The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust

  I wrapped my arms around it. It was balloon-light, but unwieldy as a mattress, and I dragged it to a clearing where a cypress stump made a crooked seat. I sat down and rested with Phil’s gift at my feet. It looked overfilled, pregnant and impenetrable, and I knew it could hold only what he had once seeded in the Garden. All I could do by opening it was learn. I wouldn’t live experiences with him or see them through his eyes. I would only know what had happened to him.

  “Just the facts, ma’am,” I told the seedpod, and slit it with my thumb.

  It pooched open, and I reached into it. I pulled out a slippery green seed and knew what Mississippi collard greens taste like in Cleveland.

  I nearly threw the fuzzed and golden sunflower seed back for the ticklish slobbery facts it imparted.

  And then a powdery orange seed told me a taste I already knew, and memory tightened the edges of my tongue: the citrus-sweet memory Phil had meticulously constructed as a gift for me. More than a memory. A secret.

  “Oh Jesus,” I whispered. “Oh, no.”

  I squeezed the edges of the split-open husk back together, grateful that the halves knit themselves closed. I walked yards and yards away from the pod. This wasn’t a symbol. Symbols are inert in the hands of those they don’t trigger. This was a trigger. It was all the ammo there ever was against Phil. Every one of his switches.

  Sometimes Why flickers like a lightning bug. Sometimes it cracks like lightning. Right between your eyes.

  I picked up the seedpod and held it close to my body and let the filters lift. My cypress bench and the little pond where the frogs moaned all began to slip, and when the ground under me was good and runny, when I was starting to sink, I pressed the weightless seedpod which housed the heaviest things I knew away from me. I buried it in the undifferentiated mud of memory where it would grow and bud and flower in intuition and not knowledge. I pushed until I was certain there was nothing left for Celeste to eat. Then I opened my eyes.

  From: Ren@Incrementalists.org

  To: Phil@Incrementalists.org

  Subject: Re: Gift

  Wednesday, July 6, 2011 6:41 pm GMT - 7

  I’ve unpacked and put your things away.

  Come home.

  Phil

  I drove slowly, because it isn’t safe to drive when you’re tearing up, and, by God, I was going to make it there without being pulled over, or hitting anything. Nothing would be wrong on this drive. Too many things could go wrong after it, but nothing on this drive.

  I felt my heart beating.

  It’s only a couple of miles from my house to The Palms. I could have walked; I often do. But that would have taken too long.

  I arrived, and I delivered my car to valet and went in the front door—that wouldn’t take me past the poker room. There was exactly one person I wanted to see.

  The elevator took forever to arrive, and the ride up slightly longer than that.

  I made myself walk, not run, down the hall.

  “Come home,” she had said. Jesus.

  Don’t be stupid, Phil. Go slow. Don’t go touchy and grabby before you know where her head is at. Don’t make things worse.

  I stopped in front of her room; I knocked and the door opened instantly, like she’d been waiting behind it. She looked up at me and I took her in my arms and crushed her, and she buried her head in my shoulder and I felt wetness there. I kissed the top of her head and squeezed until I was afraid I’d hurt her. Somewhere, miles away, the door snicked closed behind us.

  “There are so many problems,” I said. “But I—”

  “Phil.”

  I stopped.

  “You really do talk too much,” she said.

  Ren

  Sometimes a life pivots in a way you can’t fight or deny; the first warning sign is your old self dead at your feet. Sometimes what you need is the opposite of what you want because it makes you reach for it. Sometimes none of the constructs or plans or pivot points matter.

  He was all that mattered. The taste of his mouth on mine, the solid unyieldingness of his body that my body wanted to wrap and mold and form itself around. Everything else felt irrelevant and trivial to me, and we almost shredded our clothes trying to get free of them fast enough to fill our hands and mouths with each other again. There was no fear, no pulling away or even holding back, nothing reserved or restrained or considered. His hands hurt me, and I wanted them to. His mouth took from me and I wanted nothing left behind.

