Love in the Time of Global Warming

by Francesca Lia Block

  After she escapes from the monster that takes her, Tara will go back to the oasis but she will be chased down. The Giants will threaten her with death if she doesn’t tell them where we are. She knows, she can see us, but she will not tell. And she will not survive. At least not in her current form.

  Take my bones, Pen, bury them in the ground. Life will spring from them.

  * * *

  Hardly realizing what I am doing, I run, fast, back to the van, as if my speed will help in some way, as if I’m not way, way too late.

  I return with the black box that once contained a map, fall to my knees, and begin to gather up the bones as if without them I will perish on the spot.

  The palm trees rustle with heat, not with any breeze. My neck, bent over the box, feels so tight with pain it may snap off if I move too suddenly. I look up, at the blank sky, at the murky water. A rainbow light throbs out and then dissolves into white across the oasis. Then my one seeing eye goes black in the sun. I am falling into nothing like the rest of my world.

  * * *

  Venice said, “I’m so soft, you made me so soft, I don’t want to be soft like you.”

  He had come home from school and told us that he pushed a kid.

  “You know not to do that,” my mom said. She was making dinner, not looking at him, that distracted, worried look creasing her face.

  I went and sat with him at the table that was covered with his Legos. There was hardly room to eat and I was mad at my mom for not making him clean it up. “Why’d you push him?”

  “We were playing basketball. He was showing off and I told him he was a ball hog. He pushed me first.”

  My mom was finally getting it and she came over, too, wiping her hands on her apron. She smelled of onions. “You know to get help from a grown-up if that happens, right, Ven?”

  “No! I don’t want to tell on him! I need to show I’m not soft! Like you, all of you! Even Dad! You’re all soft.”

  He ran out of the room and I followed him. I knocked on his door. “Please let me in.”

  I waited until I finally heard the click of the lock. He was sitting on the floor with hundreds of baseball cards spread out around him.

  “If anyone hurts you I’ll beat them up,” I told him.

  “No you won’t.”

  “That’s because I’m a spaz,” I said.

  “No, it’s because you’re soft.”

  “That’s true, too.”

  “Dad shouldn’t have lost his job,” he said. “He should have fought for it.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “He should fight the bank from taking our house. He should do something.”

  “He’s trying,” I said, but I knew what Venice meant.

  “I hate how soft you all are,” said my brother. His face was flushed, making his eyes appear a lighter gray, and his back was rigid. There were bruises, cuts, and scrapes on his knees but he would never complain about the pain.

  * * *

  I wonder, now, as I sit in the van, how I can make up for being too soft, for not saving my family, for not saving my friends, for not helping anyone. I have a sword in my hand and I have a van and supplies. I have a black box that once only contained a map and that I filled with what I am sure are the bones of a magical girl. I even know where to find Kronen.

  There is a piece of paper in the van. It says Bank of the Apocalypse and there are directions. It says Find Pen. Find Kronen and kill!!! Find Pen. The writing is Hex’s graffiti scrawl.

  My baby brother would never call Hex soft. Not Hex.

  And not me, either. Not anymore. Not any fucking more.

  22

  BANK OF THE APOCALYPSE

  THE BUILDING HAS GOLD COLUMNS and a massive doorway, a mural depicting Giants, with bodies sticking out of their mouths like limp cigarettes. Someone besides me has studied their Goya. Bank of the Apocalypse reads a handwritten sign. It balances atop a pile of ruin-rubble and clean-sucked human bones. I can make out doors and windows, crumbled fireplaces, tiles, metal pipes, shingles, signs that read Foreclosure. The homes of so many skeletons. People who used to fight over the last blueberry muffin at the breakfast table, get down on their knees to scrub bathroom floors, and kiss one another good night, thinking they were at least relatively safe. Now they are just dust in the debris.

  I climb through the rubble toward the door. It takes a long time, time enough for a Giant to see me from the blood-red stained-glass eye window and reach out to crush me in his hand the size of a tractor.

