Love in the Time of Global Warming

by Francesca Lia Block

  “I knew he was going to the beach and that he was in danger so Grace and I went after him. I went in and pulled him out of the water,” Merk told me. “He would have died. I still don’t know if he was trying to kill himself or not.”

  When Merk and my mom got my dad back and he recovered from the shock and pain of the news, he said he couldn’t have Merk around ever again. My father said he was willing to forget what happened, do what was right by my mom and raise me as his own but that Merk could never be a part of our lives.

  * * *

  “You rescued my dad? How did you know where he was? What do you mean you knew he was going to the beach?”

  “Like you do,” Merk says. “Like you know things. Since your eye.”

  Did I get this from Merk, the ability to tell Kutter’s story, to see my friends’ childhoods, to know things I couldn’t know? But my sight only really came to me after I lost my eye, as if that brought it on.

  “Why did you come to me now?” I ask Merk, looking out at the ruin around us.

  “Because I always stayed in touch with your mom about you, through e-mail. I never came to see you because I’d promised David. And it turned out, then, that I was hired by Kronen’s company. When your dad got fired for trying to expose what Kronen was doing I became ‘involved,’ let’s say.”

  “What do you mean by involved?”

  Merk’s dark, fevered gaze won’t meet mine. “I was supposed to keep an eye on him. Make sure he didn’t talk. After the disaster, Kronen sent me and a crew to look for your father. But I went to help you escape. You were in my mind and I knew you were alive. I can’t explain it; sometimes I just know. I owed you and David, big time. I’d almost ruined his life twice.” Merk winces slightly, shifting in his seat, and grips the steering wheel. “I was pretty far north and the roads were a mess. Some situations came up on the way. It took me longer than I’d thought to get to you.”

  But he did get to me and saved my life. The father who raised me could not have passed on the killing gene. But Merk could have, oh yes. And although my story helped me, it didn’t destroy my enemy. Maybe the ability to kill is all I have left.

  * * *

  When we get to what used to be my street, Merk stops the car.

  “Are you going to come with me?” I say. I’ve let him leave me twice before. I want to at least tell him that I need him now.

  “No, sorry. I’m only here to help you when you really need it. It’s the only way you’ll grow into your gifts.”

  “You sound like a clichéd fantasy movie.” I look at the wrecked landscape outside the car. “When I really need it? You think this isn’t hard enough? And what gifts? That’s just BS.”

  “No, it’s not. You know it’s not. I heard that story you told back there. You didn’t just make it up. It came through you. I know because I have abilities of my own.

  “And there’s more, right?” Merk continues. “Something that happened when the shit hit the fan. Otherwise you wouldn’t have survived.”

  I weave my fingers in my lap, not meeting his eyes.

  He means how I stopped the wall of water.

  “Pen?”

  Finally I look up and see something rising out of the gloom at the edge of the sea. It’s painted pink, which makes no sense beside the rest of the landscape; I think of Dalí’s rose in the desert, I think of Homer’s dawn. It’s a dollhouse grown huge. It’s a Giant’s toy. It’s mine.

  “Please, come with me.” I have no choice but to say it plainly to Merk, to beg him.

  He shakes his head. “You stopped the water, Pen. You’re strong. I’ll be back someday, if you need me. But for now I think what you really need is right ahead of you.”

  He aims a finger gun at the house.

  What does he mean? What I really need?

  “Merk…” I say, afraid to go, afraid to have it not be what I need it so much to be. Whom I need it to be …

  “Go ahead,” Merk says gently, enfolding me with his voice. “Go. You don’t need me now. You picked exactly the right place for me to take you. If you hadn’t picked it, I’d have brought you here anyway. I’ll unload your things on the porch.”

  There is one person I need the most. I get out and I run to my house.

  23

  HOUSE OF THEN

  NOW THAT LOVE HAS BEEN taken from me so many times (my mother, my father, my brother, Argos, Moira, Noey, Ez, Ash, and Hex, my great-and-noble-hearted Hex) I don’t know why I believe in coming here. But, somehow, I do.

