Love in the Time of Global Warming

by Francesca Lia Block

  My father. I need to find him, I think, and almost say it out loud, but suddenly I’m so tired. And thirsty.

  “What if someone cloned stem cells from a human who’d been genetically modified somehow?” The young man raises his glass to me and grins. “But don’t worry yourself about that now. We’re safe in here. Drink up.”

  He sounds like a charming madman but “charming” is the operative word and how long has it been since I’ve felt charmed? Plus I’m so, so thirsty. I can tell him about my family later. So I touch my lips to the liquid, the first fresh thing I’ve had in sixty-eight days. It stings a little, tightens and numbs like pomegranate seeds or persimmons or too much spinach. Already the smacking pain in my bones seems to lessen. And then I think, This is all I want. All I want is to forget what just happened with the Giant, forget what happened before that, stay here. To stay here getting high until I die. Free lotus potion and cute boys and girls sprawled around. All of it so easy, just for the taking. So what if it’s a little cold; I have a thermal shirt and sweatpants. The dried blood on them doesn’t matter anymore.

  “Come on.” He takes my hand—his is surprisingly small and I can feel the bones like twigs encased in flesh and we run through the lobby and up the staircase that swirls to hallways flanked by rows of rooms. The doors are all open and people are inside sleeping or hooking up, survivors like us. Broken bottles and clothing litter the hallways. A girl is crunched up into a ball, hugging her knees and whistling, pointing at the blank wall. Another is crushing red flowers so the juice drips into her mouth; some spills down her neck in rivulets. The young man takes me to a room with charred black curtains and a faint burned smell still in the air. The window overlooks the flooded streets below. It’s so dark; any stars are masked in smoke and cloud.

  “I love you,” my new friend says. “What’s your name?”

  * * *

  His name is Hex (“for Hexane,” he says with a mellowish smile, “a hydrocarbon that is somewhat toxic but can cause euphoria and a somnolent state”) but he doesn’t remember how he got the name or the way in which he got here. None of the hotel dwellers seem to remember. They’re here and that’s enough. All day they pick the strange flowers that grow undaunted through the cracks, crushing the thick, wet petals in their hands and drinking the juice that pours forth into their cups. They seem to want to remain high all the time, hoping that the Earth Shaker was a bad trip and not willing to stop drinking and find out that they’re wrong.

  He takes off his black motorcycle boots, sits on the bed with the half-burned bedspread in the candlelit room he calls “Camp Hex,” and gestures for me to join him. We watch each other over the tops of our glasses filled with the red drink. It may be toxic, radioactive, born of this ruined land but I don’t care. It makes my throat burn and my eyes water and my mind bloom. Yes, bloom. Hex asks me where I come from, and I tell him about the one-eyed Giant and the man who gave me the van. I don’t talk about my family because that already seems like a dream now; especially like a dream the more I sip. But I do say, “There’s someone I am looking for.”

  “Everything you need is here, Pen.”

  I shake my head and look down at the bloodstains still on my hands. I want that shower. And food. But I don’t want to go back out to the van.

  I am already starting to forget who …

  “I think there’s a boy,” I say. Very fast, very big eyes, lips that pout or easily spread into a smile that will need braces. What are braces?

  Hex nods. His face is thin and pale, like his hands, with a few faded scars on his cheeks. “They’re all gone,” he says. “No use. Drink up.”

  I take another sip. The juice of the flower trickles down into my stomach, fills up my blood. I’m dizzy. All around the room are piles of books, Bibles, and magazines. I feel like maybe once I would have wanted to read everything but now I just stare at them.

  “I collect any reading material I can find,” Hex tells me. “Mostly from the shelves in the lobby. No one else seems to care. This is my prize possession.” He shows me the book, pages stained and furled with water damage. The Odyssey.

  “He used to read it to me as a bedtime story,” I say.

  “Who?”

  But I can’t remember. Somebody. Nobody?

  “Everything is about the wine,” says Hex, holding the book in his small hands, his thumbs jammed through holes in his big black sweater. “The sea, the wine, hospitality, loyalty, courage, kleos. Meaning glory. What would your book be about?”

