“Isn’t it major?” The swamp creature holds something up out of the dark ooze. It’s not a boho-chic paisley dress or a lavender-and-black tweed suit draped with chains or a nude-and-black lace blouse, all of which I might recognize as “major” from Moira’s leftover magazines.
It’s a human skull.
Hex leans closer to look at it. The girl reaches out her hand and grabs at his sweater, lifting herself up out of the water. “Now you are a man to keep!” Her breasts are fake-looking and her waist is disproportionately small.
“Hex!” I say. “No!”
I pull at him and fall backward onto the muddy ground. He stops and looks at me.
“Pen?”
“We have to go,” I say, struggling to stand, slipping. “Please. You’ll die there. Remember the sirens luring the men to their death?”
“Yes. The book.”
“Stories,” I say. “I’ll tell you a story. Come on.”
He looks at me, then back at the girl with the skull. Something glitters grimly in its eye sockets. Something that princesses and movie stars would have worn on their fingers.
“The sirens,” Hex says. He sits down in the mud beside me, still watching the girl. “I have always been a sucker for pretty girls. Especially ones who can sing. Even mean ones. I’d do anything for a pretty girl.”
I take the rope I’m still carrying and wrap it around his wrists, tie it in a knot the way Venice learned in Cub Scouts. Hex lets me do this without even flinching, as if he doesn’t know I’m here.
“Come on,” I say, standing, tugging. He doesn’t weigh that much more than I do so I’m able to get him to his feet. “I’ll tell you a story.”
* * *
I drive as far away as I can get from the swamp. Hex is in the passenger seat, the rope still around his wrists. He keeps looking out the window and moaning softly. I start talking, telling him the first thing that comes to my mind, a memory from before the Earth Shaker:
Moira and Noey in a pool…? The last time I saw them and it was only an image on my computer.
“Gavin’s having a Christmas party,” Moira said, brushing her hair. She insisted we call her Ginger and it was accurate anyway; her hair was a blush color more than an actual red.
I could feel my jaw tighten. I don’t want to go.
“Come on, Penelope.” Noey had noticed my reaction; she knew me so well. “We need to get you out of here.”
They didn’t think it was healthy that I avoided leaving my house if I could help it, but what was the point of going anywhere, especially if they were there with me?
“You guys go. There’s some reading I want to catch up on.” It wasn’t an excuse; I had a date with Ovid.
“Oh shit, Penelope.” Moira came and sat beside me on the bed. She had tried semi-successfully to cover up her freckles with makeup but I loved the way they played across her face. “You need to live a little.”
For me, living was that, being there with them, but they didn’t understand. They told me I wasn’t active enough. Not that they were exactly action heroes but they sometimes went to political protests; I didn’t like the crowds. Noey took tae kwon do and Moira rode horses and surfed. I was weak and awkward, barely passing PE most years. Noey took photographs of Moira she called “girlist,” partial body shots of long legs in torn stockings and violently high, toe-crushing shoes, torsos in bathtubs with rose petals that looked like blood, hands squeezing a tiny roll of belly fat, eyes dripping mascara. The pictures made a statement about our female dissatisfaction. My reading and studying and retellings of old stories didn’t do anything except help me think better. I was at least thoughtful. Too thoughtful, my friends said. And all I thought about was myths and old paintings that made me feel drunk on wine or struck by lightning but didn’t matter to most people.
Let’s take some photos at the beach. There’s a party on the boardwalk. There’s a housing protest downtown. Close your books. Come dancing. Come swimming.
I had no outlet, my friends said, no place to let out my frustration and anger at the world except the occasional fight with my mom. But Noey said yelling wasn’t taking action; it was desperation and it didn’t change things.
“It just makes your throat hurt and raises your blood pressure. That’s the only way my mother feels she can control her life and it sucks,” she said.
