by Steven Brust
“What happened to your face?” the kids would say, and their moms would shush them, smack their legs sometimes, but after the first couple, Daniel got good at it.
“I was in a fire,” he told kids. “Do you know what to do if there’s a fire where you live?” And they’d talk about fire safety and not to hide from the men in the masks and suits. Kate guessed at least half the parents they saw that morning would put new batteries in smoke detectors before they went to bed, and half the kids would be drawing pictures of what firemen looked like in full gear.
“You’re good with kids,” she told Daniel as he followed her back to her office at lunchtime.
“Every kid we saw today would have been The Fat Kid when I was in school.”
“Yup,” Kate said. “That’s the high fructose corn syrup. HFCS’s poisonous, totally unregulated, and more addictive than cocaine. Our entire food supply is adulterated, but of course it’s the most vulnerable—the poor and young—that get sick first. That’s always the case, but here it’s particularly pronounced since they put HFCS in almost all cheap food. You have to pay to avoid it.”
He looked at her with his gentle, poet’s eyes over the wrapper of his sandwich. “You wouldn’t have shown me all that if you weren’t thinking about letting me help.”
Kate shrugged. “I could maybe use an assistant.”
“In your anti-sugar crusade?”
“I’m not anti-sugar,” Kate said. “Sugar, in moderation, is perfectly fine. Makes life worth living, even. The problem with HFCS is that it’s engineered to be so addictive no one can use it moderately. Certainly not kids.”
“So you’re offering me an apple?”
“What, like Eve?”
“Like any good mom. You said, ‘no dessert for you!’ but I wouldn’t give in, I wanted a cookie, so you’re giving me fruit.”
“Daniel.”
“Kate, I want to make a difference for these kids. I do.”
“I’m sure you’ve already—”
He took her hands. “But I don’t really know anything about it. I’d be nothing more than a warm body as your assistant. But with Ren and Phil, my being just a warm body is exactly what you need. You told me what’s at stake, that he’s the oldest, that nobody can even imagine what it’d be like without him.”
But at the word “imagine” something occurred to Kate. Daniel, the love, had such an imagination. He probably saw what Incrementalists did as exciting and heroic all the time. “Let me show you what it looks like,” she said.
Kate settled Daniel’s lithe body against her side in a gesture uncomfortably reminiscent of shouldering a toddler, and closed her eyes. Daniel, not yet an old hand at following her into the Garden, shuddered in a way altogether reminiscent of something else, and Kate smiled through the cloggy mustiness and itch of her sense triggers.
“Come with me.” She waved him up her cobbled pathway, through the den, past the craft room, and out to the back porch. She rolled out her rolly bin of mosaic tiles, and glanced across the labeled lids of repurposed baby food jars. Ramon’s peculiar labeling required more patience than Kate often had, so she didn’t tend to graze his memories much. But for dissuading Daniel, there could be none better. She pulled out the 1.199, 32.2217.110.9264, 07.24.2013 jar and held it up to Daniel.
“What’s this?” he asked, holding out his hand. Kate dumped the shimmery gray tile into his palm.
“A recent memory of Ren and Phil as seeded by Ramon, who went to visit them when they were moving into their new house.”
Kate shook the same tile from the same jar into her own hand and walked over to the tray of wet cement that waited, as it always did, on the deep window ledge of the screened porch. “Put it anywhere,” she told Daniel, and watched as he selected a place in the rather chaotic mosaic and pressed Ramon’s memory into the wet cement, then she did the same.
“Wow,” Daniel said, opening his eyes half an hour later. “Ren’s really … esoteric.”
“Yeah,” Kate agreed. “She spent almost two whole days in the Garden just trying to figure it out.”
“But she didn’t really. In the end.” Daniel’s sandwich had vanished in two enormous bites.
“It’s often that way,” Kate said.
Daniel nodded, eyeing her sandwich. “She and Phil are really in love, though.”
“Yes,” Kate agreed. “They really are. She’s going to have a hard time adjusting to any new Second.”
“What was the thing in September that Phil was worried about?”