  Sometimes all you are is want.

  “Lie down,” he told me, and I climbed, naked, into the center of my big hotel bed, knowing he watched me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, eyes refocusing on mine once I was lying, only undressed and wildly awake, exactly as I had when I first opened my eyes after he’d staked me. “I didn’t mean to sound so—”

  But I held his eyes and opened my legs, and he stopped talking with a noise like the sound of something breaking in his chest.

  “Turn over,” he said.

  I twisted onto my belly, and even though I only wanted to arch my back and raise my ass to him, I couldn’t stop it from rocking. I couldn’t hold it still.

  “Turn back,” he said, in a voice I knew would not be able to talk in words again tonight.

  I rolled again onto my back, my hips dancing against the coverlet, my breasts heavy with needing his hands on them. He walked from the foot of the bed to the side, beautiful, primitive and naked, looking down at me, and my thighs and breathing. My belly and squeezed-tight breasts shook with wanting to be where his eyes touched.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, leaned over me and took one breast in his open mouth. I think I screamed. Or I whispered something stupid. My fingers were in his hair, untwisting the band that held it, pulling my body deeper against his insistent tongue and unforgiving teeth.

  Then he was on top of me. In a single uncoiled spring, he went from sitting by me to pinning me. My arms wrapped his back. My legs wound his. He pushed into me.

  And it was enough.

  My body gasped around him, and suddenly, it was enough. Enough to have his back under my hands, his body and mine occupying the same space.

  And just as suddenly it wasn’t. Wasn’t enough, would never be enough, couldn’t ever hold everything I felt. He reached a hand down my back and lifted my ass up hard against him. He caught his other hand in my hair. And this time, I know I screamed.

  But he kissed me. He held me pinioned, inside me, on top of me, and under me. He held me, gripped and mastered. Held me slave and savior. Held me still, and kissed me. I twisted under him.

  My tongue and hips and breasts ground in hungry circles. He took his mouth away and tightened his grip on my hair and ass, and pressed his temple against mine. And I saw through the Gardens.

  All of them.

  The patterns overlapped, and I saw the symbol for symbolic things. I felt the name for things that name things. I was—we were—the metaphor that tells how metaphor communicates. As he reached, and reached again into me, all the symbols dissolved. They ran in layers of meaning over my skin, and spun impossibly down into bottomless oceans of time, and past, and hunger, into a blackness that closed with a zip. Not Samsonite, but Eagle Creek for our summer house on Eagle Lake. And for a moment, I remembered everything. But I was pummeled by his wanting, and by my want reaching back, and it didn’t matter.

  If fear pulls away, love pushes in. For every withdrawal, a deeper penetration, and if I ever felt afraid again I would reach, not for Fibonacci, but for the simple truth that I was loved. And I would have told Phil that—I wanted to, panting under him—but words were gone with the symbols we swam in, were diving hard down into. I reached with my temple, touched it to his, and came in tiny vast compressions no smaller than forty thousand years of shared symbols, and no bigger than a pivot.

  SEVENTEEN

  What We Can Do

  Phil

  “Have you ever noticed,” I said, “that there’s something erotic about hotel rooms? I mean, just b
eing in a hotel room. Any hotel room.”

  “No,” she said. “Never noticed that. And especially not a Vegas hotel room. Nope, never noticed that at all.”

  She nuzzled her head onto my shoulder.

  A little later she said, “So, I take it you don’t mind that I was meddled with?”

  “I mind a lot,” I said. “I hate it.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” I slid down a little so I could kiss her, then slid back up. “I still mind that, but I’ve decided that will in no way prevent me from taking advantage of it.”

  She laughed, and her hair tickled my chest.

  “How about you?” I said.

  She was quiet for a little while, then said, “I don’t know. I’m still working it out.”

  “Is it ‘leave me alone to think’ working it out, or ’talk to me about it’ working it out?”

