Love in the Time of Global Warming
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Authors: Francesca Lia Block
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For Jasmine, Sam, Jeni, and Ezekiel
Oh my child, ill-fated beyond all other mortals,
this is not Persephone, daughter of Zeus, beguiling you,
but it is only what happens when they die, to all mortals.
The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together,
And once the spirit has left the white bones, all the rest
Of the body is made subject to the fire’s strong fury,
But the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away.
From Homer’s
The Odyssey
CONTENTS
Love in the Time of Global Warming
T
HE 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.
1
THE EARTH SHAKER
T
HE ROOM WAS SHAKING
and I thought I knew what it was because I had been born and raised in a city built on fault lines. Everyone was always dreading something like this. But we never imagined it would be of such force and magnitude.
I called to Venice, the most beautiful, smartest, sweetest (and he would want me to add most athletic) boy in the world, “I’m coming! Are you okay?”
I imagined his body lying under boards and glass, pinned down, but when I got to him he was just huddled in the bed in the room papered with maps of the world, wearing the baseball cap he insisted on sleeping in (in spite of the stiff bill), trembling so hard I could barely gather him up in my arms. My dad came in and took him from me—my brother’s legs in too short pajama pants dangling down, his face buried in my dad’s neck as Venice cried for his fallen cap—and I got our dog, Argos, and we all ran downstairs. My mom was there, crying, and she grabbed me and I could feel her heart like a frantic butterfly through her white cotton nightgown. We ran out into the yard. The sky looked black and dead without the streetlight or the blue Christmas lights that decked our house. I could hear the ocean crashing, too close, too close. The world sliding away from us.
The tall acacia tree in the yard creaked and moaned, and then my ears rang with the silence before danger. My dad pulled us back as we watched the tree crash to the ground in a shudder of leaves and branches. My tree, the one I had strung with gold fairy lights, the one that shaded parties made for teddy bears and dolls, the tree in whose pink-blossomed branches Dad had built a wooden platform house with a rope ladder. That was where I went to read art history books and mythology, and to escape the world that now I only wanted to save.
I was holding Argos and he wriggled free and jumped down and ran away from me, toward our big pink house overgrown with morning glory vines and electric wires strung with glass bulbs. I screamed for him and my mom tried to hold me back but I was already running. I was inside.
The floor was paved with broken glass from the Christmas ornaments and family photos that had fallen. (A tall man with wild, sandy-colored hair and tanned, capable hands, a curvy, olive-skinned woman with gray eyes, an unremarkable teenage girl, an astonishingly handsome boy and a dog that was a mix of so many odd breeds it made you laugh to look at him.) My feet were bare. I reached for a pair of my mother’s suede and shearling boots by the door, yanked them on, and stepped over the glass, calling for my dog. He was yelping and growling at an invisible phantom; his paws were bleeding. I picked him up and blood streaked down my legs.
I turned to open the door but a wall of water surged toward me behind the glass pane and I put up my hands as if to hold it back, as if to part the wave.
And then I fell.
That’s all I remember of the last day of the life I once knew.
2
THE PINK HAND OF DAWN
W
HEN I WAKE EACH MORNING
—Venice’s baseball cap beside me and a photo of my family under my pillow—and feel the pink hand of dawn stroking my face, sometimes I forget that my mother and father and Venice and Argos are gone, that my best friends Moira and Noey are gone. I forget that I am alone here in this house, with the sea roiling squid-ink purple-black, dark like a witch’s brew, just outside my window, where once there existed the rest of my city, now lost as far as I can see. Even dawn is a rare thing, for usually the sky is too thick with smoke for me to see the sun rise.
When I did go outside, after the water levels went down, the smoke-black air, and the piles of rubble that had once been buildings, were the first things I noticed. Then I saw the giant frightful clown in the blue ballerina tutu; he used to preside over the city of Venice and now bobbed in the water among a banquet of Styrofoam cups and plastic containers. He was missing one white-gloved hand but still had his red top hat and bulbous nose, his black beard. The clown had made me drop my ice cream and run screaming to my mother when I was a child; now he looked even more monstrous. I saw crushed cars stacked on top of one another and the street in front of my house split in two, exposing the innards of the earth. Nothing grew and not a soul roamed. The trees had fallen and the ground was barren of any life, the world as far as I could see, deserted.
The debris of splintered buildings floated in swamps that were once the neighborhood where my friends lived. Moira’s family’s green and white Craftsman bungalow vanished; Noey’s mother’s 1960s apartment washed away. Had my friends run screaming, barefoot in their pajamas, from their houses into the street? If I listened, could I have heard their voices beneath the crash of the surf? Had they been killed in their sleep? Were they conscious when it happened, were they in pain?
I think of Moira’s ginger hair. Was it loose or braided? She sometimes braided it when she slept. I can see Noey’s watchful artist’s eyes, so round and brown in her round, dimpled face. Was she wearing one of her vintage punk T-shirts and men’s striped silk pajama pants? I can pretend my friends are somewhere out there alive but sometimes hope only makes everything worse.
It’s been fifty-three days since the Earth Shaker—I’ve ticked them off with red marks on the wall by my bed as if this small ritual will restore some meaning to my life. It’s early February but that doesn’t signify much anymore. No bills to pay, no homework due, no holidays. If things were different I might have been collaging Valentines for Moira and Noey and buying dense chocolate hearts wrapped in crinkle-shiny red paper for Venice.