Love in the Time of Global Warming (4 page)

A gust of cold gray air bites at my neck, chest, and belly like a wild animal that knows where I am most vulnerable. Beads of moisture cling clammily to my skin. My legs shake from driving and from the cold.

Although the van is well stocked, I still have to find more vegetable oil fuel and more food and water, as well as personal supplies. I walk toward the glass doors where a thirty-foot fiberglass man in a sombrero stands guard. It looks like the burrito-stand man from Pacific Coast Highway. But how did he get here?

Something is piled in front of the store and I think at first it’s more trash. But then I see these are bones—a heap of them. And there’s no avoiding them now; I’m too close, without the protection of the van. I get that dizzy out-of-body sensation like I did when I was ten and we saw a dog hit by a car. Like it wasn’t real. Though it heaved and bled black blood in the middle of the street, and my dad got out, wrapped it in a blanket, and took it to the vet where it died. I kept my eyes closed the whole way. And that was just one dog. There must be hundreds of bones here. Human bones. Gnawed raw. Just the hair left on the heads like string.

Through the smashed glass doors I see the aisles filled with things. Just things. But things matter now. They are all I am sure of. They will help me survive, drive, get toward something, anything. Get me away from this. So I keep my eyes open, still pretending the bones aren’t real, go past them, and go inside.

The aisles are littered with dirt, the floors streaked dark in a way that almost seems obscene. Especially when combined with the fetid-flesh stench of the air. But the things still look pristine on their racks. Whoever came in here didn’t get far. My footsteps echo on the linoleum where once, a million years ago, my mother rolled her shopping cart, baby Venice sitting inside pointing at the plastic toys.

I grab a cart and start to run, pulling things down off the shelves as fast as I can—alcohol and bandages and aspirin and tampons and toilet paper and sunblock and cans of food and bottles of water and vegetable oil.… Why hasn’t the store been looted already? Does this have something to do with the pile of bones in front? Is someone lurking here? Guarding the supply? Ready to kill me? I must be quick and not think about any dangers.

I know this store well; I know where everything is and it’s like I’ve been practicing for this moment for years, as if I knew, somehow, every time we shopped, that I’d have one last chance to grab the very last remnants of civilization from these shelves. Who is going to manufacture bandages and toilet paper now? Let alone electronics? Is anyone out there? Wouldn’t someone besides Merk have come looking for me if they were? Is everyone in the whole world, besides me and Merk and those men who were with him, gone? If I once thought I knew heartbreak (the person I had a crush on only saw me as a friend, my dad had lost his job, and we thought we might lose the house, too), now I realize I had. Now I realize where the expression comes from. That area of my chest filled with fissures and erupted fault lines.

I remember the news stories about the terrible conditions of Chinese factories. All for the sake of our toys. But maybe China is okay; maybe people are still alive in China, lined up in factories producing glittery little boxes full of light. Maybe there’s a world beyond Los Angeles, or at least America, where everything is business as usual. But then why has no one come to my rescue? And why is the air so black and still?

And then, it isn’t. Still.

The Giant of my dreams is here, standing above me.

Did he come out of the sea? Did he come out of the earth when it shook? Did he break the earth with his footsteps? Is he my hallucination?

He has to stoop to fit beneath the ceiling of the store. His skin is thick, warty, and pale. His forehead is high and furrowed. One eye socket is a ruined hole, sinking in on itself like a toothless mouth. The other eye rolls up, black and gelatinous and hungry.

This Giant reaches out and lifts me in his hand in just the same way as the figure in the Goya painting of Saturn eating his son, my legs and feet dangling straight down, my jeans pulling up, cutting into me, my rib cage crushed in huge fingers like it’s a little basket woven of straw. Clammy flesh all around me. The store sways sickly below, my tiny shopping cart filled with pathetic-looking supplies. I think again of the bones at the door. I’m going to be part of that heap, my head ripped from my neck stem, my blood drained like wine, my flesh eaten away. I’m going to be bones at the end of the earth at the end of the world.

But I have something in my pocket, I have my scissors in their plastic container, and I pull them out and hold them up.

