A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  The commotion is happening in the street-level parking lot behind the mall.

  A big tree-trimming truck rolls down Harlem and stops in the right lane, blocking traffic. The driver gets out and starts putting orange cones around the truck. Nick hands me a pair of binoculars and points down the driveway toward the parking lot at the back of the mall.

  Then I see it.

  It’s kind of like a really long, really fat green tomato worm, the kind that half crawls, half humps, looking for something to chomp. Its long, fuzzy, green back goes up and down, humpety-hump. Slowly, very slowly, it seems to cut at an angle across the parking lot behind the mall. It’s headed straight for where Nick and I are standing, next to the tree-trimming truck.

  The police are trying to keep the path in front of the tomato-worm thing cleared. Behind them in the parking lot, I see commotion, and I can tell they didn’t succeed entirely. A hook-and-ladder truck is extending its long red steel tongue, up-up-up, twenty feet in the air, now twenty-five feet, now thirty. Somebody’s yelling for help from the top of the green hump, which rises, carrying him with it.

  I use the binoculars Nick has handed me. The guy is sitting in a tree. And the tree is rising almost as fast as the fire-truck ladder is rising.

  On Harlem, cops are directing traffic away from the intersection.

  Nick pulls me aside, out of the way of another fire truck. A gas company truck pulls up behind the fire truck, and then three more. Guys get out and stand around, looking uneasy. The gas company is really concerned. I know why, but I wait, watching.

  Now I see that the tomato-worm thing is coming out of the ground. I hear popping and tinkling as chunks of pavement rise, are wedged up, or crackle and slide away in a shower of masonry bits. A small river of sewage runs along the mall driveway into the rear mall lot and exits into the gutter. The green tomato-worm is coming closer. I can see its bright yellow nose erupting out of the pavement, moving at a slow, steady eighth-of-a-mile per hour, toward the intersection.

  Firemen, looking ready to die and carrying axes, walk beside it. Something big goes bang underground, and the firemen leap back. A plume of white shoots into the air, only thirty feet away from me and Nick. We clutch each other, but it’s water. Just a water main blowing.

  And then the intruder is right in front of us. It’s a little brown lump, a root, a knob of bright yellow wood inching up out of the asphalt, ten thousand times faster than it would move in nature. Here at our feet, it’s only a few inches high. Ten feet behind, it’s two feet high. Thirty feet behind, it’s as high as the firemen, who take a few careful ax-swings and lop the tops off of the trees which are growing up right under a bunch of electric and telephone wires.

  “I’m thinking mulberry,” Nick says. He steps back. Together we fade away from the line of action to look along the row of trees, straight as an arrow, coming up slantwise across the parking lot, through the hoods of parked cars, nicking the corners off buildings, relentless and oblivious to the works of man.

  The guy stuck in the treetop is being helped down the ladder. I raise Nick’s binoculars. Yes, he’s all over purple streaks of berry juice. The trees back there have already fruited.

  Meanwhile, the line of sprouting trees has slowed. It’s coming straight toward us.

  Nick grabs me by the arm and yanks me back. I resist. I want to see this. But he’s determined, so I let him pull me away.

  In the middle of the intersection, the concrete heaves ever-so-slowly.

  A tiny crack appears, right at our feet. And then it stops.

  I see a ripple of something, not quite wind, maybe the growth impulse bouncing back and forth along the tops of the trees. The ripple passes back along the line of saplings, hits the ripple coming forward, sends up a spike, a taller tree in the center, and then ripples slowly back toward us where we stand at the corner of Harlem and Irving.

  We’re standing at the end of a line of trees, now.

  After a few bounces, the growing seems to stop. The trees seem to stand still. I think, Hey, maybe they’ve slowed to normal growing speed. Then the first purple berry plops down on my face.

  “You little idiot,” Nick hisses. “Are you never afraid?”

  I look at him. His big sensitive face looms over me, full of worry and exasperation.

  Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching pigeons dive into the flames, but I want to get through his thick noggin. I say abruptly, “What if someone offered you your heart’s desire? Would you ask for what you want? Or would you ask for the means to get it for yourself?”

