Welcome to the Greenhouse (29 page)

When they came out of the terminal, the famous heat banged down on Tyler like falling rocks. “Good god!” he yelled.

“Oh, come on. Don’t be such a baby. We only just had our first one hundred degrees day. Just wait until April!”

Tyler brought up a thermometer and saw that it was a hundred and nine.

“In a few months you wouldn’t be able to be out here at all,” Ilse said. “Still people come in the summertime. Heat tourists. Who can understand them?”

When the bus came, Tyler discovered the fare got higher and higher as the temperature rose and more cooling was needed to make the interior habitable. Habitable, but nothing more, he thought. His temperature readout told him it was an even hundred degrees inside the bus. And it was more crowded than he had ever seen a bus be. It was a little past two in the afternoon. Where were all the people going? He was lucky to find two empty seats together so Ilse could appear to sit beside him. She looked pretty cool and collected.

He minimized his overlays and saw that some of this Phoenix was familiar to him. It was the foundation that
Still Burning
had been based on. The city was very flat with clusters of tall buildings scattered about. There were no jet skateboarders on deserted freeways. The freeways were not, in fact, deserted. There were many buses and cargo vehicles, but more amazing there were quite a few cars in the dedicated auto lane. There were cars in Eugene, but they were strictly status symbols and mostly only brought out for the parade during the annual Eugene Day. Here people seemed to be using them to move the meat around.

“Almost there!” Ilse said at every stop.

They were on the bus for a long time, and Tyler was glad to have his water bottle.

Finally, she said, “This is it!”

He got off the bus.

“Now it’s a short ride up to my place.” She led him to a bank of bicycles that you could rent for a few dollars.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how to ride a bicycle,” Tyler said.

“What?” Ilse sounded astonished. “You’re from Oregon!”

He worked at home. He shopped in the mall downstairs. Where in the world would he go on a bicycle?

“Okay, okay,” she said. “We’ll walk.”

He followed her down a street that snaked around houses the color of dried mud with orange tile roofs. They all had solar panels. They all seemed very quiet and dark.

There were quite a few of the big saguaro cacti scattered about like giants holding up their hands at a bank robbery. “Really more green than I expected,” he said.

“All stuff that doesn’t need to be watered.” She went on to point out ocotillo cacti and prickly pear with pale purple fruit.

At last they came to Ilse’s house, and she disappeared from his side before he reached the door.

It was much cooler under the extension of the roof. The door itself was made of heavy wire screen, and he could see a shadowy figure approaching from the dim interior.

Then she opened the door and there she was smiling at him—a woman in her early fifties with short brown hair and pale blue eyes. She wore a loose smock with no sleeves. It was bright blue with green leaves. No shoes. Her toenails were pink. She was very tan and what was the word? Weathered, maybe. She was around five-five.

“Tyler,” she said and put out her hands, and he took them. Her hands were soft and warm and a little moist. She pulled at him. “Come in! Come in!”

He wanted to give her a big hug, but he felt suddenly shy with her which was silly after all they had been through together. She let go of his hands and latched the screen door behind him.

“More to drink first,” she said.

She took him to the kitchen and poured him a glass of cool tea.

“Let me show you the house.”

The small house she had shared with her grandmother was full of shadows and dim spaces. There was a front room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. It was all very open and there was always a breeze coming from somewhere. It was eighty-five degrees inside, he saw, and after the extreme heat outside, it felt pretty comfortable.

Ilse’s room reminded him of his own except hers had only three walls of screens. The fourth wall was open to a shady area outside.

“My garden,” she said. “I don’t have to close this room down and run the cooler until almost May.”

He had imagined she would be struggling in sweltering misery and eager for him to rescue her and take her away, but she seemed to be trying to impress him with how well she lived.

“I didn’t really wait to see what the Secret Ingredient was until you got here,” she admitted.

“I wouldn’t have expected it,” he said, but he had sort of expected it. All their friends certainly expected her not to look until he got to Phoenix. Thinking of their friends made him realize that they were alone. She must be closing out the others. She must want him all to herself.

“But I do think your coming all this way is a special occasion that demands Grams’s fish cakes,” she said.

