Love in the Time of Global Warming

by Francesca Lia Block

  I say, “Giants must love it here.”

  “That’s the point,” Hex tells me from my lap. I didn’t know he was awake.

  “Where should we go?” Ash asks.

  I look around at all the fallen castles and arches and towers. Where would my mother be? I have no idea.

  We decide we need a plan so we set up camp behind a large stack of broken Grecian columns, shattered golden Buddhas and medieval candelabras, splintered gondolas, ransacked suitcases, destroyed slot machines, and the now familiar human bones. Ash keeps watch from on top of a Louis XVI chair with torn upholstery, his lyre at his side. Hex builds a fire and Ez puts some soup in a pan to warm.

  “Last can o’ tomato,” he says.

  “Don’t remind me,” Hex mumbles. “I like the tomato. It reminds me of rainy days. With grilled cheese.”

  “I thought you only liked junk food.” I punch his shoulder.

  Ez wrinkles his nose at the soup and runs a hand through his red curls. “I don’t remember what an actual vegetable tastes like.”

  “At least we have the stuff from Tara,” Ash says from his post.

  I prefer metallic tomato soup any day to pickled roots that look like homunculi and unrecognizable meats.

  After we eat, Hex suggests we read passages from The Odyssey aloud for inspiration. Maybe we’re stalling but it feels like we need more fortification than tomato soup, and words can do that when food is scarce. So can kisses but that doesn’t seem like an option right now.

  Usually Hex reads to us but he thinks we should all take a turn tonight. I ask Ash if he wants to read while I keep watch, but he shakes his head.

  “It’s okay. Not much of a reader.” He looks out at the black sky hanging low over the rubble of a Giant’s ruined playground. “My mom used to tell me how stupid I was. That I was a stupid fag and I was going to hell. I guess she was right about the hell part.”

  My body clenches with righteous anger at his mother and I don’t know what to say to this—Ash never mentioned anything about his family before. We are all walking around with pain. I realize how little we know about one another.

  Ez is silent too—he just tightens his jaw—but Hex won’t let something like this slide.

  “Fuck that,” he says. “If all the stupid queers are so bad why are the four of us still here?”

  We all laugh in a bitter way at Hex’s words. It’s something I wonder about almost every day—why we were spared when so many weren’t. We might all be queer but stupid we are not. Still, why are we on this journey then? Maybe it’s a bad idea.

  Ash throws a glance back over his shoulder at Hex. “Wait, since when are you queer?”

  “I am not what I once was,” he answers and though Ash and Ez exchange a glance, no more discussion seems to be needed.

  “Maybe we have superpowers,” Ez says. “I mean, besides the basic natural queer superpower.”

  “My superpower is love.” Hex gives me the smile that makes my body hurt with the effort of not grabbing and kissing him. “Mad skills. I can take you to other worlds, believe me.”

  I can vouch for that.

  “What about you, Ez?” I ask.

  “I have no idea. I’m a coward and a sugar addict? I don’t think that qualifies me.”

  “You’re brave,” Ash says from atop the golden chair. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  “And you’re a musical genius,” Ez replies. “Pen’s our storyteller.”

  “I don’t have any powers,” I say. “Let alone super.”

  “Not true.” Hex’s face is lit red above the leaping flames he’s brought to life. “You’re still discovering them all.”

  “You’re the god of fire,” I say.

  He lifts his hands above the flames as if he’s controlling them. Then he says, “When the thing happened, the Earth Shaker thing…” He pauses. We’ve never talked about it before—the moment it happened, what we did, how we felt. It’s been too hard to think about. But maybe we’re stronger now.

  “I was living at the Culver Hotel. I’d just gone to sleep after doing an apocalypse set for December 21st. Those Mayans had it going on. The flames were all around me, eating up all the curtains and the bedspread. I just stood there, like fully mesmerized, waiting for them to get me. And then it all stopped. They died down around my feet.”

  We are quiet, staring at Hex. I remember how he seemed to control the flames at the Lotus Hotel. He grins and I can see he’s embarrassed. “Good times.”

