And the words crawl up my vertebrae to the nape of my neck.
* * *
Later we all say good night and head to bed. We are trying to conserve our candles for emergencies and so our days are determined by the rising and setting of the sun. I don’t mind because I have Hex to sleep with. He’s my personal flame.
We hold hands as we walk upstairs to my room, our fingers woven like threads making a quilt, a quilt that would tell a story of our battles, our separation, and our reunion. Argos always sleeps with his nose tucked into the curve of his body at the foot of Venice’s bed in the room next door to mine, and Ez and Ash have my parents’ old bedroom.
The floorboards creak under our feet, swollen with moisture that seems to have seeped into the entire house. I shiver with cold and with the anticipation of being held in my lover’s arms. When we reach the bed Hex faces me, takes my right hand, and holds it up to his chest so I can feel his heart, yes, thrombing under the tattoo that reads Heartless. Hex is the most heart-ful person I know but he likes to pretend he’s “badass,” as he would say. And he is that, too. He’s the one who taught me to sword fight, who fixed the leaking roof and scavenged for pieces of unbroken glass to replace the windows that were smashed in the maelstrom. Our pink two-story clapboard house might not be moisture proof but it’s pretty safe and solid compared with anything else I’ve seen out there—well, except for the Giant’s lairs but those don’t count.
“Feel that?” Hex says. “An excess of love, baby.” His pulse is so strong I can imagine the whole shape of his heart, as if I’m holding it in my cupped palm.
I put his hand to my heart, too. “No such thing.”
He lifts me up—even though we’re about the same height he’s always been stronger—and lays me on the bed. I shiver, cold until he eradicates the chill with the length of his warm body, his face buried against my collarbone so his hair tickles my chin. Outside I can hear the sea, our music mix. Sometimes I wonder what’s out there in that ocean, if any life is there, if a world still exists on other shores. Were the Earth Shaker, and the tsunami that followed, felt around the planet? Did other Giants decimate the population? I could wonder all night but now I just want to pray to my mother and listen to Hex’s heartbeat, just want us to remain in our secret place until we die.
“Why are you afraid of illusions?” I whisper to Hex as I taste the first intoxicating petal of the flower of sleep.
“Because I think we’re all going unconscious here in some way. And we can’t afford to. We have to be strong. You never know what’s coming.”
It’s almost enough to make me snap awake. But not quite.
* * *
I dream about my mother, Grace. She’s in my room with me—it’s so real. I can see her long hair and her white nightgown blowing in a salt-sea breeze that’s come through the window. Her eyes are the same bright gray as Venice’s eyes. There’s a coronet of gold and baroque pearls on her head and a white dove perched on her hand. She looks young and healthy, not the frail near-corpse I held in my arms just before we were separated for the last time. All this BS about being okay with the loss of her, as long as I have her memory, is gone. My heart is atrophying. Even in my sleep I feel tears dripping hot streaks down my face, taste their salt in my mouth. I reach for her, once, twice, three times, but each time she escapes me.
I know that my mother wants me to leave, go somewhere, but I don’t understand. She wants me to go to Paris? Athens? Rome? Venice! My mother loved that city the most, obviously; that’s why she named my brother after it. I remember our trip to Europe when I was ten. It didn’t seem like a real place to me at the time—the gondolas, the little canals running between the ancient, ornate buildings. Does Venice, Italy, even exist anymore? But that’s not what my mother means. No, something else. She wants me to go away from the house, to do something important. She shows me a tiny painting she’s made. It’s of a man with overlarge, palliative blue eyes, flared nostrils, full lips. And a crown of antlers on his head.
I ask her who he is and she says he’s the king and that I must go find him. I ask if she can go with me. It’s the only way I can do it, I say. She shakes her head, no, she can’t. I’ll have to do this by myself. The world is depending on you, she says.
What world?