  “The pink house at the edge of the sea,” I say, even though I don’t know what that means. “The Giants, the blood, the eyes, the butterflies.”

  For some reason the word “butterfly” makes me look again at the words tattooed on his neck. “Hey, what does it say?”

  “Non sum qualis eram. I am not what I once was.”

  “Cool.”

  “It’s from a book I love.”

  “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “What you once were.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  We giggle, little bursts of fireworks in my solar plexus.

  “Maybe some of these items will spark your memory,” he says, gesturing around the room.

  I wander about, looking at his collection—batteries, paper clips, pencils, nails, a nail file. There is a cell phone and I hold it up to punch in some numbers that somehow seem important but nothing happens.

  “I like to tinker with electronics, take things apart and put them together again. It’s how I relax.” He grins at me. He has little fangs—tiny vampire teeth—and lips pink as lip gloss.

  Next he picks up a globe of the world and spins it so the pale colors blur. I want to cradle it in my arms. I can see a room filled with maps, the walls papered with maps in the same soft colors as the ones on the globe, the vast pale blue oceans, the jagged landmasses, created by ancient movements of the earth. But where was that room? And what has happened to all that land?

  “I wonder if it’s still even here,” Hex says, as if reading my mind. “Maybe it’s just us in the Lotus Hotel.”

  Through the fractured glass window an orange butterfly darts, landing for a second on Hex’s wrist before flying away. We both blink at it like it’s a hallucination.

  “I have another one,” he says.

  “Another one what?”

  He holds out his arm and pushes up his sleeve. Another tattoo—the word Faithless—is inked blackly against his pale skin.

  He might be faithless but I believe in him. I think he’s an alchemist, like one of the elongated, androgynous figures from a Spanish surrealist painting I think I used to love (or did I dream it?), a creature living in a distorted tower with black and white parquet floors, caring for a wan-faced, trapped moon. Hex reads The Odyssey aloud to me.

  “‘But any of … [my men] who ate the honey-sweet fruit of lotus was unwilling to take any message back, or to go away, but they wanted to stay there with the lotus-eating people, feeding on lotus and forget the way home.’”

  Forget the way home. A mild worry nags at me but it’s so slight, like when you’ve left the house and think you’ve forgotten to turn off the stove but you know you really have so you don’t go back (should you?). Then Hex begins to hum song after song I vaguely remember—something about being loved until the world comes to an end—and I slump against him, forgetting the unattended imaginary flame on the imaginary stove. His sweater is so soft, I think, as I fall asleep on his bed. Sheets that smell of smoke and old books and of him.

  7

  BULL’S BROTHER

  WE STAY HERE FOR DAYS, I’m not sure how many—I’ve ceased my counting. Once I made red marks on a wall. Here the only red marks are the ones on my body, but they’ve turned black and purple by now. We drink the juice of the impossibly alive red flowers we pick from the cracks in the lobby floor and they make our mouths pucker and stain our tongues bright red, soothe our souls. Sometimes one of the boys or girls from the hotel comes
into our room and sits on the bed with us, cross-legged, long hair streaming down slender shoulders. Sometimes they kiss Hex on the lips and a part of me wonders if it would bother me if I wasn’t so high.

  “Who are you?” I ask a girl in a tattered black silk slip. Her eyes are so pale and murky they look blind, or maybe visionary.

  She leans over and digs her ragged nails into my arm so I pull back. “The elves of the Lotus Hotel. We came from underground.”

  For some reason this makes perfect sense to me. “Why did we all survive the Earth Shaker? And no one else,” I ask.

  “Oh, we are special,” she says. “Chosen. Of the clan of earth, water, fire, or air. I stopped a fire myself, just like him.”

  She kisses Hex’s lips and leaves. He leans over and rests his head on my shoulder, gazing at the ceiling; I stroke his coarse black hair.

  “What fire?”

  “I’m kind of a slut,” he says, ignoring my question. “I confess I manipulate people with my sex-charm. It’s for survival. I’m sorry.”

