Love in the Time of Global Warming (12 page)

When she tells us her name, it becomes even clearer. Tara.

Tara? Maybe she truly is the Tibetan goddess. Wait. What am I thinking?

Hex lowers his sword and bows his head. I kneel before her and bury my face in my hands to hide the tears. I don’t know why I’m crying just now. But I can’t stop. Hex puts his hand on my back and more tears release with the pressure of his fingertips.

I’ve missed you
,
Tara
, I think, which doesn’t make any sense.
I longed for you.
It’s as if I’m speaking to a part of myself that was severed from me.

“Why have you come?” she asks, her mouth perpetually curved as if smiling, but not quite, her voice tinkling wind chimes. “How did you get here?”

It’s Hex who speaks. “We have a van.”

She closes her eyes. Her eyelids shimmer, swaths of sunlight in the shade of the palm trees. “You are looking for someone?” And I know that we were meant to come here.

“My family,” I whisper, the words scraping my throat like sandpaper.

Tara’s eyes open and she looks around her, past the green enclave of the oasis, toward the empty white sky. I am aware of a stirring in the palms that makes me uneasy.

She stands in silence, fingertips to lips, and beckons for us to follow her; she has a very light, dancing step. She’s swaying her hips. I don’t worry that Hex is falling in love with her because I have already fallen in love with her, too. But not in the way I love him. Hex, I want to kiss all the time like we did in the van last night; for some reason that I don’t quite understand I want to worship at the young woman’s feet with the delicate metatarsal bones and the small silver rings on the toes. The butterflies still surround her, forming an animated cloak.

We cross a creaking, slatted bridge to the houseboat. Inside it is dark, with a low ceiling, and smells of dried grasses and flowers. Glass jars of dried herbs and pickled foods line the wooden shelves, also small bottles of colored tinctures that our hostess says can purify questionable water or add nutrients to the soil and canned food. There’s a small U-shaped wooden harp, a bed draped in diaphanous cloth, and cushions on the floor. Most of the butterflies have stayed outside but a few of the more tenacious ones decorate her hair and collarbone.

It’s cramped with all of us here. Ash has to bend his head to fit, though the rest of us aren’t that tall. We sit awkwardly on the floor and Tara brews us tea over a small fire pit. The tea smells rich and medicinal and when I sip it there is the taste of twigs. A slight coating covers my mouth as if I’ve been licking a plant with furry leaves.

Ash asks if he can see the harp, which he calls a lyre. I’m surprised that he knows the real name. He holds it in his lap like an infant, but doesn’t play.

Tara sits cross-legged on the floor and tells us that her parents owned the inn but she’s the only one left. She was in the mountains gathering herbs when the Earth Shaker hit and somehow she and her oasis were spared. Like us. After it happened she began to have visions. “Everyone was taken from me but in exchange I received this sight.” Her voice is somnambulant and I wonder about her sanity, but then, who am I to wonder that?

“I see the lost living,” she says. “I saw you three before you came. I see a woman. But she’s almost gone. I think there is also a boy.”

I grab Hex’s hand without even realizing I’m doing it. “Where?” I say but my mouth is so parched the words are like slivers of dry skin.

So Hex says it louder for me. “Where?”

“You have to start in the Afterworld,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

Afterworld? I don’t like the sound of that.

“Are they both there?” Hex asks.

She shakes her head. “Only the mother. And she is a prisoner of your greatest enemy. He discovered that she is your mother. It will take great sacrifice but that is your only chance.”

“How do we get there?” I ask, trying to keep my voice from rising in pitch to the pure desperation I feel. “Where is Venice? My brother?”

“You have to go to the place called Sin,” she says as she sips her tea. “The place that had all the lights. The mother is there.”

So it’s not as bad as I thought. It’s a place where the living can go.

“Las Vegas?” Hex asks.

Ez frowns and leans closer to him. “How does she know?” He looks at Tara. “No disrespect, but why should we trust you?”

“It’s on the map,” I say, thinking of the yellow lines, shining neon. As if this explains her clairvoyance. Or maybe it’s just the truth.

Hex nods and puts his hand over mine, paper over a rock, like in the hand game I used to play with Venice.

“And my brother?” I ask again. Again! “Do you know where we can find him?”

