Love in the Time of Global Warming (2 page)

I’ve cleaned the house as best I can, sweeping up the glass, nailing down loose boards. I tried to avoid bathing for as long as possible but finally, when the crust on my skin hurt, I gave in and now I use a minimal amount of the precious bottled spring water with which my anxious (overly, I once thought) father stocked the basement for a sponge bath every week and a half. I eat as little as possible from my father’s stockpile of canned foods to make them last. No one has come for me this whole time, which makes me think that this disaster reaches farther than I can see. But who knows what would happen if a stranger came. Perhaps I’m better off this way.

*   *   *

In the morning I try to make this half-dream state last, imagining Argos licking my face the way he was not allowed to do, because it might make me break out, but I let him anyway. Then I flip him over so he is on top of me, his body stretched out, belly exposed, big paws flopping, his tongue still trying to reach me from the side of his mouth, even in this position. Above us, the da Vinci, Vermeer, Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, and O’Keeffe prints (torn from broken-backed art books found at garage sales) papered the low attic ceiling like a heaven of great masterworks. (They are still here, though damp and peeling away from the wood.)

I imagine my mother calling me from downstairs that breakfast is ready and I am going to be late for school, calling for Venice to stop playing video games and come down and eat. I cannot smell, but I try to imagine, the scent of homemade bread and eggs cooked in butter, the mix of sweet jasmine and tangy eucalyptus leaves baking in the sun. The sharp smell of turpentine in which my mother’s paintbrushes soak, the sight of her latest canvas on the easel—a two-story pink house in a storm on the edge of a cliff with a sweet-faced boy peering out the window. The sound of the sprinklers zizzing on outside, the throaty coo of doves in the trees.

I tell myself that when I get up and go downstairs my mother will say, “Brush your hair, Penelope. You can’t go to school like that.” This time I will not make a comment, but kiss her cheek and go back up and do it, thinking of how Moira spends hours each morning straightening her hair sleek and how Noey’s black pixie cut is too short to need a fuss. I will eat the oatmeal without complaining, I will be on time for school and not consider Venice High a highly developed experiment in adolescent torture.

I try to imagine that my father will be drinking black coffee and reading a book at the kitchen table. He is sleepy-eyed behind his horn-rim glasses, smelling of the garden he tends each morning, about to go to work (this is before he lost his job and the depression and paranoia set in), looking like someone who could take care of anything, not let anything bad ever happen to his family. And that my brother will be there, with his hair standing up on the back of his head, his sturdy, tan little legs, and his dirty sneakers that get holes in them after just a few weeks. I will not complain that he has finished all the orange juice, is chirping songs like a bird, asking too many questions to which he already knows the answers—
Penelope, do you know how magnets work? Can you name a great African-American orator from the 1800s? What team scored the most home runs of all time?—
or is wearing my basketball jersey. I will notice that his eyes are thoughtful gray like the sea at dawn, our mother’s eyes.

But now all of this is as magical and far-fetched and strange as the myths my father once told me for bedtime stories. Shipwrecks and battles and witches and monsters and giants and gods are no more impossible than this.

Because, when I force myself to rise from my bed unbidden by anyone, and go downstairs, unbrushed, unanointed (my mother would not mind; it is safer this way in case any marauder should find me), the simple breakfast scene will not exist. The house will be broken and empty, the sea encroaching on the yard, the neighborhood flooded, the school—if I dared venture there—crumbled to scraps of barbed wire, brick, and stucco, the city named after angels now in hellish devastation as far as I can see. A basement full of canned goods and bottled water that my father provided, with more foresight than most, sustains me for another day that I do not wish to survive, except to await my family’s return.

Fifty-three marks on the wall. If the world still existed, wouldn’t someone have come by now?

Like the dead orchid beside my bed, I am still alone.

3

ANGELS OF THE APOCALYPSE

N
OEY HAD A JOKE
that we were going to start a band called Angels of the Apocalypse. I thought it was kind of stupid because only Noey could play anything—drums. Moira loved to sing and looked great doing it but she wasn’t very good. It was a terrible band name anyway. Plus there were only three of us and as far as I knew there were four apocalyptic angels. But Noey had T-shirts printed with a photo of wings on the back and the name of the “band” on the front.