  He looks stunned.

  At the sight of his shocked face, my smarts come back, and I shut my mouth.

  Now I’m afraid. I just came this close to telling him everything.

  The moment passes. Nick takes the binoculars back. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What is your point?” I say, exasperated, as we get in the car. “What’s with the grand tour?”

  “Your city is under siege,” Nick says to me. “Bad things are happening. You seem to think it’s some kind of fun-ride designed for your amusement.”

  My mouth falls open. “Where did you get that idea?”

  And here comes the scold. “You approached the blue zone without safety equipment and without backup,” Nick says, making the Cherokee skid around a corner. “That was dumb. And against orders. Today I showed you what happens when a city can’t fight magic.”

  I keep my temper. “Nobody can fight magic,” I say. “That’s kind of why it’s magic.”

  “Bullshit,” Nick says. “You might as well say, Nobody can fight fires, or the common cold, or economic inflation. My point is, you’re not immortal, Hel. Bad things happen. Grow up.”

  His voice is hard but there is a little ragged note of worry in it.

  I refrain from smacking him in the head and spattering his brains over the windshield.

  Because Nick is afraid for me.

  That’s so sweet. Horribly misguided, of course, but he’ll never know that, if I can help it.

  “Nick, nobody got hurt today.”

  He turns on me, incredulity and anger in his face. “What do you mean, nobody got hurt? Did you not see the fire trucks? The ambulances? The flames twenty feet high? The gas company is terrified one of those trees will break a main and send a whole neighborhood up, kaboom! Even if nobody gets killed, it’ll cost millions to replace those streets, the buildings the trees damaged, the gas station, people’s cars—”

  “And they were all there, cops and fire and ambulances and the gas company, ready for it to happen. And nobody got hurt. Not even that doofus who tried to climb a tree.”

  “They were not ready. You can never be ready for what may happen.”

  I square off to him. “You were. How come, by the way? I didn’t hear you running the police band on the radio.”

  His face shuts down. He points the car eastward again. I have hopes he’ll take me home now.

  I’m still wondering how he knew where to go.

  He drives down the ramp southbound onto the Kennedy. “Nick!” I protest. “It’s rush hour. No!”

  He looks in his rear-view. “Can’t get off now.”

  I look back, too. Cars are backed up behind him to the light, all trying to join the rush. “You goof,” I say. “It’ll be solid pink.”

  “I know.”

  Well, it’s not as if everyone else in the city isn’t also trying to get on the Kennedy right now. We’re all goofs.

  We drive slowly into a wall of pink smog. Visibility is about eighty feet. Everybody is very careful not to actually touch bumpers with anyone else, but we’re all tightly-packed within half a car length, as far as the eye can see, which as I say isn’t far. Where we are, people are honking their horns. Ahead, everything is quiet.

  I slump in my seatbelt. “Goof,” I mutter.

  Nick says, “Relax. Our chances of disappearing out here are about the same as our chances of getting killed by a drunk driver. Less. Look at
all these people. They clearly think this is not their day to die.”

  “They’re goofs, too,” I grumble. The honking fades and we slide into silence and near-zero visibility. The tacky Jeep hood ornament on Nick’s Cherokee begins to fuzz away into the pink smog. I sit motionless, breathless. The motor dies.

  Without thinking, I put a hand out and touch him on the arm and leave my hand there. I can now feel everything going on in his body, as if I’ve stuck my finger into his electrical socket. I also get the rush of a lifetime. It doesn’t suck at all, being trapped alone with Nick in silence, in a car where nobody can see us.

  Nick is controlling his every breath. His belly muscles are tightening every time he exhales. His shoulder muscles loosen every time he inhales.

  “You asked me,” he says, “how I knew all that stuff was going to happen right then, right there, today.”

  I’m controlling every breath, too.

  Nick tightens. “I’m drawn to magic.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “How does that work, exactly?”

