Love in the Time of Global Warming

by Francesca Lia Block

  I’ve never seen him smoke but he does it naturally, hungrily, closing his eyes, almost shivering with relief, like he’s been dreaming of this moment since the Earth Shaker. The smoke makes me cough and he quickly aims it away from me and hunches back a step. “So you’re really her.”

  “Beatrix Ray,” she says. “And you have come to my world. This is Ez and he is my minion. Thus you will be.” She holds out two leather dog collars.

  Collars.

  I notice Hex’s small but well-defined biceps flinch. “We really should be going,” he says.

  The woman picks up a silver bell shaped like a lily and holds it in the air, then rings it. We feel the building shake as if the bell caused this and I turn to Hex. That sound, that rumbling, means run. But we can’t.

  “Frakk,” Beatrix says. “These are our new friends. See that they are properly kept.”

  The Giant’s feet are thick, bare, and bloated like those waterlogged corpses I once saw in the street in front of the pink house. The feet send more cracks through the tiled floor where he steps, like hammers. When I try to look at him black particles float dizzily through my eyes so I keep my gaze on the ground. But when I finally glance back up I see that he’s wearing a crude, garish pink papier-mâché mask in the shape of a pig’s head. That he’s caught the butterfly perched on Ez’s head. And crushed it between massive fingers.

  Hex takes my hand and leads me toward the woman. I remember his words, I’d do anything for a pretty girl. I reflexively pull back but he squeezes my fingers and catches my eye.

  Conveying: It’s okay. Trust me.

  “Ez,” she says. “Collar them.”

  He lowers his eyes and won’t turn his face to her. She jerks the leash attached to his collar and he makes a small sound and stumbles forward. With the Giant watching us (for I feel his eyes, though I won’t look) we kneel, letting Ez put the collars with leashes around our necks and then fasten them to a marble post. The moldy collar pinches the skin of my throat and I swallow against it, suddenly afraid I won’t be able to breathe.

  “May we have a place to sleep?” Hex asks. “Please. We’re very tired.” He can be as charming as a little girl when he wants to be.

  “But first you must eat.” The woman opens a curtain and gestures to a banquet table piled with multicolored cakes and other pastries. “Even my minions eat. Isn’t that right, Frakk?”

  I hear a sound, like the echo of a hollow building collapsing, coming from the Giant’s throat.

  “No, no, they’re not your dinner. Have some cake,” Beatrix tells him. “And you, too, Pen and Hex.”

  Hex catches my eye and shakes his head no so slightly I’m not sure if I actually saw it.

  “Oh thank you, Beatrix. We’re not hungry now. But we would love to be able to rest a little.”

  “First you must hear my story,” she says. “Frakk likes it, too.” She whispers to us, “It’s how I bewitched him.”

  I look at Ez, still stuffing his face with frosting, and think of Odysseus’s men, turned into pigs by the witch, Circe. The Odyssey is our guide. Maybe that’s why Hex signaled that I shouldn’t accept the cake.

  Hex sits at Beatrix’s feet and gestures for me to sit behind him. I want to lean my head on his shoulder but not as much as I want to get out of here. I have a feeling that’s what he’s going for, in spite of the huge monster obstructing the entrance.

  “I’ve lost my true love,” she says. “Not to mention my career. I was once queen of the air.” She points to the broken TV and the photo of her and the man. “That’s me with my co-star and real-life lover. But everything changed so I was prepared for the apocalypse. I became a practitioner of dark arts just in time and now I will reign over the ruin!”

  She goes on and on like this, smoking and talking in an affected voice that sometimes wavers into a pinched British accent. She tells us of lost lovers, starring roles, premieres, gowns, feuds, and her worldwide pursuit of spells to keep herself young forever. The Giant hovers near the door, blocking with his girth what remains of the fading light. Ez sketches and stuffs his face with cake. Finally both he and Beatrix fall asleep and the Giant turns his head to watch us. I’ve made myself actually look at him straight on—he’s rocking back and forth and waving his hands around the pig mask over and over again.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” I whisper into Hex’s ear. His hair smells smoky from the cigarette. The ceilingless room is cold and I stay as close to him as I can.