Noey and Moira weren’t close to their parents like I was. Noey went to AL-ANON meetings to deal with her mother’s alcoholism and Moira’s therapist thought her mom was a narcissist. Mostly they just avoided their families, retreating to my house when they needed some parental affection and a good home-cooked meal. But after dinner with us that night, Moira and Noey ended up going to Gavin’s party. I watched them from my window as they ran across the lawn. Moira in a faded pink denim miniskirt and a light green lace T-shirt and Noey in purple skinny jeans and a black hoodie with small silver stars on the back. They were laughing and their hair was shining like leaves in moonlight, their limbs long as saplings. I thought, Girls are magical at this phase, girls are invincible, nothing can touch them. I didn’t think “us” because I didn’t feel that; I felt other, on the outside, watching them. I stayed at home with Ovid’s Metamorphosis. At least I was smart, I told myself. I read the encyclopedia for fun. Not everyone could do that. Would want to do that, my friends would have said.
Noey texted me Sally Mann–esque photos of Moira’s legs in tie-dyed stockings dancing, Moira’s hair flying out across her face, under a halo of red and green heavy glass Christmas lights, Moira’s bare belly with a boy’s hand grabbing her belt. The last one was of Noey’s legs dangling in the water while Moira kissed a boy, both of their heads emerging above the misty pool, her hair afloat around them. She looked like a siren, who could lure him to his death if she chose.
I went to sleep staring at the last image, wondering, not what his mouth tasted like, but hers.
* * *
This part, this last, I don’t tell Hex, although I trust him enough to tell him anything—don’t I?—so I’m not sure why I don’t. Because I don’t want him to know I had a crush on a girl or because I have a crush on him? He’s asleep anyway, though, and my eyelids are dropping shut over my eyes like the lids are forged of silver, so I stop the van and untie the rope from his wrists. Maybe it’s not the best idea for us both to sleep at the same time but it’s better than crashing the van. It’s dawn and the air is a silty gray. I hope the cloud cover will hide us from danger. If I let myself, I’d be able to hear the girls singing in the distance, wanting us back, like the sirens in the weirdly prophetic book that lies on the seat between me and Hex. The book scares me a little now but I pick it up anyway.
“You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters of all mankind and whoever comes their way; and that man who unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens singing, has no prospect of coming home.”
9
BEATRIX THE WITCH
SLUMPED IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT of the van I have a dream I’ve had versions of before:
Venice doesn’t come home from school. I ask my mom where he is and she says she let him walk alone. I scream at her and call a phone number. Venice answers, says he is with a friend and I ask him to put the friend on. It’s a man who laughs and tells me that his daughter and Venice are in class together. I ask the daughter’s name and the man hangs up. When I call back, his voice is deep and hollow, and when I ask to speak to Venice—Please, please put him on—he keeps laughing and saying, “Who? Italy? Rome? Who do you want to speak with?” I am screaming and tearing at my mom’s clothes, begging her to go find Venice, but she keeps cleaning the house. I have a large cut on my knee that is deepening into a bloody hole. There is a gypsy fortune-teller sitting in a balloon-festooned cupola on a hill in a park. She asks me if she can read my fortune but I run away screaming, stepping in piles of dog shit, searching for my brother.…
* * *
When I wake up my whole body hurts, like poison has be
en injected into my veins. I wonder if the planet feels like this after everything we’ve put her through.
Someone is stroking my head with hands gentle as my mom’s. For a moment I wonder if she will be there beside me.… My chest tightens with hope.
It’s Hex, sitting up in the passenger seat. He doesn’t ask me what the dream was and I’m grateful. Not that waking up is much better. Except that he’s here.
“Are you okay?” he asks. His voice sounds the clearest I’ve ever heard it. The lotus potion must have completely worn off.
“I had a dream. About my brother.”
“You want to tell me?”
So I do. I tell Hex about my family, how we were separated, how I was afraid to go out looking for them, how Merk came and sent me on the journey, how the Lotus Hotel waylaid me, how I have to keep looking though I have no clues.
“I’ll help you,” he says. “If I can.” He looks away and swipes a hand across his eyes. “I had a dream, too. About those kids at the hotel. I was too fucked up to realize. What must have happened to them…” He swallows like he’s trying to push something large and bitter back down his throat.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I think, I want to help you, too, but I don’t tell him because what could I do to help anyway? I’m pretty sure those kids are all dead by now.
