The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust

  “Phil!” I said. “What the hell?”

  He rubbed both eyes with the heels of his hands. “I have no idea,” he said. “Holy shit.”

  “Is Felicia maybe trying to reach us, talking to us through these?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. Maybe,” Phil shook his head, distracted. “But holy shit.”

  “What?” I said, no longer feeling smart at all.

  “Jesus,” Phil said. “The number of times I heard Celeste say both those things. And ‘everyone’s selfish,’ and I’ll bet every other damn reason and excuse and explanation in here.” Phil looked ready to kick the whole chest in. “Celeste’s been baking alpha cookies,” he said. “She’s found a way to feed us her Whys, to give other Incrementalists a taste of her victimization and innocence and force her perspective on the rest of us. What I believed about her motivations, I didn’t understand, I ingested. I swallowed her explanations whole. Oskar too. We gotta tell Ray.”

  Phil

  “Why?” she said. “Is there something he can do about it from there that we can’t from here?”

  “He has to know,” I said. “In case.”

  “Right,” she said. “Seed it, then. In case we don’t make it back.”

  I said, “You’re anxious to get on with this.”

  “Yes. I hate designing when I don’t have the specs.”

  “Mike Caro says people make a lot of bad decisions just to get it over with.”

  “Who?”

  “Poker theorist.”

  “Great. You’re giving me poker wisdom now?”

  “It’s all I’ve got. But I have a lot of it. Your job as a good player isn’t—”

  “Don’t.”

  I exhaled. “All right. One sec.”

  I made a piece of paper and a pen appear in my hand, put the paper against the wall, and wrote down our latest discovery. Then I stuck my arm through Celeste’s wall, into my own, and turned the paper into an African Violet hanging in a small planter next to Raggedy Ann. “Done,” I said.

  “Good. Now what?”

  “Now,” I said, “I think we should maybe destroy all these cookies before Celeste gets to hand any more of them around.”

  “How? I thought you couldn’t damage someone else’s Garden.”

  “You can’t when someone brings you into theirs,” I said. “But it seems to work differently when we break in. I saw the bruises your scuffle with Ramon left on him.”

  “Oh, crap, I didn’t mean to hurt him. I wanted to reach you.”

  “That’s why he showed me. He was making a point, back when I needed it, about you not being much like Celeste.”

  “Great,” Ren said. “So I hurt him while he was helping me and he used the bruises to help me more? Guess I owe him.”

  “We all owe each other,” I said.

  “Speaking of,” Ren gestured at the cookie jars. “I owe Celeste some wanton destruction. What do you suggest?”

  “We alpha-lock her whole box of Whys.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, dear Houdini, you cannot.”

  I turned around.

  Oskar’s opinions to the contrary, she sure seemed real. And Celeste. But Oskar’s dialectics were certainly right about one thing: love can turn into its opposite.

  “You can’t,” she continued, “because in order to alpha-lock something, you have to truly not care about the damage you do. And I don’t believe you’re capable of that, Phil. And I know our little bird here isn’t.”

  I looked over at Ren. Her eyes were fixed on Celeste, and she had the same expression Doyle Brunson had when shoving with 10-2—that is to say, none at all.

  “This,” said Celeste, “is my existence now. It isn’t much, it isn’t the same as when we swam in the Pacific, Phil, or when we spent all day making love in that hotel in Montana and I gave you ten orgasms and you swore no one had ever loved you the way I did. It isn’t like that, but it’s what I have instead, and you know that I can and will alpha-lock the whole Garden if you try to take it from me. I shall do it just by seeding these Whys in strategic places. You know I’m capable. You know there is nothing you can do to me that will more than inconvenience me, and you know that inconveniences annoy me. Do you remember in London, once, when I was annoyed—”

  “Celeste,” I said, “I don’t think you’re real. I suspect you aren’t real even in terms of this mentally constructed world we’re in. But one thing I know for sure, you aren’t Mike Matusow. You are not putting me on tilt. Ren already knows the worst of me, so she isn’t going to tilt either. Let’s get down to business.”