  Nothing seems to bother me. I smile again and run my hands over the peeling, flocked wallpaper. Little velvet leaves and flowers, a pattern that I try to analyze to see where it repeats, though it’s hard to tell. You could go crazy trying! I think, and laugh out loud.

  The girl comes back holding a guitar. She gives it to Hex and leaves again. I notice she is wearing running shoes with her slip dress and I almost remember something I don’t want to and wonder if the shoes will ever decompose.

  Hex takes the guitar in his hands like a baby and runs his fingers over the strings. Then he plays for me. It’s a song that sounds vaguely familiar but I don’t know for sure. His voice is rough, but soothing.

  “It’s funny to substitute the world ‘squirrel’ for ‘girl’ in pop songs,” he says. “Also, ‘hams’ for ‘hands.’ Like ‘I kissed a squirrel, and I liked it.’ Or ‘Put your hams in the air.’ Want to try? It’s fun.”

  “I don’t think I remember any songs,” I say.

  “‘Sexy’ is always ‘Hexy.’ ‘I’m hexy and I know it!’ Try it, Pen!”

  I laugh, his voice tickling my neck like fingers.

  “‘Baby’ is ‘rabies.’ ‘Young’ is ‘dumb.’ ‘You’ is p…”

  “Okay, I get it, I get it.”

  “What about apocalypse songs? My specialty. I have a whole set list. ‘Blood Sport—Sneaker Pimps.’ ‘Smoke and Mirrors—RJD2.’ ‘Ambulance—TV on the Radio.’ Oh, and this is old school…” He strums the guitar hard and sings in a deep voice, “‘This is the end, my friend.’”

  The words make my spine as cold as his voice is hot. “Is it safe here?” I say.

  That’s when the room shakes and even the warm high is penetrated with the kind of dread that numbs you cold and I think, Another Earth Shaker, but it’s not. Not that kind. Or maybe they are the same. Hex said something about Giants cracking the plates in the earth.

  Someone screams downstairs and we peek out into the hallway, Hex’s hands on my shoulders. Kids are running up the staircase. We go to the top of the stairs. A huge something hulks in the lobby. It hits the milk-glass light fixtures so they sway over the rubble and water and lotus flowers.

  “Who blinded Bull?” the thing wails. “Who blinded my brother?” Its voice sounds like an ambulance siren but deeper.

  Bull’s brother. The massive creature picks up a candelabra and waves it around the room. Turning everything to a black-and-white horror show flickering on a movie screen.

  “It’s one of Kronen’s,” Hex says, as the Giant holds the candelabra up to the torn drapes. Almost instantly they become flames themselves, the whole room a red velvet conflagration.

  Hex shoulders a black leather backpack adorned with zippers like a motorcycle jacket, and we take the fire escape—iron stairs scaling the side of the building—and swing off the last rung onto the cracked pavement below.

  We hear screams from the hotel, glass breaking.

  A sudden gust of wind carries the fire from the brick building out into the courtyard, dead trees igniting. A pile of wooden beams in the street catches, blistering with red sparks, blocking us from the van. Smoke blinds and chokes me.

  Hex takes my hand. It’s hard to see but it looks like he’s holding his other palm out toward the flames, muttering something. Instantly they subside. What did he do? Was there a fire extinguisher?

  We run to the van, unsteady. Half-drunk. My eyes and throat still stinging. How can I drive like this? Hex grabs the key from my hand. Not that he could walk a straight line either. Don’t Drink and Drive warnings flash like neon in front of my eyes but back Then you didn’t have to escape man-eating Giants. Like we do now.

  “Let’s go,” Hex says as if to himself—he’s driving. “Go go go.”

  Earthquake. Flood. Fire. Giant cannibals.

  We go.

  8

  THE SIRENS OF BEVERLY HILLS

  HEX AND I DRIVE NORTH and then west according to the compass he keeps in his pocket. The only reason we chose this course was because the road was less ruined and we were able to make our way slowly through the rubble and flooding.

  I can still taste the lotus juice in my mouth, making my tongue furl up, sore with longing for more. I’m so thirsty. There’s still water in the van (thankfully no one broke in and stole it while I was on my lotus bender) but Hex doesn’t have any bottles of the potion with him.

