Ez draws blowsy cabbage roses and candy-striped tulips, as refined as those in a sixteenth-century Dutch or Flemish Renaissance still life, and serves the canned beans on tin plates, setting them before us as if he is giving us a gourmet meal. “Sir, mademoiselle, your food. Beans Baked à la Tin Can from the kitchen of Ezra the gourmand.”
I bet he was a great chef. He tells about how to use turmeric to make the rice a golden color and prevent inflammation, how to soak antioxidant-rich goji berries in water to plump them, and add them to quinoa, using chia and hemp seeds for protein.
“As long as you don’t mention the junk food,” Hex groans. “Because I need to slam some of that shit down now!”
“You could smell the onion rings from a mile away,” Ez says. “Toxic waste. I mean grease.”
“Now, now,” says Hex. “Don’t dis my toxic grease. One man’s toxic grease is another man’s comfort food. And now you’ve got me talking about it like I said not to!” He chews a knuckle. “Next you’re going to bring up cigarettes.”
“I’ll tell you about spirulina powder,” Ez says. “Protein-rich superfood from green algae.”
“Blech. That’s better.”
Since the Earth Shaker, my stomach sometimes hurts like it’s being stabbed from inside with little elfin swords. I scrape my spoon over my plate to get the last thin layer of brown sauce, almost lick it but decide not to. Not that Ez or Hex would care, though.
Ez finishes his baked beans and is rummaging around the van looking for hidden cans of extra food, old nutrition bars, anything edible. He finds a compartment built into the back of the van and opens it. “What’s this?” he asks. He takes out a large wooden box, painted black. Inside is a map.
Maps always remind me of my brother, how he covered the walls of his room with the free ones we got in the mail and ones he meticulously drew and colored himself. And, something else: Merk mentioned a map. You need to find them. There’s a map in the van. I’d forgotten.
On this map, a route, marked in yellow neon highlighter, goes from Los Angeles through the desert to Las Vegas.
“This is what he mentioned, right, Pen?” Hex asks, examining it. “He seemed pretty deliberate about giving you the van. I say we go to Vegas.”
“I don’t think so. Who knows what that guy was doing? It might be some kind of a trap,” says Ez.
Hex eyes him sideways. His voice is terse, impatient. “He gave Pen a van with fuel and food. That doesn’t sound like a trap to me.”
“He said my family might be there,” I tell them. “And, anyway, where else will we go?”
But before we follow the route on the map, we decide to go up into the hills to survey the city so we know what we’re dealing with if we try to leave. None of us really want to see the truth but this isn’t a time for shielding our eyes.
Up what used to be Beachwood Canyon—now a cracked cement road covered with dead palm and cypress trees and lined with fallen Craftsman cottages, Spanish adobes, and Normandy castles in varying states of collapse and ruin. We reach the fire road that leads to the Hollywood sign. It used to read Hollywoodland but the letters fell down decades ago; now we’ve lost the o-l-l-y-w so it just reads H-O-O-D.
We park the car behind some rocks, slather ourselves with sunscreen from the Giant’s store, and walk on foot. Hood City stretches below us, for as far as we can see—a dark expanse of fallen trees and buildings that look like they were made of carelessly crumpled paper; nothing green; small fires burning, spontaneously, even as we watch. The air stings my eyes and there are particles of soot in my mouth. Here and there, I think I see something big and slow and fleshy lumbering along below us but it could be my imagination.
There is nothing, anywhere, that has not been touched by disaster. I wonder if this is what we’d see if we had an even greater view of the city, the country, the planet.
Ez is standing catatonic, staring out at the view.
“Ez?” I say, afraid; it’s like he’s back in his cake-induced trance. “You okay?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Ez?”
Hex shakes his shoulder. “Snap out of it, man, we don’t have time for this.”
“I didn’t realize it was this bad,” Ez says, his eyes blank.
“The Earth Shaker,” I say.
“But all the people? Where could they all go?”
“Remember Frakk?” I say. “There are more like him.”
