Love in the Time of Global Warming (7 page)

“You want to tell me?”

So I do. I tell Hex about my family, how we were separated, how I was afraid to go out looking for them, how Merk came and sent me on the journey, how the Lotus Hotel waylaid me, how I have to keep looking though I have no clues.

“I’ll help you,” he says. “If I can.” He looks away and swipes a hand across his eyes. “I had a dream, too. About those kids at the hotel. I was too fucked up to realize. What must have happened to them…” He swallows like he’s trying to push something large and bitter back down his throat.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I think,
I want to help you, too
, but I don’t tell him because what could I do to help anyway? I’m pretty sure those kids are all dead by now.

My stomach growls then, so loud it’s like there’s an animal in the van with us. Hex smiles, as if glad for the distraction, though I’m embarrassed by the insistent sound of my hunger. “We’d better feed you, right?”

I get a whiff of myself as I sit up. I’m covered in dried mud, which is preferable to Giant’s blood, I guess, but not much. “Starving and stinking.”

“S and s. At least we’re sober now.”

“That was quite a high.”

He frowns and pats his pockets like he’s searching for a cigarette. “I guess I just wrecked eighteen months of sobriety, but does lotus juice count?”

“Do you not want it to?”

“It counts. I was fucked up for … how long?”

We figure I was at the Lotus Hotel for about two weeks and if I add that to the time I counted on the wall of the pink house it’s been almost three months since the Earth Shaker.

Hex tells me that back Then, when he was twelve, he started drinking and using, doing whatever it took to get his supply. “Good times.” At thirteen he was a full-blown addict and it got worse when he started DJing five years later because he could get into all the clubs and everyone was always giving him free alcohol and drugs. “I was like this mini–pill machine, downing them with whiskey. Could drink a dude twice my size under the table.” When his best friend Yxta died from an overdose, he dragged himself to a meeting and quit cold turkey. Until the end of the world.

*   *   *

As he speaks I see a picture in my mind, as if I’m looking at one of the old master paintings I love. It’s a child, very small, sitting in a room frowning into a mirror. Sunlight dapples the pink walls. I want to take the child in my arms.

*   *   *

“But it doesn’t really matter now if I’m sober or not, does it?” Hex says, snapping me out of the vision I don’t understand.

It does matter, I realize, now that the lotus-juice high has fully worn off; it’s the only way we will be able to really survive this journey. But I don’t want to upset him for “going back out,” as he calls it, and I can tell, by the shade he’s pulled down behind his eyes and the way his jaw twitches when I start to ask, that he doesn’t want to talk about the friend who died or why he got high at twelve in the first place. “I think we can start fresh now,” I say gently. “We need our wits about us.”

“‘Wits about us’?” He purses his lips and shakes his shoulders, teasing. I’m glad that at least he can still tease me right now. “Are you from another century?”

“Sometimes I think so. But you’re the one who’s always reading from Homer.”

“Point taken. But we need food as well as wits. Dig in.” He holds up a can of chili and a bag of chips from our stash in the car.

“Sounds blissiant.”

“What?”

“I make up words sometimes. It means ‘divine.’”

He laughs. “Okay then.”

We eat the cold beans and stale chips and then use up some of our precious water for very much needed sponge baths in the back of the van. Hex keeps his undershirt and boxers on and turns away, hunching his bone-thin shoulders as he washes himself. The knobs of his spine are clearly visible. I’m surprised that, despite his bravado, he’s even more modest than I am. Maybe because he’s not high now. My curiosity about him keeps me from worrying about what he thinks of my own skinny, bruise-marred body.

He puts on a clean black T-shirt and jeans from his leather backpack and a pair of black high-top basketball shoes with gold trim. I eye the clothes, jealously, I guess, because he offers me an extra T-shirt and jeans from the same pack. Or maybe he just can’t stand to see me in my blood-mud-crusted thermal and sweats anymore?

“Do you only wear black?” I ask him.

“Yep. Sorry you don’t get much selection.” He tosses me the empty backpack. “This isn’t exactly a department store.”

“Are you kidding? I meant, thank you. Fresh clothes are the best thing in the world.”

“Besides metal-flavored canned beans.”

“Mmmmm.”