  My mother never foresaw this danger. She was scared we would get sick from drinking tap water, eating genetically modified fruits and vegetables, even breathing the air. We had to put on sunscreen every day because of that hole in the ozone that kept her up at night. She gave us vitamins and bought us only chemical-free shampoo, even though it never made my hair as soft and clean as Moira’s. I used to hate how afraid my mom was and how afraid she had made me. Now I understand but I can no longer be like her. I have to fight.

  The ceilings are so high I can’t see the top of them, and the only light is from the red glass eye. All around me are vaults that look like crypts. The whole place is a mausoleum.

  “Here she is,” a voice says.

  Not a Giant, but Kronen emerges from the shadows, wearing a carefully constructed suit made of patches of dried, bumpy material. I force myself to stand my ground. The sword in my hand looks like a needle, even to me, though Kronen is only a few inches taller than I am.

  “You’ve come back?” he says, smiling. It further distorts the uneven planes of his face. “I knew you would come back.”

  “I want my friends,” I say. “You have my eye. You took my mother. I want to know what happened to her, and to my friends. And my brother.”

  “Friends are important. Brothers are important. Sons, sons are important.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry for what I did. But you had your revenge. An eye for an eye.”

  “What will you give me if I don’t help you find them? A stick in the eye?” he muses.

  I won’t let my hand go to the empty socket hiding under the patch. I won’t think of how that eye is gone, how it is as if every work of art, every beloved’s face it ever reflected, has vanished with it. If I saw madness in Kronen before, now it has exploded like a boil. That nasty suit—it looks like it’s made of dried skin.

  “If you don’t tell me, if you don’t return them to me safely, I will kill you,” I say.

  Kronen pets the strip of hair on his chin in a way that feels too intimate, almost sexual. His eyes roll up in contemplation. “I don’t know where your friends are,” he says cheerily. “Your dear mother died of natural causes, poor thing. Your brother got away from me.” Then his voice changes, deepens, his eyes stab at my face. “And you could not kill me if you tried. Have you forgotten who I am? What I have made? What I have destroyed?”

  His laughter turns into shaking and the shaking comes from the steps of the Giant entering the room.

  Now my sword really is a needle. And the color of fear dripping through my veins? Like our old friend, Homer, said, fear is green.

  “This is Kutter,” Kronen says. “My other son. My perfect son. My other original. Like Bull. My babies from whom all others originated in lesser, more imperfect forms. But Kutter is the most perfect of all. I believe you have met before.”

  This Giant has two eyes and does not have a mistress controlling his actions. He is bigger than Bull and Frakk and looks like Kronen, with the same hooked nose and strip of hair down his chin. His eyes even roll in the same way. He’s the one from the Lotus Hotel.

  I hold out the nihonto, remembering what Hex told me. When you strike, it is not a thought. It is pure action. You embody the result not the action. Like the deepest meditation.

  But my sword would not even scratch this monster.

  Kutter stoops and examines me the way I might have once looked at an insect on a leaf. He reaches out his hand and I
am entranced by the nail beds, white with fungus like an infected tree. A smell comes from his flesh, fetid and deadly, something made, but not by Gods or Nature.

  “You blinded Bull,” Kutter says. Now I’m not an insect but something venomous he wants to kill.

  “Yes. I was trying to save my life. I have sacrificed my eye as retribution.”

  I pull off the bandage, showing whatever horror lies beneath.

  Kutter moves closer to see, his rank breath on my face. I refuse to flinch. His eyes grow glazed, staring. I see myself reflected in his irises—two young women, each with a single eye and a dark gash where an eye once was. I think of Frakk bewitched by Beatrix’s story, the Giantess mesmerized by Ash.

  “And I have something else for you,” I say. “Besides the eye your father took. A story about you.”

  “What do you know of me, little blind thing?” Kutter’s voice makes the walls of the Bank of the Apocalypse shake.

