The Incrementalists (28 page)

Here’s how it felt in his little hand.

And this is from Cal, too: the taste of an orange slice, with powdered sugar on it.

Any further back and the memories don’t have power anymore, so we can stop there.

I closed the suitcase, brought it downstairs and outside, and I set it under the olive tree.

Then I opened my eyes and hit Send.

Ren

He’d packed me a suitcase.

I read Phil’s email seven times trying to figure what it meant that he’d left a suitcase for me under a tree. I wasted some time cursing Ramon’s damn wobbly alpha, because Who and When and Where were so not the point with the suitcase. I wanted to stick a pin through the flickering body of alpha. I wanted enough light to see Why.

Was he just answering the question I’d asked about what mattered? Was he saying the memories he’d packed in their casing of symbol and put out for me, these memories, or the symbols for them, are what matter to him?

That he wanted me to have them mattered to me.

It was a symbol. Like the little bird in Great-auntie Cece’s fairy tale. Few things have as much power. But it’s never the symbol—the bird itself, the cross itself, the prophet’s name in and of itself that is sacred—it’s the welter of emotions, ideas and insights it triggers. If it triggers nothing, its power is nothing.

Or was the suitcase his way of saying good-bye?

I took a shower and wished I had a bathrobe. I didn’t want to wear anything I’d packed for the three-day business trip I’d been expecting. Not that I owned the right clothes for today. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. I put on my pajamas and carried my laptop from my desk to the bed.

I found nothing new in my in-box except a forwarded political rant from my uncle, a selection of new sex-and-drug and sex drug spam, and a request for my expense report from Cindi. No changed meetings or new calendar items with Incrementalist fingerprints on them. Nothing else from Phil.

I emailed Brian and cc’d Cindi, introducing them. I suggested Brian take his grocery receipt for the dinner he was going to cook for me by HR. Liam had said he’d reimburse him. Cindi loves Italian food and needs a little syncopation in her life; Brian needs an optimist, so I told Brian Glyphx was on Central and Adams where there’s an adorable little coffee shop. Getting them in a room together would be enough, with my flakiness to laugh over together.

Then I read Phil’s email again.

This was him reaching out. But Celeste would be in the Garden, and I’d used up my day’s worth of courage.

This was Phil saying who he was: a closed case left, not a package delivered; a memory, not a conversation. But he wanted me—or was at least willing for me—to open it, and to know him. Was he symbolically offering to share his memories and himself with me?

I closed my eyes and was blown back against the headboard by the tumble of images, memories and emotion. I breathed through it. I reached out for the quiet mudflats, the saline stretch of goopy, gooey, undifferentiated morass, and realized it scared me a little less now. And the taste of root beer always made me smile. I placed the filters one at a time: Phil’s villa, the olive tree, a suitcase; and I found a seedpod. It was black and shiny as fake leather. And almost as big as I was.

I wrapped my arms around it. It was balloon-light, but unwieldy as a mattress, and I dragged it to a clearing where a cypress stump made a crooked seat. I sat down and rested with Phil’s gift at my feet. It looked overfilled, pregnant and impenetrable, and I knew it could hold only what he had once seeded in the Garden. All I could do by opening it was learn. I wouldn’t live experiences with him or see them through his eyes. I would only know what had happened to him.

“Just the facts, ma’am,” I told the seedpod, and slit it with my thumb.

It pooched open, and I reached into it. I pulled out a slippery green seed and knew what Mississippi collard greens taste like in Cleveland.

I nearly threw the fuzzed and golden sunflower seed back for the ticklish slobbery facts it imparted.

And then a powdery orange seed told me a taste I already knew, and memory tightened the edges of my tongue: the citrus-sweet memory Phil had meticulously constructed as a gift for me. More than a memory. A secret.

“Oh Jesus,” I whispered. “Oh, no.”

I squeezed the edges of the split-open husk back together, grateful that the halves knit themselves closed. I walked yards and yards away from the pod. This wasn’t a symbol. Symbols are inert in the hands of those they don’t trigger. This was a trigger. It was all the ammo there ever was against Phil. Every one of his switches.

Sometimes Why flickers like a lightning bug. Sometimes it cracks like lightning. Right between your eyes.