  There was a painting from 1890 by an American artist named Edwin Romanzo Elmer. He painted his nine-year-old daughter Effie in front of their house under a lilac tree, a sheep and a kitten, a wicker pram with a baby doll. He and his wife sit in the background, dressed in black, while Effie stands in front glowing with sunlight. The clouds in the sky look as if they are made of brick because the white paint cracked over time. It appears to be a lovely if slightly weird pastoral scene, until you learn that the painting is called Mourning Picture and that it was created after Effie died.

  I feel like Effie returning to my house, returning from the dead. But unlike her I’m afraid I’ll find that everyone I loved has given up waiting and gone to the Afterworld without me.

  Houses are not homes. My father—maybe not my biological father, but my father all the same—told me that when he thought we would have to move. We never had to because foreclosure—a small disaster—was replaced by a much bigger one. We lost both our house and our home anyway. We lost each other and I know now that is all that ever mattered.

  But still this house by the sea, this house with its implacable façade (very much like the one in Elmer’s painting), its broken windows, and its ruined salt-encrusted yard (once there were purple morning-glory trumpet blossoms, once an acacia tree with pink flowers; there were sunflowers and citrus trees and vegetables), reminds me of what was before, reminds me of Then. I want to go inside and find my old room and lie down and dream this world away. I don’t care who else has occupied the place, what marauders have decimated it. I think that at least, at last, I will reclaim my land. I have faith, at least, in this.

  And more so because of the orange butterfly. I hold out my arm. It alights there, fanning its wings as if it has landed on a flower, on a sunny day, on a living planet. It stays on my arm, ticklish and fragile as a breath, as I go forward.

  With Hex’s sword at my side, the box of what I believe to be Tara’s bones in my hands, and the butterfly now flying before me, I walk over ground that is dry and cracked in places, saltwater marshy in others, toward the front door. It’s unlocked and inside it seems terribly quiet. I hear no boot steps, no breaking glass or shouting. Instead of the smell of territorial urine and fear-sweat I smell the saline winds that have blown through, blown it clean.

  I go up the narrow stairs slowly, unafraid, accompanied by my winged companion. I hold my sword to defend myself only until I reach my attic bedroom. Then it doesn’t matter if I die.

  Dried leaves cover the creaking floorboards, becoming dust. I wonder if there will ever be new leaves, new life.

  In my hands, the box of Tara’s bones seems to be telling me something.

  For what if I bury them in the ground outside this house? Would my acacia tree bloom? My father’s vegetable garden with carrots, pumpkins, tomatoes, and snap peas?

  I imagine him walking down the hall toward me in his dirty jeans, a bunch of carrots ripped freshly from the ground dangling in his dirty hands, feathery leaves and wrinkled orange roots that tasted so sweet. I sneered at them—stupid me. My mouth is a wasteland now, carrotless, despairing. I say to the air, all I have of my father’s ghost, “I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  My father taking a bite of carrot. My mother saying, “You’ll appreciate what we have here one day, Pen. It’s better than you think.”

  My brother saying, “Yeah, Penelope. Why don’t you appreciate anything?”

  “Why are you so annoying?” I reply.

&nb
sp; My brother crying. How could I have made him cry? He smelled like sunshine and yellow flowers and strawberries. He smelled like a world that is now gone.

  * * *

  Inside my torso it feels like a landslide of dry shale where nothing will ever grow again. Time to die. I am at the door of my room but the butterfly flies off down the hall. I hear something coming from the room next door, from behind the door where the butterfly circles as if trying to get in. My heart tumbles down a secret staircase inside my chest and lands hard in the pit of my stomach.

  I go toward the door and put my hand on the antique knob my mother chose so carefully. The house around me grows still as the breezes stop and the leaves on the floor rustle no more.

