by Steven Brust
I shook my head. “I haven’t,” I said.
“He wants us to.” Phil hadn’t put his phone back in his pocket, and the way he was holding it—sideways in his hand and weighing it—he looked like he still might just pitch it over the dam.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“I know.” Phil put his arm over my shoulder and I leaned against his side.
“I don’t want the real world to catch us,” I said. “I know we’re running away, and I know we can’t do it forever, but I don’t want to stop.”
Phil tightened his arm around me. “I know,” he said. “But that’s how you know it’s the real world you’re running from. It keeps being there, even when you leave it.”
I dropped my head against him and tasted something cold, like graphite or shale, wrapped in a rag that had once been an apron, which had been a flour sack before that. I ran my tongue over my lips, but it wasn’t in the water-sprayed air. I closed my eyes and felt along the edge of buried memory. A fierce union man on a visit to someplace green and hilly. Phil would remember his name. I just stroked the profile of his Stand-and-Fight switch, and wondered if I had one too. My mom, maybe? The way she’d managed no matter what.
“Do you know why I have only the memories of my life to draw from when I’m trying to see my own switches?” I asked him.
He shook his head, still resting on the top of mine. “Something to do with Celeste, I’d guess,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, enjoying hearing him say her name like you’d say, “Something to do with the weather.”
“I guess, at least for now, she’s able to hang on to most of that stub.”
“Oskar and Ramon are right, you know,” I said.
“Fuck them.”
“It’s the perfect answer.”
“Fuck perfect.”
“I don’t know, Phil.” I rolled from under his arm to against his chest, my arms tucked in, and he put his around me. “I don’t know what’s right to do. I’m all conflicted and confused, and a thousand other modern and inconvenient things. And Oskar and Celeste are so decisive. Ramon too. If he has concluded that the best way to keep Celeste from hurting you is to get rid of me, there’s a part of me that wants to be noble enough to accept that.”
Phil’s body was rigid against mine. “Acceptance isn’t what we do,” he said.
I shrugged. “And anyway, Celeste was right, I’m no martyr.”
“Martyrdom isn’t what we do either,” Phil said. “We do better. Not perfection, not redemption. Just better.”
I grinned against his chest. “Perfection is overrated,” I said.
“Yeah. And all the perfectionists are just too good to be true.”
I laughed. “We should be The Betterists.”
“Sounds like pederasts.”
“We shouldn’t be that,” I said, looking up at him. “That’s not better.”
“No,” he agreed, matching my serious tone. “This is better,” he said, and kissed me. I stood in his arms and closed my eyes and in the same way all the meanings and implications and contexts of a massive idea can concentrate in a single symbol, all the sensations and emotions and nerves of my body concentrated in my mouth, and his kissing me was conversation and love and sex, tasting and biting, as demanding as it was responsive, as profound, and as subtle. I wound my hands over his shoulders. He still had his phone in one hand and I felt it vibrate against my back even before I heard it.
He stepped away from me and looked at his phone like he wasn’t sure what it was. I took it out of his hand and stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Maybe,” I said, “it would be better if we checked our email.”
“Better than what?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Better than standing here kissing you? Unlikely. Better than checking into a hotel somewhere between here and Phoenix and getting lost in each other for a couple more hours? Decidedly not.”
“Better than having your phone ring every half hour, no matter where we are or what we’re doing, until Ramon shows up at our door and starts reading aloud to us?”
Phil shuddered. “Ray doesn’t always notice if a man’s dressed or not,” he said.
I pulled his phone out of my pocket and handed it to him. He took it with a dimple-cracking grin. “You know, it’s not like its prior location would have dissuaded me from going after it,” he said. “Quite the contrary. In fact, perhaps in the interest of improved communication, you should start carrying it for me, and I’ll just reach for it whenever I feel the need to be connected.”
But I’d already taken out my own phone and was pulling up email. “Oh, fuck,” I said.
I tucked my back against him so he could read over my shoulder. I didn’t know the sender’s name.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Disturbance in the Garden?
Thursday, July 7, 2011 7:36 am GMT-5
Hi All,
So a weird thing happened to me. Anybody else? I’ve been getting together switches for some meddlework I want to do on a teacher at my kids’ school. She’s a nice lady, but a little overinvolved in the children’s home lives, if you know what I mean. She’s always asking my kids what they ate for breakfast, and how many hours of TV or video games they play. Like that’s any of her business! Details, if anyone cares, are the yellow Matchbox tow truck on top of the TV in the living room.
So anyway, I was keeping her switches in this adorable red-and-white sock yarn in the center row of cubbies in my wall of cotton blends. I went in today to wind in the plaid shirt she was wearing on the day in seventh grade when no one in the cafeteria would let her sit with them, and there weren’t any empty tables. Poor thing, she’d just walked around and around the whole period with her food on her tray.
So I went to add this to the skein and it wasn’t there! I found it later in the NYLON BLEND wall. I’d never make a mistake like that. I’d love to know if any one (Hello, any Salt reading?!?) has any idea how something in my own Garden could have gotten that out of place. I mean, I put it back, but sheesh.
Thanks!
Kate
Phil’s phone rang in his pocket, against my ass.
