Golden State: A Novel (3 page)

“I’m here.”

Today, the people of California are voting. The ballot boxes are ready; the citizens are poised to act. What once seemed like an outlandish notion has become, almost overnight, a real possibility.

In retrospect, is it possible to pinpoint the moment when things began to change, the event that set all of this madness in motion? I remember certain headlines, vaguely anxious conversations with friends and colleagues, a growing sense of excitement coupled with an equal measure of unease. I remember twenty-somethings in leg warmers and bomber jackets, dressed as if they’d just discovered the ironic eighties, standing on street corners with their clipboards and ballpoint pens, shouting, “C’mon, people. Let’s put it on the ballot!” Even their anthem was a throwback to a time when they were toddlers: the Scorpions, “Wind of Change,” blasting from portable iPod speakers.

“Boy, that takes me back,” Tom said one night several weeks ago. We were sitting at a sidewalk café in Noe Valley, having just come from the mediator’s office, where a young woman in an exceedingly tight dress had assured us that our divorce need not be rancorous.

“Are you married?” we asked her in unison.

“No, but I know a great many married people—divorced ones, too,” she answered brightly, as if that made her an expert. Anyway, her
assurances were unnecessary. The end of my marriage to Tom has been sad and exhausting but never rancorous. We don’t despise one another. Between us, there is no lack of mutual respect. Neither one of us did anything specifically to hurt the other. Instead, something happened to us, a wound from which our marriage was unable to recover.

That night at the café, “Wind of Change” blasted from the window of an apartment across the street. I heard the soaring notes and thought of Berlin in 1989—the dramatic events on which the song was based. “I was glued to the TV, watching the wall come down,” I said to Tom. “I wanted to be over there, in Eastern Europe, where the world was changing.”

“It’s changing here, now,” my husband said. “These kids, they’re on a mission.”

True enough. “The student volunteers are the real heroes in this fight,” our governor has said. You have to admire their righteous aggression, as if daring you to pass them by without signing up for the cause. And I did sign their petition, standing in front of the Safeway across the street from Ocean Beach, chatting amicably with the good-looking college kid in a
SURF MAVERICKS
T-shirt, who offered me his purple pen and proclaimed “Awesome” with such conviction, I longed to share his enthusiasm. It was so easy to scribble my name on the page, never bothering to read the fine print. After all, a signature seems so harmless until one considers the fact that, in California, the number of signatures required to put an initiative on the ballot is laughably small, a tiny drop in the bucket of our state’s population. And once an initiative is passed, the state legislature is powerless to reverse it.

After the success of the petition, the campaign began in earnest. There were editorials in every newspaper, commercials on television and radio, town hall meetings across the state. The new president of the United States weighed in (“foolish”), along with the minority whip (“ludicrous”), not to mention every D-list celebrity who could book five minutes on cable news.

And yet, if there were some way to revisit these moments, to
watch myself and others, eavesdrop on the conversations, I think I would be bewildered by our collective apathy. Until a few weeks ago, it all seemed like so much babble. Few of us believed that anything would come of it. After all, one becomes accustomed to a certain level of security, a certain level of, well, certainty. We understand the possibility of change up to a point. What we are not prepared for, what we lack the capacity to imagine, is a seismic shift. The wall going up or coming down, the decades-old dictatorship falling, the familiar boundaries disintegrating.

As a doctor, I regularly experience that moment when I sit across the desk from a patient and tell him or her the news—cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s—that moment when, with one utterance of a phrase, I turn someone’s world on end. After all these years, it’s still the part of my job I dread the most. There is a look of confusion, a flicker in the eyes, as the diagnosis takes shape in the patient’s mind. Everything must be reevaluated according to this new knowledge, which the patient will carry around like a thorn in the side, a stone in the shoe, until the day he dies. The seismic shift writ small, in the bedrock of an individual life. No one is ever quite prepared for it.