Kate gave Daniel what was left of her sandwich and tore into the chips. “The Incrementalists tried to open up our world to the rest of the world. It kinda put Phil in the spotlight. He was nervous.”
“But?”
“But almost no one noticed. We’re a little too subtle for our own good sometimes, maybe. A little too incremental. But all the clues are still out there, and the website. You could follow them, if you wanted. You could be involved that way. Deputized.”
Daniel nodded. “Maybe,” he said. “I’m going to go now, okay?”
Kate knew her smile was indulgent, the kind you give when you say the baby can stay up late, but she couldn’t quite turn it into a happy one. She had offered him a candy and taken it away when he reached out his hand. She had to let him go. She just didn’t want to. “Okay,” she said, and ate both the Pop-Tarts in the foil packet, HFCS be hanged.
* * *
Irina washed her face in the sink, pulled off Frio’s too-starched shirt, and got her emergency panties out of her purse. She checked her phone. It was dangerously low on battery. She’d missed calls from Oskar and Ramon, as well as one from her chief, and two from unidentified numbers, but nothing from Lucy or Menzie, which meant she could go bail him out and hope he’d learned his lesson.
But it was almost noon. Her chief and his wife would walk out the church doors in thirteen minutes and drive the one mile to Chaffin’s Family Diner where they would stay for about an hour and a half. If Irina didn’t bump into him there, she’d have no way to see him until Monday, and getting him to call off the Southside mop-up raid wasn’t a meddle she could pull off over the phone. Irina swore at the mirror, and tried out some of the hotel’s hand lotion as a makeup remover. Jimmy tapped on the thin door. “Iri?”
“Fine!” Irina shouted. “Coming!” The lotion made her eyes sting. She walked back into the room bleary-eyed.
Ren was awake and tucked under the canopy of Oskar’s oaken protection. Her delicate brows wrinkled in recognition at her dress on Irina, but she didn’t say anything.
Matsu opened the door and looked into the hallway. “Let’s go.” He stepped back into the room, holding it open. Irina glanced at Frio, inert on the bed. Despite her bravado, she didn’t like leaving him. He’d been a good lover in that self-conscious way the young men these days had of thinking of sex as an arena of potential expertise. Frio had spent time trying to understand What Women Liked, and Irina thought he had genuinely wanted to pleasure her. And he had. It didn’t make him a good lover—a skillful pleasurer maybe—but Irina appreciated the intention.
She let Jimmy, Oskar and Ren, then Ramon file out before she got down on her knees to hunt for her shoes. She found one under the bed. Matsu plucked the other from atop the TV, handing it to her without comment. He rechecked the hall, deployed the DO NOT DISTURB sign, and held the door for her, waiting.
Frio’s broad, almost hairless chest rose and fell evenly under Ramon’s neatly written catalog of what and when and how much he’d administered. The paper was unsigned, of course, and in letters that you’d think came off a laser printer if they hadn’t been on a hotel memo pad page. Irina walked past Matsu into the hall and down the fire stairs to the hotel parking lot where Oskar and Jimmy stood flanking Ren—Oskar all bristling protectiveness, and Jimmy radiating sympathy, tears in his eyes, leaning over her. Matsu materialized in the midst of them all, tweaking Oskar’s hackles in a way Irina knew she shouldn’t enjoy as much as she did. “
We must put some distance between ourselves and Frio.”
“Yes,” Ramon agreed with a brisk nod. “We need to get out of here and prepare for the funeral.”
“Ren,” Oskar asked. “Do you have family we should meet at the airport too?”
She shook her head. “I told Mom not to come. I couldn’t—”
“Go home, Ren,” Irina told her. “Take a long shower and get dressed in your good clothes.”
Ren looked at her frankly, no suspicion or cunning in her wide-set eyes.
“I’ve done this before,” Irina told her. “And it isn’t easy, but Phil is safe now. You found his stub. And being there for Chuck’s family is part of how we make up for what we do to people’s lives.”
“It’s true,” Oskar said.
“Can you help her?” Irina asked him, a little lead-footed on Oskar’s protector switch, but her assistant police chief would be already in his car. “I’ll keep out of it,” she promised. “I’ll go back to my place and get dressed and meet you at the memorial. I just need to borrow someone’s phone.”