She shakes her head no, winding tresses like silken rings around her fingers. “I’m sorry, I can’t see that but I see his face. Light eyes? Not blue or green, though. Almost … like the lightest shade of the rocks? Perhaps he’s hidden himself, his psyche, as protection from others who have sight?”

Since when can Venice “hide” himself from those with second sight? (I remember: He hid himself from monsters in his
dreams.
) Since when is second sight an accepted element of the world? Since when is the world populated with giants and magical girls? Since the Earth Shaker.

But there was a question in her voice when she suggested he had hidden himself from her mind. Perhaps she can’t “see” where he is for a worse reason. Perhaps he is gone. Tara said she could see living people; she never mentioned the dead.
No, he can’t be.…

I cover my eyes with my palms and try to breathe but it catches in my throat as if there’s a wishbone lodged there. Hex holds up my cup and tells me to drink more tea.

“I don’t think he’s gone,” Tara says, in answer to my silent terror. “I can only see his eyes, not where he is. The mother may know. Or … the man.”

I am suddenly so tired, light-headed, calmer (from the tea?) and I lean against Hex. His arm circles my rib cage. It feels like it’s going to float away from the rest of my body. “I don’t understand,” I say.

I hear Hex as if from far away, for the narcotic drowsiness has overtaken me. “Please tell us more. Explain to us.”

“Sleep now,” she says. “Dream now. I will tell you when you awaken.”

*   *   *

I sleep so long and deeply that when I wake, sweating, with silver-green shadows falling over my face, I can’t remember where I am, or, for a moment,
who
I am.

Then Hex says my name and I recognize his face. I exist in his eyes so I exist and even the pain in my body lessens. The water outside laps the houseboat in soft insistence. It reminds me of Argos waking me with his puppy kisses so long ago it seems more ephemeral than a dream.

Ez and Ash are sitting at the low wooden table eating a bowl of something that smells warm and sweetish. The girl isn’t here.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Tara went out to look for food and herbs,” Hex tells me. “She thinks there may still be live plants in the hills.” (I find myself listing the ones I know:
Desert lily and yucca. Primrose and buckthorn and creosote and sage. Sunflowers and dandelions are edible. Dogbane for poison.
… A mild convulsion rocks my spine thinking of the possible need for toxic substances.) “She says she will tell us more later. She says we have to get ready to fight.”

I cover my eyes and lie back down on the small bed where they must have placed me. The girl is crazy, don’t they see? Why must I fight? I want to run, keep running away. Maybe some life exists beyond all of this.

But what if my mother is where Tara says she is? The map told us to go there, too. But where is my brother? I had more questions to ask. How had I let myself sleep?

I’m angry now—at myself, at Hex, at crazy Tara with her visions and her live trees. I get up and look out at the fan palms and the dark water. There’s no birdsong now but a buzzing sound in my head like mosquitoes, or maybe there are mosquitoes left among the living. What diseases would post–Earth Shaker insects carry? “Did she tell you anything else?”

Hex says no. Ez and Ash were also sleeping when she left. They offer me the porridge she made them but I’m too upset to eat.

“You needed to rest,” Hex says. “I think she gave us the tea to restore us. I trust her. You’re the one who believes in the orange butterflies.…”

“Then where is she?” Again I feel like I can’t breathe in the small space of the houseboat. There are no butterflies here now. “Why did she leave?”

“She’ll be back,” Hex says. But he doesn’t sound so sure.

*   *   *

When Tara doesn’t return after dark, an agitation possesses me, Hex, Ez, and Ash, turning us into its dancing marionettes. We break up into pairs and walk around the oasis, calling for Tara as if she’s just gotten carried away looking for herbs and forgotten about us. But inside I know it isn’t like that. I feel queasy and my temples thump as if my brain’s trying to get out of my skull. The night is getting blacker.

Eventually we go back to the houseboat and Ez makes the rest of the porridge. I eat it, sweetened with some honey from one of Tara’s jars, and it takes away the pain in my stomach. Then Ash picks up the lyre and runs his fingers over the strings, begins playing with great surety, as if he’s done it always. I close my eyes, soothed for a moment by the music. It seems to change the ions in the air, makes it easier to breathe again.

“How did you learn how to play that?” Ez asks.

Ash shrugs. “I like instruments. I played piano when I was little. It’s just sort of natural?”