“I thought I hallucinated that. I mean, Giants with pig heads?”
“Unfortunately you didn’t,” says Hex. “Times are hard on the boulevard. I saw that written on a wall once.”
Ez puts his hands over his face and starts to cry, little breathy gasps, his shoulders shaking.
I put my arms around him. We’re both so thin that our collarbones bump, hard. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not! My family’s all dead. My brother…”
I try to make soothing sounds but I’m thinking of my own family—what they thought of when they saw the wave coming, terror like being held in a Giant’s palm—and it’s hard to be of comfort. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No!” Ez looks at me like I’ve slapped him. “I don’t want to talk. I want to die. Life was hard enough before.”
Hex breaks a twig with his boot. “Be glad you’re not dead. We’re the lucky ones.”
“Lucky?” Ez glares at him through a film of tears. “How are we lucky?”
“You had a family,” he snarls. “Not everyone does. And you lost them but you’re alive. You have a chance. They don’t.”
“Listen, stop!” I sound like my mom breaking up an argument between Venice and my younger self. “Stop it! Let’s get out of here.”
There’s one more place I want to see before we leave this town.
11
THE MUSEUM OF ANGELS
AS WE DRIVE THERE I explain to my friends—there are three reasons I want to go to the museum.
One, my mom took us almost every weekend since before I could walk. We did arts and crafts in the courtyard, explored one gallery each time, and ate croissant sandwiches at the café.
Two, some of my favorite works of art are there—Monet’s Nymphéas with the large water lilies, a melding, glowing blur of color and light, painted by an artist losing his sight to cataracts. Georges de la Tour’s Magdalen, which seems like there’s a candle burning behind the canvas. Rodin’s bronzes—the centauress, her human torso straining to be free of her animal haunches, the devilish minotaur grappling with a naked nymph, the crouching woman who looks like she’s either giving birth to the earth or being born from it. Robert Graham’s column has doll-sized, bald, naked women half-emerging from inside (or imprisoned, it’s hard to tell).
Three (and this is also a reason I don’t want to go): to see if any of it still remains. In spite of the impressive exterior with clustered old-fashioned street lamps and modern black stone waterfalls, the Los Angeles County Museum always seemed a little apocalyptic to me because of the tar pits.
We arrive at what was once a park and see black goo gubbling up from the ground; in ancient times it claimed mastodons and preserved their bones for scientists to study. I wonder what will happen now—who, if anyone, will find our remains and trace them back to a civilization that self-destructed. I’m afraid to think about what has happened to the works of art inside the buildings but from what I can see in the near distance, the structures are still standing and this makes me curious.
“We should leave,” Hex says as we stand at the edge of the tar pits, gazing up at the museum buildings to the west. There used to be a father-and-baby mastodon statue on the shore, watching the mother drown in the tar, but now all three statues lie broken, belly up in the black pool. “I have a bad feeling. I’ve seen enough.”
Ez nods in agreement.
“Please,” I say, tugging on Hex’s T-shirt sleeve. The collar pulls away from his tattooed neck and his tendons look taut as the strings of a musical instrum
ent. “Just really quickly. I want to see inside, if anything is left.”
He frowns at me. “I need a cigarette.”
“Please, Hex.” I look at Ez, thinking of his masterful sketches of Beatrix and the Dutch still-life sketches on napkins. “What if the art is still there? We need some art. You’re like me, right, Ez? You need it. Like food.”
“He needs his jugular more.” Hex puts his fingers lightly around Ez’s throat and Ez acquiesces. Poor Ez; he’s at Hex’s mercy. “Those monsters could be there.” At first I think he’s still joking when he says this but there’s something different in his voice, under the tease. Fear? I want to be the one in charge this time. Convince him that I can be brave, too. Protect him if I have to. But I don’t think I will have to.
“What are you going to do if you find art, Pen? You going to steal some and put it in the van?”
“I’m going to remember,” I say. “When there was art.” The images are stories. They help me to escape. They help me to see.
