by Steven Brust
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry to interrupt. I don’t like to dwell on it. That’s exactly what happened, and it didn’t turn out well. Those memories are hazy, and go back a long, long way, but I know it happened. There was almost a full millennium of fighting among ourselves and making everything worse. I know it was ugly. No one wants to go back there again. We learned.”
“God,” she said. “I’ll remember this?”
I hoped so. “It’ll start coming back as impressions and half memories. But you can always go to the Garden and graze for as many of the details as you want. It’s a good idea to, actually. I do it from time to time, just to keep myself in line. But don’t tell Oskar, it’d make him feel superior.”
“Can’t have that,” she said, and gave me a six-thousand-watt smile that looked nothing like Celeste’s.
Her mouth was soft and yielding and strong all at once, and her tongue tasted like lemons and unabashed laughter; her hands on my back felt like she was trying to pull me into her, and one part of my mind wondered if I were crushing her, while another part wanted this to never end. We were somehow both standing up, and I was just starting to think that falling over was a real possibility when she stiffened and pulled her mouth away. I dropped my arms and she took a step back. She fixed me with her eyes like she was trying to see into my skull and said, “I’m not Celeste.”
I thought the best thing to do was stand there like an idiot with my mouth open, so I did until she walked past me, opened the door, and went back to the living room.
I wasn’t hungry anymore.
EIGHT
How’s the Head?
Ren
Three pizzas came. For four people, we got three pizzas in three separate deliveries, and we moved all Irina’s flowers from the breakfast bar and sat there and ate. Or Oskar and I ate, Phil and Irina picked.
“You discovered your Garden,” Irina said. “Phil stayed with you and guided you. Oskar grazed. I just sent messages. I’m not so hungry.”
But she looked hungry, and I suspected she just didn’t like pizza, even though she’d ordered her own. Phil sat beside me, and I told Irina and Oskar about my muddy Garden, and they were nice enough not to laugh. Oskar called it “postmodern,” and Irina said it wasn’t, but Phil said it sounded like Ramon’s grid, with its mad swarm of data points filtered by tracking axis lines, which made me feel a little less like a freak. “It’s just a signal from noise problem,” Phil said. “We all solve it differently.”
“Sounds like you all do everything differently,” I said, and Irina and Oskar laughed.
Irina climbed off her barstool. “I’m going to put a slice of this in the oven. Is yours warm enough, Ren?”
I looked at the empty box Phil and I’d been eating from. “I’m fine,” I said.
“Oh, for the love of all the gods in heaven and all the bullshit on this stupid earth, Phil!”
Phil’s eyes got round and he set his beer down softly. “Irina, don’t—”
“I made this myself! Her mother’s recipe. You heathen!” Irina brandished the mummified tuna casserole at us over the bar. “What did you do, just turn the oven off and leave it?”
“Maybe.”
“And you’ve been eating pizza and Froot Loops since? Are you children?”
“I like sugar cereal,” I said. “I didn’t get it as a kid, so it feels grown-up to me.”
Irina looked from me to Phil and back as though trying to evenly distribute her disdain without spilling any.
“I thought you were just baking it for the smell,” I said at last. Which earned me a quick sideways glance from Oskar.
“I wasn’t meddling with you!”
“No?” Phil asked her. “With the mint sprigs tucked into the flowers, and the tempting offer of a hotel breakfast in bed tray?”
“No.” Irina stood, her monkey hands clamped to her bony waist, and I tried to imagine what she’d been like young. Her personality was a third of the age of Phil’s, but she felt like someone’s grandmother, and I just wanted to kiss him again.
“Gosh, look at the time,” Phil said, and stood up. “I’m going to go pick up Jimmy from the airport. We can run by the store and get you some tea on the way, if you want to come with me, Ren.”
“That’d be great,” I said. “I have a meeting at The Palms at five.”
“Can you drop me off there, too?” Oskar asked, and I was unreasonably disappointed that Phil said yes.
“Well, I’m not going,” Irina said. “I have some grazing to do.”