  “Don’t worry,” he tells me. “We have to take turns sleeping. Just don’t eat anything, I think it’s bewitched. And let me do what I have to.”

  I don’t like the sound of this but I keep watch while he rests his head in my lap and closes his eyes. I think I would be happy to have his weight resting against my crossed legs under other circumstances but I’m too frozen with dread to really feel anything. Even Hex’s considerable body heat won’t thaw me out.

  When Beatrix wakes in the cold, dead dawn, she sends Frakk away and tries to feed us again. She tells Ez to bring us plates of cake. I stare at the porous layers lined with filling and whipped cream and my mouth’s salivating like a dog’s. Hex, whom I’ve elbowed awake, politely declines for both of us.

  “But I have something to offer you,” he says.

  She opens her eyes wide as twin hand mirrors. “Oh, yes? Really? What is that?”

  “I’ll sleep with you,” Hex says, smiling that wicked grin with the vampire teeth. “In exchange for our freedom.”

  She looks like she’s going to cry. Her black hair whips around her in a gust of wind, sudden through the ruined walls. Leaves shake and fall to the floor. I’m so cold it’s making my shoulder and calf muscles cramp. And I don’t want Hex to sleep with her. I put my hand on his arm.

  “I have to,” he whispers, angling his head back to reach my ear with his mouth. “We’re going to die otherwise.”

  I look at Ez, with frosting in his nostrils; his eyes roll back. Another butterfly is circling him, seemingly unaware of the fate of its crushed friend.

  I nod at Hex.

  “Why would I agree to that?” Beatrix says through her tears.

  “You want me,” he says to Beatrix. “Believe me.”

  I don’t know anything anymore about what lies outside myself, only a little about the broken landscape inside. I don’t want Hex to go with Beatrix but I can’t say anything. I scuttle over as far as my leash reaches and scrounch down next to Ez with frosting all over his face and hair.

  Beatrix comes over and touches Hex’s face, her fingers lingering. She touches his throat and I can feel mine close up and I gag. She takes his leash and tugs it—almost playfully is how I’d describe it, under other circumstances.

  “Remember, don’t eat anything.” Hex whispers the warning but his eyes are shout-big.

  I watch him walk away behind Beatrix. Is she a witch? I think of another Goya painting, this one of a black, horned he-goat surrounded by a gaggle of howling, deformed witches. Beatrix is a pretty witch but she gives my stomach the same queasy, inside-out feeling I’d get looking at those dark works of art.

  Then I turn my attention to the cake. All we’ve had for four days now are canned meats and beans with a tinny aftertaste and stale chips that sting our gums. It’s like my mouth is made of salt and dirt. Don’t eat anything.

  I look at Ez instead. “I’m Pen.”

  He doesn’t answer me. His brown eyes seem to have a glaze over them, a sugar cataract. His hands continue to wriggle in his mouth even though the cake is now gone.

  “Are you okay? How long have you been here?”

  His mouth drops open but he doesn’t speak.

  “She trapped you here?” My fingers move toward his dog collar but he covers it with his own before I can touch it.

  I glance down at the sketch he’s made; it’s of Beatrix. The long neck, mystic eyes, and classical features look as Pre-Raphaelite as Beatrix herself. I bet Ez knows who Waterhouse is. Or once did.
>
  “You’re a great artist.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You should come with us,” I say. “Hex will handle her.”

  When I say these words my stomach drops like I’m falling from a great height. I don’t want Hex to “handle” Beatrix. I imagine his small hands caught in the sea snakes of her hair. Her fleshy lips, bony-curvy body. She looks like she could crush Hex but he’s stronger than he appears.

  “Talk to me,” I say to Ez. “Tell me your name.”

  “Do you have any cake?” he asks. “Strawberry pistachio cream cupcakes or anise butter cookies? She gives me plenty. Do you have any sweet buns stuffed with plum lavender jam? Tiger-striped macadamia cinnamon rolls? Fresh peppermint leaf and rose-petal ice cream?”