I scrape out the can for the last remnants and set it aside in a box. He asks what I’m doing.

“Recycling?”

“Is there much point?” Hex asks.

It’s just a habit, I guess. “Maybe we’ll be able to use them for something.” The piles of garbage everywhere don’t need to get any bigger. “Maybe it still matters.”

“That’s what I like to see.” He taps the inside of his forearm where the tattoo is and then covers the last four letters so it reads
Faith.
“Someone needs to have some.”

Not that I think I really do but I can at least pretend.

*   *   *

Maybe just driving is some form of faith, rather than giving up, curling up in a corner of the van, and waiting to die.

“Wait,” I say. “There’s somewhere around here I want to go.”

Hex stops the van in front of a crumbled mansion with an ornate metal gate. It hangs on its hinges, swinging in a gust of wind that chills me like cold iron on the nape of my neck. The only reason I’m not too afraid to go in is that I glimpse the orange butterfly for a moment, before it vanishes, consumed by shadow.

We enter through the gate and walk up a winding path that leads to ruined stone steps. In the front courtyard is a round fountain basin full of stagnant water. Broken light fixtures survey us like shattered eyes.

“Greystone Mansion,” I say. This is the historical, supposedly haunted Doheny mansion. My mother took me here when I was young to see the architecture, as wonder-filled as if she were ushering me inside the pages of a book of fairy tales. That’s why I want to go here now.
She was here. We were here together
. But the place seems so different without a world around it.

We go through the enormous arched doorway into an entry hall. The gray roof has caved in and dead trees curve like praying hands over the top of the house. Someone has hung broken crystal chandeliers from their branches. Piles of dried leaves cover the cracked black-and-white tiled floor. I recite to myself what I’ve memorized of the parts of plants listed in the encyclopedia—
guard cell, upper epidermis, waxy cuticle, stoma, palisade mesophyll, spongy mesophyll, vein, waxy cuticle, lower epidermis
—like an incantation to return the flora to life. At the back of the room is a massive mound of broken statuary and furniture, branches, rocks, jewelry, electronics, and books. There are lots of cracked carved stone plaques depicting obscenely old-mannish-looking, screaming babies straddling piles of fruit.

There’s a woman, stretched languidly on a leather couch with lion-carved feet, her black hair falling over her breasts. She wears a sheer, one-shouldered dress, the same lilac color as her eyes and as the disintegrating dried flowers scattered on the floor. Her skin is very white and you can see the lilac-blue veins running through her.

I think of a painting from the Pre-Raphaelite period, a Waterhouse painting maybe, so sweet and pretty but so throbbingly sexual at the same time.

A young man crouches on the floor staring at the woman and sketching furiously on a tablet. Beside him is a large, three-tiered cake—green frosting roses on top—that he stuffs into his mouth as he sketches. There is cake on his face and in his curly red hair.

“Who are you?” she asks, waving her hand at us, raising her defiant chin; she has the chiseled, symmetrical bone structure of a mannequin.

“Pen and Hex.”

“You sound like a Las Vegas act. And in your matching clothes!” She snickers. “This is Ez.” She points at the young man. “He’s mine.”

He blinks up at us. His eyes like Venice’s when he played video games for too many hours. But these eyes aren’t gray; they’re deep brown, almost amber. He’s wearing a large dog collar around his neck and attached to the collar is a leash that the woman holds in her hand. There’s an orange butterfly perched among his curls, fanning its wings like a lady cooling herself down at a fancy dress ball.

“Aren’t you … I knew it! You’re her, aren’t you?” Hex says to the woman in lilac.

I look at him, trying to figure out what he’s doing. Then I see the huge TV with the photo of the woman and a tall, dark-haired man taped to the screen.

She smiles, a bittersweet twist to her lips. “I was her. If a soap opera star falls in a house and no one is there to see, does it mean she isn’t there?” She laughs in a strained way and lights the cigarette that’s been dangling loosely, as if forgotten, from her fingers.

Hex picks up a butt from the floor. “Do you mind if I keep this as a souvenir?” There’s red on the tip. “It touched your lips.”

“Silly boy. You want one? Just one.” She holds out another cigarette and he comes toward her, reaches for it. But she holds on just a little too long and I realize I want him to move away from her. Instead, as she lights the cigarette he bends even closer so their hands are almost touching.