I picked up the seedpod and held it close to my body and let the filters lift. My cypress bench and the little pond where the frogs moaned all began to slip, and when the ground under me was good and runny, when I was starting to sink, I pressed the weightless seedpod which housed the heaviest things I knew away from me. I buried it in the undifferentiated mud of memory where it would grow and bud and flower in intuition and not knowledge. I pushed until I was certain there was nothing left for Celeste to eat. Then I opened my eyes.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Re: Gift

Wednesday, July 6, 2011 6:41 pm GMT - 7

I’ve unpacked and put your things away.

Come home.

Phil

I drove slowly, because it isn’t safe to drive when you’re tearing up, and, by God, I was going to make it there without being pulled over, or hitting anything. Nothing would be wrong on this drive. Too many things could go wrong after it, but nothing on this drive.

I felt my heart beating.

It’s only a couple of miles from my house to The Palms. I could have walked; I often do. But that would have taken too long.

I arrived, and I delivered my car to valet and went in the front door—that wouldn’t take me past the poker room. There was exactly one person I wanted to see.

The elevator took forever to arrive, and the ride up slightly longer than that.

I made myself walk, not run, down the hall.

“Come home,” she had said. Jesus.

Don’t be stupid, Phil. Go slow. Don’t go touchy and grabby before you know where her head is at. Don’t make things worse.

I stopped in front of her room; I knocked and the door opened instantly, like she’d been waiting behind it. She looked up at me and I took her in my arms and crushed her, and she buried her head in my shoulder and I felt wetness there. I kissed the top of her head and squeezed until I was afraid I’d hurt her. Somewhere, miles away, the door snicked closed behind us.

“There are so many problems,” I said. “But I—”

“Phil.”

I stopped.

“You really do talk too much,” she said.

Ren

Sometimes a life pivots in a way you can’t fight or deny; the first warning sign is your old self dead at your feet. Sometimes what you need is the opposite of what you want because it makes you reach for it. Sometimes none of the constructs or plans or pivot points matter.

He was all that mattered. The taste of his mouth on mine, the solid unyieldingness of his body that my body wanted to wrap and mold and form itself around. Everything else felt irrelevant and trivial to me, and we almost shredded our clothes trying to get free of them fast enough to fill our hands and mouths with each other again. There was no fear, no pulling away or even holding back, nothing reserved or restrained or considered. His hands hurt me, and I wanted them to. His mouth took from me and I wanted nothing left behind.

Sometimes all you are is want.

“Lie down,” he told me, and I climbed, naked, into the center of my big hotel bed, knowing he watched me.

“I’m sorry,” he said, eyes refocusing on mine once I was lying, only undressed and wildly awake, exactly as I had when I first opened my eyes after he’d staked me. “I didn’t mean to sound so—”

But I held his eyes and opened my legs, and he stopped talking with a noise like the sound of something breaking in his chest.

“Turn over,” he said.

I twisted onto my belly, and even though I only wanted to arch my back and raise my ass to him, I couldn’t stop it from rocking. I couldn’t hold it still.

“Turn back,” he said, in a voice I knew would not be able to talk in words again tonight.

I rolled again onto my back, my hips dancing against the coverlet, my breasts heavy with needing his hands on them. He walked from the foot of the bed to the side, beautiful, primitive and naked, looking down at me, and my thighs and breathing. My belly and squeezed-tight breasts shook with wanting to be where his eyes touched.

He sat on the edge of the bed, leaned over me and took one breast in his open mouth. I think I screamed. Or I whispered something stupid. My fingers were in his hair, untwisting the band that held it, pulling my body deeper against his insistent tongue and unforgiving teeth.

Then he was on top of me. In a single uncoiled spring, he went from sitting by me to pinning me. My arms wrapped his back. My legs wound his. He pushed into me.

And it was enough.

My body gasped around him, and suddenly, it was enough. Enough to have his back under my hands, his body and mine occupying the same space.

And just as suddenly it wasn’t. Wasn’t enough, would never be enough, couldn’t ever hold everything I felt. He reached a hand down my back and lifted my ass up hard against him. He caught his other hand in my hair. And this time, I know I screamed.

But he kissed me. He held me pinioned, inside me, on top of me, and under me. He held me, gripped and mastered. Held me slave and savior. Held me still, and kissed me. I twisted under him.