  The frosting in his hair suddenly looks weirdly appetizing to me. As if reading my mind, he pulls a glob out of the strands and eats it. He smiles and his teeth are green from the roses.

  “How’d you get here?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. She found me in a ditch, she says. She bathed and dressed me, gave me my jewelry.” He touches his collar. “Then she fed me.” His eyes look into the distance, landscapes of whipped cream and layer cake, I imagine. “It is always my birthday here. All I have to do is draw.”

  “You have to come with us,” I say. “You’re her prisoner.”

  He surveys me blankly. “Yes, of course. What else would I want to be?”

  “Do you remember before?” I ask. “Do you remember Then?”

  “Then does not exist,” he says.

  “Try to remember. Did you have a family?”

  “I had a twin,” says Ez. “We were never apart. Then he was gone. Everything was gone.”

  * * *

  Two red-haired boys, exactly alike and yet completely different, on a basketball court behind a grand Spanish-style house. One is shooting baskets while the other draws flowers with chalk on the asphalt.

  * * *

  Why am I seeing this image, and so clearly? It’s like the vision I had of the child in the pink room. Could this red-haired boy be Ez? Could the other child be Hex? But why am I seeing them this way? It’s not like I’m imagining it, but actually seeing them.

  I reach out with tentative fingers and stroke Ez’s red hair, still sticky with frosting. Not Moira-ginger, really red. I expect him to flinch, which he does at first, and then he flutters his eyelids and tilts his head toward me. I continue to pet him like this until … finally he closes his eyes and then leans his head on my knee and falls asleep.

  In another room Hex is with Beatrix and I tell myself not to visualize his body on top of hers, the swirls of black hair wrapping them both up like toxic waves. I try not to eat frosting out of Ez’s hair as he sleeps but suddenly the taste of sugar is what I want. Hex is mine, I think, and then wonder how I could think that. He’s never kissed me. I’ve never even seen him without a shirt on. I know the skin of his chest must be very pale and smooth like the rest of his body; I can see his wide shoulders and his narrow waist.

  My brother, Venice, is gone and I’m not dead. But I’m pretty much walking dead, without a heart.

  Venice is still my heart, and my heart is missing, but Hex has become my lungs.

  * * *

  When Hex comes out of Beatrix’s chamber he looks paler than ever but he doesn’t have his collar on. He walks over to me, silent in his rubber-soled basketball shoes. He’s carrying something in his hand—a long sword with a curved steel blade, death-sharp. I recognize it as a traditional Japanese samurai sword or nihonto. It has a black handle inlaid with white bone; there’s a black iron dragon plate at the hilt.

  “Why do you have that?” I ask as he releases me from bondage.

  “She gave it to me.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  He flashes the sword in the air, swift and graceful as if he’s done it a million times before. “I took lessons, once.”

  I just stare at him, imagining him in a studio with mirrored walls, wearing a samurai costume, his hair bound back from his face, kohl eyes.

  “Let’s leave,” he says. “She says we can leave.”

  I want to ask him what he did to convince her to let us go, to give him her sword. I want to yell, What did you do? I want him to be mine. I want to be able to say, You are mine, you can’t be with anyone else. But instead I cradle Ez’s face in my hands before resting his head on a pillow on the floor.

  “We have to bring him,” I say. “He’s dead otherwise.”

  “We don’t have enough supplies.”

  “Please, Hex.”

  He looks down at Ez, then back at me.

  “He can have half my food. Please.”

  “No way. You’re too thin already.”

  Ez opens his eyes and sits up. “We can bring the cake!” he says brightly.

  “No cake, yo. You’re almost as bad as me with the singing chicks,” says Hex, but I can see by the softening of his sword-reflecting eyes that he’s going to give in.

  As we drag Ez away, all I see, when I look back at the banquet table, are piles of dirt.

  10

  HOOD CITY

  FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS after this (I’ve started marking time again, red slashes on the interior of the van), Ez rests in my arms crying for cake while Hex drives. When Hex isn’t looking I feed Ez half my portion of canned peaches or black beans, which he sometimes vomits up outside while I hold his forehead. I can see Hex is irritated that Ez is so helpless, another problem for us to handle. But I know when he gets better, Hex will be glad to have one more pair of hands.