“Tell him we’re coming back,” I said. “It was Celeste in Kate’s Garden. I remember it.”
Phil
“I need to learn that expression,” she said as we came over the rise and Lake Mead dropped out of sight in the rearview mirror. “I’m guessing it has to do with frustration management.”
“A bad job of,” I agreed.
She put her hand on my leg and I covered it with my own.
“I’d have thought you’d have a sports car. Or at least something with manual transmission.”
“Last year I went through a brief spell of being environmentally conscious. I’m over it now. But I like the car. I hit a hot streak and paid cash for it. Used, but still. It was a good feeling.”
“A hot streak?”
“Yeah, you know. When everything is going right, and every laydown is correct, every call is correct, and all of your good hands hold up.”
“But…” she broke off.
“What?” I said.
“Do you need hot streaks? I mean, with what you can do.”
I stared at her, then pulled my eyes back to the road. “Honey,” I said. “I don’t meddle when I’m playing poker. That would be, uh, no, I don’t do that.”
“Oh,” she said.
“You mean, you thought I was cheating all this time?”
“I didn’t think of it as cheating. Have I offended you, Phil?”
I considered. “I don’t think so. Startled me, is more. It isn’t that I have such a high regard for meddlework, it’s that I have a high regard for poker.”
“You love the game.”
I nodded.
We were starting to get Las Vegas traffic now, and it was rush hour. Yes, Virginia, Las Vegas has a rush hour.
The Prius w
as nice, but too small to hold an elephant. I finally said, “So, you can sense when Celeste is in the Garden.”
She nodded.
A pickup truck cut in front me; I braked and said, “Can you tell what she’s doing there?”
“No.”
“Have you tried?”
“I don’t know how I’d go about that.” She sounded like her voice was even and steady only because she was putting a lot of effort into making it so.
“You know Celeste’s sense images,” I said. “Use them. See if you can track her, look over her shoulder.”
“Now?” she said, as if I’d asked her if she had any last requests.
“No. Let’s wait till we get to The Palms and see what they think of the idea.”
“All right,” she said, her voice telling me how pleased she was with the Governor’s reprieve. She said, “How can someone be loose in the Garden? It’s a metaphorical construct. It doesn’t have an objective existence, does it?”
“It has all sorts of objective existences, scattered everywhere one of us is. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
“It is infuriating that I have to ask these questions. I know, I know, that this is the sort of thing that ought to just be flooding back to me; all of the answers about what we can and cannot do, and how we meddle, and where to search for switches. She’s taken that from me.”
“Just delayed it,” I said, wishing I were sure of that.
We finally reached the 15, only a few minutes away from The Palms and, I hoped, some answers.
“You can fight her, you know.”
I felt her glancing at me. “What do you mean?”
“Do you remember our first meeting at The Palms?”
“I’ll withhold the sarcasm, and just say yes.”
“Two things struck me about that meeting. The first was that it was harder to convince you to let me sit down than I had expected it to be. The other was that, when you asked me how old I was, I got angry, upset, even though that’s an obvious question that we always expect.”
“Go on,” she said. “What does it mean?”
“The first means you were fighting her, and the second means I was.”
We drove in thoughtful silence up to valet parking at The Palms.
EIGHTEEN
Unpleasant Personality Traits
Ren
We stopped in front of Jimmy’s door to listen to the shouting on the other side, and Phil’s face split in a wide grin.
“What?” I asked.
“That sounds great,” he said. “All the quiet, serious conversation was starting to worry me.”
“Ah,” I said, like I understood. He raised a hand to knock, but I slipped between him and the door and kissed him. “For luck,” I said.
“You don’t need it,” he said, but he kissed me again anyway, one arm braced us against the wood veneer, the other around my waist. If the door had opened suddenly we would have fallen, him onto me, into the room. But it didn’t, and we didn’t, and when I opened one eye just a little, his eyebrows were drawn together like I’d only seen them when he was furious. But it didn’t feel like the time he’d kissed Celeste.
He must have felt me looking, because his face softened and he opened his eyes. “Are you worried?” he asked.
“Nah,” I said.
He smiled at me and tugged his shirt straight where it had ridden up between our bodies.
“More like terrified right out of my socks,” I said.
“Well, that’s okay then.” He squeezed my hand and knocked.
The shouting stopped abruptly, and Matsu opened the door.
Jimmy’s suite somehow managed to look expensive without being elegant or beautiful, but the living room was spacious and all the furniture was new. Ramon stood with his back to the balcony, radiating beneficent calm. Oskar clutched the back of an upholstered armchair, and two people I didn’t know sat on an overstuffed settee.
Matsu pushed two more chairs in from the bedroom while Ramon introduced me to Felicia and Nick. Felicia was striking—the kind of beautiful that makes everyone nervous, and I felt suddenly grubby in my jeans and anxiety.
If Oskar had any sense he’d stop glaring at her and try smiling. He had a nice one, and they’d make a handsome couple. Instead, he prowled the space between the bedroom and living room, and got in everybody’s way as the chairs were arranged and drinks doled out and quick updates given.