My stomach growls then, so loud it’s like there’s an animal in the van with us. Hex smiles, as if glad for the distraction, though I’m embarrassed by the insistent sound of my hunger. “We’d better feed you, right?”
I get a whiff of myself as I sit up. I’m covered in dried mud, which is preferable to Giant’s blood, I guess, but not much. “Starving and stinking.”
“S and s. At least we’re sober now.”
“That was quite a high.”
He frowns and pats his pockets like he’s searching for a cigarette. “I guess I just wrecked eighteen months of sobriety, but does lotus juice count?”
“Do you not want it to?”
“It counts. I was fucked up for … how long?”
We figure I was at the Lotus Hotel for about two weeks and if I add that to the time I counted on the wall of the pink house it’s been almost three months since the Earth Shaker.
Hex tells me that back Then, when he was twelve, he started drinking and using, doing whatever it took to get his supply. “Good times.” At thirteen he was a full-blown addict and it got worse when he started DJing five years later because he could get into all the clubs and everyone was always giving him free alcohol and drugs. “I was like this mini–pill machine, downing them with whiskey. Could drink a dude twice my size under the table.” When his best friend Yxta died from an overdose, he dragged himself to a meeting and quit cold turkey. Until the end of the world.
* * *
As he speaks I see a picture in my mind, as if I’m looking at one of the old master paintings I love. It’s a child, very small, sitting in a room frowning into a mirror. Sunlight dapples the pink walls. I want to take the child in my arms.
* * *
“But it doesn’t really matter now if I’m sober or not, does it?” Hex says, snapping me out of the vision I don’t understand.
It does matter, I realize, now that the lotus-juice high has fully worn off; it’s the only way we will be able to really survive this journey. But I don’t want to upset him for “going back out,” as he calls it, and I can tell, by the shade he’s pulled down behind his eyes and the way his jaw twitches when I start to ask, that he doesn’t want to talk about the friend who died or why he got high at twelve in the first place. “I think we can start fresh now,” I say gently. “We need our wits about us.”
“‘Wits about us’?” He purses his lips and shakes his shoulders, teasing. I’m glad that at least he can still tease me right now. “Are you from another century?”
“Sometimes I think so. But you’re the one who’s always reading from Homer.”
“Point taken. But we need food as well as wits. Dig in.” He holds up a can of chili and a bag of chips from our stash in the car.
“Sounds blissiant.”
“What?”
“I make up words sometimes. It means ‘divine.’”
He laughs. “Okay then.”
We eat the cold beans and stale chips and then use up some of our precious water for very much needed sponge baths in the back of the van. Hex keeps his undershirt and boxers on and turns away, hunching his bone-thin shoulders as he washes himself. The knobs of his spine are clearly visible. I’m surprised that, despite his bravado, he’s even more modest than I am. Maybe because he’s not high now. My curiosity about him keeps me from worrying about what he thinks of my own skinny, bruise-marred body.
He puts on a clean black T-shirt and jeans from his leather backpack and a pair of black high-top basketball shoes with gold trim. I eye the clothes, jealously, I guess, because he offers me an extra T-shirt and jeans from the same pack. Or maybe he just can’t stand to see me in my blood-mud-crusted thermal and sweats anymore?
“Do you only wear black?” I ask him.
“Yep. Sorry you don’t get much selection.” He tosses me the empty backpack. “This isn’t exactly a department store.”
“Are you kidding? I meant, thank you. Fresh clothes are the best thing in the world.”
“Besides metal-flavored canned beans.”
“Mmmmm.”
I scrape out the can for the last remnants and set it aside in a box. He asks what I’m doing.
“Recycling?”
“Is there much point?” Hex asks.
It’s just a habit, I guess. “Maybe we’ll be able to use them for something.” The piles of garbage everywhere don’t need to get any bigger. “Maybe it still matters.”