She led him back to the kitchen and told him to take a seat. There was a dark wooden box on the table. It was about the size of a shoebox, and the lid was nicely carved with angels playing harps and horns.

Ilse put a pot of water on to boil and said, “Step one. Prepare instant mashed potatoes as per instructions on the box.”

She poured instant mashed potatoes into a measuring cup and then stood there looking down at the pot of water on the stove. Would she stand there until it boiled?

No. She turned away and came over to the table and put a clear glass mixing bowl, a teaspoon, and the recipe down next to the carved box. Then she sat down across from Tyler.

“One teaspoon salt,” she said. “And three drops of seafood flavor.”

“Is that the Secret Ingredient?” Tyler asked.

“Nope,” she said.

“What is seafood flavor, anyway?”

“No idea.” She pulled the wooden box across the table and opened it.

She took out an old letter and put it to one side. She took out a string of black pearls and held them up to the light.

“Pretty,” Tyler said.

She put the pearls down on the letter and took out an old coin purse and opened it and handed coins to him one at a time—a quarter from 1923, a half-dollar from 1960, a dime from 2006, and a penny from 1959.

“You’ll have to look them up,” Tyler said.

“Just junk. Horrible condition. But I will look them up anyway.”

She put a small bright yellow can down on the table and closed the box. “This is it. The Secret Ingredient.”

He waited a moment then picked up the can.

New!

Tropical Flakes!

Net weight 1.0 oz.

He turned the can around and read the label on the back.

“You do realize ‘fish food’ is not like ‘cheese food?’” he asked.

“Of course I do.” She took the can from him. “It’s food for fish.”

She opened the can and smelled what was inside. “The recipe says to use ‘as much of the Secret Ingredient as the Occasion merits.’ So, how much do you suppose this occasion merits?”

She held out the can for him to smell. He leaned forward and saw that there was a little less than half left. The Tropical Flakes were orange and several shades of green. They smelled like he imagined fish would smell or maybe fishy water.

She put the can down on the table and got up and walked back to the stove. She took the pot off the burner and dumped the instant mashed potatoes into it. But then she put the pot on the counter and came back to the table and sat down again.

“There’s this famous video,” she said, “of a guy eating bluefin tuna sushi. Do you know it?”

“I don’t think so,” Tyler said.

“Probably from a cooking or travel show. Close-up of the chef cutting a thin slice of pink fish and putting it on a wad of rice and sliding it in front of this bald guy in a flowery shirt. He picks it up and puts the whole thing in his mouth. And the look on his face! You’d think he died and gone to heaven. Then he talked about how you needed to get the fish in touch with the roof of your mouth to really appreciate it. Then he had another slice!”

“Ancestors,” Tyler muttered. “He could have left a slice or two for us. They didn’t have to use up every last good thing they had.”

“It wasn’t Grams’s fault,” Ilse said. “She could have run off during the Great Migration but she stayed here and helped make the place livable for the rest of us.”

“She must have been amazing,” he said.

“She was.” She lifted the can of Tropical Flakes again. “But her fish cakes were awful, if you want the truth.”

She picked up the teaspoon and dipped it into the can. Her hand shook a little and a few flakes fell to the table. She put the spoon in her mouth and closed her lips around it.

Good? Bad? Tyler couldn’t tell from her expression. He was sure she was not on her way to heaven.

She pulled the spoon out of her mouth and dipped it back into the can and held it out to him.

He hesitated a moment then leaned forward and opened his mouth, and she fed him the spoonful of tropical flakes.

The sea, the sea.

He pushed the flakes against the roof of his mouth like the guy with his sushi.

A little repulsive really. The flakes clung to the back of his teeth and he had some trouble getting them off with his tongue. Ilse ate another spoonful and then fed him one. “I’m done with the fish cakes,” she said.

By the time they finished the tropical flakes, she looked a little green. He was not feeling so hot himself.

“Will the children hate us now?” she asked. “The way we sat here and polished off the Secret Ingredient?”

“You’re not coming back to Oregon with me, are you?”

“No,” she said, “but thanks for almost asking.”