“What is your name?” His voice is thick with phlegm and the sulfuric smell from his maw makes me gag.

“Nobody,” I say. I try to keep my voice calm, clear, strong but it sounds as compressed as my ribs feel. “Do you see Nobody?”

“I see Nobody,” he says.

The room is tilting below and black dots swim in my eyes, half blinding me. “Do you harm Nobody?” I say.

“I harm Nobody.”

The floor is far away. Will every bone in my body break if he drops me? What will that feel like? Venice broke his collarbone once just falling on the playground. I cried. I cried more than he did. Venice.

*   *   *

I don’t see my whole life flashing before my eyes. What I see in my mind is my family in pain: my brother in a cast, my mother cooking more and more meals to try to make everything okay, my father on the phone with the bank after he’d lost his job at the lab. We never knew exactly what happened, only that it was sudden, and that, before, he had been growing anxious, working later every night. After, he changed. He became narrower-eyed, jumping at loud sounds. There was a year of fighting with the bank. “I just can’t afford these rates on an underwater property.… You lost the paperwork again? I sent it three times. This is ridiculous. May I please speak to a manager?” Months and months of this. My parents arguing in their bedroom at night. My father saying there was a conspiracy, my mother begging him to seek counseling, medication. My mother crying. I was so afraid we’d lose our home and that maybe my father was losing his mind. Now I’ve had to leave the house and I wonder if my father was right after all. I think of the windows shattered, the paintings ripped from the walls as easily as bandages from a wound, the feather quilts torn apart. The man with the red face and cheeks full of dead rats. All that arguing with the bank came to nothing. They held my father in their palm, his legs dangling, a little nobody, and then everything was gone.

*   *   *

“I’m Nobody,” I say again. “Child of Nobody. You don’t see Nobody, you don’t harm…”

And I close my eyes and strike out, strike the Giant in his one eye with my scissors.

There’s a popping squelch sound and blood flies everywhere. It’s in my face, on my clothes, burning in my eyes, trying to seep into my mouth; I spit and vomit comes up.

He drops me, roaring. My body hits the linoleum floor.

I stagger and slide to my feet, still intact—though pain sears through me, hot as fire—lean onto the handle of my shopping cart for support, spin its wheels around, and run out of Hell’s Eye, through the shards of cracked glass doors, past the heaps of bones. I, who was taught to hurt no one, not even to kill insects, to rescue and respect and protect all sentient beings, no matter how small. But what is sentient in this demon world? Nothing. Nobody. Nobody at all.

6

THE LOTUS HOTEL

V
ENICE USED TO HAVE
nightmares about the world ending. I knew because I’d hear him cry out and I’d run to him. He’d be saying, “It’s all our fault.” Or, “The polar bear told me the ice would melt.” Or, “The giants woke up and said ‘No more!’” Once he told me he sometimes had to hide himself in his dreams, using his mind, so the dread monsters couldn’t find him. It was hard work; he never felt really rested and there were dark rings under his eyes. Sometimes he peed in the bed and I’d hear his cries before my mom did. I’d strip off the sheets and help him change, and then he wanted to come into bed with me. He’d lie on his back with his knees bent up over my legs and I’d curl my arm around his waist and put my face against his neck. His skin was always so warm and soft except for the dried, dusty patches on his knees and elbows. His heart would beat faster than usual for a while, while I pressed the tender spot in the webbing between his first finger and thumb to relax him the way my mom taught me, and told him stories about boys who could magically make plants grow or repair the holes in the sky, until he calmed down and fell asleep.

I was wildly protective of Venice since the time he was rushed to the hospital as a baby. I’d been watching him while my mom was painting downstairs; he had a fever—we thought just a flu—and I was putting a cool cloth on his forehead when his body convulsed. Seeing him moved by some unseen force, it was like the Giant nightmares. I screamed for my mom and we went to the hospital where they said he had viral meningitis. I wanted to stay overnight with him, holding him in my arms while they restored his body fluids intravenously and got his fever down, but they wouldn’t let me. My dad and I left my mom there and went home. I didn’t sleep the whole night.

