Love in the Time of Global Warming (3 page)

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.)

“I missed you,” I said.

“Me, too. I missed you so much.”

The anger drained out of me like blood. We hugged each other, holding on tight. Like the world was going to end.

*   *   *

The chocolate bar is gone by the time I return from the memory; I haven’t even enjoyed the dense crack of sweetness. As I lick the dark stains off my fingers I wonder if I’ll ever know chocolate again, let alone the residue of love.

5

THE CYCLOPS

M
ANY OF THE ROADS
are destroyed but I drive where I can, avoiding ditches and fallen, rotting palm, ficus, and sycamore trees, pretending that I know what I’m doing and thankful that at least the van isn’t a stick shift. It doesn’t really matter that I lurch and swerve along; there’s no traffic. Maybe I’m going in circles; I don’t know. The air outside the van is dark with soot and smoke, from the scattered fires, and beneath the burn is the sick-sweet smell of rot. There are no people to be seen. Live ones, anyway. I avoid the sight of the dead like I used to avoid the bad news on television. Back Then I read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
or art history books, novels, or poetry but I have no books now when I really need them.

What I know is this: I have been sent on a journey. I was too afraid before, too afraid for over two months to venture out in the ruined spaces, even if it meant finding my family. But now I am on my way. Merk said he knew my parents, that I might be able to find them.

I’ve looked through the van for some kind of map but I can’t find even that. Maybe Merk was crazy, but somehow I believe him, or at least I want to. He gave me the van, after all. And what if my family is somewhere out there? I let myself imagine it for a moment, let myself see their faces, see myself falling into their arms, safe in the house we make with our huddled bodies. We’ll have one another. We can set up a camp, live out of the van, forage for food. It’s all I want now. But I have no idea how much the world has changed, not only from the Earth Shaker but in the weeks after, no idea how I’ll ever be brave enough to even find food and water, let alone fight whatever dangers exist.

*   *   *

We used to shop at this store a lot. Venice thought it was a big deal to go buy baseball cards and video games and plastic action figures when he was smaller. I always got mad at him for spending his money on overpriced stuff he’d grow tired of soon but he never listened to me. But I was just as free with my allowance, buying underwear and socks, camisoles, slips, and pajama tops I’d wear with jeans during the day. My mom got rolls of toilet paper and cleaning supplies, bags of tea lights and the Christmas lights we strung up all year round. Strange, how exotic and dreamy that sounds now—a trip to the store for toilet paper with my once annoying, now wildly precious family.

*   *   *

The big red bull’s-eye sign looms above the building. It’s one of the few things still standing. There are huge cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot. I park the van and get out.