Three walls of the room are covered with big Thomas Brothers maps of Orange County: one from the 1930s (faint tracing of roads), one from 1990 (north half of county gridded with interlocking towns, southern half, the hills and the Irvine and O’Neill ranches, still almost empty), one the very latest edition (the whole county gridded and overgridded). Kind of like keeping X-rays of a cancer on your walls, Jim has thought more than once. Surrealty tumor.

Stagger to the bathroom. Standing at the toilet he stares at a badly framed print of an old orange crate label. The bathroom walls are covered by these:

Three friars, taste-testing oranges by the white mission.

Behind them green groves, and blue snow-topped mountains in the distance.

Portola, standing with Spanish flag unfurled, silent, on a peak in Placentia.

Two peacocks in front of a Disneyland castle: “California Dream.”

Little bungalow in the neat green rows of a grove in bloom.

Beautiful Mexican woman, holding a basket of oranges.

Behind her green groves, and blue mountains in the distance.

You have never lived here.

The labels, from the first half of the twentieth century, are the work of printer Max Schmidt and artists Archie Vazques and Othello Michetti, among others. The intensely rich, exotic colors are the result of a process called zincography. Taken together, Jim believes, these labels make up Orange County’s first and only utopia, a collective vision of Mediterranean warmth and ease astonishing in its art deco vividness. Ah, what a life! Jim tries to imagine the effect on the poor farmers of the Midwest, coming in to the general store from the isolated wheat farm, the Depression, the subzero temperatures, the dustbowls—and there among the necessary goods in their drab boxes and tins, these fantasies in stunning orange, cobalt, green, white! No wonder OC is so crowded. These labels must have given those farmers a powerful urge to Go West. And in those days they really could move to the land pictured on the boxes (sort of). For Jim it’s out of reach. He lives here, but is infinitely further away.

The utopias of the past are always a little sad. Jim steps into pants, pulls on a shirt, pads through his ap and looks out the front door.