Love in the Time of Global Warming

by Francesca Lia Block

  I knew eventually we’d be apart. I’d applied to study art history at NYU, Moira was going for fashion design at FIDM, and Noey had a scholarship in photography at Purdue.

  Sometimes we had slumber parties in my room and I’d make up stories to help them sleep—tales based on the myths I’d read or the paintings I’d seen. Tales of the great heroes of the past, who sailed the seas, fought monsters, and rescued their friends and lovers. I made up words, too, which drove my friends crazy. (“Faunishness,” Penelope? Really?) Sometimes I made Odysseus, Aeneas, and Achilles into heroines instead. My friends liked that twist, although it wasn’t always easy for me to do since the original stories were so male-oriented, the women in them often so passive or cruel.

  Moira, Noey, and I lay together, our long legs stretching out and entangling in our sleep. In the morning sunlight flitted through the trees, over their faces like a flock of butterflies, and I’d watch my friends while they dreamed, wondering if my stories were playing out inside their heads.

  * * *

  The butterfly is the first sign of life I’ve seen since the Earth Shaker. Lepidoptera is the scientific name. It sits on my windowsill, hardly moving its orange wings—veined with black like some elaborate stained glass. I want to look at it under a microscope, the horny proboscis and the tiny scales on the wings. My mother made collages with butterflies and had her own design of them tattooed across her back—four in various descending sizes to represent our family. I want this one to fly in here with me. The air outside is ashy and smells of smoke and rotting garbage. My room isn’t much better but at least there is shelter. The solitary orchid my parents bought me on my sixteenth birthday is just a brittle stalk in a pot of dirt, but I bring it over to the window anyway.

  The butterfly doesn’t move.

  “Are you dying?” I ask it.

  I think it is dying.

  Why are we here—just us and no one else? Is this salvation or the worst of punishments?

  Today the butterfly is still alive, but a piece of its wing is missing. I’m sure it will die in a few minutes, an hour at the most, but later in the day it is still holding on. I wonder how it can be that tenacious; I would have given up long ago.

  But maybe it has a reason to live, someone or something it needs to see.

  I would wait forever to see my parents and Venice, Moira and Noey and Argos, but the chances of them coming back here are probably as slight as this butterfly growing a new wing and taking flight. Still, I am too afraid to leave and search for them.

  Later that day the mutilated butterfly takes off into the gray sky and I wonder if it is trying to tell me something I’m not ready or willing to know.

  4

  THE MARAUDERS

  IT’S BEEN SIXTY-EIGHT DAYS now and the hundred and twenty cans of food my disaster-conscious dad left for a family of four are more than half consumed, three quarters of the bottled water gone, in spite of my careful rationing.

  The men come when I am sleeping. I wake to hear them outside in the darkness, shouting, laughing, and at first I think, Someone is here! To save me!

  Then a voice shouts, “Overland’s crib? Not bad. Weathered the fucking storm.”

  Overland! My dad.

  “Noah’s fucking ark. You think he’s still in there?”

  “Never know. If not, maybe the family. Heard the wife and daughter were hot.”

  “Any live female with legs would look hot to me just about now.”

  “You’d take anything with legs, man, live or dead.”

  “Fuck off.”

  I feel as I did in childhood nightmares where I became a Giant, my limbs tingling and thick and huge, paralyzed in my bed. There was a painting I found as a child, on one of my obsessive searches through my mom’s art books; it was attributed to a follower of Francisco de Goya. Colossus had the stomach-tickling, skin-prickling allure of something I wasn’t quite supposed to see, and showed a bearded Giant looming among storm clouds, above a scene of fleeing people and animals, his haunches turned to the observer and his head vanishing into blackness. That was what I became in my nightmares—the Giant. But I was not empowered by my size; I was dying from it.

  And that is what I become again when I hear the men in the yard.

  I can’t move.

  Pounding on the door. For a moment I wait for Argos to bark, my little-man dog that thinks he can protect me from everything. But he’s gone, too. There’s no one to protect me. My father filled the basement with all those cans of tuna fish, beans, anemically pale vegetables, and neon-bright fruit, all that water, but in spite of his talk about conspiracy and danger my mom never let him get a gun.

  I heard my parents arguing about it more than once, after he lost his job—my dad saying we weren’t safe, we needed protection, and my mom telling him he should see a psychiatrist. It was out of character for my dad, the idea of having a weapon. My parents were modern-day hippies, always believing in love and peace, never imagining a world where families and friends vanish, the sea eats the land, and men come in the night and pound on your door.

  And break your windows.

  The sound of glass shatters the spell of the Giant and makes me leap from my bed. Through the windows I can see shadowy, shambling figures in tattered clothes surrounding the house on two sides, standing on the strip of sand that isn’t flooded with seawater; there is no way I am going to be able to get past them. In the mirror on my closet door, illuminated by the flashlights in the yard, is a pale, bony-faced, heavy-lidded girl with a flat chest, dirt smears on her cheeks and chin. Only her waist-length hair under her brother’s old baseball cap gives her away.

  I grab a pair of scissors in a plastic sheath—a weapon or a means to a disguise—and I head down the back staircase to the basement.