Ez nods. “I want to remember that, too. There was a Hindu watercolor of eight mother goddesses on animals fighting these little white, bloody demons.”
“There are lots of demons,” Hex says, eyeing the smoky skyline. “Do you really need to go into a museum to see them?”
But he goes with us anyway.
* * *
We enter the oldest building first. The glass door has been smashed but inside the dark rooms the art still hangs on the walls. We walk around warily; Hex has his sword drawn. I can’t believe how much is still here. Why hasn’t it been destroyed or looted? A shiver like chipped ice slides down my spine.
On the wall before me, lit by a thin beam from the skylight, is a drawing by Odilon Redon of a hot air balloon shaped like a blown-up human eye. I saw a print in my mother’s art book of a Redon painting of a hillside, that looks made of petals, insect wings, and semiprecious stones, on which lies a sleeping nude woman. A bald Cyclops with protruding ears hovers above her. It used to register as almost charming to me, the shy-seeming monster. Now the thought of the single floating blue eye makes me sicken and cringe.
I turn to an oil painting by Elihu Vedder of a landscape of clouds above peeling-back layers of dark teal, jade, and white surf. It’s called Memory and if you look closely you can see a child’s face emerging from the sky. It reminds me of Venice, the way his sweet, round face floats in the clouds of my mind. I turn to call my friends over, to show them …
Then the building shakes.
“Pen!” I hear Hex calling for me but I can’t see him. The room is too dark and now the wall in front of me is cracking into pieces, the art falling to the floor, glass frames shattering.
Something is here with us.
Something grunting, reaching out a massive hand to me.
“My bride,” he says.
12
THE GIANT’S BRIDE
AS THE BUILDING CRUMBLES around me, crumbles to dust, I am lifted up and carried away in that hand. I’m screaming for Hex and it feels like an organ is being torn slowly out of my unanesthetized body. Hex and Ez are there, in that building. I’m pleading and screaming and kicking. The thing lifts me out into the gray light of day. Stink of tar in the air. I see his face; he looks like the Giant I blinded but he has two looming eyes.
“Please!” I say. “My friends are there! Please!”
“No friends. You are my bride. I must fatten you.”
“My friends! Please don’t leave them there.” In delirium I’m asking for him to go after them? But better than seeing them crushed to death—somehow we could escape a Giant more easily than an earthquake? Or is it better? Could we escape, even together?
“No,” he says again.
He carries me to the other museum building, the newer one with the high ceilings. He grabs the flimsy partitions, cracks them between his hands, and thrusts them aside, leaving space so he can walk through the rooms.
A delicate bed with a pale blue hand-painted headboard, decorated with clouds, ribbons, and cherubs, stands waiting. He places me on it, holding me with his thumb—the thick, clammy weight on my chest—while he uses rope to fasten me there. Bristling, braided rope cutting into my skin.
“I must fatten you.”
He exits, heavy footsteps making the room shake, but it doesn’t fall. I wish it would. I scream for Hex and Ez until my throat is raw as if with infection. The room spins and grows dimmer and then goes black.
* * *
When I wake it’s to the smell of food. Steaming, fatty meat, the first meat I’ve seen in months. It’s glistening on a plate in front of me. The Giant is crouched down watching my face.
“You must eat.”
Meat. But there are no animals to hunt. Only a few humans …
I feel whatever small amount of food is in my belly gurgling up. I cover my mouth with my hand and shake my head.
“My bride must be fat.”
I shake my head, gritting my teeth to hold back vomit. No.
“You will stay with me and give me sons.”
A terror as of something ripping my body in half. I turn my head away, flailing under the rope trying to free myself, chafe burns at my wrists and ankles. “Let me go!”
The meat. What is it? Who is it? I scream for my friends as if they can hear me. I think, I will be slaughtered and eaten. Like this.
I have no scissors, no sword, even my voice is failing me, turning into a wretched squeak. I stare at the meat. The Giant tears off and holds up a long strip. Then he pinches at my jaws the way you would do to a stubborn dog and tries to shove the meat into my mouth. I bite at his hand and he slaps me so my head snaps back.