On the last day of March 2099, on the rocky, parched slopes west of Rexford, Montana, Lewis Behrend Jessen met Patricia de la Montaña Vargas.

Jessen was sixty-seven years old. Everybody who mattered called him Bear. He had been American by birth, back when that sort of thing mattered, and Danish by ancestry. He was so pale his skin had peeled and burned in successive layers over the years, always revealing deeper, ruddier ones. Each layer also added freckles and age spots, too, till now he looked like a ruined patchwork man. His eyes were blue, like a cloudless sky. His hair, when he’d had any, had been red as rubies. His belly, when he’d had one, had hung over his big sterling silver horseshoe belt buckle. (Tacky? Damn straight. It had belonged to his father, as had the Colt.45 revolver with ivory grips. The Browning 9mm, and the shotgun for scaring away the megafauna, he had bought for himself.)

Bear was seven feet tall, broad-shouldered and big-boned. These days he looked more like a giant human walking-stick, ninety percent bones and one hundred percent wrinkles. He lived in an aging ranchstyle house he and Orla had built in Rexford back when they moved up here. That was in the late sixties, maybe twenty years before the collapse was officially acknowledged, but by then everybody who had a lick of sense had seen it coming.

Rexford was just south of the Canadian border. A lot of people had moved through over the years, trying to make it across into Canada. Bear and Orla had talked about trying for it themselves. But at first they thought they wouldn’t need to, this far north, and later it just seemed as if it were too late to try.

Bear had just celebrated his forty-second anniversary the night before, over a trout he had caught that very evening, at a fire he built in his back lot, on the banks of the stream. Maybe it had been the fire that attracted the girl.

It was a miracle anyway that that seasonal wash could house a living fish, choked as it was with algae and weeds. The fish was certainly an endangered species. But hell; who wasn’t, these days?

Here’s a curious thing: when Bear cut the fish’s belly open he found an aluminum ring, a soda can pop-top. They didn’t make soda cans anymore—never mind the kind of pop-tops you can wear. Bear washed the blood off the ring in the stream, kissed it, and put it on his pinkie finger. As he did so he had to shake his head at his foolishness. Orla would have been amused. They had had to barter the real ring away long ago, along with Orla’s. The reason had seemed important at the time, and it wasn’t as if their marriage had suffered for want of a wedding band or two. Now that she was dead he rather wished he hadn’t.

With her gone, truth to tell, Bear didn’t mind much whether he lived or died. He’d had his share of living, and was ready to be done with it all.

Orla had not approved of his thoughts of suicide.

“Why?” he had asked. Seeing her on her deathbed (it had been late last fall; lung cancer, Orla believed, though they weren’t sure-anyway, it didn’t matter, since they had no way to treat it), he had made up his mind. Bear did not want to outlive his wife. He had gotten out his Colt.45 and thumbed cartridges into the cylinder, one by one. “I figure it’s better to go out together. Don’t you?”

She had wheezed, “Lewis…” A pause for air. “Behrend Jessen. Put that… thing away.” She was glaring at him as fierce as the day they’d wed. “Don’t you…
fucking
dare.”

He eyed the gun with a sigh. Where did she get the energy to pick a fight at a time like this? Damned woman. “Now, Orla, for cry-eye—”

She clutched her mother’s blue cross-stitched coverlet that she loved so much. “Don’t… bullshit me, fool. Put it… away.”

He started to argue; she coughed up blood. You can’t trump bloody gobbets for settling an argument. He put the gun away, intending to get it out later. He was baffled by her obstinacy.

The next night, he held her hand and said again, “Why not?”

She did not answer right away, and he thought maybe that was it, that she was gone. But she squeezed the words out between inhalations. “There’s… a… reason.”

He did not reply right away. He felt her implacable gaze, felt her grip on his hand.

“Promise… me.”

He scowled. “Orla Jessen, you have never believed in God. If you are going to tell me the Lord Almighty has a plan for me, I swear I’ll put a bullet in my brain right this minute.”

“Reason,” she said again. It was quite literally a gasp. And it was her last word. Perhaps an hour later, perhaps two, her breathing ceased.

