The Subprimes (20 page)

It was not much, she knew, to stake people's lives on. But she had also seen the eyes of the men and women who worked with her every day, and she had read, correctly, their desire to flee no more. This was the rock they chose to stand on.

ARTHUR MACK WOKE HIS DAUGHTERS
with kisses and nose rubs against their soft cheeks. The girls slept together on a queen-size
four-poster, and when they opened their eyes, their first thought was how happy they were to see their father, and their second was what exactly was he doing in their Gam's house?

“Let's go, girls,” he whispered. “Do you want waffles? Do you want to meet Pastor Roger?”

“Um, I dunno,” said Ginny.

“I'm sleepy,” said Franny.

“Let's just go and have a quick breakfast and meet with Pastor Roger, and that'll be all nicey nice, right?”

“Does Mom know?”

“Shhhh”—he held a finger up to his lips—“let her sleep.”

He gathered up both girls and a down comforter. “You girls can sleep in the car, on the way to the waffles.”

This didn't seem to the girls a good idea, or in keeping with the recent pattern of their days, but they were tired and he was their father.

“Don't you guys want to be a family again?” Arthur asked.

They agreed. It was what they wanted.

“So let's do that, and that starts with us leaving right now.”

He had them padding out the door and down the stone path to Adelaide before Gemma had even stirred. She heard whispers and little feet against the path and thought it sounded strange, and then she sat up with a start, tossed her bedding aside, and was out the front door in time to see Arthur's taillights heading down the street.

I SIT WITH RONIN AT
the dining table, his algebra book open between us, a dozen sheets of blank scratch paper, pencils, and erasers spread out on the table in the cone of yellow light as we both ponder the mysteries of polynomials. We are supposed to reduce (–18×
²
n)
²
(–
¹
/
₆
mn
³
), sets of numbers and letters so alien-looking
and -sounding it hurts my eyes and mouth to look and say them. But the only chance Ronin has of passing seventh grade, I realize, is if I sit down with him and both of us, inch by bloody inch, advance up the Omaha Beach of middle school algebra. It is a first time for both of us. I myself was so stoned in seventh grade that I doubt I grasped this material, but that was in my youth, before the waves of numerically literate Asians, both at home and overseas, became the officer corps of capitalism. Now, the only hope our children have of achieving a life of 750-plus credit scores is to be able to go polynomial-to-polynomial with those East Asian kids. Of course, if Enhanced Quantitatives were doing what the state was paying them to do, I wouldn't be sitting here, struggling to wrap my middle-aged brain around these strings of hostile numbers and letters.

Ronin shows me what he knows so far. How to simplify inside the brackets, then find like terms, push those together, remember the order of operations, then exponents, but no, I think, this has to be wrong. Shouldn't exponents be first? Or is it brackets? I flip through the textbook, looking for the correct order.

“That can't be right.”

Ronin sulks beside me.

I worry I am undermining his self-confidence. Am I being too harsh? If I were more confident myself, then wouldn't I be able to gently nudge him to the correct simplifications? Where is his Danish mother and her numerically hyperliterate architect boyfriend? Why aren't they helping Ronin with his math?

“PEMDAS.” Ronin sounds this alien word out slowly.

“Is he Greek?” I ask.

“No, it's ‘Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,'” he says, recalling a mnemonic that he has obviously heard repeatedly in his EQ sessions. “Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, um, something, Addition, Subtraction.”

“Division?” I say.

“That's it!”

And we set to work with our simplifying. Reducing (–18×
²
n)
²
(–
¹
/
₆
mn
³
) to 54m
⁵
n
⁴
is a pleasing and logical operation that makes us both happy. We each do a dozen of these problems, and both come to the same answers eleven out of the twelve times we try. We are making something work, together.

“This isn't so hard, is it?” I ask.

Ronin is concentrating, and I imagine that he is making a breakthrough, right here, at our dining table. Why, we may have the makings of an Ivy Leaguer after all.

“I fucking HATE THIS,” he says, and puts his head down on his arms.

But no matter, we have completed one night's homework. He is now only fourteen assignments behind.