* * *
The next day I wake with Hex spooning me. It’s so cozy-dozey here, and warm, why would I ever want to get up? But something propels me. In spite of the cold and the veil of sleep still clinging to my body, I go to the window. The sky is its usual gray, not even a few streaks of rose glimmering through the clouds, and the sea just outside our house is liquefied lead.
On its surface, moored against a rock I see a wooden ship, creaking softly—perhaps that is the sound that woke me. The large tattered sails flap in the wind. A coldness goes through me as if I’ve been immersed in the morning ocean and goose bumps blast up on my arms and shins.
Before I can wake Hex I hear the front door open and see a figure run out of the house toward the ship in the water. Venice.
“I’m coming!” he cries. He is stumbling and falling, getting up again and running with his arms outstretched.
I race downstairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door.
“Venice! Stop! What is it?”
He doesn’t seem to hear me. As I catch up with him and touch his shoulder he turns and stares. I realize he is sleepwalking—that blank expression. Sleepwalking was something that terrified me as a child—lack of consciousness in motion, like the reanimated dead, the revenants who peopled those old black-and-white zombie films played on TV at witching hours. I say his name again.
“There’s something out there,” Venice whispers, his sea-gray eyes pooling bigger.
And then my little brother’s hair bursts into flame.
2
OMENS
STOP. DROP. ROLL.
I throw myself on top of Venice, and I’m screaming, screaming for Hex who knows the ways of fire. I can smell the bitter char of burning hair, hear the sizzle but I don’t care if I burn to death; my brother is not going to be harmed. He’s the one who has to survive in this post–Earth Shaker world. He’s the reason I survived this long. Maybe my sole purpose is to sacrifice myself for him.
All these thoughts rage through my mind like flames as I tackle my brother, trying to put out the fire with my own body and the wet ground.
The next thing I know, Hex is holding me, saying my name over and over and telling me to look. I don’t want to look. I don’t want to see any more destruction. I can’t take this loss, above all.
“I’m all right, Pen, I’m okay.” It’s his voice—Venice—and I force myself to open my eye.
“What happened?” I reach to touch his hair. It’s all there, longer on top, shorter on the sides, neatly trimmed by Ez’s scissors just a few days ago, as if Venice had gone to a professional salon. We teased him then. Feels so long ago.
“What happened, Hex? I saw it.…”
“We did too,” Ez tells me, touching his own red hair as if making sure it didn’t get burned off either. He and Ash are sitting on the wet ground with us. “We ran out after you and when you touched him it stopped.”
“Did you feel it?” I ask Venice, pulling him almost roughly against me with the force of my relief. Argos pushes his nose under my armpit, trying to lick Venice’s face. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“I’m okay, Pen. It’s okay. I didn’t feel anything.”
“It seems like some kind of collective hallucination,” Hex says.
“Like a spell,” says Ez.
“Spooky,” Ash adds.
I let go of Venice and turn to press my cheek against Hex’s. “What’s happening? I just want things to go back to normal.”
“Normal? Never. None of us are normal, Pen. Thank god for that.” I can’t see his face but I swear I can feel him smile. Then his voice is gruff again. “None of this is normal. You better get used to it. But any problem that comes
up, we’re going to handle it together, okay?”
Nodding my head, wanting to bury into him. The mud is seeping through my sweatpants and I realize how wet and filthy we all are. A cold white light is trying to break through the clouds. It’s officially morning and suddenly I feel exposed, watched.
Ez gets up, then Ash. “Let’s go eat,” Ez says.
Hex stands and pulls me up with him. Venice lifts Argos in his arms, the dog’s muddy paws further staining my brother’s T-shirt.
We’re all standing there looking toward the horizon and then I remember how this whole thing started. The ship.
I put my hands on Venice’s shoulders but he doesn’t try to run toward the ship this time. He’s just staring at it and his eyes are unreadable.
“What is that?” I say but the last word comes out in a shivering stutter.
“We’re not going to find out right now,” Hex says. “Let’s go inside.”