She and Moira wore them to the Santa Monica Mall. I felt too embarrassed so I didn’t wear mine.

While Moira tried on dresses I leaned over the railing and looked down at the people and stores below, imagining what it would be like to fall to one’s death here. The mall, with its greasy smells and labyrinth of silver escalators leading nowhere, always made me hungry and tired like I needed something I could never have. I would rather have been home reading about the melting clocks of French surrealism or the dark, haggard faces of German expressionism.

This kid, Corey something, from our school was hanging out in the food court and he asked if we wanted to get high with him. I didn’t, not because of the weed, which I actually liked the few times I’d tried it, but because I wanted to be with my friends, without the interruption. Corey was blond-banged and athletic-looking. Moira stroked her hair, coiling and uncoiling it around her fingers, while Corey sipped her soda and asked her to sing for him since she was in a band, after all, right? I almost cried and then pretended I had something in my eye, trying to concentrate on not letting my eyeliner run. We went to Corey’s house and smoked in his living room until his mom came home and we escaped out the window.

“Such a hottie,” Moira said later.

I looked at her lying on my bed with those freckles, that rose-colored hair, eyes of fractured jade, and something clenched in my stomach I didn’t fully understand yet. I just knew I didn’t want her to talk about this Corey person at all.

Noey sat cross-legged on the floor with her camera around her neck. She and Moira both liked being at my house more than their own (Moira’s parents were always busy working; Noey’s mom drank and yelled) so most nights my mom invited them for dinner. We helped her in the kitchen, making complicated paella, bouillabaisse, or lasagna with fresh herbs, meats, and produce from the Sunday Farmers’ Market. Venice complained about too many girls being over but he looked at them with a kind of wide-eyed, starry-lashed wonder and they asked him about his latest obsession—baseball cards or video games or football season. My mother painted me and my friends as the three Botticelli Graces, dancing in a circle holding hands, almost exactly like the original, except for our blue jeans and cotton tank tops. Only Moira liked to pose but Noey and I did it anyway to please my mom. Besides, her paintings were amazing—as dreamy as they were lifelike—and we wondered if someday the painting of the three of us would be in a museum, keeping us together forever.

I knew eventually we’d be apart. I’d applied to study art history at NYU, Moira was going for fashion design at FIDM, and Noey had a scholarship in photography at Purdue.

Sometimes we had slumber parties in my room and I’d make up stories to help them sleep—tales based on the myths I’d read or the paintings I’d seen. Tales of the great heroes of the past, who sailed the seas, fought monsters, and rescued their friends and lovers. I made up words, too, which drove my friends crazy. (“Faunishness,” Penelope? Really?) Sometimes I made Odysseus, Aeneas, and Achilles into heroines instead. My friends liked that twist, although it wasn’t always easy for me to do since the original stories were so male-oriented, the women in them often so passive or cruel.

Moira, Noey, and I lay together, our long legs stretching out and entangling in our sleep. In the morning sunlight flitted through the trees, over their faces like a flock of butterflies, and I’d watch my friends while they dreamed, wondering if my stories were playing out inside their heads.

*   *   *

The butterfly is the first sign of life I’ve seen since the Earth Shaker.
Lepidoptera
is the scientific name. It sits on my windowsill, hardly moving its orange wings—veined with black like some elaborate stained glass. I want to look at it under a microscope, the horny proboscis and the tiny scales on the wings. My mother made collages with butterflies and had her own design of them tattooed across her back—four in various descending sizes to represent our family. I want this one to fly in here with me. The air outside is ashy and smells of smoke and rotting garbage. My room isn’t much better but at least there is shelter. The solitary orchid my parents bought me on my sixteenth birthday is just a brittle stalk in a pot of dirt, but I bring it over to the window anyway.

The butterfly doesn’t move.

“Are you dying?” I ask it.

I think it is dying.