  This sounds like the kind of malarky I read on the internet, on the blogs of wannabe magicians and vainglorious fourteen-year-old satanists and fierce, blackly triumphant paganoids who want to believe that Mother Nature is getting back at us for all those styro burger boxes and non-recyclable Pampers.

  I drawl, “Oh, tell me. Can it be? Are you the reincarnation of an Egyptian high priest of Ra?

  “No,” Nick says. He sounds defeated. “I’m just a poor schmuck who can always find trouble before anybody else does. Big whoop.”

  He turns sad eyes toward me. I believe him.

  “That’s gotta suck,” I say sincerely.

  “You have no idea. You scared hell out of me when you went to the blue zone alone,” he says.

  I want to say something, probably not “Fuck you,” but “Thank you” seems inadequate. I look out the window at thick pink fog.

  He says, “Ever since we met, I’ve had the strongest, I dunno what to call them, premonitions, feelings about you.”

  If “feelings” means “boners,” I already knew that.

  What if it doesn’t?

  I look back. He can’t sense the truth about me, can he? Hairs lift on my arm.

  “Something’s about to happen to you, Hel, something magical. Something huge. I have no idea why it hasn’t happened yet. Usually I get a few minutes warning, maybe an hour. If it’s not actually old news, old magic.”

  I practically swallow my tongue.

  He turns worried eyes on me. “I wouldn’t tell you ordinarily. What would be the point? If I feel it’s about to happen, then it’s going to happen. But—” He hesitates and I feel a decision crack through his body like lightning. His energy has a do-or-die flavor right now. “Hel, I don’t usually have time to get to know people before it happens to them.” He smiles bitterly. “I’m like the medical examiner who never sees the corpse until after the bad things are over.”

  He puts his hand over mine on his arm. I’ve totally forgotten I’m touching him. That’s because I’m such a hideous prana addict that, once tapped into his energy, I can’t stop myself from sucking it in.

  “I don’t want to have to watch this happen to you. Whatever it is. Please, Hel. If I warn you, it’s to protect you.”

  I make a stupid, meaningless noise.

  He says, “Watching you skate, I realized something. You’re fearless. You’re probably the only fearless person I’ve ever met. I mean, really fearless. That’s inspiring. I wish I could throw myself into the world the way you do. But you’re so young, Hel. You don’t know what there is to fear.”

  My chest heats up. Oh man, I think. Do I wish you were right.

  “Imagine doing what we did this afternoon all day, every day. That’s my job. Looking for new stuff before it happens. Charting it. Praying somehow we can prevent it. Knowing we can’t.”

  I don’t want to imagine it. “How long have you—”

  “Since Pittsburgh. At first I thought I was going crazy.”

  There’s a long silence. The hood ornament reappears. Then the bumper in front of us. We inch forward through the pink, just half a car length behind that bumper. I draw prana off him like a tree sucking up the first desert rain. It’s making me a little giddy.

  He has more to tell me. I can feel him working himself up.

  “It’s not just that I know it’s about to happen.” He looks at me now, and I see real fear in his eyes. “It’s that I’m drawn to it. I — I want it somehow. It makes me feel good. Good.” He shakes himself all over like a wet dog. I feel terrible shame in his energy. “That’s just wrong.”

  Boy, do I know what he means. “What did you do before you joined the agency?”

  “I was a cop.”

  “Where?” I say, but I think I know.

  “Pittsburgh.”

  I blurt, “Whoa. That’s like being the last firefighter to get out of the World Trade Center alive.”

  “I was in Hawaii on a leave,” Nick says. “I got back after the government closed the city. But I couldn’t stay out. I broke the law. I had family back there. Friends.”

  “You went in?”

  “I had to.” He swallows. “It was hell. Food riots, looting, armed gangs ruling the streets, unbelievable violence and fear and destruction. Imagine if you can. No power. No food, no clean water. God knows what it’s like now, after three years.” He stares out the car window at fluffy pink nothing. “I found my parents’ bodies. Their house was a smoking hole in the ground. Eventually I found my girlfriend’s body, too.”

  The only polite thing to do is to keep my mouth shut.

  He says, “I was too late.”