One morning three months ago, I was standing at the bedside of Mr. Luongo, a quiet man known throughout the ward for his habit of addressing everyone, even the youngest orderlies and volunteers, as “ma’am” or “sir.” My residents were gathered around me, trying to get to the bottom of Mr. Luongo’s recent seizures, when he grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume on the television mounted on the wall. “Call the cartographers,” a familiar voice said. “We will have to draw a new map.” I looked up at the screen. There was the governor standing on the steps of the capitol in a sharp gray suit, his signature hair holding its own against the wind. It was a rather melodramatic thing to say, but he is that kind of politician. Before he was the governor, he’d been the mayor of San Francisco. Most had assumed he’d soon be making a bid for the White House, that each office he held in California was only a stepping stone to something bigger. Which was why almost everyone
was stunned when he threw his hat into the ring with the secessionists.

“There comes a time when ‘states’ rights’ must be more than a catchphrase,” he continued. “That time has come for California. It is our right and our destiny—our responsibility—to become a sovereign nation.”

“Fucking idiot,” Mr. Luongo spat.

“It’s about time.” Debbie, a first-year resident in podiatry, was gazing up at the television with a look of undisguised admiration. She’d met the governor once at a fund-raising event in Berkeley. He’d touched her back while moving through the crowded room, his hand lingering a moment longer than necessary.

“What happens to you—to everyone at the VA—if this goes through?” asked Rajiv. I wanted to tell him not to worry, that everything would be fine. Instead, I shrugged. “I have no idea.” It occurred to me what a strange limbo we would be left in, should the initiative succeed.

In the days that followed, the governor’s performance was played ad infinitum on the national and local news, parsed by the pundits, analyzed by the lawyers, and much maligned by other politicians, even those of his own party. He was called a traitor, a hero, a fool. One powerful southern senator said, “Is it really surprising, coming from that immoral, elitist hotbed of wacko liberalism called California?”

Many Californians were enraged, but a great many were inspired. Before his announcement of support, the secessionists had been considered a fringe faction, percolating their extreme ideas on the sidelines for decades, not to be taken seriously. The governor’s speech, combined with a perfect storm out of Washington, D.C.—a tide of radical conservatives elected to Congress, an impending attack on Iran, a legislative ban on stem-cell research, a dismantling of basic gun control legislation, a federal rollback on offshore drilling regulations, a constitutional amendment that struck down gay marriage—changed all that. To top it off, California was on the verge of bankruptcy.

“We sent $315 billion to Washington last year,” the governor
wrote, in an open letter that was published in every major newspaper in the state. “We received $245 billion in services. That’s $70 billion that we paid to build roads in Juneau and fighter planes in Huntsville, while we’re forced to fire teachers, close schools and nursing homes, release violent offenders from our prisons, and gut social services. And let’s not forget Crystal Springs.”

Crystal Springs Reservoir, which lies on top of the San Andreas Fault twenty miles south of San Francisco, had been in need of seismic repairs for decades. Last summer, during a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, the dam finally collapsed, as geologists had long warned it would, putting an elementary school in the small, wealthy town of Hillsborough underwater. Forty-seven children who were attending summer school that day drowned, along with three teachers. Their photographs were all over the news for months, as were the pictures of two dozen runners, hikers, and mothers with strollers whose bodies had been washed off the adjoining Sawyer Camp Trail when the dam broke. The Crystal Springs repair was part of a planned $4.5 billion overhaul of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct system, largely funded by the state, but the project had been put on hold due to budget cuts.

“We had the money to fix that dam,” the governor wrote. “But we sent it to Washington instead.”

If the governor was polarizing, he was also charismatic. By the following morning, vendors were already hawking secession merchandise in Union Square. T-shirts and bumper stickers and key chains and underpants declared,
CALIFORNIA IS
MY
COUNTRY
.

I bought one of each. Not that I really wanted California to secede. Not that I thought it could ever really happen. But I did appreciate the historical significance of the moment.

Today is the day, then: democracy in action. It’s up to the voters to decide whether we will stay or go. Whether we will protect the union or destroy it. In the past three months, Roger Harte, a tech billionaire from Palo Alto, has poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign for secession. The opposition was slow to organize, even slower to pony up funds for a fight they didn’t believe they
could lose. Just as they began their anemic counterattack, Congress allocated $12 billion to erect a gigantic electric fence along the entire border between Mexico and California.