  “I had something similar,” Ez says softly. “I was at my parents’ house, with my brother. The floor was rolling like a dragon was under it, and things were falling on me. I got down in a ball and covered my head with my hands and kept screaming, ‘Stop, stop, please, Gaia, Ki, Terra, Zemyna, stop this, please listen to me, goddesses of the earth.’

  “This huge bookcase was teetering.… I knew it was going to crush me. I closed my eyes. Then it stopped and the bookcase fell in the other direction.

  “But when it was over, my family…”

  I grab Ez and pull him close. He buries his head under my chin. “I’m sorry I snapped at you when you asked about him, when we were at the Hood sign.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “His name was Eliot,” Ez says. “We were identical. But he was totally different. He was brave.”

  Ash blinks at him with eyes like a fawn’s. “I’m so sorry.”

  “We all lost people,” Ez says, wiping his nose on his T-shirt. “I’m sorry.” He addresses this to Hex.

  Hex is chewing on his knuckle and I bet he wants a cigarette. I think about him by himself in his room, facing the flames, alone at dawn, no one to lose. How I wish I’d known him, Then. I think of him sitting next to me in the dining room in the pink house, holding my hand under the table while we eat burritos in mole sauce, my mom lecturing him about not drinking sodas or smoking.

  “In some ways it’s a lot easier when you don’t have anyone,” Hex says.

  It’s his way of apologizing. Ez nods at him, acknowledging this.

  Ash squares his shoulders against the night, not looking at us. He’s ripped the sleeves and lower pants legs off what Hex called his “twee suit” so he looks ragged and tough. “I was lifted up by the wind. It carried me across the desert. It carried me like I was a piece of paper and landed me inside the T-Rex.”

  Nothing surprises me anymore. I can see Ash flying like an angel through the desert, his ropy dreads buoying him up, arms outstretched, eyes shut.

  I close my own eyes, imagining, and when I open them everyone is looking at me. “What?” I say, not meeting their three sets of irises—amber, jade, and celadon. “What?”

  “Tell us,” they say.

  I did not part the waters. I am not capable of anything special except reading encyclopedias. I did not part the waters.

  But I do remember, before I passed out, that I held up my hands to the wave that was hurtling toward the front door of my house, the part of the flood that took my father. I stopped that wave and it subsided and drifted away. I saved the pink house. I saved myself.

  We are all insane. But how do you distinguish sanity from insanity, how do you diagnose abnormality in this new world?

  I finish my story and we are all very silent for a long time.

  “We have to forget this,” Hex finally says. “We are here for a reason and it’s not to think we’re gods now.”

  But whether we are demigods or deluded children, where do we look first?

  So many ruined hotels around us.

  “Why don’t you all rest,” Ash says. “I’ll stand guard.”

  Hex narrows his eyes. “I think you may need more than that harp thing to protect us.”

  Ash shrugs and with one deft hand catches all of his dreads up in a hair band. “Lyre, not harp thing. Maybe not. But I’ll wake you if I do.”

  Hex’s expression says Since when does this guy talk back, but he lets it go. I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep. Not only because I’m
anxious but because the close proximity of Hex’s body is causing a stirring in me like a warm breeze in the oasis fan palms. When we lie down he puts his arm around me but he doesn’t touch me anywhere else and soon he’s asleep. I can’t get comfortable. The mattress in the back of the van is thin and I can feel the wire springs sproinging into my back. Ez, lying on the backseat, is breathing evenly, asleep, too. I can see Ash outside the window of the van, poised on the junk pile, just a shadow. He looks so vulnerable there and I wonder if this was a good idea.

  I’m just drifting into a dream of Hex’s hands on my body, hoping it’s real, when I hear the soft rippling sounds of the lyre and I sit up. Why is Ash playing? I open the door of the van to tell him to stop—Hex will wake up and kill him for giving us away with the sound—but Ash’s back is to me, his hand gesturing for me to wait. There is something commanding about him and I stay where I am and look past him to the dark beyond.

