that was news as bad as it got.
Even Dad wouldn’t be too bent out of shape. After all the other changes Marshall had made, Dad would just roll his eyes and wonder out loud if his kid thought his initials were ATM. (Marshall did think so, but he’d learned long before he got to UCSB that saying as much was one of the really bad ideas.) Dad would also wonder- pointedly-if Marshall thought he could get a job with his new major in the unlikely event that he graduated. Marshall could hear the whole thing already, inside his head. He didn’t even need to go home for it.
He hustled down the stairs and escaped air conditioning and fluorescent lights. The sun smiled on him. The sun smiled on all of Santa Barbara almost all the time. It was May. L.A. was sweltering under a heat wave. Even San Atanasio, which caught a lot of sea breeze, would be up in the eighties. The Valley, Riverside, places like that… Marshall didn’t want to think about them.
Here, he didn’t have to. It was seventy-three, maybe seventy-four. It might climb to eighty on the hottest days of summer. It might sink down to sixty on the coldest days of winter. The campus had its own lagoon, full of reeds and ducks and shorebirds. How awesome was that?
Guys and girls went by. Some wore shorts and T-shirts, some jeans and T-shirts. About one in three was talking into a cell phone or texting and trying not to bump into anybody. Bicycles wove in and out among the people on foot. Some of the riders were talking on cell phones, too. And yes, some of them were texting. Even Marshall didn’t think that was exactly brilliant. It wasn’t that he’d never done it, but he didn’t do it a whole lot.
A girl smiled at him. He waved back. They’d been in a class together… last year? Year before? He couldn’t remember, any more than he could remember her name. She wasn’t anyone special, just someone vaguely nice. He supposed she thought he was somebody vaguely nice, too.
He was a creative-writing major now. What kind of story could you make out of a couple of people, each thinking the other was vaguely nice? How would you even start? Or maybe that was the wrong question. How would you end the story? What would you be trying to say? You had to say something about life, the universe, and everything, didn’t you? Otherwise, why would you bother to write?
Those all struck him as pretty good questions. He didn’t have answers for any of them. How did you find answers for questions like those? By writing? Would you-or somebody-see what was wrong with what you did and how to fix it? Wouldn’t you get awful tired of turning out crap? Sooner or later, you were supposed to stop turning out crap, weren’t you? But how?
Those struck him as good questions, too. The person he knew who came closest to being a writer was Vanessa, and cranking out reports and proposals and editing other people’s garbage didn’t seem awful goddamn creative to him.
Maybe I’ll learn, he thought. Or maybe I’ll switch majors again, even if Ms. Rosenblatt does laugh at me.
VII
Berkeley. Colin Ferguson always felt he needed a passport when he came up here. The People’s Republic of Berkeley, cops called it. Cops called Santa Monica, the L.A. beachside suburb, the People’s Republic, too. Damn few cops had an idealistic view of human nature. Jerks and assholes-that was what their world boiled down to.
“Holy shit!” he said happily. That was a parking space, right around the corner from Kelly’s apartment building. Parking spaces in Berkeley were even harder to find than Republicans. He had to parallel-park to get into this one, but he did it. It wasn’t even a two-hour zone; he could stay as long as he wanted. He put on the Club and got out.
There wasn’t any secure entrance at her building. People just went in and out. Most of the ones who did looked like college students. That didn’t automatically make them princes among mankind, as Colin had reason to know. But Kelly said she’d never had her apartment broken into, and her car only once. Plenty of folks in places with better security had worse luck.
A girl-well, she was around Vanessa’s age, which made her a girl to Colin-coming down the stairs gave him a curious look as he climbed them. She didn’t say What’s an old fart like you doing here? — her eyes did it for her. But as long as Kelly thought Colin belonged, he could suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous near-adolescents just fine.
He knocked on her door. She did have a little spy-eye so she could see who was there. And she had a dead bolt. It snicked back. Then she threw the door wide. The smile on her face was bottled sunshine. “Hey!” she said, and threw her arms wide, too.
They hugged with the door open. Then he went all the way in, and she closed it behind him. Phone calls and e-mails and texts kept them up on what they were doing. But not being able to get together all the time made the times when they could that much sweeter.
In between kisses, they went through variations on How are ya? How ya doin’? for some little while. Colin bragged about his parking fu. Kelly looked suitably impressed. She knew how lucky you needed to be to cadge a space anywhere in the Bay Area.
Kelly’s place looked quite a bit like Bryce’s-quite a bit like most grad students’ apartments, Colin suspected. Books and papers and printouts were scattered everywhere. She wasn’t compulsively neat about things the way he was. That didn’t mean she couldn’t find whatever she needed, though. He’d seen her pluck a journal out from under a blizzard of papers so she could check something in an article. He had no idea how she knew it was there, but she did.
She pulled Anchor Porters out of the refrigerator. They clinked bottles. “What’s the latest on the park?” he asked. Unless you had to fly cross-country, the volcano was old news by now. It wasn’t on CNN much any more. Even the late-night talk-show hosts left it out of their monologues.
“Still massively fucked,” Kelly answered-she was much easier swearing around himan he was around her. “I mean massively.”
“Is the road down to Jackson still closed?”
“Oh, you bet. The whole Pitchstone Plateau is going back to being a lava field,” she said. Colin must have looked blank, because she explained: “When you drive down-drove down-from Yellowstone Lake to the park’s south entrance, you were driving across the Pitchstone Plateau. It’s what happens to a lava field after it weathers for a hundred thousand years or so.”
“Pines,” he said, remembering. “Lots and lots of lodgepole pines.”
“Uh-huh.” Kelly nodded. “They can grow on almost zero nutrients, so they spring up first. Of course, a gazillion acres of them burned back in 1988, and now they’re burning again.”
“I bet they are,” Colin said. Even after all these years, the charred lodgepole pines, some still upright, some fallen and more than half hidden by their upspringing descendants, others lying out in the middle of what was now grassland, remained a big part of what you saw-had seen-at Yellowstone. “What’s the Park Service going to do when tourist season rolls around again?”
“Cry,” Kelly answered, which startled a snort of laughter out of him. She went on, “They ought to close it up completely, but that’d cost ’em God knows how many hundred million dollars.”
“How much would getting tourists swallowed up in a big eruption cost ’em?” Colin asked, not altogether ironically. Governments and corporations did risk-benefit analyses all the time, weighing whether lawsuits from a foul-up were likely to cost more than not fixing what was wrong. Of course, they couldn’t fix it here, but they could hope it didn’t get any worse.
“That’s what they’re wondering, all right,” Kelly thought along with him. “From what I hear, right now the plan is to let people in to see Mammoth Hot Springs and the other stuff way at the north end of the park, but to keep the rest of it off-limits.”
“Maybe that’s far enough away,” Colin said. You didn’t think about Yellowstone’s immensity till you were actually there. It was bigger than some of the little states back East.
“Maybe.” But Kelly didn’t sound convinced.
“You’re worrying about the supervolcano.”
“You bet I am. If it goes, Mammoth Hot Springs aren’t far enough away. Jackson isn’t far enough away.”