  Inside this room, the room where my brother once lived, a boy lies on a mattress. He is wrapped in a blanket and his hair has grown past his shoulders. Out of the blanket jut his limbs that are so thin. Dirt covers his face. I see his eyes, though, clearly, gray and hallowed as the eyes of the goddess in the old lore. A dog, skinny as a stick figure, pokes his snout out of the blanket and hobbles toward me.

  A small orchid in a porcelain container is sprouting tiny green whorlies of leaves. The room is full of butterflies and my butterfly joins them, becomes lost in them. Hex said that he thought the butterflies were souls of the dead, perhaps my father, my mother, guiding me.

  “Penelope?” the boy whispers. And I go to him; I go to meet my brother, to take him in my arms where the space he left has never closed.

  24

  LITTLE GREEN

  MY BROTHER ESCAPED Kronen and the Giants. In the midst of the Earth Shaker it felt like a hand had lifted him and my mother up and carried them out of the water.

  “It couldn’t have been a hand, we knew it couldn’t but then we saw it, the Giant thing,” Venice says. “It was going to … it almost … But then it saw other people running and it dropped us and chased them instead.” His voice has the high, strangled tone he used to use when he told me his nightmares.

  Venice and my mother ran for miles until they were caught by another Giant and taken to Las Vegas. My brother wasn’t sure why Kronen kept them alive, except that he said something about luring me to him after I blinded Bull.

  Venice was able to escape on foot. “I hid myself,” he tells me, “with my mind,” and I remember how he said he did that in his bad dreams, using his mind to hide from the monsters. That’s why Tara couldn’t see him. But in spite of this, Venice was taken in his sleep, when he finally collapsed from exhaustion among the ruins of a small chapel on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and was driven to the pink house by a mysterious stranger. Merk.

  At first Venice thought he had died and this was the Afterlife. When he realized he was still alive he began to hope that, somehow, I would come to find him. It was not me who came, though, but Argos. He arrived two weeks ago, limping, starving, but with lights still in those black eyes when he saw my brother. At first Venice thought he was hallucinating from hunger. They’ve been living on a small supply of canned food and bottled water Venice says appeared on the porch a few days after his arrival.

  “What happened to Mom?” Venice asks, huddling with his head between his knees so his voice is muffled and I can barely hear him.

  My hands stroke the jagged blades of his shoulders through his dirty T-shirt and my throat burns with the words I say to him. “She died, sweetie.”

  “Dad died, too,” he tells me.

  “Yes.” I don’t want Venice to see me cry now.

  He peeks up, and smooths out, with his small but still sturdy hands, the large map on the floor beside him. Another map of the world. It is large and it has almost all been colored in except for our state. “I made it for you. I’ve been working on it for a month, since I got here. I knew you’d come back before I finished it.”

  “You were right.”

  We survey it together, the jigsaw puzzle of ocean and land.

  “Did everyone die?” Venice asks, pleading with me to give him an answer that does not send him hurtling out into the stratosphere.

  I kiss the top of his head. His hair is greasy and his neck crusty with dirt. I want to tell him about Ash and Ez and especially Hex. Hex who taught me to fight and love, who held me against his chest that said Heartless but never was. Someday I will tell Venice about them. “Not everyone. We’re here. And Argos.”

  At the sound of his name my dog licks my face and follows the orange butterflies with his eyes.

  “And them,” I say, and point to the butterflies. “They’re still here.”

  “Why?” Venice asks, lifting his head. His eyes are red but he’s holding the tears in. Brave. I used to wonder if he felt too much pressure not to cry and if that was bad for him. My parents never said not to but he learned it on the school playground, on the baseball field. When he’d be up at bat I’d pray that he wouldn’t strike out and if he did I’d turn away, not being able to see him run off with his head lowered, biting his lip. I knew he was telling himself: Don’t cry. Boys aren’t allowed. They will be, now, in this new world. I wanted to tell him it was okay to let the tears flow. “Why are the butterflies still here?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re here and we have to keep fighting. Maybe there are other people out there, too. We can’t give up now.”

