared with condensed fog and cigarette ash and the droppings and boot residues of girl buskers and panhandlers. Some olallieberries went rolling.
“Oh, that is so nice of you,” she said to the ruined cake. “That is so special of you.”
Weeping at her ineffectiveness, she conveyed the uncontaminated chunks of cake into the box and then worked for so long to wipe the icing from the floor with paper towels, as if it were smeary albino shit, as if anybody but her actually cared about cleanliness, that she nearly missed the bus to Felton.
A fellow rider, a dirty girl with blond dreads, turned around and asked her, “You going up to ’Pico?”
“Just to the bottom of the road,” Pip said.
“I’d never been up there till three months ago,” the girl said. “There’s nothing else quite like it! There’s two boys there that let me sleep on their couch if I have sex with them. I don’t mind that at all. Everything’s different in ’Pico. Do you ever go up there?”
It happened that Pip had lost her virginity in Lompico. Maybe there really was nothing else quite like it.
“It sounds like you’ve got a good thing going,” she said politely.
“’Pico’s the best,” the girl agreed. “They have to truck in their water on this property, because of the elevation. They don’t have to deal with the suburban scum, which is great. They give me food and everything. There’s nothing else quite like it!”
The girl seemed perfectly contented with her life, while to Pip it seemed to be raining ashes in the bus. She forced a smile and put in her earbuds.
Felton was still fog-free, the air at the bus stop still scented with sunbaked redwood litter, but the sun had dropped behind a ridge, and Pip’s childhood bird friends, the brown towhees and the spotted ones, were hopping on the shadowed lane as she walked up it. As soon as she could see the cabin, its door flew open and her mother came running out to meet her, crying “Oh, oh!” She wore an expression of love so naked it seemed to Pip almost obscene. And yet, as always, Pip couldn’t help returning her mother’s hug. The body that her mother was at odds with felt precious to her. Its warmth, its softness; its mortality. It had a faint but distinctive skin smell that took Pip back to the many years when she and her mother had shared a bed. She would have liked to bury her face in her mother’s chest and stand there and take comfort, but she rarely came