We got tea—four boxes, two herbal, two black—at the grocery near Phil’s house. Phil also got Lipton instant iced tea, lemon juice, and a lilac-scented candle. But when he caught me looking at the instant iced tea, he said it wasn’t for me. After we dropped Oskar at the front of the hotel and pulled back into traffic, Phil reached for my hand. “I knew you weren’t Celeste,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be.”
“Who’s Celeste?”
He laughed. “Never mind.”
So for a few miles, I didn’t. I adjusted the A/C vents to point right at my face and leaned my cheek against Phil’s shoulder. He put his hand on my knee and squeezed it, and I watched the tropical trees and the brilliant sun, and felt the space between our bodies fill up with wanting and curiosity.
“Celeste was the most recent dominant personality in the stub you got,” Phil said after a while. “I was in love with her, or tried to be, over several lifetimes.”
“Do I remind you of her?” I asked.
“Not anymore,” he said.
“Do you miss her?”
He shrugged, lifting my head a little on his shoulder. “I don’t know. She killed herself, and that makes me sad.”
“Is suicide one of the things you, I mean we, aren’t allowed to do? Like choosing your own Seconds?”
“It’s not that we aren’t allowed to choose our own Seconds, it’s that we can’t. And, no, suicide isn’t forbidden. In fact, Eleanor and Gaston have stayed together and kept their ages roughly in synch for quite a while that way.”
“I can’t decide if that’s awful or sweet,” I said.
Phil chuckled, its rumble amplified in my ear against his arm. It made me want to wrap myself around him and feel his laughter everywhere. “I think it’s both,” he said. “But with Celeste, it was just sad.”
I nodded. “So now Oskar’s in the Salt.”
“Yeah. Celeste would have hated that.”
“She must have been pretty sure she’d stay dominant in me,” I said.
“We all were,” he said. “First time in a long time I’ve liked being wrong.”
I squeezed his arm and smiled. “I have a meeting with my boss at five o’clock, and then we’re meeting with his boss either after that or tomorrow morning.”
“Let’s make it tomorrow. I’d like to see you tonight.”
I nodded. It’s stupid how big little things are in the very beginning of anything. “Won’t you be meeting with Oskar and Jimmy and Irina tonight?”
“And Ray. But I think you should be there too. That’ll make six, which isn’t great, but we can call in Matt if necessary; he’s next after Oskar.”
“Is he on Oskar’s side?”
“Now you sound like Celeste.”
“Who’s Celeste?”
“No, it doesn’t matter. We don’t really have sides. Celeste thought Oskar was an extremist, and dangerous because of it. He thought she was cautious to the point of irrelevance.”
“And you?”
“Different arguments, different points along the axis. On Germany, I was with Oskar; I wanted us to do more. With Fox News, I agreed with Celeste; what Oskar pushed was unsubtle. With Cambodia, we all blew it.”
“Suicide seems like a drastic step for a moderate person,” I said, as we pulled up along the curb outside baggage claim.
“Yeah,” Phil said. “I still don’t quite believe it. There’s Jimmy!”
I climbed out of the car to find myself folded int
o a hug like a cashmere coat. Jimmy looked like an Arabian thug but smelled like vintage leather and good wine. A tiny ruby winked in the pierced flesh of his earlobe like blood in black velvet. He kissed both my cheeks, and then hugged Phil every bit as long and as tightly, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. He threw open the Prius’s back door and tossed in a vintage Amelia Earhart suitcase. I tried to offer the front, but he refused and positioned himself squarely in the middle of the backseat like a Pasha, completely obscuring the rear window.
“So, Ren!” he said, “How’s the head?” and laughed when I groaned.
We laughed and talked our way back to The Palms, and I got out and waved good-bye. Phil winked at me, and I promised to head over when my afternoon meeting ended. Jimmy and Phil drove off and I went up to my room to drag myself back to the real world before I had to meet Liam.