I’ve never seen him smoke but he does it naturally, hungrily, closing his eyes, almost shivering with relief, like he’s been dreaming of this moment since the Earth Shaker. The smoke makes me cough and he quickly aims it away from me and hunches back a step. “So you’re really her.”

“Beatrix Ray,” she says. “And you have come to my world. This is Ez and he is my minion. Thus you will be.” She holds out two leather dog collars.

Collars.

I notice Hex’s small but well-defined biceps flinch. “We really should be going,” he says.

The woman picks up a silver bell shaped like a lily and holds it in the air, then rings it. We feel the building shake as if the bell caused this and I turn to Hex. That sound, that rumbling, means run. But we can’t.

“Frakk,” Beatrix says. “These are our new friends. See that they are properly kept.”

The Giant’s feet are thick, bare, and bloated like those waterlogged corpses I once saw in the street in front of the pink house. The feet send more cracks through the tiled floor where he steps, like hammers. When I try to look at him black particles float dizzily through my eyes so I keep my gaze on the ground. But when I finally glance back up I see that he’s wearing a crude, garish pink papier-mâché mask in the shape of a pig’s head. That he’s caught the butterfly perched on Ez’s head. And crushed it between massive fingers.

Hex takes my hand and leads me toward the woman. I remember his words,
I’d do anything for a pretty girl.
I reflexively pull back but he squeezes my fingers and catches my eye.

Conveying:
It’s okay. Trust me.

“Ez,” she says. “Collar them.”

He lowers his eyes and won’t turn his face to her. She jerks the leash attached to his collar and he makes a small sound and stumbles forward. With the Giant watching us (for I feel his eyes, though I won’t look) we kneel, letting Ez put the collars with leashes around our necks and then fasten them to a marble post. The moldy collar pinches the skin of my throat and I swallow against it, suddenly afraid I won’t be able to breathe.

“May we have a place to sleep?” Hex asks. “Please. We’re very tired.” He can be as charming as a little girl when he wants to be.

“But first you must eat.” The woman opens a curtain and gestures to a banquet table piled with multicolored cakes and other pastries. “Even my minions eat. Isn’t that right, Frakk?”

I hear a sound, like the echo of a hollow building collapsing, coming from the Giant’s throat.

“No, no, they’re not your dinner. Have some cake,” Beatrix tells him. “And you, too, Pen and Hex.”

Hex catches my eye and shakes his head no so slightly I’m not sure if I actually saw it.

“Oh thank you, Beatrix. We’re not hungry now. But we would love to be able to rest a little.”

“First you must hear my story,” she says. “Frakk likes it, too.” She whispers to us, “It’s how I bewitched him.”

I look at Ez, still stuffing his face with frosting, and think of Odysseus’s men, turned into pigs by the witch, Circe.
The Odyssey
is our guide. Maybe that’s why Hex signaled that I shouldn’t accept the cake.

Hex sits at Beatrix’s feet and gestures for me to sit behind him. I want to lean my head on his shoulder but not as much as I want to get out of here. I have a feeling that’s what he’s going for, in spite of the huge monster obstructing the entrance.

“I’ve lost my true love,” she says. “Not to mention my career. I was once queen of the air.” She points to the broken TV and the photo of her and the man. “That’s me with my co-star and real-life lover. But everything changed so I was prepared for the apocalypse. I became a practitioner of dark arts just in time and now I will reign over the ruin!”

She goes on and on like this, smoking and talking in an affected voice that sometimes wavers into a pinched British accent. She tells us of lost lovers, starring roles, premieres, gowns, feuds, and her worldwide pursuit of spells to keep herself young forever. The Giant hovers near the door, blocking with his girth what remains of the fading light. Ez sketches and stuffs his face with cake. Finally both he and Beatrix fall asleep and the Giant turns his head to watch us. I’ve made myself actually look at him straight on—he’s rocking back and forth and waving his hands around the pig mask over and over again.

“How are we going to get out of here?” I whisper into Hex’s ear. His hair smells smoky from the cigarette. The ceilingless room is cold and I stay as close to him as I can.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “We have to take turns sleeping. Just don’t eat anything, I think it’s bewitched. And let me do what I have to.”