The Incrementalists (7 page)

I looked for a good B-movie line, but came up empty, not even a pod people reference.

“That wasn’t why,” Phil said, but he wouldn’t look up from his drink.

“Phil created a double link to Celeste in you, and probably a memory loop or two in the process. I’m guessing he hid all this from you? That you went into your Second blind?”

Phil was looking at me, but now I was the one eyeing my own feet. I nodded. “Did you ever wonder why zombies never have shoes?” I asked. “You’d think that’s the one thing you’d want to keep track of, if your skin wasn’t so much staying attached.”

Irina rotated her head toward Phil. “Is she insane?” she whispered. “Already?”

“She’s stressed.”

“I’m right here,” I said.

“It’s a coping thing she does,” Phil said. “She’ll be okay.”

“Hello?” I said again.

“Hello Ren, dear. Try to calm down,” Irina soothed. “We’re going to help you get through this. The first few days can be quite intense, but there are tricks, ways of thinking about what is happening, analogies and meditations that can ease the integration.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Why don’t I take you back to your hotel?” Irina stood up and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I’ve arranged for us to have adjoining rooms, and I brought something special for your headaches.” She smiled at me, her blue eyes a kind oasis in her parched face. “We’ll have breakfast in bed on room service trays.”

I stood up and leaned into Irina’s embrace.

Phil shrugged. “Go if you want to,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

Irina put a Slim Jim finger under my chin. “You understand Phil hid important things from you,” she said. “He pried more than he needed to and discovered some very personal things about you, Ren, and he hid them in the Garden.”

Phil made an odd noise, and Irina’s eyes shot in his direction, but she didn’t release my face. “Yes, you hid them ingeniously, but I’m very good with patterns.”

I nodded. “Me too,” I said. “I’m gonna stay.”

“Very well. You know where to find me.” Irina took car keys and an expensive leather bag from a barstool. “Don’t forget the casserole. It won’t be good if it’s overcooked.”

“Will she ride her broomstick to The Palms?” I asked Phil as she left. “Can you valet that?”

“Nah, she’ll have a car hidden around the block.”

“Wow,” I said, maybe just a little acidly. “You guys sure think of everything.”

Phil

I knew that whatever I did or said next was important. It’s often the first, initial reaction after you’ve been busted that determines how things will go down. So I chose my next action carefully. I went to the cabinet, got the bag of powdered sugar that I keep for the one time a year I bake, and opened it. I got a spoon, stuck it into the bag, and then, very carefully, I tapped the sugar onto the sliced oranges. Then I put the powdered sugar back, got a couple of paper towels, and set one in front of her.

She was still standing, watching me like I was an exotic snake that might suddenly bite. I put the bowl of oranges between us. “Have a matzo ball,” I said.

She picked one up carefully, and bit into it in slow motion, then chewed and swallowed. “It’s good,” she said.

“The mother of someone I was eighty years ago used to do that as a treat.”

“You must pick up a lot of recipes.”

“You learn what you like. Then you get a new Second, and you don’t like the same things anymore. It’s annoying sometimes.”

She ate another one and wiped her fingers on the paper towel. “So, you had an agenda, and it didn’t occur to you that I might have one too?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“And it didn’t occur to either of us that Celeste had one. Does Irina know that, too?”

“I haven’t gotten around to seeding that part yet.”

“Seeding?”

“It’s how we put memories in the Garden for each other to see. We graze for them when we need to retrieve information.”

“Do you water and weed them too?”

“Look, our words for things evolved, okay? It’s not like we all sat down and made it up in accordance with a style sheet somewhere. You can make a project of that, if you need one.”

“I’m plenty busy, thanks. Is Celeste going to be pissed I outed her meddling with you in the 2000 election?”

“It doesn’t work like that. Either you’ll become Celeste, and maybe wish you hadn’t, or you’ll stay Ren and live with your decision.” A shudder went through her. I recognized it. I knew what she was going to ask next, so I answered it. “I was Chuck Purcell. Born in January of 1972, in Pittsburgh. In ’94, I was driving home from work, and there was a fire, and I stopped, and I helped. Celeste recruited me. It took me a long time to decide.”

“Is Chuck sorry you did?”