I’m glad to get away from the ship. It could be anything. There could be Giants out there in the ocean, lying in wait. There could be other humans who might want our food and our water supply. Or the ship could be empty. For some reason this seems just as terrifying and even when I get inside and change into dry clothes I can’t stop shivering thinking about what has already happened this morning.
Ez takes a ration of almonds from our stash and roasts apples on the hibachi stove for breakfast. After we’ve eaten and fed Argos we all gather in the living room and close the curtains so we can’t see the ship swaying in the dark waters, as if it’s watching us. We try to stay busy with our morning meditation and yoga class, our reading and drawing and repairs—I’m mending some shirts and Venice is attempting to fix a broken chair—but it’s like we can’t really concentrate. Hex has taken his sword down from the wall above our bed and every so often he reaches for it as if to reassure himself. But we skip sword practice today; it’s always hard to get Ez and Ash to comply and Hex, Venice, and I are too worn out from the morning incident to try to convince them. But as the day drawls on I can’t sit still anymore.
“We need to do something about it,” I say, finally. Before I wanted to get inside the house but now I feel like I’m going crazy just sitting here.
I do a quick checklist of our abilities, trying to see how we could use them against an ominous ship or what might be aboard it. There are Hex’s sword-fighting lessons and we regularly lift the weights my father kept in the basement, Ez cooks and guides the meditation and yoga, and Ash’s music saved us from being eaten by a Giant. Ash once flew; Ez kept furniture from crushing him during the Earth Shaker; Hex put out fires; Venice once hid himself from the eyes of Giants and he has a supernatural ability with growing plants. And me, I stopped a wall of water from destroying my house during the Earth Shaker and after I lost my eye I began to see random visions of people’s pasts, although it’s happened much less lately. None of our gifts sound particularly promising.
“I don’t want to explore just yet,” says Hex. “I don’t like the effect it had on Venice.”
“But that’s the whole point. What if that happens again?”
We all look at Venice but he’s busy hammering away at the chair, singing softly to himself. Sometimes he gets a very peaceful look when he’s working, as if he’s back in our old life, minus the video games. Well, minus just about everything.
Finally he looks up. The peaceful expression is gone. “I won’t let it get me again.”
“I’m not going,” says Ez. “Pen, we just have to wait it out.”
I get up and go to the window but I don’t open the curtains. “Wait what out? Wait for them to attack?”
“Who’s them?” Ez says. “We don’t know if anyone’s there at all. We don’t even know if it’s real.”
“What, you think it’s a figment of all of our imaginations like what happened to Venice’s hair?” I say. “Collective post-traumatic stress disorder?”
That’s our explanation for almost everything and it kind of makes sense after what we’ve been through.
“Who knows? It could be anything. We’ve pretty much seen it all, right?” Ash chimes in.
We pretty much have.
“What do you think, Ven?” I ask, since the rest of them seem to have made up their minds.
My little brother shrugs. “I can beat it now.”
“It looked like it was going to burn you to death,” I say, which I realize, too late, isn’t exactly going to help Venice feel better about what happened. But it might get my friends to change their minds and deal with the situation.
“But it didn’t,” Hex says. “It was some kind of hallucination we all had at the same time. An”—he pauses and then emphasizes the next word—“illusion. And what’s ‘it’? The ship? How do we know they’re connected? How do we know it means anything?”
Before I can stop myself I answer. “Because your book says it is. The fire was like what happened to Aeneas’s son Ascanius’s hair.” I pick up Hex’s precious Aeneid. “It was an omen.”
We all look at each other, six sets of somber eyes, including Argos’s.
Oh shit, not another prophetic book.
I mean, unless it is a children’s picture book about happy and slightly annoying animals or something. Not an epic about omens and wars. We already had to deal with that once, when our lives began to resemble Homer’s Odyssey.
And I had to bring up The Aeneid. Maybe I’m getting as obsessed as Hex is.
“What did the omen in the book mean, though?” Ash asks. “I can’t keep track of all your stories.”