  “What business would that be, dear Thumper?”

  A good question, that. I wished to hell I knew the answer.

  Ren

  “The business at hand,” I said, “is saying good-bye. Good-bye, dear Hoho.”

  Celeste’s head whipped around fast enough to fling a hairpin free. “What did you call me?” she demanded, but she recovered quickly. “You never called me that. All the other grandbratties did, but not you.”

  “And now I’ll never call you anything else.” I smiled at her. “If I think of you at all, which I may not. Shame to be forgotten by all your living relatives.”

  Celeste came across the polished wood towards me. “No, you’ll remember me. Every time you close your eyes,” she said. “Both of you will. Not because I will find you whenever you come to your Gardens, but because you’ll always know I can. And sometimes I will.”

  “I’m not going to let that happen,” Phil said, and if the dismantled bed-chest hadn’t been between us, and too wide to reach across, I think he would have strangled her, even if she didn’t have a body to wake up bruised or choking.

  “Every time you close your eyes, lover,” she said, and puckered her lips into a kiss.

  “I’m going,” I told her.

  “Yes, open your eyes now, but you can’t leave me, we’re a part of each other.” Celeste turned away from me and moved toward the workbench, speaking only to Phil, as though I’d already left. “As long as you believe you love this little bird, you’ll never be rid of me, my dear.” She walked along the edge of her lab table, fondly touching various bits of equipment. “Me and my dear little great-niece are a package deal. Until she dies. Then she’ll be gone, and I’ll still be in the stub.”

  “My great-niece and I,” Phil corrected her, but he looked pale. Celeste wasn’t the first person who’d told him this. It was what Jimmy had warned me against.

  Celeste looked at me. She lifted her arms to display the long sleeves of her gown and made a slow, fashion model turn. “Do you like it?” she asked me.

  “It’s still the most beautiful robe I’ve ever seen,” I said, watching the pale pink satin billow and puddle around her. Embroidered with velvet and tiny ocean pearls, in the moonlight, it would have looked white.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Phil gave it to me.”

  “He has exquisite taste,” I said evenly. “But I like his blue-and-white one better.”

  She laughed and walked over to a shelf the pale green of my Nana’s after-dinner mints, which held a framed, black-and-white picture of Celeste at the age she’d been our summer at the lake, and a small crimson box. She took the lid off the box to reveal a single mounded chocolate. “Here,” she said, holding it out to me. “Taste this.”

  “Ren,” Phil cautioned, but I started toward her, or the shelf behind her, anyway.

  “Do you remember our Montana candy?” Celeste asked him, lifting the chocolate out for me. “Go on, Renee. It would do you good to know how Phil could fuck when he was a young man.”

  I looked at the treat held on her pale, pink palm. “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m done being your little bird.”

  I was close enough now to be certain the picture of Celeste wasn’t a photo, but until I touched it, I couldn’t be sure if it was seed, hedge or stub.

  “Oh, so you’ve grown up have you?” Celeste mocked me.
“And do you now know thyself, dear Socrates? You think you’ve found the true princess packed into our drab little Wren? You’re no better than Oskar with his neurochemical determinism. ‘Bump up the testosterone and any man will grow violent.’ Ha! As though, if we gelded Matsu, he’d no longer care to fight.”

  “I am loved,” I told her, but she gave me a patient smile, and I turned the golden picture frame into thin, gilt-edged, shamrock-painted porcelain.

  “Do you really expect to keep moving from growth to growth, getting better and better? That’s not how pivots work. You will fall over the edge again one day, and when you do, Phil won’t be there. Phil leaves.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m glad you feel safe here, Hoho. It must be nice being somewhere where nothing can surprise you,” I said. “But I’m not afraid of what I don’t know. I’m okay with uncertainty.” My throat was so tight with fear it distorted my voice, but I made Celeste’s ink-penned face brown into tea, liquid and flat in its frame, and I kept her from looking back at it. I hoped Phil would think the wobble in my voice was anger, and I hoped Celeste’s self-portrait was as toxic to her as it had been to me.