“Chuck is me, and I’m not sorry.”

“But Chuck is gone.”

“His memories aren’t.”

“Is there anything left?”

“I’m a Pirates fan. I never used to follow baseball.”

“What about his family?”

“Mother and a sister.”

“Do you keep in touch?”

“Christmas and birthday cards. That part is hard, when you change. That’s the worst part.”

“You could have told me.”

“There was a lot I could have told you. But you said yes before I finished asking. I wasn’t about to talk you out of it. Why did you say yes, by the way?”

She ate another slice of orange, then wiped her fingers. “Are you going to have one?”

I did. It brought back memories. The sugary, smooth, melting orange tasted like—

“What’s funny?” she asked.

I held up the bit of peel left in my hand. “This is one of the things Celeste used as a switch on me. I didn’t eat it, but something around me had a hint of the flavor, or the smell. She’s very good. Why did you say yes?”

She stared out the window over my shoulder. I have a date palm back there. I never eat the dates. She said, “A couple of reasons.”

“And one is?”

“At my work, we’re trying to build a device that does what the Garden can: store memories remotely. It’s kind of a passion project for me.”

Out my front window there isn’t much to see except a stone lawn and a dog fence. I haven’t had a dog in years.

“And?” I said.

“And someone told me once that if I ever met a guy who shared my hidden dream, to jump at any chance he offered me.”

Maybe I should get a dog. Times like this, I could use a dog to lick the juice off my fingers. And to nuzzle me and look up at me like I couldn’t possibly have fucked up.

“Well?” she said.

“But they’re a pain in the ass to take care of.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I sighed. “Well, isn’t this just grand?”

Ren

Phil had powdered sugar on his face, but I wasn’t going to tell him. “I’m tired,” I said.

He nodded.

“I want to go to sleep, but…”

“But I haven’t taught you any of the tricks yet for managing your dreams.”

I picked up another orange slice and put it down again.

“And the dreams are usually pretty intense the first couple of nights,” he said.

“Yeah.” I didn’t want to relive last night if there was a way to funnel the torrent into something I could drink from rather than drown in. He was studying my face. I held his eyes.

We’d cleared a space in the flowers for the bowl of oranges, but he was framed on either side by the extravagant color and smell of bloom, stamen and leaf. His face could have been veiled too, for all I could read in it. “Can you trust me?” he said at last.

“Probably not.”

He nodded.

“I have to touch you.” It wasn’t desire in his voice. Almost regret. “It’s the only way I know how to get into your experience enough to shape it for you. It’s not something I can do with language.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s—” I could see, in the tiny muscle tic over his left eyebrow, what it was costing him not to drop my eyes. “It’s intimate,” he said.

“I’ll close my eyes and think of England.”

His smile only reached half his mouth. “Not like that.”

“Okay.”

“More.”

“Stop it!” I snapped. “I said okay.”

He walked into the living room like a man on the way to his own embalming. I followed too quickly and had to wait on the rug like an idiot while he found a CD and put it on. It was something low and wordless, all cello, or at least all strings. I’ve never been good with picking out instruments, Mom’s efforts and Prokofiev’s aside. But I thought it was odd, with everything he must know about me, that he wouldn’t pick a music matzo ball. But maybe this was one of his.

He held his hands out in the universal symbol for “dance?” And I stepped into the hole his arms made, my right palm in his left, my left on his shoulder. He closed long, cool fingers over mine and rested his right hand lightly on my waist. Our feet made a slow, shuffling orbit around the empty space between our bodies, and for a long time, we just danced. My mind spun down, stopped grappling with what I’d heard and said, and finally quit listening to my thoughts. He brought the crown of his head to mine and rested it there, but none of the tension left the shoulder under my hand. He turned his head, and pressed his temple against mine, the way he’d done after he’d kissed Celeste on my mouth.

Wanting to articulate the magic of what I felt, and to share its power with the man who held me, I said, “Oh.”

He pulled me against him.

“Close your eyes,” he whispered.

The music held my feet and kept their little steps stepping, but everything that wasn’t my body was soaring. My knees wove between Phil’s. Our bellies, and his hips and mine floated over our feet and knees like boats in deep currents. My breasts against him made two polestars of white light. Our temples touched; we danced. And our dancing didn’t matter. Our bodies were extraneous. Symbolic.