Oskar’s blue eyes narrowed, but Matsu held out his phone to Irina. She took it and groped in her bag for car keys.
“I’ll come with you,” Ramon offered.
“It’s okay,” Irina said, turning to go. “I’m fine.”
She just needed half an hour with her police chief to meddle him into calling off the mop-up raid, but she needed it now. Church was already out and she had to hit a Target for a Sunday dress and pantyhose. She did not want to wait until Monday to find out what her lover Jack Harris had known. Yes, she’d always planned to expose him for his betrayal of public trust and abuse of power, but if it turned out he’d known the Tucson Police Department had a man, Porfirio Martinez, undercover inside the Hourlies, much less that it was he who had shot Phil … Well, Irina might appreciate forgiveness, but she was not above blackmail whether or not Menzie intended to deliver on what she could threaten.
* * *
“Ren!”
The bathroom door bounced off the steam-slick wall, and Ren flinched.
“Oskar? Jesus, don’t you ever knock? You’re as bad as Irina with the—” she stammered, wondering how see-through the shower curtain was.
“It’s gone again.”
Ren made a gap between the shower curtain and the wall big enough for her head. “What’s gone?”
“Phil’s stub.”
Ren dropped the curtain and groped for a ledge to sit on. Her knees were going to wash down the drain. “What do you mean?” She steadied her back against the cold tile.
“It’s not where you seeded it.” Oskar was impatient with explanations. “I was worried it might have slipped again so I checked and it was gone.”
A towel, gripped in a broad fist, shoved between the wall and the shower curtain. Ren took it and Oskar reached in the opposite side and turned off the water taps.
“We have two hours before we have to be at the memorial.” Oskar dragged back the shower curtain and stopped. Ren saw the raptor blue of his eyes deepen as he took in the fact she hadn’t yet wrapped her body with the towel. He didn’t move. His eyes slid down her body—throat and breasts and belly—as a pure heat that penetrated and warmed her like the hot shower hadn’t. For the first time since Phil died, Ren wasn’t cold. Fear and grief and loneliness thawed under Oskar’s eyes. She wanted to keep them on her, but wrapped herself up in the sterile terry cloth.
“Matsu has left for the airport.” Oskar made no effort to look away from her body. “I haven’t told Jimmy.”
Oskar held out one hand, palm raised, and Ren imagined the pale wrist lace-cuffed and proffered to hand a lady down from a carriage. Slippery and shaky, she put her palm against his. “Is his Garden still there?” she asked and stepped over the tub side, holding the towel closed.
“Phil’s? I didn’t check.”
“That’s the first thing. That’s how I found him. I just—” The steamy air and fear made her dizzy. Ren sagged, and Oskar’s large, cool hands caught her shoulders and held them. “I don’t know how much more of this I can do,” she said.
“As much as you have to.”
Ren nodded and let her forehead fall forward onto Oskar’s chest.
He took her hand from her towel, took the towel from her body, and folded her body against his.
“I’ve never been in stub,” Ren said against the dampening fabric of Oskar’s shirt. “What is it like?”
“Like death.”
“He’s not in pain, is he? Or frightened?”
“I don’t know.” Oskar smoothed Ren’s dripping hair against her head. “But I know he loves you, and he doesn’t give up.”
Ren nodded. “I’ll go back to his Garden and find him again.”
Oskar opened one hand against the small of Ren’s back, and it grounded her.
“But once I do, I’m going to stay in the Garden with his stub until we have a new recruit for him.”
“You can’t.”
Ren’s body tensed against Oskar’s size and strength as she started to argue.
Oskar stayed motionless and talked over her. “You’re exhausted. Besides, Irina’s right about the memorial service being one of the things that justifies what we do to the people who loved our Seconds.”
A hard bubble of sobs was accreting in Ren’s throat. She nodded again and Oskar’s hands, spanning both her skull and her back, held her hard against his immobile body. He kissed the top of her head, and whispered into her hair. “You have to be at the memorial in an hour. I still need to shower.”