  A huge, naked female figure with thick rolls of pink and white flesh is hunkered in front of Ash. A pair of pale, froggy eyes in a bemused, sagging face watch him like he is Mesmer, the original hypnotist. She seems to see nothing else. Ash continues to play the lyre, looking directly at her. He has taken his dreads out of the hair band and they blow in the wind around his face. He appears as if he might fly into the air at any moment.

  I hear someone behind me and see Hex fully awake, holding his sword. I catch his eye and shake my head no. Ash knows what he’s doing right now, though I may have doubted him before; this I try to psychically convey to Hex. But I don’t need to. Because the Rubenesque Giantess is closing her eyes, the lids falling shut, heavily, as a child’s do in entranced sleep, her whole massive body slumping.

  Ash backs up, as if he’s protecting us with his body, and gets into the van and spirits us away into the night.

  Ez wakes and sits up in the back of the van, rubbing his eyes. “What?” he says.

  Hex pats Ash on the back as he drives. “Ez, your friend just earned his keep.”

  19

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE

  WE’VE PARKED THE VAN again and armed ourselves. Walking through the city, I feel like a parade of live hors d’oeuvres for Giants, here for the taking in spite of Hex’s sword, our knives, and Ash’s seductive lyre.

  I’m out of breath and need to stop. Hex gives me a sip of water from his canteen. I’m careful not to take too much; even with the supplies from Tara we don’t have enough to last us very long. We left some for her, in case she came back.

  No one is in the cartoony-looking medieval castle with its smashed turrets and ramparts. The half-size Eiffel Tower lies on its side among white and pale blue plaster and crystal chandelier rubble. A green plaster Statue of Liberty is cut in half at the waist, all that remains of New York, New York (and perhaps more than what remains of the real New York).

  But smoke rises from the black pyramid flanked with fake palm trees, an indication that someone is there. So that is where we decide to start.

  We stand at the paws of the giant plaster sphinx. Its kohl-rimmed eyes look startled and dead at once. I lean against Hex’s shoulder and close my eyes for a second, seeing small rainbow pricks of light on a black background as if I have my palms pressing to my lids. How will I be able to go inside?

  Ez takes my hand; I can’t tell if he is comforting me, or himself.

  “What do you want most?” Hex asks softly, staring at the cracked pyramid.

  “My family,” I say. And you, I think.

  Hex nods.

  But what if my mom and Venice aren’t in there, what if Tara was forced to direct us here, what if it’s a trap? Still, my brother never stops crying for me in my mind.

  The lobby smells like smoke, stale at best, deadly at worst. Immense gold pharaohs surround us and gold columns engraved with hieroglyphics hold up the soot-blackened ceiling. A large pile of bones in a fire pit in the middle of the gold-and-black tiled floor tells us we’re probably at the right place. Hiding in shadows, keeping our distance from the red light cast by the flames, we head toward the casino.

  There, Hex draws his sword and we all take our places beside him.

  A Giantess that resembles the last one, except wearing an Egyptian headdress, sits still as stone, holding a slot machine in her hand like a toy. She presses the levers, staring blankly at the pictures of bright fruit and animals, ignoring us.

  We pass unseen, still part of the shadows, into the café. There are three more Giants here, two males and another female, eating slabs of meat they tear from carcasses hanging from the ceiling, and slurping liquid from silver champagne buckets placed below the dripping dead animals. Drunk on blood, satiated, they don’t seem to know we’re here. The creatures, with their shadowed eyes and sunken mouths, and the slabs of raw meat hanging from hooks, remind me of the Francis Bacon painting I used to look at obsessively.

  We pass the drunken Giants and go into a smaller room. A woman lies on a table in one of the booths. I come closer and she holds out a bony, stick-fingered hand. I feel as if I’m dreaming, walking through a thick cloud, like I can’t reach her. Hex and Ez are on either side of me, Ash walks behind. I concentrate on that—that they are here, that I am not alone.

  “Penelope,” the woman says.

  I don’t let myself cry, don’t want to believe it’s her; the pain will be too much if it isn’t.