“Oh,” I said again.

“Get to this place first, and the dreams slide through you,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Can you tell me what you see?”

“Zombies,” I said.

“No, love. That was just a game you were playing. Look.”

I wanted him to call me “love,” again, but there were definitely zombies lurching my way. They shambled and shed bits of themselves in obliging conformity to type, with one flagrant violation. “They’ve got guns,” I mumbled.

“Ren,” Phil’s voice was calm, but louder. “Keep dancing with me.”

“They’re going to shoot me,” I said.

“No one is going to shoot you.”

But all I could feel of my body against Phil’s was my heart banging its way toward my teeth. “She’s going to shoot me, and you can’t reason with her because she thinks brains are food.”

“You’re sticking bits of different memories together, Ren. None of this is real.”

But it was real and what was stuck together were bits of rotting flesh. Celeste’s body decomposing.

Phil’s hands were hard on my back and my fingers. “Ren!”

The zombie raised its rifle to its shoulder and sighted down the barrel at me. It closed one eye, cocked the hammer and its eyebrow—Phil’s one emotional eyebrow. I stepped back from his arms into the blank white of someplace inside my head.

“You wanted Celeste back,” I said. I couldn’t see Phil, but I could feel him there, and all the emptiness touching me without him. “You doubled up on Celeste to make sure I’d step aside for her. With her genes and all the other stuff you matched, you knew her personality could take over mine.”

“I warned you that could happen,” he said.

“Not could,” I said. “Would. You knew it would. And you were okay with that. You wanted that.”

“Ren.”

“Ren knows you wanted her to die.”

“Celeste. I warned her, Celeste. You didn’t tell Chuck much more. I had no way of knowing she’d agree so quickly.”

“She’s not me.”

“Not yet.”

“She won’t be. Here’s a riddle for you, dear Mendel. Without generations to study or pea pods to plant, how can you still know a trait’s not heritable?”

“Celeste—”

“When that trait itself would prevent genetic transmission, that’s how. Renee didn’t inherit martyrdom from me.”

The whiteness went from rage-hot to bitter. I was shivering too hard to dance.

I opened my eyes. “Celeste killed herself,” I said, and all I could feel were Phil’s arms, like the metal hoops around a barrel.

“Will I remember this?” I asked him. “Can you make it so I won’t remember?”

“I can’t.”

“What I do next, who I am next depends on what I remember.”

“Always. But who I am also depends on what you remember.”

“Everything you remembered about Celeste wasn’t enough to change who she was.”

“No.”

“Phil?”

“Yeah?”

“Does hurting this much feel just like having her here?”

“I can barely tell the difference,” he said, but his hands were lighter, and our feet were moving again. “Can you sleep now?”

“I think I already am.”

FIVE

What Else Can I Get You?

Phil

Just like when I’ve spiked someone, I don’t know if I literally or figuratively carried her to the bed, but when I left her there, my arms were shaking. That isn’t conclusive, because the rest of me was shaking too. I was tired, and I was hungry, and I ached in places that weren’t even metaphorical. But I wasn’t going to rest. Not yet. There were used glasses and an empty beer bottle on the side table, and some dirty dishes next to the sink; I’d have liked a chance to redd up the place, flowers aside. But I wasn’t going to do that either.

I sat down in my chair, closed my eyes, and smelled cherry blossoms and tasted chive. I opened my virtual eyes and I was in my villa, kicking aside dusty old memories in the shape of fruit and urns, candlesticks and furniture. I went out back, following a well-worn path. I’d once asked Ray why it is that paths showed up in our imaginations, and he suggested something about neural pathways in our brains that didn’t sound very convincing. It didn’t matter; I went past the orchard and out the broken wooden gate, leaving it swinging loudly behind me.

Jesus Christ, Celeste.

Four steps along the path brought me to the western orchard of my neighbor. There was a hole in the ground where once there’d been a bust of Juno until I’d pulled it up, fashioned it into a spike, set it on fire, and stuck it into Ren’s head. What I was looking for should be right next to it, because time flows linearly.