Phil
Jimmy moved into the front seat, twisting a bit so he could come closer to facing me. “You know, I’ve arranged for a rental,” he said.
“Pick it up tomorrow. I want to talk to you.”
“So I gathered. All right, what is—”
“I’m falling in love with her. Falling hard.”
“With her, or—”
“Her. Ren. Not Celeste. Shit. Got it bad. I kissed her today, and then she pulled away from me like I was poison, thinking I wanted to be kissing Celeste. And then after that, she—crap.” Jimmy was silent, looking at me. Then he cleared his throat, and I said, “Jimmy, if I hear ‘mon ami’ escape your mouth, I swear to God I’ll pull over and punch you.”
He chuckled. “All right. I heard she’s lost Celeste’s memories.”
“She’s lost Celeste completely, except it comes back sometimes, and—wait. Heard how? No, don’t tell me. That lying hen.”
He shrugged. “The problem isn’t your Ren. Our Ren. So she’s not integrating smoothly. All right. We’ve handled that before. But what Ramon calls the alpha-lock is worrying me. Where is cause and where is effect?”
“You’re the grazing shaman, you tell me.”
That shut him up for a moment, then he said, “What doesn’t Ren know?”
I drove for a while, running that through my head. Jimmy didn’t know Las Vegas, so I took us onto the 15 and all the way to Sahara and then to Arvile. I trusted Jimmy and I liked him, and I wanted some time to talk to him before dealing with Irina. I finally said, “She doesn’t know about the disconnect.”
“The disconnect?”
“That’s what I call it. She doesn’t understand that we’re not really like the amnemones, at some basic level.”
“We’re just like them at the most basic level.”
“You know what I mean.”
He said, “Are these dips in the road indicative of bad design, or do they serve some engineering purpose?”
“I don’t know. I suspect some of each.”
“And did you bring us this way just so I’d bump my head?”
“No.”
“All right. You haven’t talked about the nemones with her? She never asked what we call everyone else, or how we think of them?”
“I mentioned it in passing, but we didn’t actually talk about it.”
He studied me. “Has it been getting worse for you?”
I considered. “I don’t think so. I had to fight Celeste’s attitude at close range for a few hundred years; that pushed me in the other direction.”
“Sometimes, you get pushed in one direction, it snaps you back in the other.”
“I know—Oskar.”
“Sorry. But—”
“No, you’re right. I’ve been trying to watch for bits of contempt creeping into my attitudes. So far, I think I’m all right.”
“Okay.”
We turned onto Flamingo and I pointed to The Palms. “That’s where Oskar and Ren are.”
He studied it as we passed by. “They’re trying to project naughty,” he said. “Why there?”
“It’s the best place for my sugar spoon.”
“All right.”
I turned onto Decatur and took it back to Sahara. We reached the house and got out. Jimmy looked around. “Nice neighborhood. Blue collar.”
“A lot of Mormons,” I said. “And a lot of Hispanics.”
“And, it seems, a lot of foreclosures. Have you thought about meddling with that?”
“Thought about it; haven’t come up with anything.”
We went in. Irina was on the couch, but stood and rushed into Jimmy’s arms. “Ah, my beautiful man! Come to save me from the hostility of those who fail to appreciate my charms!”
“None could so fail, ma chère,” said Jimmy. “I must ravish you at once; I cannot restrain myself.”
I started coffee while they played out their game. By the time I poured a cup, they were sitting. Since Oskar wasn’t here, I was able to take my own chair.
“So,” said Irina. “I think the best solution is to just stub Ren and find a new recruit. What do you think, Jimmy?”
Ren
The knock on the door came on the phone’s second ring. I was still scrambling to answer one as I opened the other. Oskar filled the opening, a linen-draped waiter’s tray balanced at ear level. My phone went to voice mail.
“It’s Liam,” Oskar said. “He’s been delayed an hour. He’ll meet you at six in the café. I brought tea.”
“I need to call my boss back,” I said.