  His hand goes up to my face and I remember my bandaged eye. How it would terrify him if he saw.

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you sometime, later. It’s all right. I have another.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No, I don’t even think about it now. I can see you, that’s all that matters.”

  I stroke his cheek and he blinks at me, then looks out the window into the falling darkness. “Who are those things, those monsters? They’re here, too. Why are they here?”

  “That man, Kronen, created them somehow, genetically engineered them.”

  “How?”

  I remember how Venice’s questions used to irritate me—so many questions, the ones whose answers he knew and the ones he didn’t—and now I want them, all of them. “I don’t know exactly. He changed their chromosomes and then cloned them, I think.”

  “He said something about Dad.”

  “Dad worked for him. He tried to stop him. That’s why Kronen hated us. Even more when I blinded one of his Giants. But Kronen’s gone and I think we are safe from them. I don’t think they’ll hurt us anymore.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, but I don’t think we have to worry about that.”

  There’s a pause. Then, “Penelope!” He grasps my arm. “What will we eat?”

  His supplies are almost gone and I only have a small amount from Tara and Merk. Not enough to last us very long. I hadn’t even thought of that when Merk dropped me off.

  I pick up the box of bones I’ve laid beside us on the floor. I look at the orchid with little green leaves on a stalk that otherwise appears dead.

  “Did you see this?” I ask him.

  “Yes, it’s growing. I don’t know how. Can you eat orchids?”

  “Have you taken care of it?”

  “I found water outside,” Venice says. “Some kind of spring. I’m afraid to drink it but the plant likes it.”

  “I have an idea,” I say.

  We go into the shed behind the house. It smells of decay and mold. But packets of vegetable seeds and potting soil are still there among the ceramic pots and garden tools. I guess the men who came with Merk didn’t think there was a chance anything would ever grow again.

  “Show me the water,” I say.

  Holding shovels and spades and the seed packets, Venice and I go around the side of the house and he points to the ground. Among a cluster of rocks a thin sheen of water—not stagnant, but fresh—bubbles up from the earth.

  We get down on our knees and dig, the way we used to when our dad made us garden with him on weekends.

  “What are these?” Venice asks when I open the box.

  “Bones
. Of a girl named Tara.”

  “She died?” His eyes are big with sorrow.

  “Yes. But she’ll come back,” I say, not knowing why the words come out like that.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But she will.”

  I remember how Venice used to believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny. Even when it was obvious that our mom and dad stuffed the stockings, ate the cookies, drank the milk, hid the jellybean-filled plastic eggs. I was always trying to catch them at it when I was younger, but Venice never questioned them, or if he did, he always accepted their silly answers (Why did the Easter Bunny use eggs from our garage? He has the same ones, sweetie!), his eyes flooded with wonder then, instead of sorrow. He wanted to believe.

  In the same way, Venice nods now and when I look into his eyes I believe what I’ve said even more. I believe in death and destruction now, but also in magic. For I have seen all of it.

  We bury the bones with the seeds in the earth, and water them from the spring, adding a few drops from Tara’s glass vials. I wish, along with the plants, that my friends would grow up out of this earth in the night. As a benediction I recite some lines I remember from The Odyssey when Odysseus returns and gets his father, Laertes, to recognize him.

  “… We went among the trees, and you named them all and told me what each one was, and you gave me thirteen pear trees, and ten apple trees, and forty fig trees; and so also you named the fifty vines you would give. Each of them bore regularly, for these were grapes at every stage upon them, whenever the seasons of Zeus came down from the sky upon them, to make them heavy.”

  Venice and I go inside and share a can of fruit cocktail that Merk left with my supplies on the porch. We split a can of tuna with Argos. Then we all lie down on the mattress and I sing a song my mother used to sing to me as a lullaby; it’s called “Little Green.” Venice falls asleep.

  * * *