“When they sealed the border, they sealed our fate,” the governor proclaimed, standing before an energized audience of thousands, wearing a tie striped red, white, and green, the colors of the Mexican flag. At a rally in the area known as Tehrangeles in L.A., he posed this question to the crowd of Iranian Americans: “When the drones fly over your relatives’ homes in Tehran, do you want them dropping bombs bought by
your
taxes?”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, certain members of the state legislature were busy drafting a constitution, and it was rumored that the governor of the world’s eighth-largest economy was meeting with prime ministers and presidents. Less than a decade earlier, another governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had sat down with then prime minister Tony Blair at the Port of Long Beach and signed an accord between California and Great Britain on global warming.

“I call California a nation-state because of the diversity of our people, the power of our economy, and the reach of our dream,” Schwarzenegger had said in his second inaugural address. “The commerce and trade of the nations of the earth pass through our ports. The world knows our name. We are a good and global commonwealth.”

When the new governor came out in favor of secession, rumor had it that Schwarzenegger called to offer his support. As it turned out, belief in California’s independence crossed political boundaries, created whole new allegiances, and dissolved old alliances that had once seemed set in stone.

Other lawmakers were getting nervous. “The last time states attempted to secede,” a leading Democrat in the California senate warned in a news conference, “the result was a full-blown civil war.”

“This is a different time, and we are a different country,” the governor replied. He eschewed the traditional press conference and instead posted his reply on Twitter, with eighty-four characters to spare. He refrained from mentioning the obvious: certain states were
salivating at the thought of a California secession, dreaming of a nation unfettered by our left-leaning electoral votes. Meanwhile, scholars and politicians squabbled over whether or not states have a constitutional right to secession, or merely a right to revolution.

Years before, in the rural Mississippi church that swallowed up the Sunday mornings of my childhood, the thickly toupeed and eternally sweaty pastor had been fond of delivering sermons on hedonism, in which “the dark cavern of Hollywood” and “that modern-day den of iniquity they call San Francisco” were equated with Sodom and Gomorrah. “It would do us no harm,” Brother Ray once said, “if the whole godless state slid right into the Pacific.”

I used to imagine the state cutting loose like a glacier, floating off into the ocean: a gargantuan party barge carrying the sinners to their doom or, possibly, their salvation. Brother Ray’s sermons, which surely were intended to instill in us a reverence for our roots, an allegiance to our region above all others, and a fear of evil urban centers, had the opposite effect on me. His passionate warnings planted the seeds of my desire to head west.

“Don’t leave,” my sister pleaded eighteen years ago, on the last day of my last summer in Mississippi. She was twelve then, standing in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me dismantle it piece by piece. My bookshelves were bare, my closet empty. A studio apartment was waiting for me in San Francisco. When my admission letter to medical school had arrived six months before, with a promise of financial aid, I’d been convinced that my life was finally beginning.

“Christmas is just around the corner,” I assured her.

“You won’t come home for Christmas.”

“Of course I will.”

“Where will you get the money?” She flopped onto my bed, all arms and legs and chipped pink nail polish. Her legs were already longer than mine, stick thin and covered with soft light brown hair. Her height had always been a source of mystery, a secret clue to her paternity, one I could never quite decode. The only thing our mother would tell us about Heather’s father was that he was a regular
guy, a very decent person. “Don’t worry, he’s not doing time at Whitfield,” she would say. “Tall and blond. Like the cute one in
The Dukes of Hazzard
.”

Heather flipped through the folded clothes in the suitcase, messing up the order I had so carefully imposed on my meager belongings. “Can I have this?” she asked, pulling my favorite shirt from the bottom of the pile—a chambray button-down that had belonged to my own father, who died when I was five. He’d been sitting in the shade of an oak tree outside the bank where he worked, enjoying his pimento cheese sandwich, when a large limb fell from the tree. “It was instant,” I’d been told at the time. “He didn’t suffer.” Only when I was older did I begin to doubt that his death was painless. The chambray shirt had been worn and washed so many times it felt as soft as an old sheet. I didn’t want to give it to her, but I understood that this was a test. She was making a sacrifice, and she wanted me to make one, too.