In a single, smooth sweep, Oskar brought the tray from his shoulder to the desk. I called Liam back while watching Oskar pour what I once would have called a Princess Tea: orange pekoe from a silver pot into porcelain cups, milk first, sugar after, and a plate of finger sandwiches and little pink cakes, with Chopin lilting from an iPad on the room service tray. I dialed both of Liam’s numbers, and then my voice mail. He’d been delayed. He would meet me at six in the café.
Oskar pulled out the desk chair for me and placed a delicate cup in my hand. I smelled the tea before I drank it. “So you know my mom’s an anglophile,” I said.
“Phil was very thorough.” Oskar stretched himself on my bed, propped on one elbow, like a formally dressed version of a teen idol beefcake shot: jacket artfully opened, in conservative, tailored trousers and a classic black T, with the rebel’s red necklace cord peeking at his throat.
I sipped my tea. “I don’t think tea is a switch for me.”
“It isn’t. It was one of Celeste’s.”
“Who’s Celeste?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of saying that?” He lifted his cup from its saucer. It looked like a golf ball in a backhoe’s claw.
“I do, actually,” I told him. “But she’s all anyone seems to want to talk about, and I don’t know who she is.”
“How frustrating for you.”
“What do you want, Oskar?”
“I want to talk to Celeste.”
“Get in line. But I meant, why are you here, in my room?”
“Because I think you can help me. Pass the cakes?”
I waddled my rolly desk chair over to him with the tray. He took one, and bit into it, looking at me. It was an overtly sexual bite, and corny as hell, but it ran a shiver through me anyway. He looked like my first celebrity crush, with his hair slicked back the new way he was wearing it.
He dropped his voice to a deep whisper, and I had to scoot forward in my chair just to hear him. “Have you ever really wanted something, Ren?” he asked. “Have you ever worked, and ached, and struggled after the same one thing over long reaches of time? Did you ever suffer without that one thing you desired, only to find it suddenly, tantalizingly near to hand?”
“The Fisher-Price Little People Play Family Castle,” I said. “Saving up allowance was never going to get me there. I almost gave up, until I thought of Santa.”
Oskar assessed my face. Yes, I’d wanted other things more, but he got that I wasn’t just joking. He twisted to sitting in one fluid spring. “I’ve wanted in the Salt for forty years.” His voice was a deep growl
in his chest. “And now it’s so close I can taste it.” He smiled briefly, showing strong, sharp teeth, and I thought he would not so much taste as devour with his kind of hungry.
“I know why I wanted the castle,” I said. “It had dragons. Why do you want in the Salt?”
“Because they’re doing it wrong,” he said, not needing to consider the question for even a moment. “You weren’t born yet when Nixon resigned. It was like a victory that ended the war before it was won. All the passion, the need for change, the hope, just left. The kids who were fixing the world went home. They busied themselves with neo-paganism, positive thinking, identity politics, and organic food co-ops. But they could have done it. They almost did. It was our fault. I told Salt subjective idealism—I told Salt they needed our help. They didn’t listen, and I want them to have to. Incrementalists can cause real change. We can make things better. It’s wrong to be able to do that, and to not do it. It’s just … it’s wrong.”
“Maybe it’s getting near Christmas,” I said.
“It’s July.”
“Your birthday?”
I started to roll my chair back to the desk, but Oskar caught it by its padded armrests and shook it. “Celeste would never have let this happen. She despises the nemones, and she would never permit us to so much as inconvenience ourselves to help them.” He pulled my chair right up against the bed. “Celeste’s not gone. Celeste would never just go. She’s hiding.”
With my knees between his, and his shoulders filling my field of vision, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Oskar brought his forehead to mine. “I’m here to coax Celeste out.”
“I’m here on business,” I said.
“You’re here because we brought you.”
“Well, there is that,” I admitted. “Also the poker.”
“You don’t play.”
“The shows?”
“You haven’t seen one.”
“The food?”
“Ren!” He stood up, towering over me. I backpedalled my chair, but he sat down again, watching me through narrowed eyes. “You should want this too,” he said with something like menace in his voice.