Why are we here—just us and no one else? Is this salvation or the worst of punishments?

Today the butterfly is still alive, but a piece of its wing is missing. I’m sure it will die in a few minutes, an hour at the most, but later in the day it is still holding on. I wonder how it can be that tenacious; I would have given up long ago.

But maybe it has a reason to live, someone or something it needs to see.

I would wait forever to see my parents and Venice, Moira and Noey and Argos, but the chances of them coming back here are probably as slight as this butterfly growing a new wing and taking flight. Still, I am too afraid to leave and search for them.

Later that day the mutilated butterfly takes off into the gray sky and I wonder if it is trying to tell me something I’m not ready or willing to know.

4

THE MARAUDERS

I
T’S BEEN SIXTY-EIGHT DAYS
now and the hundred and twenty cans of food my disaster-conscious dad left for a family of four are more than half consumed, three quarters of the bottled water gone, in spite of my careful rationing.

The men come when I am sleeping. I wake to hear them outside in the darkness, shouting, laughing, and at first I think,
Someone is here! To save me!

Then a voice shouts, “Overland’s crib? Not bad. Weathered the fucking storm.”

Overland! My dad.

“Noah’s fucking ark. You think he’s still in there?”

“Never know. If not, maybe the family. Heard the wife and daughter were hot.”

“Any live female with legs would look hot to me just about now.”

“You’d take anything with legs, man, live or dead.”

“Fuck off.”

I feel as I did in childhood nightmares where I became a Giant, my limbs tingling and thick and huge, paralyzed in my bed. There was a painting I found as a child, on one of my obsessive searches through my mom’s art books; it was attributed to a follower of Francisco de Goya.
Colossus
had the stomach-tickling, skin-prickling allure of something I wasn’t quite supposed to see, and showed a bearded Giant looming among storm clouds, above a scene of fleeing people and animals, his haunches turned to the observer and his head vanishing into blackness. That was what I became in my nightmares—the Giant. But I was not empowered by my size; I was dying from it.

And that is what I become again when I hear the men in the yard.

I can’t move.

Pounding on the door. For a moment I wait for Argos to bark, my little-man dog that thinks he can protect me from everything. But he’s gone, too. There’s no one to protect me. My father filled the basement with all those cans of tuna fish, beans, anemically pale vegetables, and neon-bright fruit, all that water, but in spite of his talk about conspiracy and danger my mom never let him get a gun.

I heard my parents arguing about it more than once, after he lost his job—my dad saying we weren’t safe, we needed protection, and my mom telling him he should see a psychiatrist. It
was
out of character for my dad, the idea of having a weapon. My parents were modern-day hippies, always believing in love and peace, never imagining a world where families and friends vanish, the sea eats the land, and men come in the night and pound on your door.

And break your windows.

The sound of glass shatters the spell of the Giant and makes me leap from my bed. Through the windows I can see shadowy, shambling figures in tattered clothes surrounding the house on two sides, standing on the strip of sand that isn’t flooded with seawater; there is no way I am going to be able to get past them. In the mirror on my closet door, illuminated by the flashlights in the yard, is a pale, bony-faced, heavy-lidded girl with a flat chest, dirt smears on her cheeks and chin. Only her waist-length hair under her brother’s old baseball cap gives her away.

I grab a pair of scissors in a plastic sheath—a weapon or a means to a disguise—and I head down the back staircase to the basement.

I notice that my hands are steady; they don’t shake as I open the door with the key that I keep in the lock, and pocket it. My steady hands frighten me in a distant way, as if I am watching a movie and feel concern for the main character; her hands show not that she is brave but that she is not afraid to die, that she has already given up that much.

The basement is dark and smells musty and damp. Cans and bottles line the walls. My father’s tool bench is here. He used it more and more after he lost his job at the lab, trying to take his mind off things. I think of him at work for hours, making dollhouses furnished with twig chairs and acorn tea sets—all of it so different from the scientific research he used to do. One house sits unfinished on the table. It is made out of bent willow with a thatched straw roof. So delicate. A big man could crush it in his hand.