  “I know of many things,” I say. “Gods and monsters, transformations, spells and enchantments, trees and oceans, hospitality, loyalty, betrayal, great wars. I know of kleos and I know of love.”

  Kronen laughs again, a small tittering sound. “Love? This is not a world for love.” He covers his mouth primly with his hand and rolls his eyes to regard the ceiling. His suit crackles. His laughter stops. His voice deepens. “Kill her, Kutter.”

  The monster looks at Kronen, then turns his head to me. He blinks his eyes. I hadn’t seen the sorrow in them until now.

  “I will hear,” he says, his hand holding Kronen back by the scruff of his neck. “Tell.”

  I close my eyes. I am the visionary, the one-eyed seer, the storyteller. I am Pen. I can fight with the power of images and words. “I will tell you a story of Then.”

  * * *

  Once there was a small boy named K. with big dark eyes, a boy with the innocence of any other boy. But this boy was different in that he was too intelligent for this world. It did not understand him. At five he could do mathematics like a fifteen-year-old, at fifteen he could do college-level math and so his mother (his father was gone) enrolled him in a university. He was smarter and younger than everyone and didn’t like to speak to others or to be touched. He stayed in his room and did experiments of a strange kind.

  Eventually he dropped out of college, for he knew more than all of his professors, got a job in a lab and an apartment of his own.

  Because he was small himself and had grown up in a small and crumbling apartment, while most people he knew lived in big houses, he wanted his beings to be huge, as big as mountains. He took the cells from the largest humans he could find and injected them into three embryos which he had stolen from the lab he worked for. Two sons and a daughter. The children were born and continued to grow and grow. They had to be hidden. They had to be operated on and undergo treatments so their bones would not grow too big and too weak to support their huge frames. Then K. took cells from his children and injected them into the cells of other embryos to create clones. He did not worry these would turn against him. They were his children after all, in spite of what he had done to them, how he had made and distorted them for his purposes. A very large investment company hired K. when he went to them and told them what he had created. He had faith that when they realized how much power he could help them attain, they would not betray him. They did not.

  As K. grew older, he moved to a golden mansion with marble floors and built a huge laboratory. In his lab there was another scientist, who began to question what K. was doing. The scientist didn’t find out everything but he knew too much and lost his job. He went home to his family in their pink house by the sea and told them what had happened, but not why. Soon he could not make payments on his house and the bank that funded K.’s experiments threatened to take the scientist’s home away.

  K. didn’t care about the scientist or anything else; he was busy creating his race of great beings. But the problem was, the creatures grew too big. They were too big for this earth. These Giants grew so big they made the earth shake and crack.

  Only some people survived the earthquake and the waves that followed. The Earth Shaker. And many of those survivors were eaten alive by the Giants who needed to feed. They also ate anything edible that grew until the available food supply was depleted.

  A small band of friends survived. One of them was a young woman, the scientist’s daughter. She had accidentally blinded one of the Giants. When she and her friends arrived to rescue the scientist’s wife from K., he said no, he wanted something in exchange. He wanted her eye. This she gave him. She let him cut it from her face. But he did not give her back her mother as he promised. She has returned to claim her brother and her friends.

  So now you know, Kutter, the tragic story of your birth. A story devoid of love. And love is the birthright of everyone. Even now. Is it not?

  * * *

  “How do you know this?” Kronen gasps. It’s the first time I’ve heard real emotion in his voice; he sounds like an agitated child. “How do you have such visions?” He speaks to Kutter now: “She must be killed. Rip out her other eye and then kill her!”

  Kutter tears his gaze away from me, wincing, like he’s ripping a bandage off raw skin, and turns on Kronen, flexing his meaty hands.

  I am not a hero, I am not Odysseus, there are no gods or goddesses guiding me. All I have is myself. And Hex’s sword.

  That is when I turn to Kronen and like the deepest meditation I strike and embody pure result. I embody death, not peace. The only choice in this world we have made from our betrayals and our weakness and our greed.

  Kronen collapses to the ground.