  I feel like a vulture for asking, but I have to. “But what was the magic doing? Was it worse than here?”

  Every Chicagoan wants to know the answer to that question, and nobody who knows is outside the hastily-built wall the Feds have put up around Pittsburgh.

  “About the same.” He shrugs. “Animals and plants doing weird things. Blue zones. Even the gangs were staying out of the blue zones in Pittsburgh. The population was slowly vanishing into the blue. I saw one guy go in for four seconds. When he came out, he was tearing the hair out of his own head with both hands. Anybody who goes in for longer than that, they never come out.”

  “Except me.”

  “Except you.” He turns his eyes on me, fearful and questioning.

  “It’s only a teeny blue zone, the one here,” I offer. “I wasn’t there long. And I’m no crazier than I ever was.”

  He doesn’t seem reassured.

  “But, Nick — those awful things — the riots and mobs and things — that was because the government cut the city off. If they had allowed food and water and power to go in, people wouldn’t have had food riots. If they had evacuated, people wouldn’t have gone nuts and run into the blue. The government did all that damage. We have the same magic here. You said. Only we really are fighting back. The Hinky Policy is helping us. It’s giving us time and headspace to figure out how to, I dunno, get on with it. Live with it. We’re not just — just panicking and doing a Bush Katrina on it.”

  I feel his energy waver. He isn’t so rock-steady certain as he pretends.

  I keep talking. “So your solution was to quit being a cop and go join the bad guys? Sheesh, Nick. Great logic, not.”

  His voice gets hard. “I’d rather put my knowledge in their hands than just let it run wild. I can’t let it rule me. I can’t blunder around the world like some drunk, always high on magic, out of control, taking pleasure in other people’s disasters.”

  This hits way too close to home for me. “Pleasure?” I’ve been loving being here in this car alone with him, sucking on his life force. Now I feel guilty again.

  He slumps. I feel his emotion go dark. “Yes. I told you. I’m drawn to magic. It — it gives me a high.” He pulls free of my hand on his arm and puts his head down, presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I like it,” he
tells the steering wheel, in an agony of remorse and wonder and rage.

  I feel for him. He’s a good guy in a bad guys’ world.

  As one of the bad guys, I yearn to give him some advice. Don’t hate yourself so hard. You’ll burn out. Pace yourself, like me. You’ll last decades longer that way.

  I hear car horns honking. The pink fog clears in front of us. Nick steps on the gas and we crawl faster.

  I give him a cockeyed look. “Are you trying to scare me? Because it’s working.”

  “Yes,” he says, and a huge sigh falls out of him. “Yes. I’m trying to scare you. I want you to survive whatever’s coming. I want you to stay away from the blue zone unless you have backup, and equipment, and training. Stay away, unless and until you absolutely have to go there.”

  I smile, worried. “I wouldn’t be going there at all if you hadn’t put the sting on me.”

  “I know.” He sits silent, then says, “I didn’t know you then.”

  “You—” I start to say.

  You don’t know me now.

  “You’ll be careful,” he states.

  I look over my shoulder, out the side window of the Cherokee, at the cars chugging slowly out of the pink smog.

  When I think of all we’ve seen today, I shudder. “Yes.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I get home and find the cat is missing. What on earth? It’s only an hour after my usual coming-home time. I go all over the apartment, calling her, and finally find her up inside the lining of the box spring, where she goes only when she has done something so unforgivable that she knows I’ll need a couple of hours to cool off after I find the cat pee on the stovetop or whatever.

  “What’s the problem?” I say, when I reach up under there and feel her fur. She shrinks away from me.

  I tip the bed up on its side and she leaps free and dashes for the bathroom, another retreat of last resort. I put the bed down slowly and follow her. She’s cowering in the tub, her tail fluffed, sending dirty looks at me.

  “Dude,” I say. “What the heck?”

  Then I feel all my hairs stand up, too.

  I look around. There’s an unfamiliar smell in here, shampoo, dandruff shampoo by the smell of it. I sniff. Gun oil. New rubber. A toothpaste I’m not using. The cat had a visitor while I was out.