When my jaw falls open he wrestles the meat in and covers my mouth with his palm until I swallow it down. The gaminess. I can taste nerve endings. My eyes fill up with tears. He does it again. Strip, pinch, shove, slap. And again. Then he leaves.
All I want is to stick my fingers down my throat as far as they will go but I can’t move my bound hands.
But my merciful body takes over, spewing the unchewed meat across the floor.
I lie in the darkness with something boiling inside of me like I’m going to explode. What I keep seeing, again and again, is a giant Beatrix ballooned to ten times her normal size, lying on an ornate bed with Hex pinned to her naked breast like a broach.
Delirium. What is nightmare, what is hallucination? What is reality? There was a night when my parents were fighting:
“They’re doing something. Evil. I can’t tell you. They could harm us. Maybe I should go away,” my dad said.
“David, you’re not making sense. What do you mean by evil?” My mom wept.
My pillowcase was wet with tears and mucus. At least Venice was at a sleepover, not having to hear. If he were there I would have run to him, held him, comforting myself just as much that way. But it was better he wasn’t there. Was our father going crazy? Would we lose our home, have to live on the streets? Noey didn’t have room for us; Moira’s mom would never take us in. Fear is a Giant. It feels like something was pushing at me, breaking me open, turning me inside out. My mother was crying. She didn’t come to me because she couldn’t hear me through her sobs. Is that why? She didn’t come.
* * *
But then I hear. I hear the voices, soft as the wind in nonexistent trees. “Pen, hold on.”
“Hex?”
Like a vision, like a Pre-Raphaelite painting of an androgynous-looking hero come to life. He has his sword at his side and with it he slices the ropes and sets me free. I’m trembling and nauseated, shaking when I stand, but I lean against him and Ez and they lead me out of there, my rescuers, alive. I have no idea how long it’s been.…
The van waits for us by the tar pit. The Giant is nowhere to be seen.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, sobbing, curled in the backseat with Ez as Hex drives. “I thought you were dead. I thought…”
“Hush now, sparkle princess. Hush. We’ve got you.”
“He sai
d he wanted me to make him sons. He fed me something…” I’m going to vomit again. “What did I eat?”
Ez holds my head on his lap. “You’re safe, okay. You’re safe. Everything is going to be okay.”
“No more stops,” Hex says. “Even for art’s sake, baby. We’re blowing this nasty town.”
* * *
When I wake up I’m screaming for water. “I ate it! I threw up but I ate it. What did I eat?”
Ez is driving and Hex lifts me to a seated position and holds me against his chest while I sip the water he gives me. “It’s over now.”
“But what was it? That I ate. Was it human?”
“The Giants probably have animal meat,” Ez says. “I’m sure it was an animal.”
“Pen.” Hex makes me look at him. “It’s over. We don’t have the time or energy to look back now. Okay? We’re all safe.”
My hands go to my head. There is something in my hair, drying, crusting now. I recoil. “What’s in my hair!” I pull-pull-pull at it, screaming.
Hex grabs my wrists and holds me still.
“Cut it off! Shave it off. I don’t want hair. I don’t want to be … I don’t want a body. It’s not safe! Cut off my hair.”
“Pen?”
“Now! Hex, now! You understand! I know you understand. Now!”
“When we stop the van,” he promises, as if speaking to a child. “When we stop, I’ll cut it. We have to keep going now. To get away.”
Hex holds me close for the next hour or so, calling me baby girl, singing me snatches of songs. Later, he does as he promised, carefully trimming my hair close to the scalp, then using precious water and soap to wet and lather and shave away the hairs that are left. I’m clean. I’m like a boy. Don’t even need to see my reflection. It doesn’t matter how I look. I can breathe again. I can speak.
“How did you survive? The building looks like it collapsed.” I try to keep myself from crying but tears tickle and prick in the corners of my eyes, so strongly I feel the sensation in my naked scalp.
Love in the Time of Global Warming Page 7