  Kutter waves his hands around his face like they’re on fire. He stamps his feet, moaning, and the walls of the Bank of the Apocalypse shake as if about to collapse. There are tears pouring from his eyes, soaking me, and this is what terrifies me the most, to see a monster feel. I think, Now he will kill me. Stories and visions mean nothing.

  But instead, Kutter turns and lumbers out of the Bank of the Apocalypse. The far wall crumbles, collapsing before my eyes, glass and plaster exploding everywhere.

  And someone grabs me.

  It is not Hex, Ez, or Ash as I had expected, as I had wanted with every neuron (soma, dendrite, axon), with every electrical impulse that together fires up this being I think of as me. It is not Hex, Ez, or Ash who says, “Pen! Penelope! Come now! Come with me!” and lifts me onto his back and carries me out of the Bank of the Apocalypse.

  It is Merk.

  * * *

  In the Mercedes, speeding away, I look at my hands. Blood has splattered them, splattered my clothes. Kronen’s blood. The smell that never leaves me, that smell of blood, embedding itself blackly in my nostrils again.

  “Good fighting, there,” Merk says. “You okay, samurai?”

  I stare at him. His calloused hands on the steering wheel. His rough, vagabond face now half-hidden in a beard. His thick biceps and thigh muscles. Who is he? Why is he here?

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I have to find Venice.” I realize I’m screaming and I can’t stop. “Why do you keep following me?”

  “Settle down, kid.”

  “Settle … Why do you even talk to me? Why are you here?”

  Merk turns to me and I see his eyes and I know them and I am afraid to know.

  “I knew your mom and dad, before you were born,” he says. “We went to school together. College. Your mother was a fantastic painter. She…”

  “So what? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Penelope.”

  “Why are you using that name? That’s not my name.”

  “It was, Then.”

  “Stop it!” I scream, covering my ears with my hands so the blood rushes like an ocean.

  Merk slams on the brakes so I fall forward against the dash. “I loved her, okay?” he says.

  “Who? Loved who? What are you talking about?”

  “Grace. Your mother. We were together.
We had a child.” His voice rises with emotion for the first time.

  “What?”

  “You’re my daughter.”

  I want to stick my sword into him and feel the split of flesh and the spurt of blood. It would serve him right. He sent me from my home, saying it was for my safety. Because of him I blinded Bull and was pursued by Kronen. Because of him I lost my mother and my eye and now Tara and my friends.

  I look away and dig my nails into the fleshy parts of my palms.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asks, and his voice is hoarse as if he’s trying to control some rush of feeling.

  I don’t know what might come out of my mouth, what I want to do, how he can help. The world swirls around me. And then, falling through the darkness of my mind like Dorothy’s house in the tornado, I see a small pink structure. “Take me home,” I say.

  * * *

  On the way Merk tells me a story and I have no choice but to listen. Unless I try to outshout him or jump from the moving car. But I have to get to the pink house, even if nothing more of it exists.

  * * *

  Merk was in college with my mom and dad at Berkeley. The men had already bonded over a particular band on the first night when my mom walked into the dorm dining room with a shock of black-dyed hair and kohl eye makeup like an Egyptian queen. I’d seen old pictures of her resembling her favorite singer Siouxsie Sioux.

  Merk, my dad, and my mom ate every meal together and went into San Francisco to see shows on the weekend or drove back to L.A. to hang out in Venice and surf.

  “At a gig in Berkeley, Grace and David got together,” Merk said. “It was always this tense balance to see who it would happen with first. We both were so in love with her. She was gifted and gorgeous. But I backed out. I could tell it was serious with them and I’ve never been one to settle down anyway. We stayed close through grad school. Then right before they got married your mom and I … It was the only time, I swear, we had too much to drink, lost our judgment … and she got pregnant. We told your dad right away.”

  It was a rainy night in their Venice bungalow, the palm trees, banana plants, and birds of paradise thrashing around like drunk kids at a concert. My dad ran outside before my mom and Merk could stop him.