Love in the Time of Global Warming (16 page)

“You have so many lemons! Can we make lemonade?” Yxta asked.

They went into the backyard and Lex scaled the tree to retrieve the best, biggest, yellowest lemons for Yxta. Then the two girls went into the kitchen and made lemonade, which they served in doll-size china tea cups.

Lex never thought anyone would ever convince her to have a tea party, let alone to sip from a doll-size cup held with pink-sparkle-painted nails. Yxta, though, had made this all seem perfectly sensible.

“See, you are a princess!” Yxta said.

“I would still rather be a dragon.”

“I know. You’re not a dragon or a princess.” Yxta pointed to her T-shirt, which was pink, of course, and had a sparkling lavender unicorn on the front.

Lex smiled for the first time that day. She did not know that smile was even more magical than her doll-size china tea set, her mirrored bureau covered with nail polish in every shade of pink, her lemon tree, or her long wavy hair. Yes, she could be a unicorn. Their horns were sharp and could do battle.

She did not know at that time that even with a magical horn she would not be able to protect Yxta from the pills that came in almost as many shades as the nail polish on Lex’s mirrored bureau. Or that, in some ways, dying from an overdose might be considered a reprieve in the world that was to come.

*   *   *

In my twilight sleep I can see all of them before; I know what happened to them as if I were there, watching. But I cannot see what has happened to them after we are separated, where they have gone. And I have no idea what has happened to me.

21

TWILIGHT SLEEP

W
HEN I WAKE I’M LYING
in an old black Mercedes with torn upholstery, beneath a rough blanket that smells like wet dog. Under it, my body is iced with sweat—sleet behind my kneecaps, in the crook of my elbows, between my breasts—that sets my teeth chattering. There’s a pain in my head like someone’s been hammering on my temples and a fierce, stitched itching around my left eye, out of which I can’t see. I reach up and touch the cloth bandage that covers it. I try to slide my fingers under the bandage and then I vomit all over the blanket, like I’m puking up my heart and lungs.

“At least hurl out the window,” a man’s voice says.

I recognize him as the man who found me in the basement and gave me the van. Merk, who knew my parents. He takes the blanket off me and tosses it out of the car.

He’s leathered from the sun and wearing a ragged shirt and jeans. His eyes watch me coolly, inscrutable.

“What happened?” I choke out the words, not really wanting him to answer.

“Kronen. You can’t go back there, though. He would have killed you, slowly. I got you out in time, cleaned it up, bandaged it, and gave you something for the pain. You’ve been in twilight sleep.”

“He promised,” I say, sobbing. It makes my eye hurt more. No, not my eye, my … “Where is my mother?”

Merk shakes his head and looks away. “A better question is, where do you want to go?”

“Where are my friends? What happened to them? Hex!” I scream, thrashing against the sides of the car. “Hex!”

Where would they go? I think of lying with my head in Hex’s lap, the houseboat rocking beneath us. I think of the two of us, swimming. His kisses … his hands touching me under the water the way only I’d ever touched myself before, but it was so much better. We were there together, all of us, at Tara’s.

Maybe if I go to Twentynine Palms I will find her. Even though she couldn’t see my brother before, maybe she will have a clue as to where he is now. Maybe she can help me find my friends.

I need to get back there. To the oasis.

I don’t even realize if I speak this out loud or not but Merk says, “Yes. That’s right. That’s my girl.”

*   *   *

I know the oasis has changed as soon as Merk and I arrive. I can’t tell you why but I feel it in my bones and blood and in the aching empty socket of my eye. Something terrible has come here. Or perhaps it is just me, with my suffering.

Only one palm tree lies prone in the water while the others stand. The sun is setting and the water is red as if the tree is bleeding out into it.

“You going to be okay?” Merk mumbles around his cigarette.

I don’t answer. It won’t matter. If I say yes he’ll leave and the same is probably true if I say no. He sent me off once before.

