“I’ve heard you talk about the way OC used to be,” Arthur says. They spot a mall cop and stand watching the keno results appear in the Las Vegas window, green numbers embedded in glass. When the cop has passed Arthur covers the numbers with another dead soldier. “Some of what you say is important. The attempts to make collective existences out here, Anaheim, Fountain Valley, Lancaster—it’s important to remember those, even if they did fail. But most of that citrus utopia bit is bullshit. It was always agribiz in California, the Spanish land grants were grabbed up in parcels so big that it was a perfect location for corporate agriculture, it was practically the start of it. Those groves you lament were picked by migrant laborers who worked like dogs, and lived like it was the worst part of the Middle Ages.”

“I never denied it,” Jim protests. “I know all about that.”

“So what’s with this nostalgia?” Arthur demands. “Aren’t you just wishing you could have been one of the privileged landowners, back in the good old days? Shit, you sound like some White Russian in Paris!”

“No, no,” Jim says weakly. They plaster restroom doors and walls with posters, approach the May Company at the south end of the mall. “There were some serious attempts to make cooperative agricultural communities, here. A lot of them had to do with the orange groves. We have to remember them, or, or their efforts were wasted!”

“Their efforts were wasted.” Arthur slaps up a poster. “We’d better get out of here, the cops are bound to have seen some of these by now.” He pokes Jim in the arm with a hard finger. “Their efforts were wasted because no one followed up on them. Even this kind of thing is trivial, it’s preaching to the deaf, making faces at the blind. What’s needed is something more active, some kind of real resistance. Do you understand?”

“Well, yeah. I do.” Although actually Jim isn’t too clear on what Arthur means. But he is convinced that Arthur is right, whatever he means. Jim’s an agreeable guy, his friends convince him of things all the time. And Arthur’s arguments have a particular force for him, because they express what Jim has always felt he should believe. He knows better than anyone that there is something vital missing from his life, he wants some kind of larger purpose. And he would love to fight back against the mass culture he finds himself in; he knows it wasn’t always like this.

“So you mean you are doing something more active?” he asks.

Arthur glances at him mysteriously. “That’s right. Me and the people I work with.”