“You have to start paying attention, man.” Hex frowns. “That they should leave and start a civilization of their own. That’s the whole point of the book. Be brave, venture forth, make sacrifices.”
Ash shakes his dreads as if they’ll push the idea out of the room.
“We already have our own civilization, here.” Ez puts his hand on his belly and his face blanches like he’s going to be sick.
Or maybe I’m just projecting because that’s exactly how I feel. I might be up for exploring the ship after seeing Venice’s hair catch on fire but founding civilizations is a whole different thing.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ez continues. “I’ve had enough of that shit.”
“We’ll see,” says Hex. I know this person: when he says, “We’ll see,” it means we’re going to do exactly what he has planned for us.
* * *
In bed that night he tells me he’s wiped out from the day even though we didn’t do much, really; the incident with the ship has affected all of us. I hold him tighter than usual so that he has to pry my fingers loose from his undershirt in order to shift his position. I close my eyes against the dark, my hand on Hex’s heart, and try to match my breathing to his, wishing he were still awake with me.
When I finally fall asleep I dream about my mother again. I’m calling her on the phone, asking her to come home. She says she’ll meet me somewhere so I start walking. On the way I pass a graveyard on a hill. I didn’t expect it to be there and it disturbs me. It’s crowded with bronze and marble statues marking graves, so many that there’s nowhere to walk. So many dead, I think, a world of the dead spilling down the sides of the hill. There are androgynous winged figures, women who are turning into trees, males with large heads and torsos balanced precariously on the small, delicate legs of goats, and one statue of the antler man from my other dream. Then I see a statue of my mother. I run to it but it’s difficult because of all the statues, all the graves in the way. Some of them are leaning over, threatening to fall on me. I get to the statue but it’s not my mother—it’s another woman with glittering eyes, and holding a spear. I see the eyes are holes and that there is a fire burning inside of the statue. A liquid substance is beading on her forehead and dripping down her arms. I touch it and see that it’s sweat. The statue raises her spear.
I wake shivering in a sheet of my own sweat and call for Hex. He grabs me around the rib cage and holds me until
I stop thrashing. I’ve kicked the covers off and he reaches to retrieve the blanket from the foot of the bed and pull it around us.
“Remember, it’s just an illusion,” he tells me.
I’m not sure if he means my dream or what happened to my brother. “You want to leave, don’t you?” I say into his chest. “Because of the fire. But I thought you didn’t believe in illusions.”
“I believe in Virgil.”
That old man again. “I don’t want to leave here. I know we have to at least go to the ship but…”
Hex says, “It’s okay. I promise, everything will be okay.”
“Why?” I ask him. I’m crying, tears running down my face like that sweat dripping off the infernal statue.
“Because I love you,” he says. “And that’s all we really ever have.”
He lifts my face to his and our lips find each other by instinct in the dark. As soon as we kiss my whole body relaxes like I’ve just been immersed in warm water, in a marble tub with gardenia blossoms floating on it and candles scented with lavender and vanilla burning along the rim. I stretch out so the soles of my feet rest on top of his delicate bony arches and then he flips me over onto my back. He props himself up and leans over me and I cradle his face in my palms. I can feel his hand stroking my throat, moving down to my breasts, massaging them while the other hand supports my neck. Then one finger trails from my solar plexus to my belly, over my pubic bone, between my legs. He pushes my thighs apart with one knee and moves his hand inside of me so I buck up to meet his fingers, coming almost right away. My body is so grateful for him that I want to weep again, but not out of fear now.
“Your turn,” I say.
Even after all this time Hex is still shy about letting me give him pleasure. I sit up so we’re facing each other cross-legged, holding hands.
“Okay?” I ask. I feel like I always have to check in with him first.
“Okay.”
So I push him down on his back and position myself between his legs, my mouth on him, his hands in my hair. He moans, a shudder going through him, and I’m struck by how vulnerable he can be, but only with me, only in our bed.
The Island of Excess Love Page 2