I'm looking out the dining room window at the empty swimming pool, the pale blue bottom still somehow inviting despite the fact that we haven't had water in it in half a decade. But Ronin remembers swimming in that pool, though Jinx probably doesn't, and how happy it had once made us.

At one point, after we take a break for a few minutes between the algebra and the algebra, I ask Ronin what he thinks about Anya's idea, about going to Lombok with his mother and Florian.

“I dunno,” he says, not looking up from his phone.

“But you understand it, right? What this means?”

“I guess,” he says.

“Your mom wants you and Jinx to go to sanctuary,” I say.

“I'd go with you,” he says.

“I'm not going anywhere,” I tell him. “I think the sanctuary idea is idiotic.”

“Sanctuary doesn't sound so bad,” he says. “But I don't want to go with Florian. I think that guy's kind of a dick.”

That's my boy, I think.

We get back to work trying to solve the really tough problems.

AT NINE A.M. THE NEXT
morning a policewoman arrives and serves with me an emergency court order of child custody. Anya has gone to family court and won immediate full custody of Ronin and Jinx. The family court judge, apparently, agreed that I was a threat to the safety of my children, based on my pleading guilty to Endangerment of a Minor. She informs me that Anya, accompanied by a police officer and social worker, will be at my house in an hour to collect my children and their possessions.

I know if I let them go I will never see them again.

I tell them to pack an overnight bag.

My phone rings. It's Gemma.

“Hey there,” I say. “Not a great moment right now.”

“Tell me about it,” she says. And she tells me her husband has kidnapped her children.

“What an amazing coincidence,” I say, “because I'm about to kidnap mine.”

I WISH I HAD WASHED
my car, or, better yet, had it detailed before my getaway. I hastily cleared the backseat of old manuscripts and gum wrappers and shopping bags, dumped the kids' backpacks and suitcases into the trunk, leaving space for Gemma's rolling suitcase. I stuffed a few T-shirts and jeans into a backpack, along with my computer. By the time I arrived at Gemma's mother's house, Gemma was already waiting for me, her mother standing behind her with arms folded, studying me with the same scrutiny she probably wished she had given Arthur Mack. I'm not sure if Gemma had told her that, viewed from a
certain perspective, I was essentially doing to my wife a version of what Gemma's husband was doing to her. But, bottom line, neither one of us wants to lose our kids. So off we go, driving past the whale carcasses and sitting in three hours of eastbound 10 traffic before we finally leave L.A. County and for a few miles there are up to the startling speed of forty-five miles per hour. I'm amazed the old Prius still has that in her.

It had been easy to convince Jinx to hit the road: we were going to see Pastor Roger. Ronin was delighted by the prospect of missing a few days of school. I sold this like an adventure. We were going east, into the desert, in search of some missing kids. What could be more fun than that?

Arthur had called Gemma, telling her that he had taken the kids for the good of the family.

“Okay, Arthur, I'm not sure I'm following your logic,” Gemma said, “but I am going to find you and castrate you for this.”

“Ooooh, I love it when you talk dirty.” What was alarming was that he actually meant that.

“Where are you taking them, Arthur?”

“The same place I want you to come. We have to go see Pastor Roger. I want the girls, and you and me, all of us, to sit down with him. He's so together, such a dignified person—”

“You're taking our girls to see a televangelist? That's why you've taken them?”

“He's so much more than that. He just has this way of making me—everyone—feel okay about themselves. So that I feel like things can work out. I mean, between you and me, between us, we can all be together. He can do that for us.”

“You nitwit, I'm never going to be with you.”

“We'll see what Pastor Roger has to say about that. I'm going to see him now.”

“Where are you taking them?”

“Wouldn't you like to know.”

“To Valence?” she asked. She had been watching the news and knew that Pastor Roger had set up camp near the besieged squatter town.

“Damn it,” Arthur said. “Will you at least sit down with Pastor Roger when we get there?”

Gemma hung up.