When he thought about it afterward he figured Orla would have been glad that was her last word. She was an atheist from way back. The reason she spoke of would be logical. Not metaphysical.

Bear still believed in the Protestant God of his youth (he’d been brought up Methodist), but it was not a worshipful relationship. Oh my, no. He was furious with God, who had promised salvation and had delivered hell on earth. Refugees passing through had spoken of the die-offs. Faithful or no, people were dying—had died—by the billions. By the
billions.
God was a big fat eternal asshole, and Bear had stopped caring long before who heard him say so. His pastor, Desmond Marcus, had kicked him out of the church, ten years back, and had said some hurtful things about Orla. That was hard; they had been close friends. Des and Gloria had moved on a few years ago, headed to Seattle, Bear had heard, to apply for entry there, or perhaps north to Victoria, where the summers were still tolerable.

He fingered his Colt, thinking about Des’s opinion of suicide. There had been waves of them over the years, and Des had been quite vocal about how we mustn’t succumb to despair. The man knew how to inspire you, for sure. How to keep you hanging onto hope. But in the end, Des had given up, too, in his own way. Bear had seen it in his eyes.

This isn’t despair,
Bear thought.
I’m just done, is all. I’m done.

Bear could have gone ahead and offed himself then, as Orla lay cooling in their bed. But in the face of her earlier implacability, it seemed too violent. Disrespectful. And after Bear had buried her he lost whatever spark of initiative he had had. That had been four months ago, now.

Truth was, Orla was wrong. There was simply no reason he was still living, when so many had died. Billions meant
thousands of millions.
A hundred New Yorks. Loads of Londons, a plethora of Parises, trainloads of Tokyos, whole basketsful of Beijings, Torontos, Jakartas, Mumbais. If you stacked the bodies, Orla had told him once, they’d reach to the moon and back
four times over.
(She’d always been the one with the head for figures.) All gone. In two short generations human civilization had collapsed under its own weight, the way Ponzi schemes do. Now even the greatest cities were in their death throes. The people out in the big empty middle of the U.S. had been on their own for decades. Last he heard, scientists were saying human population would stabilize at somewhere under a hundred million, worldwide, once the resource wars and genocides died down: most of them within the Arctic and Antarctic circles.

A hundred million starving, miserable people. Of every hundred people, ninety-nine dead, within a hundred years of humanity’s apex. Might as well call it extinction and be done with it. No reason
he
should still be hanging around.

Bear fingered the ring. He felt as though he had made his wife a promise, though he had never spoken the words.
Happy goddamn anniversary.

Orla would only have laughed and kissed him. Eventually, he figured, he’d either get over being mad at her for dying first, or die too, and end the argument that way.

Thanks to the fish with the ring in its belly, hunger didn’t wake him early the next morning. And that changed everything.

The morning after the fish dinner he awoke to a cool breeze blowing through the window. The sun was up. The window screen was gone, and a girl was exiting Orla’s closet. Bear lay still and observed her through slitted eyes. She had dark, tangled, dirty hair that went down well past her skinny butt. She had pulled on some clothes of Orla’s: a shirt, a pair of jeans. They hung off her. She was struggling into a pair of Orla’s walking shoes, biting her lip and grimacing. Bear could see the crusted sores on her feet from where he lay. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old.

Next she moved over to his chest of drawers, not three feet away from the bed. He breathed through his mouth, shallow and quiet.

She must have climbed the dead aspen. He had left the window open to let the breezes in. These days you didn’t say no to a cool breeze, not even at night in winter. It was a screened, second-story window on the slope of a steep hill, and the aspen was dead: brittle and as skinny as she was. A difficult climb. Anyone bigger wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.

He was not sure why he had awakened. She was quiet as a whisper as she emptied his drawers and pocketed the few items she seemed to find useful. It may have been the stink: she reeked of feces and body odor.

He spoke finally. “You won’t find much in there, I’m afraid.”

She spun to face him. She had a petite face with big eyes as dark and clear as obsidian. Sunlight glinted on the knife blade in her hand. It was a long blade, a serrated one. A fine hunting knife. It would gut him as easily as he had gutted that trout last night.