  When I used to feel pain I tried to calm myself by imagining the parts of a flower—the calyx made of sepals, the corolla made of petals, the androecium made of stamens, the gynoecium made of carpels. But you can’t get rid of all the pain that easily. Once it’s there it’s like water traveling up from the roots of a plant through the xylem to the leaves.

  The woman has on a white gown that looks like it’s made out of a tablecloth and her hair is straggling around her thin face. Her head and hands appear too big for her body. Her eyes are rimmed with long lashes. And they are gray. When I was a little girl I used to think she looked like the goddess Aphrodite, whom my father read to me about from the books of myths. The glamorous bone structure, slim waist, full breasts and hips. At that time, all I wanted was to be like her when I grew up. Or, maybe, no? To be worthy of her in some strange way.

  “Mommy!” I fall down next to the table, my face crumpling with the force of the realization, unable to contain the emotion any longer. “Mommy!”

  “Penelope?” She is crying but her mouth is still the same. The mouth that kissed good night, whispering “I love you, I love you,” so many times I couldn’t count. And it didn’t matter because there were always more I love you’s until there weren’t.

  “Can you get up? I’m taking you with us,” I say. “These are my friends. They’ll help.”

  She smiles at them. “Beautiful, all of you,” she says. “So beautiful in this dark place.”

  “Can we carry you?”

  She shakes her head no. “I can’t leave here, darling. Didn’t they explain?”

  We lift her from the table; she’s so light I could carry her by myself but I don’t want to. She feels like she’d break into little pieces if I dropped her. Her hands are around my neck and she looks into my face, her voice as dry as her chapped lips. “Look at your eyes.”

  She doesn’t say anything about my tresses being gone but her hands reach for my skull and I let her stroke the short, stiff hairs.

  I remember how we never stopped cuddling, kissing each other on the lips, even when I was an angry thirteen-year-old, fighting with her every day, running barefoot into the street saying I was going to find another family to live with. And that night we were in my bed together while she smoothed my hair and warmed my asphalt-pocked soles on her calves until I fell asleep.

  “What happened, Mommy?” I ask. “What happened that day?”

  Her lips tremble and thin to lines. “There was so much water.… But somehow, it didn’t touch us. I don’t know how. But your father…” She stops speaking and her eyes fill with tears again, her mouth falls open, wordless. />
  Daddy. With his wild hair, high forehead, the horn-rim glasses balanced on his long nose. The surfing scientist. He loved the sea, had chosen to live by the sea. How could the sea have taken him? But she said, It didn’t touch us. She and Venice had been saved somehow.

  My father’s ghost fades from my mind and I see my brother standing there in his place.

  “Where’s Venice? Mom?”

  Her hands grip tighter, stronger than you’d expect. She shakes her head and her mouth wrinkles in on itself like the little apple-head dolls we used to make in another life. “I don’t know. I don’t know what he did to him.…”

  My throat is full of ash. “Who?”

  “The man brought me. He knew of you. He was looking for you.”

  “What man?” I ask, already guessing the answer. There is only one man I know of who is looking for me.

  “Kronen.”

  Hex touches me with his shoulder so I can feel the heat coming through his shirt. Kronen. Father of the Giants.

  “How did he know you were my mother?”

  She looks around the room, then whispers so I have to lean closer. “The walls have ears. And sight.”

  I think of the people at the Lotus Hotel, the sirens, Beatrix, even Tara, but I can’t believe she would have harmed us.

  “He was angry at us before. At your father. They worked together and your father didn’t like the experiments he was doing. When your dad tried to expose it, his life was threatened, Penelope. We were all in danger, even Then, of more than just losing our home. I should have believed your dad.” Her voice is low, confused, and mournful sounding. She reminds me of a homeless person, mumbling to herself on the street.

  “You mustn’t let him find you.” Her hands dart up to my face, worrying the air around me as if trying to cast a spell of protection. I lean down to kiss her cheek, skin pale and dry and papery, crinkling over sharp bone.

  And then I’m startled out of this dreamlike moment.

  “It’s Pen, the Giant-blinder,” says a voice.

  I turn to see a man, not much taller than I am. “Where are you going?” He speaks with a calm that is worse than if he had raised his voice.