  “I know finding my own path is slower than following yours, especially here, and it puts me at a disadvantage in speed and confidence, but I’ll wager my uncertainty against your fear any day. Doubt is hard, but fear is harder. And doubt comes with something I can make, in spite of it. I can make a decision. You can’t make safety. Not even here.” I made the green-and-white frame into a cup and the tea filled it. “Life isn’t safe,” I told Celeste.

  Celeste smiled at me, stroking the velvet lapel of her beautiful bathrobe, fingering a pearl button. “Life isn’t. But I’m not really alive, am I? I’m just here. Nonmaterial. All the power, none of the risk.”

  “It’s always been about power for you, hasn’t it?” Phil said, his voice rough with hatred. “It was what you always fought Oskar over.”

  I needed Phil to stay where he was, too far to reach me quickly. “Oskar’s having all kinds of no fun with your present nonpresence,” I said.

  Celeste ignored me; she’d rather needle Phil. There’s more power in him. “Oskar was always trying to push power into the hands of the nemones,” she spat at Phil. “Neither of you could ever see they don’t want it. They’re constantly throwing their power away. Handing it to gurus and trends, advertisers and addictions. I dragged a tidy fortune, just picking up their discards.”

  There was only one step left to my plan, if I’d figured things correctly. Two steps, really, if you counted the one I couldn’t take, the one where I tell it to Phil, and convince him to do what I need him to do. I took the teacup from the shelf and almost smiled.

  “No, the nemones don’t even want what little power modernity has left them, with all their rituals debunked and all the great rites commoditized.” Celeste’s voice was rising, she and Phil picking up the notes of their old song.

  But my plan really had three steps, and only time for one. He was tilting. I was going to have to jump it.

  “How much of your power did you give me, Phil?” Celeste demanded. “And in the one week you’ve known her, how much have you already handed over to Ren?”

  “I don’t want power over him,” I interrupted. If this was going to work, I needed Phil rational for me, not out of his head angry with Celeste. The tea smelled like only one I’ve ever tasted: the one Irina, or Celeste, had made for me. It was Celeste, and it was poison.

  “I have his faith,” I said. “I don’t want more.”

  She rounded on me. “A failure of ambition.” She sneered, saw the teacup, and laughed. “Still playing my games, dearie? I have no body to die anymore. Nothing can hurt me here.” She held her hand out, imperious. “Give it to me, Birdie. I’ll drink it.”

  I drained it.

  “Ren?” Phil said, his voice gone gentle.

  I touched a finger to my ear hoping he’d read the gesture as more than symbolic—or less than, I guess. “Listen,” I mouthed to him, but I couldn’t hear it myself. Only the porcelain, and Celeste’s shattering laugh.

  “Ren!” Phil was very close, but I couldn’t see him. “Ren, are you waking up?”

  No, I’m singing at the tower in the zipped-shut dark.

  “Phil,” Celeste’s voice was sugar cube sweet, “Renee said the business was bye-byes.”

  “Don’t call her that,” Phil said, and something else, but I lost his voice under Matsu’s, low and insistent from the next room, and Felicia’s, marginally hysterical, talking about Kate, her kid’s teacher, and Celeste.

  The taste of Celeste, poisoned tea on my numb tongue; I opened my eyes in the hotel bed and was not breathing.

  NINETEEN

  One Equals Zero

  Phil

  This is where I prove that one equals zero. Ready?

  Matt says the thing about fighting is not to hesitate; to instantly make a productive, even if not perfect, response. If you have to think about it, it’s too late. That’s funny, because I started becoming a real poker player back in the 1880s, when I started learning to hesitate, to wait, to take a moment to think.

  I was almost—almost—hit with a wave of, “What is it about the women I love that makes them kill themselves?” but my brain was working too fast to accept it. I hesitated and took a moment to think.

  I’m not a martyr.

  That was Ren, not Celeste.