  “It’s let me think, I think.”

  “All right.”

  “We need to go to Phoenix today.” Her voice had a sort of scary stillness.

  “I know.”

  “I should get up and shower.”

  “Want me to scrub your back?”

  She raised her head and looked at me. “Yes,” she said.

  Ren

  Phil left to pack, his hair still wet from our shower, and I seriously considered paying too much for a bathrobe from the hotel gift shop. Instead, I called Elise. She and her boyfriend were both out, like I was hoping they’d be, but she gave me her apartment address and told me where to find the spare door key. I put on the clothes I’d packed for the flight home and took a cab.

  Elise’s place was exactly what I needed: quiet, pretty, and nowhere an Incrementalist would find me without some work. I changed the message on my phone in case Phil called before our appointed pickup time back at The Palms, and then I got comfy on Elise’s little, red-and-gold tapestry-draped sofa. Across from me, a TV perched on a large and rambling crimson bookcase, reflecting the gold-framed mirror on the wall behind me which, in turn, reflected the compact TV and the exuberant sprawl of books. I would have liked to have read the spines, but I was already short on time. I closed my eyes.

  Salt air and root beer, the undifferentiated mud of my memory. No wonder Phil had trouble saying who he was when he has had so much more time to survey, and his Garden is full and fruitful.

  My Garden, such as it was, stretched in front of me, still and peaceful, under a pale summer moon. At the very least, maybe I could roll it up like a dung beetle, into a doughy ball bigger than I was. I unzipped the Eagle Creek duffel.

  Celeste had made and hidden a secret backup of her stub; I was here to see if I could do the same. If you’re the reason Celeste has autonomy, our wisest action would be to kill you and retire the stub. Sorry, Jimmy, I’m not a martyr. I know that.

  I know it because Celeste taught me to study myself. And that moonlit strand of habit, from the journals I kept, through the philosophy books I read, to the psychology/design double major I took in college, that whole thread of deliberate self-discovery ran through my life like a strain of music. Its tune began with sheets stiff from the clothesline, softened by the humid bodies of my sleeping cousins, and wove dozens of instruments’ worth of people and places, with each of their hundreds of notes of separate clear memories, into a music—crunchy and damp—that sailed into my canvas bag. I was introspective, to a fault sometimes, but immutably. Packed into my duffel.

  It was not what I had expected. Where were my tidy seeds like the ones Phil packed when he gave me his switches? I’d swept them up in my song of introspection. It had been not just select, specific, symbolic memories that packed meaning into history, and came with the taste of trust or the texture of curiosity, but a whole symphony of who I was. A singing twig of a stub.

  And the one beside it was the other half of my double major. I’d studied psychology and not philosophy. And despite my life-long love of beauty, I took design instead of art. Because I was practical. Percussively. The drumbeat of worries my mom never shared but couldn’t hide about our rent and clothes joined the rattle of the fun we had at thrift shops shaken free by relief as much as creativity, and the ringing timpani of drugs I didn’t take, and the foreign exchange I did, rolled into a rich, dense ensemble, not of privation, but choice. Martyrdom is indulgence and wouldn’t have survived under this barrage of sound, even if it’d been innate. And the practical drum line marched thundering into the bag.

  Nana’s minced bird matzo ball soup, my switch for trust, played tuba in the courage band (I am brave, in part, because I trust people will help me when I ask), but it sang coloratura for sex. I could have watched that opera for hours, but a priest with a basso profundo started singing flat, so I went backstage.

  It was dark and vast, and every puppet, hanging by its strings on the back wall, had two faces. I picked up Practical and found Frivolous. I turned over my Strength and saw I was Broken too. And even though Know Thyself was already in the bag, I surprised myself with whispers I couldn’t quite hear. So okay, Oskar, it looks like I’m a dialectic too. And goddamn it, Celeste, fine; I am unfathomable. And yes, Phil; it’s a jumble.