  I hope.

  “Eliot,” Ez moans in his sleep the third night.

  “Who’s Eliot?” I whisper, thinking of my vision—the basketball-playing boy—and Ez wakes up as if I’ve shouted it in his ear. We’re in the back of the van and Hex is at the wheel.

  “What did you say?”

  “You were talking in your sleep. You said ‘Eliot.’ Is that your twin?”

  He covers his mouth with his hand. I can almost see the stifled sob in the way his Adam’s apple moves.

  I speak softly. “I understand. I had a brother. Have. I miss him so much.”

  Ez’s expression shifts and his eyes focus as if he’s just looked up from staring through a magnifying glass. “I’m so sorry.”

  “We’re going to find him,” I say, as if the ferocity of my voice can make it so.

  “What is he like?”

  “He’s perfect. He’s ten. He thought he was too short and that his front teeth were too big, that he wasn’t good enough at baseball, but he was perfect in every way. And I didn’t tell him that. I fought with him sometimes. He was sweet and polite and cared about people. Everyone loved him.”

  “I think when you have a very close sibling,” Ez says, “it makes you feel like you’re always supposed to have someone there with you, all the time, someone who understands you. I was always trying to find someone to fall in love with.”

  “Did you?” I ask.

  He gets the blank look in his eyes again. “I’m seventeen and it’s never happened. The world’s ended and it’s never going to happen. I’ve thought I was in love but they never love me back.”

  “I understand,” I say, thinking of how I once kissed Moira on the lips. We were drunk and dancing and our lips just brushed for that electroshock nanosecond and then she smiled at some boys who were watching us, laughed, and danced away from me like it was a joke. But I’d had an epiphany, even though I hadn’t fully accepted it at the time. I wanted to kiss girls. And it was no joke.

  “I can be your brother for now. Until we find him.”

  “And I’ll be yours,” I say.

  I think I can hear Hex letting out a gust of air between his kiss-shaped lips, exasperated with us.

  * * *

  When it’s my turn to drive I squint out the window of the VW at the darkness piled with death. I wonder if any love is out there or if what snuggles within the confines of the l
ime green van is all we will ever know.

  Hex sleeps in the back under a rough woolen blanket, his boots still on. I imagine his long eyelashes stirring with each breath. Moira used to complain about such lashes wasted on boys. Sometime, while Hex sleeps, I want to lean over and feel those eyelashes touch my cheek in a stolen Eskimo kiss.

  I am grateful Hex is here with me, that he didn’t decide to stay with Beatrix. He could have fallen under her spell like Frakk did, those lilac eyes and veins, her white skin a-glisten, rose petal–like, as if covered with a thin layer of morning dew. But I’m underestimating him, aren’t I? He’s certainly not Frakk. And he isn’t superficial. Though he did say he was a sucker for pretty girls. It doesn’t matter, Pen; he’s here.

  Ez is in the passenger seat beside me. I can hear hungry-stomach grumbles but I can’t tell if they’re his or mine. The supplies that were in the van and the ones I got at the Giant’s store are dwindling. We all smell pretty ripe. But perhaps this strange configuration of bodies is love; love is what it is.

  * * *

  In the morning Ez is less weepy and tranced-out as if the spell’s been broken. He does a careful inventory of our food and water supply. “Thirty-three cans, twelve boxes of crackers, and forty-two gallons of water. The Red Cross says you need one gallon per person per day. We have enough of everything to last two weeks if we’re very careful,” he says.

  Hex rolls his eyes and Ez adds, “Thank you for bringing me. I know you didn’t have to.”

  I try not to think what happens when the supplies run out. Maybe Hex was right about not bringing Ez but what would have happened to him if we didn’t? And if we start living as every man for himself, what does that say about us, the state of our souls?

  Still, we have to eat. Although we may eventually find more canned food and bottled water, what about when that’s all gone? There are no fresh things growing, no animals to kill and eat, although even as hungry as I am it’s hard for me to imagine doing this. Ez probably couldn’t either, so I guess it would be up to Hex to hunt.