  I notice that my hands are steady; they don’t shake as I open the door with the key that I keep in the lock, and pocket it. My steady hands frighten me in a distant way, as if I am watching a movie and feel concern for the main character; her hands show not that she is brave but that she is not afraid to die, that she has already given up that much.

  The basement is dark and smells musty and damp. Cans and bottles line the walls. My father’s tool bench is here. He used it more and more after he lost his job at the lab, trying to take his mind off things. I think of him at work for hours, making dollhouses furnished with twig chairs and acorn tea sets—all of it so different from the scientific research he used to do. One house sits unfinished on the table. It is made out of bent willow with a thatched straw roof. So delicate. A big man could crush it in his hand.

  I hear voices in the rooms above; the intruders are everywhere. Their feet pound on the floorboards. More glass shatters. A voice laughs so harshly it plunders the very air.

  I am still holding the scissors, pointing away from my body, as if I could hurt someone with them. Pathetic. I will not stab anyone with these. Although I might not be afraid to die, I realize I am afraid to fight. I remove my brother’s baseball cap, take the blades to my own head instead, and hack away my hair.

  In the dark basement I sit down on an old mattress and run my hands over my scalp. My head feels small and crushable—like a Giant’s toy. I put Venice’s cap back on.

  Penelope Overland who had a loving father, mother, and brother, two best friends and a protective dog, a house and a city, but never quite felt safe? She’s gone. Pen sits here on the mattress, staring into the dark, alone and even more stuffed full of fear.

  * * *

  It doesn’t take long for them to find me. A light under the door frame. The door shakes on its hinges—the sound of a screwdriver in the lock—and it shudder-thumps open. I grip the scissor handles.

  The man’s sweatshirt is covered in grime and I can’t see his face under the hood. His flashlight blinds me.

  I just stare at him with the scissors held out in front of my body. Through the rest of the house I hear the other men stomping and yelling. It won’t be long before more of them find their
way down here. There’s no other escape route except past the man’s wide shoulders.

  I need to run anyway. But where would I go?

  “What’s this?” he whispers, crouching and holding out his hand. “What do you have down here?” His flashlight moves from my face and scans the walls of the basement.

  Shelves stocked with canned food, water. My supplies are dwindling. He and the other men will take everything. Who knows what else they’ll take. Which one was he, yelling in the yard? Heard the wife and daughter were hot.

  “It’s mine,” I say in my deepest voice. “You all need to leave.” It sounds ridiculous, like I’m going to start crying.

  He shakes his head and puts a finger to his lips. “It’s not that simple. What’s your name?”

  “Get out of my house.”

  “Shhh, they’ll hear.” That’s when he holds his flashlight up to his face and I see his eyes. Dark eyes like mine. He sets something down in front of me—it’s a chocolate bar. I’ve eaten up the entire basement supply; it was my comfort the first few days, my only meal, and now they’re all gone. I want chocolate; I remember reading somewhere that it can trick your body into feeling like it’s in love. Sometimes when I looked at Moira I felt that way—a lightness, a tingling, an exhilaration mixed with calm. I still feel it sometimes when I dream of her, until I wake and remember that the world I knew has ended and everyone I have ever cared about is gone.

  Not taking candy from strangers just doesn’t seem to matter anymore so I reach out and point to the floor with the ends of the scissors, indicating that he should put the bar down, which he does. I grab it and shove it into my pocket.

  “I had a kid,” he says softly. “She fought constantly with her mother about the amount of sugar she was allowed to have.”

  I wonder why he’s talking about this now. It seems so trivial.

  The lines around the man’s eyes deepen. “Where’s your family?”

  I just keep staring at him, trying not to think of their faces, smiling in a photograph under my pillow. (In the picture my mom is holding Venice and I have Argos on my lap in the same position, chest puffed out proudly because he’s upright. My dad has his arms around all of us and is squinting just as proudly into the camera as if saying, “This is my wonderful family. Mine.”—Don’t think of it now, Pen.) I bite my lip and feel the little crescent moons of my teeth almost breaking the skin.

  “Most everyone’s dead.”

  “Everywhere?” I say. I didn’t mean to reveal so much … what?—shock? vulnerability?—but it came out anyway.

  “It could just be the U.S.”

  Just?

  “Or more.”

  My stomach tumbles. Then why am I here? Why is he? I want to ask him but no sound comes out.

  “You have to leave. They know you’re here.”

  Who? Who are these men?

  Something breaks upstairs. The big mirror above the mantelpiece? A glass-framed family photo or one of Mom’s drawings? Or maybe it’s the sound of my heart.

  “Do you know how to drive?” the man asks.

  I shake my head, no. I’ve only had a little practice and it didn’t go so well.

  “It may be time for a crash course. Not literally.” It looks like he’s trying to smile but his mouth just twitches. He holds out a cord with a key on it. “There’s a van outside. Diesel. You can run it on vegetable oil. I can carry you out of here. You can take the van. It’s stocked with food and water. We don’t need any more blood on our hands.”