My tongue and hips and breasts ground in hungry circles. He took his mouth away and tightened his grip on my hair and ass, and pressed his temple against mine. And I saw through the Gardens.

All of them.

The patterns overlapped, and I saw the symbol for symbolic things. I felt the name for things that name things. I was—we were—the metaphor that tells how metaphor communicates. As he reached, and reached again into me, all the symbols dissolved. They ran in layers of meaning over my skin, and spun impossibly down into bottomless oceans of time, and past, and hunger, into a blackness that closed with a zip. Not Samsonite, but Eagle Creek for our summer house on Eagle Lake. And for a moment, I remembered everything. But I was pummeled by his wanting, and by my want reaching back, and it didn’t matter.

If fear pulls away, love pushes in. For every withdrawal, a deeper penetration, and if I ever felt afraid again I would reach, not for Fibonacci, but for the simple truth that I was loved. And I would have told Phil that—I wanted to, panting under him—but words were gone with the symbols we swam in, were diving hard down into. I reached with my temple, touched it to his, and came in tiny vast compressions no smaller than forty thousand years of shared symbols, and no bigger than a pivot.

SEVENTEEN

What We Can Do

Phil

“Have you ever noticed,” I said, “that there’s something erotic about hotel rooms? I mean, just being in a hotel room. Any hotel room.”

“No,” she said. “Never noticed that. And especially not a Vegas hotel room. Nope, never noticed that at all.”

She nuzzled her head onto my shoulder.

A little later she said, “So, I take it you don’t mind that I was meddled with?”

“I mind a lot,” I said. “I hate it.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean.” I slid down a little so I could kiss her, then slid back up. “I still mind that, but I’ve decided that will in no way prevent me from taking advantage of it.”

She laughed, and her hair tickled my chest.

“How about you?” I said.

She was quiet for a little while, then said, “I don’t know. I’m still working it out.”

“Is it ‘leave me alone to think’ working it out, or ’talk to me about it’ working it out?”

“It’s let me think, I think.”

“All right.”

“We need to go to Phoenix today.” Her voice had a sort of scary stillness.

“I know.”

“I should get up and shower.”

“Want me to scrub your back?”

She raised her head and looked at me. “Yes,” she said.

Ren

Phil left to pack, his hair still wet from our shower, and I seriously considered paying too much for a bathrobe from the hotel gift shop. Instead, I called Elise. She and her boyfriend were both out, like I was hoping they’d be, but she gave me her apartment address and told me where to find the spare door key. I put on the clothes I’d packed for the flight home and took a cab.

Elise’s place was exactly what I needed: quiet, pretty, and nowhere an Incrementalist would find me without some work. I changed the message on my phone in case Phil called before our appointed pickup time back at The Palms, and then I got comfy on Elise’s little, red-and-gold tapestry-draped sofa. Across from me, a TV perched on a large and rambling crimson bookcase, reflecting the gold-framed mirror on the wall behind me which, in turn, reflected the compact TV and the exuberant sprawl of books. I would have liked to have read the spines, but I was already short on time. I closed my eyes.

Salt air and root beer, the undifferentiated mud of my memory. No wonder Phil had trouble saying who he was when he has had so much more time to survey, and his Garden is full and fruitful.

My Garden, such as it was, stretched in front of me, still and peaceful, under a pale summer moon. At the very least, maybe I could roll it up like a dung beetle, into a doughy ball bigger than I was. I unzipped the Eagle Creek duffel.

Celeste had made and hidden a secret backup of her stub; I was here to see if I could do the same.
If you’re the reason Celeste has autonomy, our wisest action would be to kill you and retire the stub.
Sorry, Jimmy, I’m not a martyr. I know that.

I know it because Celeste taught me to study myself. And that moonlit strand of habit, from the journals I kept, through the philosophy books I read, to the psychology/design double major I took in college, that whole thread of deliberate self-discovery ran through my life like a strain of music. Its tune began with sheets stiff from the clothesline, softened by the humid bodies of my sleeping cousins, and wove dozens of instruments’ worth of people and places, with each of their hundreds of notes of separate clear memories, into a music—crunchy and damp—that sailed into my canvas bag. I was introspective, to a fault sometimes, but immutably. Packed into my duffel.