“Stay where you are,” she said. She stood just beyond arm’s length. From her accent he could tell her native language was Spanish. Orla would have known what country she was from. She had been in Central America back in the sixties.
Medecins sans Frontieres.
But the girl’s English was sharp and clear as broken glass. “Try anything and I’ll kill you.”

“Fair enough.”

A tense silence ensued. He felt a twinge—it wouldn’t be breaking his promise to Orla if someone else did him in. But his intruder, she was just a kid. She did not want to harm him, or she would have killed him at the outset. He didn’t want to make a murderer out of her for his own convenience. Besides, she might muff it, and sepsis was an awful, lingering way to go.

“I have provisions downstairs,” he said. “I’ll show you where I keep them. You look like you could use some, young lady.”

She eyed him suspiciously, but the left corner of her mouth twitched at the “young lady.” After another long pause, she shrugged. “All right. Get up. Don’t get cute.”

He swung his legs out of bed and stood. His joints were always stiff in the mornings.

She stared as he stood, and stepped back.
“Usted es un gigante!”
He remembered a little of his college Spanish:
You are a.
.. what? Oh. Of course.
A giant.

It was true. Even in his current state he could easily have overpowered her. But he did not. He felt a deep pity. A dreadful fate, to be alive so young at the end of the world.

He led her into the kitchen and showed her the hidden door in his pantry. It led down into the cellar. As she stepped over the threshold and headed down the complaining stairs, he shone his flashlight in across the shelves onto Orla’s hand-labeled Mason jars.

The entire underside of their ranch house was filled with food. Jars of pickled turnips, potatoes, peppers, carrots, green tomatoes, and a hundred or more different kinds of jams. Sealed carboys, filled with beans, rice, and corn.

It’d been at least two decades since they had had access to groceries shipped from elsewhere, and maybe twelve years since the local open-air market that replaced the grocery store petered out. Since then, he and Orla had lived off wild game, water hand-pumped from their private well, and supplies they had stored up before the collapse. Orla had spent years preparing. All the years of their marriage. She had dedicated herself to their survival—even before it was clear to most that collapse was imminent; well after everyone else had died or moved on. Cured hams and chickens and turkeys hung from the rafters, and a rack held jalapeño jerked beef. Bear figured he had a good three or four years’ supplies left, if he continued the way he had. After that it was the bullet, dammit, whether Orla liked it or not.

What caught the girl’s eye, he could tell, was the medical supplies. Orla had been an ER doctor till the town had shut down ten years back, and had stocked up on bandages, antibiotics, medicines, and whatnot. All kinds of whatnot. There were vitamins and supplements, cold remedies, and the like. Most of these were post-date by now. After the last and biggest Deflation in ‘84, even the mercy shipments had stopped coming in.

The girl stood on the bottom step, silhouetted by the light he shone—fists tight little balls, shoulders stiff. Then she turned and darted up the stairs, past him into the kitchen, where she pulled the tablecloth off the table. One of Orla’s handmade vases shattered on the floor. Bear looked at it. His vision went red. He roared—grabbed the girl’s arm, wrenching it—yanked her off her feet. Her eyes went wide.

“You little shit!” he yelled in her face.

Then he felt the sharp bite of her knife blade in his gut and dropped her. She backed away, knife at the ready, eyes wide, breathing fast. Mentally, he revised her age upward. She was more like eighteen. He lifted his torn, bloodied shirt and checked his belly. Just a scratch. The folds of skin there had protected him.

He ignored the girl—maybe he’d get lucky and she’d slit his throat while his back was turned—and knelt to pick up the pieces of broken vase. These he carried gingerly into the study. He laid the pieces out on the hearth.
Maybe I can glue them back together.
But pain squeezed at his heart and he knew he never would. He just didn’t have it in him.

He heard the girl clattering around, and after a few moments he sensed her watching him. He turned. She stood in the kitchen doorway. Orla’s tablecloth was slung over her shoulder like a hobo bag. Medical supplies and jars and bags of food stuck out between the hastily tied knots. The burden of living had never been heavier on his shoulders than it was in that instant.

“Sorry,” she said finally.

Bear passed a hand over his eyes. “Just go.”