  “This is my house,” I say. But I whisper this time. Following his command as if I trust him. At this point I know that screaming won’t help me anyway.

  “Why? Because you’re here? Because your family owned it? No one owns shit now.” His voice is harder.

  “Why should I trust you?” I ask.

  His eyes glance upward, toward where the other men are stamping and yelling. He spits into a corner of the basement. “Is there anyone else you know around here who you are going to trust?” Then he turns back to me and softens. “I started that yelling in the yard to warn you, if you were still here.”

  “Merk? You there? Found any fresh meat, man?”

  Someone is coming.

  The man, Merk, hisses, “I knew your parents, okay? You need to find them. There’s a map in the van that might help. I can try to meet up with you later.”

  “You knew my parents?” You need to find them.… “Where are they?”

  “Look in the van. There’s a map. I don’t know for sure.…”

  This man, he could be anyone, a madman, eyes and promises glittering in my basement.

  “Now let’s get you the hell out.” No more time for talk. He takes a large burlap sack and holds it over me—“Get in!”—but I jab at him with the scissors, grab the key from his hand, and run up the stairs.

  The painting of me, Moira, and Noey as the Three Graces has fallen on the floor. Someone has slashed a knife through my canvas chest as if to steal my heart.

  I fly past the big red-faced, lumbering zombie on the stairs. His cheeks bulge and squirm like there are live rats inside. I run through my house—where love once lived, and now death stalks with vermin—and outside into the gloom.

  Ash swirls in the air and the landscape is gray rubble that falls away into the sea. They kept saying global warming wasn’t going to be the end of us, that it was just threats from the fanatics, that we didn’t have to make changes. But every year there were more earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and fires—every element expressing the earth’s imbalance. Every year the temperatures soared and the ice melted and no one did anything. My pink house—no longer mine—stands on the edge of nowhere like a rose in a Salvador Dalí surrealist desert landscape. I stumble over what appears to be a neon-blue running shoe but as I kick it forward in the mud I see it’s got something severed and human-looking inside. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember a news story about the feet in shoes discovered on the coast off of British Columbia, the last one just last year—people thought it was a serial killer but they turned out to be the feet of the drowned whose insanely durable shoes refused to decompose.

  Then I see a butterfly dart in front of my face; it’s like the one that came to my window. It circles back and around my head, then flies forth to where a lime green VW bus is parked in the wasteland. I run toward the van, open the door, and scramble inside. Men are running out of the house, chasing me, howling. I jam the key into the ignition and turn it. The van jolts forward, careening over rubble and debris. Taking me away into this severed world.

  * * *

  Venice’s cap is gone but I can’t go back and look for it. That little soiled red cap he always wore, even to sleep. I touch my bare, bristling head remembering how his felt after he insisted on getting his floppy hair cut off every autumn and spring. He didn’t like hair in his eyes but I thought he looked cuter, puppylike, with it long.

  I sit in the van in the dark somewhere in this city behind a building with a caved roof, gnawing on the chocolate bar with my front teeth, thinking of Merk, the man who gave me the key. “I knew your parents,” he’d said. How? Who was he? Why hadn’t he just said that right away? “We don’t need any more blood on our hands,” he’d said. What did that mean? Is that what people did now, the ones who were left; did they go around killing people? I remember Merk’s eyes. They reminded me of something. And he’d given me a car. Why? Because he knew my parents? He’d given me a candy bar and told me about his kid. My mom and I used to fight about sugar, too.

  I take a bite of chocolate and close my eyes, seeing my mom’s face. There are tears in her eyes.

  * * *

  When I was twelve I started being really mean to her. I couldn’t help it; everything she did made me mad. Or, maybe it was just that she was the only person I could let my anger out at. One day I was running late for school and she asked if I had put on sunscreen. I said, “No, I’m late, leave me alone!” and she ordered me back.

 
I tried to push past her and she grabbed my arm and pointed to the bathroom.

  “I’m late,” I screamed again.

  “It’s not my fault. You’re late because you ate too much sugar last night and didn’t get up when I told you.…”

  “You’re such a bitch!”

  She smacked me on the butt and I ran to the bathroom sobbing, put on the sunscreen, and was twenty minutes late to school.

  When I got home she looked like she’d been crying; her eyes were still puffy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. It was the first time she’d ever hit me.

  I mumbled I was sorry too. But I wouldn’t let her hug or kiss me. It made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. Like I was going to disappear, vanish back inside of her.

  Two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I was by myself in my room reading a biography of Frida Kahlo, while my mom and dad and Venice were downstairs watching a movie. When I went to the bathroom there was a small brown stain on my underwear and a red trickle in the toilet.

  I asked my mom to come upstairs. “I think I have my period.” My voice was soft; she didn’t hear me at first. I had to repeat it, embarrassed even more because of how I’d been acting toward her. I was afraid she’d say, “My little girl is a woman now,” or something stupid like that, but she controlled herself. Then I started to cry. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  “It’s okay, love. I know. The way you’re treating me, I don’t love it. But it’s pretty normal for your age. And especially with moms and daughters who’ve been really close.”

  (Even now, I can still hear her voice, as if she is in the van with me.)