I stand by the water as the last late rays of sun burn redder, stain everything, and then fade. A cold shadow falls over the oasis, creeping chills along my arms. When the sun sets lower, no longer blinding my eye, I see the van, painted with Ez’s cornucopia, parked at the other side of the oasis. Merk sees it, too.

He gives me a nod. “Go on.”

“Are you coming?”

He tells me no. His eyes look strange, almost sad. “You’ve got to do this on your own. It’s the only way to get stronger, hone your gifts.”

And before I can say anything his car peels out down the road in a cloud of dust.

I run with one hand over my bandage—every step a jolt of pain—toward the van but as I approach it, I stop. Why did I let Merk leave so quickly? What if my friends aren’t here? And what if someone else is?

I slither up to the windows as quietly as possible and look inside. The van is dark and empty. “Hex!” I shout, not caring if the wrong person hears. “Hex! Ez! Ash!”

My voice dissolves into the air. No one answers.

I run, now, again, toward the water and the bridge, across to the houseboat. The floor creaks as I step inside. The air still smells vaguely of herbs and desert grasses, dry and sweet. No one is here, either. I should have known.

Then on the floor I see Hex’s sword.

I crouch down beside it and hold my head in both hands like it’s going to fall off if I let go. Tears pour down one side of my face but the other cheek is dry as bone. The Tibetan goddess Tara was born of tears of compassion for those suffering; perhaps this Tara will appear to me now.

But no, they are all gone.

Where is Hex, his delicate hands and nostrils, his jagged smile? Where is gentle Ez and Ash who proved that we don’t have to be what people tell us we are, and that lost love returns? I gave them all up. I gave up too easily. Now I must look for them, and for my brother.

I pass out on the floor, curled, like something from one of Tara’s strange jars, the boat swaying beneath me and the black night lapping.

*   *   *

When morning comes I fill my pockets with the remaining glass vials of tinctures, take Hex’s sword, and walk slowly around the oasis. The air is already burning hot and sweat weeps down my neck. Not a clean sweat but toxic and foul-smelling. As I move down toward the water to splash my face I see a small pile of something white on the shore.

It is hard to make out at first. Then I recognize some bones of a human body (
rib, mandible, metatarsal, scapula, femur…)
, a small human body. The bones of a girl. Sucked clean. Beside the bones lie a red silk scarf and a single silver bangle that I recognize; they once belonged to Tara.

*   *   *

The girl is in the low hills sloping above the desert floor, digging with a trowel among the twigs and rocks, looking for herbs and flowers, anything alive. She has faith that something is still alive besides her fan palms and the other plants in her oasis. Above her the sky is like a vast eye watching her. She’s wearing her boots and jeans instead of silk scarves but there’s a red silk scarf on her head, under her hat, and one silver bangle on her arm.

When she is on her knees she feels the shaking. She closes her eyes and whispers, “
Om tare tam soha.
I will be reborn. I will not give up on this place.”

After she escapes from the monster that takes her, Tara will go back to the oasis but she will be chased down. The Giants will threaten her with death if she doesn’t tell them where we are. She knows, she can see us, but she will not tell. And she will not survive. At least not in her current form.

Take my bones, Pen, bury them in the ground. Life will spring from them.

*   *   *

Hardly realizing what I am doing, I run, fast, back to the van, as if my speed will help in some way, as if I’m not way, way too late.

I return with the black box that once contained a map, fall to my knees, and begin to gather up the bones as if without them I will perish on the spot.

The palm trees rustle with heat, not with any breeze. My neck, bent over the box, feels so tight with pain it may snap off if I move too suddenly. I look up, at the blank sky, at the murky water. A rainbow light throbs out and then dissolves into white across the oasis. Then my one seeing eye goes black in the sun. I am falling into nothing like the rest of my world.

*   *   *

Venice said, “I’m so soft, you made me so soft, I don’t want to be soft like you.”

He had come home from school and told us that he pushed a kid.

“You know not to do that,” my mom said. She was making dinner, not looking at him, that distracted, worried look creasing her face.