“I’ll find Phil’s stub again,” Ren said. “Tell Matsu, when he’s back from the airport, to join me. He can hold the stub while we bury Chuck.”
Ren waited for Oskar to agree or argue, but he only shifted her body against his. He drew a slow, open-mouthed breath and held her. Ren matched his next inhalation, his broad muscled chest and her breasts opening into each other. Her body softened and clung to him. Their exhale wasn’t quite a sigh; but something stronger and warmer.
“After I shower,” Oskar’s voice was heavy as steam, “I’ll put something on the forum, make sure we have someone to hold the stub after Matsu, and get a line up for after that. Someone will always be watching that stub until we get Phil spiked into a new Second.”
“Okay,” Ren said.
“Ren…” Oskar handed her the towel back and watched as she wrapped it around her body again. “What did Phil’s stub look like when you found it in his Garden?”
“Water spiraling a drain.”
“Tell Matsu, okay? He wanted to know.” When Oskar reached past Ren to open the bathroom door, his lips grazed her cheek. Then he yanked his damp shirt over his head. Shirtless and stunning, he grinned over his sculpted shoulder—strong and warm and ready to fight to the death for Phil if he needed to.
“Me too.” Ren nodded to Oskar, shut the door and went to get dressed.
TWENTY-TWO
We Live Too Long
Tucson gave them a bright day that peeked through the stained glass, which Oskar thought Phil would have liked and Chuck wouldn’t have noticed. By Oskar’s request, there was no music playing at the Avalon Chapel, and the small group was dwarfed by the room, but it somehow produced a sense of intimacy. There were a few bouquets present, one sent by Ren’s boss, and another by the poker room manager at The Palms. Oskar tried to remember if he’d ever met the man, but couldn’t bring him into focus.
Chuck’s mother made Oskar think of Irina’s last Second—small and wizened and gray, but she walked strongly, aided only by a single cane, and sat in the front row. Chuck’s sister sat next to his mother: tall and broad-shouldered and sturdy-looking. His mother said, “Oskar. I think I remember Charles mentioning you.”
“We were good friends.”
“You live here?”
“Munich, Germany, but I’ve been in Milwaukee for the last couple of years doing some work.”
* * *
I was glad that they
didn’t ask what work, because I didn’t feel like lying to them.
—Oskar
* * *
Chuck’s sister looked around. “Where’s the pastor?”
“In accordance with Chuck’s—with Charles’s wishes, there isn’t one.”
His mother said, “But—”
“I’ll be conducting the services,” Oskar said, putting quiet finality into it.
Chuck’s mother opened her mouth to argue, then nodded. She and the sister went off to find Ren, who was standing in front of the stained glass, studying it. Butterflies, Oskar noticed, and moved away to give them space and time. Then Jimmy, Ramon, Irina, and Ren took their places without anyone saying anything. Irina looked awful. Oskar checked the time and moved to the front of the room. He’d had the podium removed, and looking at them in the oversized room suddenly made him feel small.
Hands motionless at your sides, he reminded himself. It feels awkward, but looks natural. Speak slowly and clearly. Trust your words.
“I have only a few words,” he said. “Chuck didn’t want anyone sitting through speeches about him, but hoped that we would meet each other, and informally, perhaps, tell stories about him.”
Oskar looked at the small gathering, nodded, and continued.
“Chuck told me he had become somewhat estranged from his family of late,” he said, “and I know he regretted that. He was a good man, and a good friend, and I know that his family is a strong part of the man he became.”
* * *
I hadn’t exactly prepared a speech, but I’d given some thought to what I wanted to get across, and as I spoke, I relaxed, like when I’d addressed the gathering during the Spartacist Uprising, not knowing that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were already dead, and the uprising already defeated. Like then, the words came, and I felt the connection with those who were listening. What is that connection that we feel sometimes with strangers and friends? That I feel with you? That I hope you’re coming to feel with me, with Ren and Jimmy and Phil and Kate, and maybe even with Irina? I know honesty and its correlate, trust, are part of it. That’s why I’m trying so hard to be honest in these pages. And why I’m trusting you to know what to do when they end.