THE HIGHWAY CROWDS AGAIN AS
we near the Nevada border, with hundreds of vehicles pulled off the gray-top into makeshift roadside Ryanvilles, families atop sleeping bags and on beach chairs watching the traffic stream by. There are signs, soaped and water-colored onto rear windows: “People Helping People”; or simply, “SARGAM!” Jinx and Ronin gaze at the masses of families, boys and girls like them, only these are subprimes. I have to resist the impulse to warn Ronin: You see what happens if you don't do your algebra. Whatever happened to these folks, I tell myself, was bad luck, not bad math.

Gemma has been quiet, thoughtful, but careful to engage Jinx and Ronin in conversation. I admire her selflessness in getting beyond her own worries and concerns at this moment as she tries to paint this journey as some kind of rescue adventure.

“We're on a mission,” says Ronin.

Jinx thinks this over, asks Gemma, “Do you want to get divorced? Or does your husband?”

I'm worried about where this is going.

“I don't feel like I have a choice,” Gemma says.

“Divorce is a sin,” says Jinx, “so I think you should reconsider. My father and mother committed the sin of divorce, and adultery, and numerous other sins, and if they don't repent, they will suffer.”

“Now, Jinx, remember we talked about how that is one point of view—”

“I'm stating gospel,” Jinx insists.

“Jinx, my husband, he committed numerous sins—”

“I know who your husband is,” says Jinx, “Pastor Roger has mentioned him from the platform, he's a hero.”

“I don't think so,” says Gemma. “He cheated people. He cheated me. He committed many sins.”

Jinx ponders this. “What sins?”

Gemma thinks for a moment. “Adultery; um, greed; um, sorcery, isn't that one?”

Jinx nods. “Sorcery is a sin.”

“Idolatry?” I suggest.

Gemma looks at me, shrugs. “Sure. Idolatry.”

Jinx thinks this over. “‘So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you.'”

Gemma smiles back at Jinx. “Thank you, Jinx, that's what we need to do.”

I hand my credit card to a police officer who swipes it, reads the score, and returns my card. “Welcome to Nevada.”

I HAVE TWENTY-SIX TEXT MESSAGES
from Anya, nineteen kik-toks, and three voice mails that I ignore.

WHEN WE STOP AT A
Del Taco south of Jean, and Jinx and Ronin are eating U.S.-farmed kangaroo-meat tacos in their own red-benched booth, I thank Gemma for being so patient with Jinx.

“She's adorable,” says Gemma.

“I wouldn't go that far.”

“Don't be so hard on your kids.”

“I hate my kids,” I say.

Gemma sips her coffee. “I can't imagine how you lost custody.”

“You know what I mean. I just—I don't hate them—I just don't know how to fix them, and I hate that.”

“You don't fix them,” Gemma says. “You just keep them from fucking up too much.”

“That's what I'm trying to do.”

“Look, I'm glad you're coming with me to look for my kids, but you know that your own situation, in terms of keeping your kids, it's sort of hopeless, right?”

“I like to think of myself as living in denial,” I say.

I know how this looks: a father convicted for recklessly endangering minors who then kidnaps his own children is unlikely to come off favorably in family court. The way I see it, I don't have any choice, it's either lose my kids now or lose them later. And I'll take later.

“But you're just putting off the inevitable,” she says.

“Isn't that all any of us are doing?” I ask.

WE STOP IN LAS VEGAS
for the night, the city a shimmering upward-jutting glow stick of white light in the hazy evening. We're all road weary, our backs aching, our asses sore from riding too long on my old car's sagging suspension. I haven't been to Vegas in a few years, since a story about Steve Wynn's plan to build a full-scale replica of the Roman Coliseum and stage actual gladiator fights—men versus men, men versus lions, lions versus bears, lions versus robots, robots versus men, robots versus robots. It wasn't opposition from environmental and animal rights groups that stopped him, it was the latest spin of
the boom-and-bust cycle that undid the plan—at least in Vegas. He built a grand Coliseum in Macao that draws 120,000 Chinese two nights a week to watch fights between men and various wild animals. Chinese convicts are offered the chance to fight for their freedom in these battles.