I went and sat with him at the table that was covered with his Legos. There was hardly room to eat and I was mad at my mom for not making him clean it up. “Why’d you push him?”

“We were playing basketball. He was showing off and I told him he was a ball hog. He pushed me first.”

My mom was finally getting it and she came over, too, wiping her hands on her apron. She smelled of onions. “You know to get help from a grown-up if that happens, right, Ven?”

“No! I don’t want to tell on him! I need to show I’m not soft! Like you, all of you! Even Dad! You’re all soft.”

He ran out of the room and I followed him. I knocked on his door. “Please let me in.”

I waited until I finally heard the click of the lock. He was sitting on the floor with hundreds of baseball cards spread out around him.

“If anyone hurts you I’ll beat them up,” I told him.

“No you won’t.”

“That’s because I’m a spaz,” I said.

“No, it’s because you’re soft.”

“That’s true, too.”

“Dad shouldn’t have lost his job,” he said. “He should have fought for it.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“He should fight the bank from taking our house. He should do something.”

“He’s trying,” I said, but I knew what Venice meant.

“I hate how soft you all are,” said my brother. His face was flushed, making his eyes appear a lighter gray, and his back was rigid. There were bruises, cuts, and scrapes on his knees but he would never complain about the pain.

*   *   *

I wonder, now, as I sit in the van, how I can make up for being too soft, for not saving my family, for not saving my friends, for not helping anyone. I have a sword in my hand and I have a van and supplies. I have a black box that once only contained a map and that I filled with what I am sure are the bones of a magical girl. I even know where to find Kronen.

There is a piece of paper in the van. It says
Bank of the Apocalypse
and there are directions. It says
Find Pen. Find Kronen and kill!!! Find Pen
. The writing is Hex’s graffiti scrawl.

My baby brother would never call Hex soft. Not Hex.

And not me, either. Not anymore. Not any fucking more.

22

BANK OF THE APOCALYPSE

T
HE BUILDING HAS GOLD COLUMNS
and a massive doorway, a mural depicting Giants, with bodies sticking out of their mouths like limp cigarettes. Someone besides me has studied their Goya.
Bank of the Apocalypse
reads a handwritten sign. It balances atop a pile of ruin-rubble and clean-sucked human bones. I can make out doors and windows, crumbled fireplaces, tiles, metal pipes, shingles, signs that read
Foreclosure
. The homes of so many skeletons. People who used to fight over the last blueberry muffin at the breakfast table, get down on their knees to scrub bathroom floors, and kiss one another good night, thinking they were at least relatively safe. Now they are just dust in the debris.

I climb through the rubble toward the door. It takes a long time, time enough for a Giant to see me from the blood-red stained-glass eye window and reach out to crush me in his hand the size of a tractor.

My mother never foresaw this danger. She was scared we would get sick from drinking tap water, eating genetically modified fruits and vegetables, even breathing the air. We had to put on sunscreen every day because of that hole in the ozone that kept her up at night. She gave us vitamins and bought us only chemical-free shampoo, even though it never made my hair as soft and clean as Moira’s. I used to hate how afraid my mom was and how afraid she had made me. Now I understand but I can no longer be like her. I have to fight.

The ceilings are so high I can’t see the top of them, and the only light is from the red glass eye. All around me are vaults that look like crypts. The whole place is a mausoleum.

“Here she is,” a voice says.

Not a Giant, but Kronen emerges from the shadows, wearing a carefully constructed suit made of patches of dried, bumpy material. I force myself to stand my ground. The sword in my hand looks like a needle, even to me, though Kronen is only a few inches taller than I am.

“You’ve come back?” he says, smiling. It further distorts the uneven planes of his face. “I knew you would come back.”

“I want my friends,” I say. “You have my eye. You took my mother. I want to know what happened to her, and to my friends. And my brother.”

“Friends are important. Brothers are important. Sons, sons are important.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry for what I did. But you had your revenge. An eye for an eye.”