“How little?” Ez asks, eyebrows raised.

“Maybe three? I don’t know.”

“A musical prodigy,” says Ez.

“Yeah, just a nerdy choirboy,” Ash replies.

Hex comes and lies next to me on the bed. As Ash continues to play softly, Hex reads a chapter from
The Odyssey
to us. It’s the part where Odysseus ventures to the Underworld and consults with the blind prophet Tiresias who had lived seven years as a woman.

“‘You want to know,’ said he, ‘about your return home, but heaven will make this hard for you. I do not think that you will escape the eye of Neptune, who still nurses his bitter grudge against you for having blinded his son. Still, after much suffering you may get home if you can restrain yourself and your companions.…’”

The quote both frightens and reassures me. If we really are on a modern-day odyssey, as the parallels with the book seem to confirm, we may have the hope of returning “home” as Odysseus did. But what is home now and what if we can’t “restrain” ourselves? What more will we have to endure? What do we have to prove? And to whom?

“Oy vey,” Ez says. “Doesn’t sound too good to me.”

“Maybe this Tiresias guy was on crack?” Hex offers.

“No, he was wise,” I say. “Because he understood both genders.” I squeeze Hex’s hand under the blanket and he kisses the top of my head.

“Maybe because he was blind, too. It allowed him more sight. Our weaknesses are our strengths. Our flaws are our gifts.” Ash says all of this, unexpectedly for our usually less-than-philosophical pretty boy, bending his head toward the strings of his instrument as if they had just whispered that information to him.

Then Hex and I fall asleep to the sounds of Orpheus’s lyre, readying ourselves for our own trip below the earth.

*   *   *

The next morning Tara still hasn’t returned. Worry gnaws at me, as hard a taskmaster as hunger. Worry for us, for her.
I missed you. I’ve longed for you.
Anyone who lives in this enchanted place (for the extent of its enchantment has fully hit me now that I am rested and fed) cannot be ill-intentioned. She was trying to help us, I’m sure of that now. What happened?

“I say we leave,” Hex says.

Ez and Ash look at him, baby twins with their big, soft eyes.

“Don’t you think we should stay here, for a little while longer?” Ez says. I can tell he doesn’t want to give up the comforts of this place. None of us do but I have something more than comfort on my mind.

“No,” says Hex, chin set.

“I like it here,” Ash offers. “We all do, right?”

Hex ignores him; I know he thinks that, unlike Ez, Ash hasn’t earned his right to weigh in yet. “Pen?”

“I have to find out if she’s right about my mother. You think it’s definitely Las Vegas?”

Hex nods. “Two sources told us so. But you two boys will be happy to know we can’t leave for a few days. We have some work to do or it’ll be the epic fail in sin city.”

“What kind of work?” Ez is scraping the last bit of porridge out of the bowl, gobbling like he does when he’s agitated or scared.

“I need to teach you to fight,” Hex says. “Maybe Tara will be back by then.”

16

MORE THAN WORDS

“
Y
OU’RE GOING TO HAVE
to get over yourself, Pen, and learn how to kill,” Hex says as we stand on the bank of the oasis, his sword in my hands.

Learn how to kill? Not me. It’s not something I can do. I was raised in a peaceful home.

“But not in a peaceful world,” Hex says when I try to object. “It wasn’t even Then.”

And I do know what it’s like to be angry. I used to get so angry at Congress and the banks, the bankers fighting with my father on the phone, the racists and homophobes on TV, the slaughter of animals, the poisoning of the water and the air, the burned-through ozone, the refusal to legislate on behalf of the helpless planet. Sometimes I’d take that anger out on my mom and my brother, the people I loved the most. But Then, during Then, I never picked up a weapon; I never harmed anyone, not even bugs. Did that mean I couldn’t learn about killing, that I couldn’t find it in me? Since Then, though blindly (in spite of two seeing eyes, for I kept them closed), I’d stuck scissors in a Giant’s orb. And I am harder now, toughened by the days on the road. Although we haven’t eaten much, the muscles in my arms and legs look more defined, and I think I move with more coordination than before. Maybe Hex’s grace and power have rubbed off on me a bit.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I just can’t let you back down now. I need you.” He looks out across the water. “I have a feeling,” he says, “that things are going to get worse.”