Later, when Venice struck out in baseball, running off the field with his head hanging, or when he was teased about being so smart, the teacher’s pet, I saw that shaking baby and wanted to sweep him up, away from harm. As if I had that power.

Venice never said exactly what he saw in the nightmares but he told me he was afraid the world was going to end. I told him it wasn’t; I told him we were safe.

*   *   *

I drive as fast as I can away from the store from hell. I am stocked up with supplies I managed to dump into the back of the van before I tore away from the blinded Giant. Pain scorches when I move a certain way, and there is dried blood on my hands and on my thermal shirt. “We don’t need any more blood on our hands,” the man had said. I would rather be dead than part of a world like this. I keep thinking I’m going to throw up again, and my hands won’t stop shaking no matter how hard I grip the steering wheel; it’s like I have a violent fever that’s trying to burn away the sickness of what I’ve seen and what I will become. I blinded someone. Something. I stabbed him.
It
. I pull over and open the door and vomit precious nutrients into the street.

*   *   *

Parts of the streets around the hotel are flooded with murky, mucked-up water. Who knows what lies under there? It rushes past me, black and frenetic. In the distance random fires, the only uneasy light, burn among piles of garbage.

I stay on the higher parts of the road. It’s hard to know where I am because so much is gone. But I recognize the oddly shaped angular brick building standing like a Giant’s slice of cake above the mire. An orange butterfly swoops past my windshield. I park and get out and limp after it toward the hotel.

My mom took us to the Culver Hotel to see the lobby with the milk-glass light fixtures and dark wood paneling, the velvet couches piled with brocade pillows. The actors who played the Munchkins stayed there when they filmed
The Wizard of Oz.
They swung from the chandeliers and fire escapes, my mom had said. Those crazy, drunken Munchkins. And we laughed. My mom loved this place. I can see her getting excited about an antique chair, a glass lampshade, as if she’d discovered some rare artifact. For her love of this place alone, I’ll go inside; I’ll brave whatever dangers. For what if she’s somewhere here?

I put the van key around my neck and approach slowly now, hobbling, bruised from my fall. There will be blood-black wildflowers on my skin soon. My muscles feel like flayed meat wrapping my bones. It’s dark. Candlelight reflects, flickering in the tall, curved leaded glass windows. Though I can no longer see the butterfly I walk toward this place. As if the orange wings have guided me here. As if I’ll somehow find my mom inside.

I walk through the door.

The first thing I think when I enter is that the people lying around on the couches in the candlelight have survived the Earth Shaker and do not have blood on their hands, at least as far as I can see. Me, that’s a different story; I need a thousand showers to get this nasty, crusting blood off of my skin and erase what I did.

The kids seem high, strewn out, half-naked, laughing. Some of them are crying, but in a luxuriant, dramatic way, as if from great happiness. No blood, but they are all filthy. Cold wind rushes through some fracked-glass panes carrying the smell of mildew and mud, with something else—something sweet—woven in; the couches are soaked with rainwater. The tall bookshelves are empty. On one wall of the hotel is a huge painted mural of a half-naked young woman sitting cross-legged on a lotus flower. She is bright red, glowing ruby-ish, with large gray eyes. Gray like my mother’s, like my brother’s. I recognize her from my studies of mythology and religion as Tara, the Tibetan goddess of emptiness, action, and compassion. She was born of the tears of empathy from the eye of a bodhisattva. When she was a human princess the monks told her she could be reborn as a man but she chose the body of a woman as her vehicle of healing. The deity Tara comes in many colors but Red Tara is the magnetizer of all good things, though I’m not sure I believe that anything good exists.

“Hello, beautiful,” someone says.

I turn and see a young man in black clothing. He has a shock of black hair and smoky green eyes. His body is slim and small but his shoulders are broad. There’s a tattoo on his neck, inky writing I can’t make out. I don’t feel fear when I see him, only relief. He squints into my face. “How’d you get here?”

“Where’s
here
?”

“The Lotus Hotel,” he says. “See?” He points at something growing out of cracks in the marble floor. Large red flowers with layers of pointed petals sprouting like weeds everywhere. They’re the first growing thing I’ve seen since the Earth Shaker. “Won’t you have some, sparkle princess?”