Nick’s voice was liquor-scorched and accented, the least attractive Incrementalist I’d met yet. Not that physical beauty meant anything, I reminded myself. But it made a peculiar contrast, Felicia’s sleek to Nick’s mangy, her poise to his slouch. I shook hands with them both, and smiled as openly as I could manage under their scrutiny.
Phil kissed Felicia on the cheek, shook hands with Nick, and sat in the chair Oskar had been abusing. He leaned back and grinned. “So,” he said. “Why the hell are you two here?”
Felicia widened her lash-fringed, green eyes. “Ramon called me and said to come.”
“Did he say why?”
Her cheeks pinked. “Yes.”
“Want to tell me?”
Felicia looked at her hands.
“What’d Ramon tell you, Nick?” Phil asked.
“That you were in trouble.”
“Ah,” Phil said. “That’s true. Did he offer you a place in the Salt?”
“He knows I don’t want one.”
“Did he suggest one might be opening up?” Phil kept his tone conversational, but he had a grip on the arms of his chair like he thought they might fly off.
“Jesus, Phil,” Oskar cut in. “We told you we were bringing them in. You didn’t have an issue with it.”
“I’m asking why,” Phil said.
“For our expertise and experience,” Felicia said, with just enough English on “experience” to imply seniority without saying so.
“Why they are here is not important,” Ramon said.
“It is to me,” Phil said. “And Ren.”
“They are here at my invitation,” Ramon said.
“Not good enough.”
“They are here to help,” Jimmy said. “And we need all the help we can get. Have you seen Kate’s email?”
Phil nodded.
“It was Celeste,” I said.
Matsu nodded. “That’s what Phil said.”
“There is no way that’s possible!” Oskar exploded. “The Garden isn’t a real place people can go. It’s a metaphor. It’s a way of thinking about an abstraction that’s too…” He gestured wildly out the window, into the bedroom. “Abstract,” he said. “Ren can’t know Celeste was in Kate’s Garden any more than I can.”
“Have you been in Kate’s Garden?” Phil asked.
“No,” Oskar snapped. “It sounds insipid.”
Phil smiled without dimpling. “So tell me how it’s not a contradiction for you to have been in her Garden or mine or Jimmy’s, and that makes sense, but Ren knowing Celeste was in Kate’s doesn’t.”
“Same way it makes sense for me to have been in your house, but Ren wouldn’t know whether Felicia had ever been in it.”
“I know Celeste hasn’t,” I said.
They all looked at me.
“I also know Celeste never visited Phil’s house,” I said. “Not the one here.”
“Because you now have Celeste’s memories,” Ramon said slowly.
I shrugged. “I don’t know why,” I said. “I just know.”
“I want to talk to Celeste,” Oskar said.
I felt Phil go taut in the chair beside me.
“No way,” I said.
Oskar started to say something else, but Felicia interrupted. “Have you tried grazing for her?” she asked me.
“You’ve been to her Garden,” Jimmy added. “Maybe you could go back there?”
I shook my head. “I could try that,” I said, “but I don’t think it’d work.”
“Ren,” there was something like urgency in Ramon’s voice
. “We need to know what Celeste is meddling in now.”
“Goddamn it!” Oskar said. “How can Celeste meddle at all? How can we even talk about Celeste like she exists somewhere? Celeste is dead. Has been for a while now. Irina too. There is no Celeste. There is no ghost of Celeste in the Garden.”
“Oskar,” Phil said very quietly. “Sit down.”
“There are our memories of Celeste,” Nick said.
“And there are Celeste’s memories,” I said. “I don’t have them all.”
“What do you have, Ren?” Ramon asked.
I closed my eyes to keep from looking at Phil. I didn’t know the answer to Ramon’s question. All I knew was of the infinite possible answers I might find, maybe six wouldn’t hurt Phil. Of those, I wasn’t sure even one would give whatever love we were creating enough air to thrive or fail on its own merits. If what I had of Celeste was too much of her, or even too much like her, how could Phil stand to love me?
I still wasn’t going to eat the fucking birdseed. I kept my eyes stubbornly closed.
“I knew Celeste was in Kate’s Garden,” I said, “because I recognized the pattern. It’s like what Matsu said in Phil’s Garden with the olives. From just two stones, you can know a diagonal. It’s the diagonal-ness I recognize. The Celeste-ness. And trying to explain that is like trying to explain anything without either an example or a metaphor.”
I opened my eyes.
Matsu nodded. “You recognized the Celeste pattern. A Celeste way of ordering information. The data points didn’t change, you just saw the lines Celeste would have drawn between them.”
Oskar grunted.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Can you just go find it, see what it’s doing?” Nick asked.
I shook my head. “You aren’t going to like this,” I told Phil. “Her pattern isn’t in the Garden now. I don’t know where Celeste is.”
Phil
There are at least three things that it is impossible to avoid when you talk about yourself as much as I’ve been doing here: lies, errors, and revealing nasty, unpleasant personality traits. Now it’s time for the one of the latter: I was taking great pleasure in how discomfited Oskar was by the whole thing. With everything else that was going on, I hope I can be permitted a bit of pleasure at Oskar’s pain, but permitted or not, there it was.