  “It’ll force me to sober up,” he says. I don’t know why he’d want to, but I refrain from saying so.

  “The Giant won’t get far,” he continues, almost cheerfully, as he drives. “Either he’ll burn in the fire or drink some wine and be out for a few days.”

  After he eats them, I think. The ones who didn’t burn to death. Fire clan or no.

  Hex eyes me sideways where I sit in the passenger seat with my feet tucked up under me, winding a length of coarse rope, that was among the supplies in the van, around my hands. I still haven’t washed off the Giant’s blood.

  “He is after you, right? He said something about his brother.”

  I shrug and shiver myself into a smaller ball. My high is wearing off fast.

  “I thought so. You blinded Kronen’s Giant, homegirl? That’s impressive.”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble.

  “The Cyclops!” Hex reaches into his backpack and pulls out the book, points to it as he quotes:

  “‘… he … caught up two together and slapped them, like killing puppies,… and the brains ran all over the floor, soaking the ground. Then he cut them up limb by limb and got supper ready.’”

  I try to shiver off the image.

  “Why the hell are there Giants?”

  “Kronen cloned stem cell–manipulated beings, somehow enhanced so their bones wouldn’t break from the strain of the size?” Hex wonders aloud. “Maybe it was funded by some secret corporation, to gain power? Or maybe the Giants were the last straw that caused the earthquake that ended the world? I have no idea.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask, hoping he has a more lucid answer for this question than for my first one.

  He shrugs. When we stop it’s because we have to. A large expanse of swampy water stretches out in front of us. And we hear singing.

  Not just any singing—it’s high-pitched, too high, eerie but gorgeous. The words don’t make any sense but I want to catch them, rearrange them into something my mind understands. Hey ho the runway in the blimey blithely air! Shooting sugar into your lines and crevices. Say chic luxe fortitude be-glistens your wrecked eyeballs’ celebrity against the sea storm of my heart. Lachrymose! Oh you will be smote with bows and trinkets of botulism oblivion, birthday girl! Hex stops the van and gets out and runs to the edge of the swamp. I follow him. For some reason I bring with me the coil of rope. My companion crouches and stretches out his hand toward the water.

  The air sweats sulfur, rank in my nostrils.

  A head emerges, then another. Girls. Their hair is long and tangled, thick with m
ud, their noses small for their faces. They rise up and we see their bare breasts and emaciated torsos. They are wearing jewels, all kinds of necklaces and bracelets and rings coated with mud and entangled with weeds. Around them in the water float shoes and more jewels and mannequins in what were once expensive items of clothing.

  “Come to us,” the girls sing. “He won’t smell you here, in the mud. Giants can smell you out good, you remember? ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum.’”

  This part of town, it’s familiar but so changed. The palm trees have fallen, necks snapped like slaughtered birds’. The buildings have crumbled, large sheet glass in piles of shards. This is where the wealthy once roamed in their shiny cars. A leviathan of a Rolls-Royce lies busted and belly up at the edge of the swamp. Not a butterfly in sight. I’m starting to imagine them as guides and I don’t think they want me to be here.

  “Come on,” Hex says to me but I pull him back.

  “We have to go,” I say.

  “They’re so pretty.” He sounds high again, gazing at the mud-slicked bevy of girls, and my stomach ties itself into a perfect bow.

  One of the girls turns her head and smiles at me, heart-shaped lips baring large teeth. Her hair is matted with black oil and her cheekbones are sharp enough to do damage. “I used to love pretty things,” she whisper-hisses, slithering toward us, her bony back arching from the mud. “Wicked jewels and shoes. I went shopping all the time. Attended the showings of the hottest collections. Had the best plastic surgeons in town remake my entire face and body as if from scratch. But it was never enough.” She flings her head from side to side, strings of hair streaming out, flicking mud. “Now I can have whatever I want. Come into the swamplands of Beverly Hills where all the jewels are free and there are no men to worry about impressing.” She grins at Hex. “Except you! Lovely boy!”

  I tighten my grip on his arm.