by Steven Brust
“Infinitely better than if I don’t try.”
“Phil,” Jimmy said, and something in his voice made me look at him. All the richness was gone from his dark skin. “Phil, I can only begin to guess how upsetting this latest discovery is, but if you imagine that, even if you succeed, it’s going to simply fix this problem between you and Ren, you are living in a dreamland.”
Phil pulled his eyes from Matsu to Jimmy and shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” Which made me want to scream.
“Okay, Phil,” I said, trying to keep the rage out of my voice. “Let me ask the question a different way: What does matter?”
I watched the fight seep out of him.
“There’s a big piece of me right now trying to say nothing does, but I’m ignoring it,” he said. “What matters is that we take whatever time we have, Incrementalist or amnemone, Primary or Second, forty thousand years or two thousand or fifty, and do what we can to make this ugly world we’re stuck in a little less ugly. That’s what matters.”
“Beauty matters?” I said.
“Yes. In the broadest sense of beauty.”
These men had seen me poisoned and vomiting. They’d seen me in a bathrobe and morning-after hair. I could have walked over to Phil and wrapped myself around him. It wasn’t because of them that I didn’t.
“Better matters,” I said. I wanted him to look at me. That was all it would take.
“Yes, by any reasonable definition of better.”
“So what is going to make this better?” I asked.
“Making sure that the sick, twisted, ugly, evil personality of Celeste is not getting in the way of our work, or my life. I have two thousand years behind me. I will happily trade whatever I have left to see her gone.”
Fucking Celeste! I needed Phil, and she had him.
“We’re pretty sure we know how to get that done,” Oskar said.
“Eh?” said Phil.
Matsu nodded. “We’ve been working on it for a while, and the three of us agree. We need to bring in two others to consult; and Phil? This, my old friend, you cannot take part in. You must let go, and let us.”
Oh, God. I thought. Oh, no.
Phil sat back on the sofa with his eyes closed. “Wait,” he said. “You’re saying you can do it?
“Yes,” Oskar said. “We can do it. All we need is for you not to meddle with it. Just leave it alone.”
Phil looked to Matsu, who nodded. “We believe we can.”
I glanced at Jimmy. His eyes were full of tears, and he wouldn’t look at me. He had warned me. Their wisest action.
“Good lord. Okay,” Phil said. “I need this done. I want this done. I thought you were telling me that … shit. Fine. Jesus. My manhood is not tied up in who pulls the fucking trigger! God! Go! Do what you have to! I’ll sit on my hands. I’ll play poker. I’ll stay the fuck out of your way. Fix this thing!”
Oskar looked pleased. Matsu looked. Well, Matsu looked like Matsu.
“Will you tell me?” I asked.
“No,” Matsu said. He met my eyes and held them.
“Matsu?” Phil said, wary.
“You are both too close to the problem,” Oskar said. “We need a clean field to operate here.”
Ramon held Phil’s eyes as steadily as he had held mine. “We’re flying Felicia and Nick in,” he said.
Phil nodded. “Okay.”
Jimmy cleared his throat. “We’ll send Ren back to Phoenix,” he said.
“Is that where you want to be, Ren?” Phil asked.
“I’m not sure what I want is on the list of what matters.”
“It matters to me,” Phil said. He could look at me now, but I was the one watching the floor.
“I want to know what they’re planning,” I said. “And I want to stand up for Celeste.”
“You want to—which?” Phil almost jumped off the sofa.
“She doesn’t have a voice here, and I can give her one,” I said. “But most of all, I want to stand up for not having all the fucking answers every goddamn time.”
“Beloved,” Phil said, and that word in his voice made me want to never stop crying. “Celeste has many voices. She has her voice when she takes over your mouth. She has the voice she used to meddle with me. She has the voice she used to meddle with you. She has the voice she used to meddle with the rest of the goddamned group. She has nothing but voice. I think I’m tired of hearing it. We know goddamned well we don’t have the answers, that’s why we argue all the time. We do our goddamned best to ask the right questions.”
“Okay, Phil,” I said. “Here’s a good question. What if Celeste wanted to go virtual, to play Ghost in the Garden and meddle with the meddlers instead of screwing around with the nemones? Wouldn’t making you love me be the perfect protection for her?”
“I have no reason to believe Celeste meddled with me in that way. And I do love you. And I have no interest in protecting her. So evidently not.”
Ramon hadn’t moved. “Celeste and Ren are the same stub, Phil.”
“I know,” Phil said.
Ramon nodded. He was quiet for a moment, watching for something I couldn’t see in Phil’s face. When he found it, he said, “There’s no Ren without Celeste, Phil. And no Celeste without Ren.”
“I’m not convinced that is true indefinitely. And, it would seem, neither is Celeste.”
“Let us take care of this Phil,” Oskar said. “Like you said. Don’t meddle. Let us fix it. Go play poker.”
Phil nodded. “Ever heard of Gila River?” he asked me.
“Nope,” I said.
“It’s an Indian casino. Beautiful poker room. Right outside of Phoenix.”
“I’ve wanted to watch you play since the first time I heard you talk about it.” That wasn’t a lie, but the casual tone I was matching or mocking in Phil was.