“That’s what I like to see.” He taps the inside of his forearm where the tattoo is and then covers the last four letters so it reads Faith. “Someone needs to have some.”
Not that I think I really do but I can at least pretend.
* * *
Maybe just driving is some form of faith, rather than giving up, curling up in a corner of the van, and waiting to die.
“Wait,” I say. “There’s somewhere around here I want to go.”
Hex stops the van in front of a crumbled mansion with an ornate metal gate. It hangs on its hinges, swinging in a gust of wind that chills me like cold iron on the nape of my neck. The only reason I’m not too afraid to go in is that I glimpse the orange butterfly for a moment, before it vanishes, consumed by shadow.
We enter through the gate and walk up a winding path that leads to ruined stone steps. In the front courtyard is a round fountain basin full of stagnant water. Broken light fixtures survey us like shattered eyes.
“Greystone Mansion,” I say. This is the historical, supposedly haunted Doheny mansion. My mother took me here when I was young to see the architecture, as wonder-filled as if she were ushering me inside the pages of a book of fairy tales. That’s why I want to go here now. She was here. We were here together. But the place seems so different without a world around it.
We go through the enormous arched doorway into an entry hall. The gray roof has caved in and dead trees curve like praying hands over the top of the house. Someone has hung broken crystal chandeliers from their branches. Piles of dried leaves cover the cracked black-and-white tiled floor. I recite to myself what I’ve memorized of the parts of plants listed in the encyclopedia—guard cell, upper epidermis, waxy cuticle, stoma, palisade mesophyll, spongy mesophyll, vein, waxy cuticle, lower epidermis—like an incantation to return the flora to life. At the back of the room is a massive mound of broken statuary and furniture, branches, rocks, jewelry, electronics, and books. There are lots of cracked carved stone plaques depicting obscenely old-mannish-looking, screaming babies straddling piles of fruit.
There’s a woman, stretched languidly on a leather couch with lion-carved feet, her black hair falling over her breasts. She wears a sheer, one-shouldered dress, the same lilac color as her
eyes and as the disintegrating dried flowers scattered on the floor. Her skin is very white and you can see the lilac-blue veins running through her.
I think of a painting from the Pre-Raphaelite period, a Waterhouse painting maybe, so sweet and pretty but so throbbingly sexual at the same time.
A young man crouches on the floor staring at the woman and sketching furiously on a tablet. Beside him is a large, three-tiered cake—green frosting roses on top—that he stuffs into his mouth as he sketches. There is cake on his face and in his curly red hair.
“Who are you?” she asks, waving her hand at us, raising her defiant chin; she has the chiseled, symmetrical bone structure of a mannequin.
“Pen and Hex.”
“You sound like a Las Vegas act. And in your matching clothes!” She snickers. “This is Ez.” She points at the young man. “He’s mine.”
He blinks up at us. His eyes like Venice’s when he played video games for too many hours. But these eyes aren’t gray; they’re deep brown, almost amber. He’s wearing a large dog collar around his neck and attached to the collar is a leash that the woman holds in her hand. There’s an orange butterfly perched among his curls, fanning its wings like a lady cooling herself down at a fancy dress ball.
“Aren’t you … I knew it! You’re her, aren’t you?” Hex says to the woman in lilac.
I look at him, trying to figure out what he’s doing. Then I see the huge TV with the photo of the woman and a tall, dark-haired man taped to the screen.
She smiles, a bittersweet twist to her lips. “I was her. If a soap opera star falls in a house and no one is there to see, does it mean she isn’t there?” She laughs in a strained way and lights the cigarette that’s been dangling loosely, as if forgotten, from her fingers.
Hex picks up a butt from the floor. “Do you mind if I keep this as a souvenir?” There’s red on the tip. “It touched your lips.”
“Silly boy. You want one? Just one.” She holds out another cigarette and he comes toward her, reaches for it. But she holds on just a little too long and I realize I want him to move away from her. Instead, as she lights the cigarette he bends even closer so their hands are almost touching.
Love in the Time of Global Warming Page 5