  The Eagle Creek duffel was not a harmonious symphony of interwoven songs of myself—fuck, I contradict myself—but a roar of static, like a house on fire. But I was going to go out singing. Over the noise of all the signals, despite not knowing what the hell I was doing, I’d make up something loud. Not a memory from the Garden of all memory, but a dream from the fields of the uncreated of work and love. I thought about the RMMD which I now knew must record more than memories and information linked to auditory cues, but songs and stories as well. And I thought about Phil, with his dimple and eyebrows and his curiosity and conviction. And I sang, “Our memories aren’t all we are,” to the tune of “Camptown Races,” and I zipped it all up before the final “da.”

  I left Elise a note and twenty bucks for all the Cap’n Crunch I ate, and I put the key back under the ceramic frog.

  Phil

  It was about four hours later that I got back to pick up Ren. I paid for her late checkout because I felt like I owed it to her boss, and after Jimmy’s lecture about evil, I couldn’t bring myself to do even a light meddle on the clerk.

  The valet retrieved my car, we loaded up Ren’s suitcase and her laptop, and hit the road.

  “How do you like to road-trip?” I said.

  “Not as a verb,” she said.

  “Correction noted. Are you of the Stop Everywhere school, or the Just Get There school?”

  “Very much of the Just Get There school. You?”

  “I’m adaptable, but Just Get There is my preference.”

  “Good, then.”

  “Except you have to see the Hoover Dam.”

  “I’m fine with that.”

  She put her hand on my leg and I felt a smile grow. A little later, she said, “Do Incrementalists ever see the future? Get premonitions? That sort of thing?”

  “No. What are you feeling?”

  “Nervous. About Oskar and Ramon and Matsu fixing what should be our problem. Like something is doomed to go wrong.”

  I was quiet for a while, then I said. “I don’t believe in premonitions. In forty thousand years, I haven’t seen anything remotely like evidence, in us or in anyone.”

  “All right.”

  “So the feeling is coming from something else. Something you know or suspect or noticed but aren’t consciously aware of.”

  “That isn’t much better,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Are you looking forward to being home?”

  “Yes. No. I think so.”

  “You like Phoenix?”

  “I’d prefer Tucson. Hey, do you think we could do anything about that obnoxious new law?”

  “The immigration thing? Maybe. We sometimes do things on that level. Kevin did pretty good with the gay marriage thing in New York.”

  “That was us?”

  “
Well, it’s never that clear. We pushed here and there, and helped. Kevin was handling it. How much difference he made, I don’t know.”

  “We need to fire our people in California, then.”

  I chuckled.

  “What about the Green Revolution thing in Iran?”

  “Not us. Long, ugly arguments on that one, but in the end we stayed out. I think we were right to.”

  “Why?”

  “The heart of Mousavi’s program was cutting social services for the poor.”

  “Oh.”

  “Celeste wanted to support Mousavi, and lord, you should have heard Oskar.”

  “I can imagine.”

  I nodded. “But in the end, Goli had the last word. She lives there.”

  “Must be tough for her.”

  “She likes it. Says she’s doing good. And she’s crazy into the music. Don’t get her started on the first new creative music in two hundred years. Seriously. Don’t get her started.”

  Ren laughed and my heart flip-flopped.

  I parked the car and we got out and walked around and looked at millions of tons of water held back by concrete and steel.

  Ren said, “By we do you mean humanity, or the Incrementalists?”

  “What?”

  “You just said, ‘Look what we can do.’”

  “Oh. Did I? I meant humanity. It always hits me like that.”

  She put her hand on my arm and I grew about half a foot and my cell phone rang.

  “Are you going to answer it, or just stare at it,” she said after a while.

  “I might throw it into Lake Mead,” I said, but of course I answered it.

  Ren

  “That was Ramon,” Phil said.

  I watched the held-back water and didn’t say anything.

  “He wanted to know if either of us has checked email.”