“Well, if you’re going back to Phoenix, I have no plans,” he said. “Although, really, if you’re after excitement, watching grass grow is marginally above watching me play poker.”
“Don’t know as I’m really looking for excitement right now,” I said.
“Perfect, then.”
Ramon and Oskar exchanged glances. Jimmy was in the kitchenette.
“I have to stay here through tomorrow,” I told Phil. “The call with Jorge and Liam that Jimmy set up is too important to risk taking on a cell phone in the desert. But after that, God, I’ve never wanted to leave anywhere as much.”
It might kill me, but I was not going to goddamn cry.
“That works for me. We can fly to Phoenix after that, or if you’d prefer, have you ever driven across the Bould—the Hoover Dam?”
“No,” I said.
He talks too much. I told him last night he talks too much. He smiled at me. “You’ll like it.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go up to my room now.”
“Rest well,” Phil said.
“Yeah,” I said. “See you.”
“Yes,” Ramon said, but Jimmy and Oskar were both too engrossed in what they were doing to notice I was going.
“Do you want me to tuck you in?” Phil asked.
“No, I’m okay,” I said, which might be the biggest lie I’ve ever told.
“He’s not reaching out. He’s not reaching out,” I whispered in the elevator. “And I can’t keep pulling him.”
Phil loved me. I knew he loved me. But he was going to let Oskar make decisions for him, and Oskar was no hero. He’d kill me if it took that to silence Celeste for Phil.
I shut the door of my room and pushed the night lock into place. I was afraid, and angry, and hurt, and not at all sure I wasn’t crazy to boot. Were there enough drugs to make this stop if I told a nice doctor my story? I knew there weren’t.
I’d gone up to that room to advocate for doubt. To look Oskar in the face and ask him how he could be so sure Celeste was evil when she was as certain he was. I went, armed only with questions, to a war of answers. I never had a chance.
I went bec
ause I love Phil. And love turns up, even with no answers.
I went because I am an Incrementalist. And beauty fucking matters to me. Even before Phil and Celeste, I believed in Better because I was never any good at Good. Maybe I should have worked harder at learning to appreciate each mountain climbed rather than setting off right away for the next peak. Maybe Good should have been good enough. But if Good is as good as it gets, why get up in the mornings? Just to keep circling in the holding pattern? I don’t even think that’s possible. Inertia will get you. You can’t balance on the mountain’s pointy peak. You fall off. So you find the next mountain. You learn to enjoy the climb. You get better at falling. Or maybe that’s what I’d always told myself because I could never get peaceful on mountaintops.
Either way, I was tumbling down.
SIXTEEN
Cracks Like Lightning
Phil
I drove back to my house. I tried to think, but thinking has never been my best game. I could feel, but I didn’t care for it much. I listened to the voice in my head that said I should maybe spend a little less time feeling sorry for myself and think about Ren. I listened. I agreed.
It didn’t change anything.
I knew that I was in the process of creating one of those memories that you’d pay ninety percent of your bankroll to wash out. But it’s like full-on tilt; you watch yourself make stupid play after stupid play, and you say, “I should stop this. I should stop doing this now. I should get up and walk away from the table.”
One plus zero is, ah, to hell with it.
Fuck.
Two thousand years and I was no better than this?
Forty thousand years, and the human race was no better than this?
Bullshit.
Pain forces your attention on yourself. My pain was making it impossible for me to reach her, and her pain was making it impossible for her to reach me.
What we needed was a way to break the pattern. Neither of us wanted that pattern, but neither of us knew how to break it. And it should be so easy. All it should take is the right—
Yes.
The right trigger.
Or, as we Incrementalists call it, a switch.
Fortunately my car appeared to know how to get home, because I’m not sure how else I arrived there.
I walked into my house and threw myself into my chair. I opened up my laptop and composed an email.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Gift
Wednesday, July 6, 2011 1:13 pm GMT - 7
It’s all going wrong, and I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe if I’d spent some of the last two thousand years meddling with, or at least examining, my own head instead of everything else, I wouldn’t be this bad at something this important. I don’t know. The idea of doing that is strangely repellent, so perhaps, at some basic level, I’m incapable of it.
I know that you are more precious to me than anyone I’ve met in the last 2000 years. If there is something I can do that you can put into words, I’d be grateful if you did so.
But meddlework is funny. You can change someone—a bit. You can make a guy less of a prick, or more of a decent human being. You can push him to do something he probably wouldn’t have, or get him not to do something he wasn’t one hundred percent convinced was right. But you can’t turn night into day. Some things are fundamental, and if those are impenetrable walls between us, then so be it. I am who I am, not who Celeste wanted me to be, nor whoever I might guess you want me to be.
There is something I want you to have. It is the only thing I have that, really, has any value. If it turns out to have no value for you, then I guess that says it all. But of the two hundred and four Primaries, over forty thousand years, this is a first. I hope I get some credit for that, at least.
There is a suitcase under the olive tree behind my villa. I offer it with love.
Yours,
Phil
There. Done.
All right, Phil. But do you have the balls to send it?