  Twice, she’d said it. She’d drunk the tea, knowing it was poison, knowing it would kill her, but—

  I’m not a martyr.

  But then, why?

  Listen, she’d said. To what? I listened, and heard nothing. I had to think. I was thinking.

  Was that the point? Was that what “listen” meant? Just a way to get my frontal cortex engaged? But, if it was, that meant there had to be something to think about. That meant she had a plan.

  She drank poisoned tea as part of a plan?

  Well, yes, of course she would do that. If she saw a way to win, and if that’s what it required, then, certainly. But if it also required me thinking, then it meant it required me to do—something.

  What? What could I do? What could she expect, anticipate, that I could do, when she’d just poisoned her mind, which would poison her brain, which would poison her? What had the poisoning accomplished?

  Until she dies.

  Happening here, in the Garden, it had separated Ren from Celeste. They were no longer linked to each other, bound to each other, because Celeste had to separate herself or be poisoned too. Only there was nothing to keep her from returning if the poison wasn’t fatal, so that wouldn’t solve the problem unless … what?

  What?

  What is not an axis; there is no “What” in the Garden, because we create and destroy all the “Whats” at will, except for hedges, and seeds, and—

  And Celeste had made a seed of all her memories. And Ren knew she had done so.

  Not the solution, but the opportunity for the solution. The chance to settle it.

  You take what you know, you eliminate as many unknowns as you can, calculate the odds as well as possible, and you make the play. And sometimes, that play looks like a wild-ass gamble that came out of nowhere, but you have the pieces, and the options narrow and narrow until only one is left, which, by definition, is not an option.

  One option is the same as no options. One equals zero.

  And thinking it through took much, much less time than it has taken to describe the process, because sometimes the symbol is clumsier than the symbolized.

  “Your little bird,” said Celeste, “made a gallant effort, but her next Second will be my next Second. If she is gone, she is gone, but I’ll still be here.”

  “I think you missed the point,” I told her.

  “Oh?”

  “She isn’t going for your life; she’s going for your comfort.”

  That was total bullshit, but I needed something that would grab her attention.

  “What the fuck do you mean
, my comfort?”

  Where was it? What would it be?

  Listen, she had said.

  I listened, then, and I heard music: Concerto for Drum and Self-Knowledge; Symphony in Suitcase Minor.

  I set my mouth on automatic while my brain raced.

  “Comfort is the enemy, Celeste, don’t you know that? Remember all the antiwar protesters in the ’60s, and how, by the time of Desert Storm, they had their jobs and their lives and their houses in the suburbs, and so they decided Desert Storm was different, that it was a justified war, because now they had something to lose? Remember that? That something was comfort. Well, we’re going to destroy your comfort, Celeste.”

  What I was hearing was the moment Ren had understood me. The thing that symbolized understanding. Understanding that comes through pain. Yes. I was so sure I was right, I almost smiled.

  I walked over to the wall and put my arm through it, reaching for the reflection of Ren’s Garden in mine, where the seed had to be. I reached my hand out for the sound of singing, and I took hold of the handle, and dragged it back: a black, Eagle Creek duffel. Not the suitcase I’d given her; a bag she’d planted because she hoped I’d look for it. A sack full of what I needed, what she needed me to have.

  I looked at Celeste and I did smile.

  “The end of your comfort,” I told her.

  She looked skeptical.

  “Come take a look then,” I said. I opened it, but didn’t turn it towards her.

  She took a step forward, and then another, and I willed the transformation of the duffel; it was hard and it was on fire and it was in my hand.

  She looked at me, and her eyes widened.

  “Five plus three is eight,” I told her, and drove Ren’s stub, as a burning spike, into Celeste’s forehead.

  Celeste screamed, and her Garden fell apart around me, and I opened my eyes.

  Ren

  Ritual is symbol in motion. Ritual mixes meaning into time where each delineates the other, and we roll it out like so much razor wire at the perimeters of power. Sex, money, death—all bordered with ritual like police tape. We cordon the sites of pivots and make taboo the words that name them.