Lauren Groff - Arcadia

All day, a sense of panic taints the air: someone, somewhere, advertised Cockaigne Day, although nobody knows who, or nobody will admit to knowing. But here it is in High Times, Whole Earth Catalog, Henderson’s . A tiny write-up in the Voice . Arrivals have picked up this week, thirty on Monday. Today, the Thursday before Saturday’s Cockaigne Day, Bit walks to the Gatehouse and finds a zoo: two hundred visitors. Though Titus has emergency backup to keep people from crashing, his method worked only in the beginning of the week. The visitors have begun to find their way in through the woods. Now they pitch tents in the forest, sleep in the cars, mass up at the Eatery for grub. They grumble when the food runs out. They go into Ilium and come back swinging greasy bags of burgers, and even though Titus pitches a fit that roars all the way up to Arcadia House, they persist.

At dusk, it is so crowded in the Octagonal Barn for the Emergency Meeting that there is no place to sit. People stand, and some climb the lofts and rafters and sit in the dark up there. The Council is at the fold-out table, Abe on one end, Handy at the other. On hot humid nights like this, the ghost scents of ancient animals rise from the floors and fill the air. Hannah rushes in. She leans over Abe, whispering, and runs back out.

Bit watches his father go paper white. Steady Abe loses his composure so entirely that the debate is well on its way before he seems to snap to. Titus is roaring, reading out a list: What if we’re harboring a murderer? A pedophile? What if one of our people gets killed? Raped? What if some of the Runaways’ parents are trying to find them? What if the girls lie about their age in the Swingers’ Tents and they’re underage? What if we’re hiding a terrorist?

For three pages, he goes on, and in these words, Bit can hear Abe. Something relaxes in Bit, now that Titus is firmly on his parents’ side.

Then Handy opens his hands on the table. He says, First of all, it’s only going to be for Cockaigne Day, and then they will all have to either go or live in Newbieville for the month, as per our rules. And secondly, he says, going very stern, Titus, I resent your bigotry. Even murderers, he says, deserve a second chance.

There is a whoop and holler, voices all over the Octagonal Barn rising in agreement.

When it calms, Abe says, What about food? We have no money to feed anyone, Handy, especially with the dough we’re sending to Astrid’s Midwifery School, and the other stuff that’s happening. Even our own Trippies and the medicine for the Hens strain us. You know this. You of all people know this, Abe says.

Handy says, I stand, as always, humble in the knowledge that the Universe will provide.

On and on they debate for an hour, until Regina with her black brows claps the mallet. We’re not getting anywhere. Vote time, she says. Lanternlight glimmers on her cheekbones.

The vote passes to the Council of Nine; five yea to allow the gate-crashers to stay, four nay to drive them out. Down the stretch of the table, Abe and Handy look at each other, fury against gloat. Bit thinks of a high front meeting a low, the storm that ensues.

Abe is tongue-tied, scarlet: he would kick something, if he could. The meeting moves on.

It is too much tension for Bit, and his stomach goes sour. He leaves and runs across the twilit lawn down to the Sugarbush, to see why Hannah was so agitated. He gives a long knock, three short; two short; one long, Bit in Morse code. Hannah opens for him.

It is a swelter in here, a hundred twenty degrees. The stove is being fed with wood, and Hannah is in her knickers, soaked through with sweat. She has drawn the curtains and is reading by flashlight in the corner. Heaped on the screens are quantities of drying herb. But it doesn’t seem like very much to Bit. Not enough, certainly, to finance all of Arcadia for a year.

Bit says, Weird. Seemed like a lot more this morning.

Hannah says, That’s because it was. Now he sees what he’d missed in the gloom: Hannah is livid, her face trembling. I went out for a pee, she says. I didn’t bother to lock up. Ran back in a minute later and three fourths of the junk was gone. Gone. Like that. One pee, and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of the best of our bud, gone.

Bit thinks of Helle looking at him from the corners of her eyes in the woods, biting her nails, just after he told her about the Pot Plot. He wants to shrivel into nothing. This is his fault. Something must cross his face, because Hannah says, Bit? Did you tell anyone about this?

The sudden divide, the seesaw, and he has only a moment to choose.

No, he says.

His mother turns away, nodding. Sweat trickles in the dark hollow between her shoulder blades. When Bit offers to stay up all night with the drying weed, Hannah says, thoughtfully, No. I don’t think so.

Bit waits outside her door, reading, but Helle doesn’t come back that night. When she staggers in at dawn, rum fumes precede her into the Ado Unit Common Room, and she is inarticulate. Bit helps Jincy and Molly put her to bed. He stands, watching her sleep, and Jincy squeezes Bit to her chest. Good, sweet Jincy, his first friend.

She doesn’t deserve someone like you, she says in his ear.

We’re just friends, Bit says.

Right, Jincy says gently. I’m kicking you out, friend Bit. It’s time for you to go to sleep.

Midmorning, Bit passes the open window of the Cannery, where a work crew is putting up raspberries. He overhears a woman saying. . Helle. Acting out since she’s been back.

Another woman says, . a Trippie, if she isn’t . .

Someone says, Georgia! then laughs.

I saw . . a murmur.

Louder again, . like her father.

Too much, says someone, emphatically.

Bit looks in. The women wear men’s undershirts soaked through, identical blue bandannas on their heads. With the dimness, the distance, the uniforms, he can’t tell who they are. They could be the same anonymous woman. To Bit, right now, they are.

Bit rises, unable to sleep. Outside, the hundreds of extra people in Arcadia make a roar like what he imagines an ocean sounds like. Ike is snoring through his nose. There is a light under the door from the Common Room, and when he goes out into it, he finds Helle with a kerosene lamp. She’s sitting on the spavined couch, staring at a book. She looks up when she sees Bit and claps the book shut.

Hey, she whispers. Hey, he says. In his throat, his sorrow, thickening. He wants to ask her why she stole from them; why she wants Arcadia to starve. He wants to tell her that he knows. But she looks so sad that he can’t, not yet. She must be coming down from some high: her pupils are still huge, and the long rubber band of her mouth ends at the corners in bitter knots.

He sits next to her, and she puts her head in his lap. He can feel her breath warming his thigh, her eyelashes as they slide across his skin. He thinks of his hands washing dishes in the Eatery, sliding gunk off plates, scraping compost, the steam so hot on his fingers they feel like they’re blistering, anything to keep himself in control. He scratches her scalp, moving between the dreadlocks, her oils collecting in his nails. His hands move to her long neck, kneading the knots out of it, and he sees how small her ears are, tiny mouse ears, so delicate under her haystack of hair that he wants to gnaw them. With this thought, his penis gives an involuntary jerk. She must feel it. She sits up. The skin of her face looks loose, and there are shiny dark places under her eyes. She studies Bit for a moment. She clicks out her retainer, trailing silvery filaments of spit, and leans forward, and puts her mouth on his.

It’s a shock, this kiss. It is his first. To taste her breath, pungent with the anise seed some Arcadians chew after dinner. How rubbery her lips are, the strange slabby tongue in his mouth, their teeth clinking. He is shaking. He thinks about the Common Room door opening, someone seeing them on the couch. She takes his hand and slides it up her shirt to one of the dough lumps there. She takes her hand and unbuttons his jeans, her cold knuckles on his lower belly. It is too much for him. He gasps, there’s a great, woolly spasm, and his shorts have a hot wet spot in them.