That was the real question.
It was by far the most terrifying thing I’d ever considered doing.
Fear is a powerful force.
But—
Suppose you’re sitting on top of two pair, $1,200 in the pot, a possible flush on board, and your opponent pushes. You have $300 in front of you, so that’s the effective bet. With the way the hand played out, and with what you know of this guy, you figure there’s about an eighty percent chance that your hand is no good.
If you call and lose, you’ve lost $300. $300 times .8 is $240, your expected loss.
If you call and win, you win $1,500. $1,500 times .2 is $300, your expected win.
The net gain is $60. If you make that play a thousand times (and you will), you’ll win $60,000.
Okay, so, what’s my point?
That sometimes you can believe you’re losing, and it can still be the right play to push all of your chips into the middle.
Fear is a powerful force. But math is even more powerful, and however much it hurts, however terrified you are, your job is to make the right play.
I closed my eyes and tasted chive and smelled cherry blossoms. I climbed up the stairway, and down the hall, and up again to what would have been my bedroom if I’d really lived there. Under the bed was a suitcase. Samsonite. Black. I set it on the bed, opened it, and started filling it.
Here was popcorn and beer and mustard and sweat: the smell of the stands at Three Rivers Stadium when Chuck’s dad and uncle would take him to games.
Here was the sound of the bat hitting the ball, from the same person and time.
Here was the feel of the seat and the handlebars when Chuck finally got his BMW.
This is the smell of exhaust.
And before that, Reggie Fox, from Cleveland, and here is the feeling of Boland, Reggie’s Yellow Lab, licking the inside of Reggie’s ear.
Boland smelled like this.
Now we’ll put in the taste of collard greens that Reggie’s mother learned to cook when she was a girl in Mississippi. They were hard to get in Cleveland, but that just made them more special.
Reggie’s mother loved jazz, and here’s “Celeste Blues” by Meade Lux Lewis, scratchy on an old 78. His mother used to dance him around the room to that.
Here’s how her hair smelled when she did.
And another, and another, and yet more; emptying the metaphorical bag into the virtual suitcase. I took it all the way back to Cal, Calvin White, of Kansas City, Missouri, and when he was four he got his own little chalkboard, with his own chalk, so he could add and subtract all day, because that’s what he loved doing. Here’s the smell of the chalk.
Here’s how it felt in his little hand.
And this is from Cal, too: the taste of an orange slice, with powdered sugar on it.
Any further back and the memories don’t have power anymore, so we can stop there.
I closed the suitcase, brought it downstairs and outside, and I set it under the olive tree.
Then I opened my eyes and hit Send.
Ren
He’d packed me a suitcase.
I read Phil’s email seven times trying to figure what it meant that he’d left a suitcase for me under a tree. I wasted some time cursing Ramon’s damn wobbly alpha, because Who and When and Where were so not the point with the suitcase. I wanted to stick a pin through the flickering body of alpha. I wanted enough light to see Why.
Was he just answering the question I’d asked about what mattered? Was he saying the memories he’d packed in their casing of symbol and put out for me, these memories, or the symbols for them, are what matter to him?
That he wanted me to have them mattered to me.
It was a symbol. Like the little bird in Great-auntie Cece’s fairy tale. Few things have as much power. But it’s never the symbol—the bird itself, the cross itself, the prophet’s name in and of itself that is sacred—it’s the welter of emotions, ideas
and insights it triggers. If it triggers nothing, its power is nothing.
Or was the suitcase his way of saying good-bye?
I took a shower and wished I had a bathrobe. I didn’t want to wear anything I’d packed for the three-day business trip I’d been expecting. Not that I owned the right clothes for today. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. I put on my pajamas and carried my laptop from my desk to the bed.
I found nothing new in my in-box except a forwarded political rant from my uncle, a selection of new sex-and-drug and sex drug spam, and a request for my expense report from Cindi. No changed meetings or new calendar items with Incrementalist fingerprints on them. Nothing else from Phil.
I emailed Brian and cc’d Cindi, introducing them. I suggested Brian take his grocery receipt for the dinner he was going to cook for me by HR. Liam had said he’d reimburse him. Cindi loves Italian food and needs a little syncopation in her life; Brian needs an optimist, so I told Brian Glyphx was on Central and Adams where there’s an adorable little coffee shop. Getting them in a room together would be enough, with my flakiness to laugh over together.
Then I read Phil’s email again.
This was him reaching out. But Celeste would be in the Garden, and I’d used up my day’s worth of courage.
This was Phil saying who he was: a closed case left, not a package delivered; a memory, not a conversation. But he wanted me—or was at least willing for me—to open it, and to know him. Was he symbolically offering to share his memories and himself with me?
I closed my eyes and was blown back against the headboard by the tumble of images, memories and emotion. I breathed through it. I reached out for the quiet mudflats, the saline stretch of goopy, gooey, undifferentiated morass, and realized it scared me a little less now. And the taste of root beer always made me smile. I placed the filters one at a time: Phil’s villa, the olive tree, a suitcase; and I found a seedpod. It was black and shiny as fake leather. And almost as big as I was.