The Incrementalists (29 page)

It was not what I had expected. Where were my tidy seeds like the ones Phil packed when he gave me his switches? I’d swept them up in my song of introspection. It had been not just select, specific, symbolic memories that packed meaning into history, and came with the taste of trust or the texture of curiosity, but a whole symphony of who I was. A singing twig of a stub.

And the one beside it was the other half of my double major. I’d studied psychology and not philosophy. And despite my life-long love of beauty, I took design instead of art. Because I was practical. Percussively. The drumbeat of worries my mom never shared but couldn’t hide about our rent and clothes joined the rattle of the fun we had at thrift shops shaken free by relief as much as creativity, and the ringing timpani of drugs I didn’t take, and the foreign exchange I did, rolled into a rich, dense ensemble, not of privation, but choice. Martyrdom is indulgence and wouldn’t have survived under this barrage of sound, even if it’d been innate. And the practical drum line marched thundering into the bag.

Nana’s minced bird matzo ball soup, my switch for trust, played tuba in the courage band (I am brave, in part, because I trust people will help me when I ask), but it sang coloratura for sex. I could have watched that opera for hours, but a priest with a basso profundo started singing flat, so I went backstage.

It was dark and vast, and every puppet, hanging by its strings on the back wall, had two faces. I picked up Practical and found Frivolous. I turned over my Strength and saw I was Broken too. And even though Know Thyself was already in the bag, I surprised myself with whispers I couldn’t quite hear. So okay, Oskar, it looks like I’m a dialectic too. And goddamn it, Celeste, fine; I am unfathomable. And yes, Phil; it’s a jumble.

The Eagle Creek duffel was not a harmonious symphony of interwoven songs of myself—fuck, I contradict myself—but a roar of static, like a house on fire. But I was going to go out singing. Over the noise of all the signals, despite not knowing what the hell I was doing, I’d make up something loud. Not a memory from the Garden of all memory, but a dream from the fields of the uncreated of work and love. I thought about the RMMD which I now knew must record more than memories and information linked to auditory cues, but songs and stories as well. And I thought about Phil, with his dimple and eyebrows and his curiosity and conviction. And I sang, “Our memories aren’t all we are,” to the tune of “Camptown Races,” and I zipped it all up before the final
“da
.
”

I left Elise a note and twenty bucks for all the Cap’n Crunch I ate, and I put the key back under the ceramic frog.

Phil

It was about four hours later that I got back to pick up Ren. I paid for her late checkout because I felt like I owed it to her boss, and after Jimmy’s lecture about evil, I couldn’t bring myself to do even a light meddle on the clerk.

The valet retrieved my car, we loaded up Ren’s suitcase and her laptop, and hit the road.

“How do you like to road-trip?” I said.

“Not as a verb,” she said.

“Correction noted. Are you of the Stop Everywhere school, or the Just Get There school?”

“Very much of the Just Get There school. You?”

“I’m adaptable, but Just Get There is my preference.”

“Good, then.”

“Except you have to see the Hoover Dam.”

“I’m fine with that.”

She put her hand on my leg and I felt a smile grow. A little later, she said, “Do Incrementalists ever see the future? Get premonitions? That sort of thing?”

“No. What are you feeling?”

“Nervous. About Oskar and Ramon and Matsu fixing what should be our problem. Like something is doomed to go wrong.”

I was quiet for a while, then I said. “I don’t believe in premonitions. In forty thousand years, I haven’t seen anything remotely like evidence, in us or in anyone.”

“All right.”

“So the feeling is coming from something else. Something you know or suspect or noticed but aren’t consciously aware of.”

“That isn’t much better,” she said.

“I know.”

“Are you looking forward to being home?”

“Yes. No. I think so.”

“You like Phoenix?”

“I’d prefer Tucson. Hey, do you think we could do anything about that obnoxious new law?”

“The immigration thing? Maybe. We sometimes do things on that level. Kevin did pretty good with the gay marriage thing in New York.”

“That was us?”

“Well, it’s never that clear. We pushed here and there, and helped. Kevin was handling it. How much difference he made, I don’t know.”

“We need to fire our people in California, then.”

I chuckled.

“What about the Green Revolution thing in Iran?”

“Not us. Long, ugly arguments on that one, but in the end we stayed out. I think we were right to.”

“Why?”

“The heart of Mousavi’s program was cutting social services for the poor.”

“Oh.”

“Celeste wanted to support Mousavi, and lord, you should have heard Oskar.”

“I can imagine.”

I nodded. “But in the end, Goli had the last word. She lives there.”

“Must be tough for her.”

“She likes it. Says she’s doing good. And she’s crazy into the music. Don’t get her started on the first new creative music in two hundred years. Seriously. Don’t get her started.”

Ren laughed and my heart flip-flopped.

I parked the car and we got out and walked around and looked at millions of tons of water held back by concrete and steel.

Ren said, “By
we
do you mean humanity, or the Incrementalists?”

“What?”

“You just said, ‘Look what we can do.’”

“Oh. Did I? I meant humanity. It always hits me like that.”

She put her hand on my arm and I grew about half a foot and my cell phone rang.

“Are you going to answer it, or just stare at it,” she said after a while.

“I might throw it into Lake Mead,” I said, but of course I answered it.

Ren

“That was Ramon,” Phil said.

I watched the held-back water and didn’t say anything.

“He wanted to know if either of us has checked email.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t,” I said.

“He wants us to.” Phil hadn’t put his phone back in his pocket, and the way he was holding it—sideways in his hand and weighing it—he looked like he still might just pitch it over the dam.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“I know.” Phil put his arm over my shoulder and I leaned against his side.

“I don’t want the real world to catch us,” I said. “I know we’re running away, and I know we can’t do it forever, but I don’t want to stop.”

Phil tightened his arm around me. “I know,” he said. “But that’s how you know it’s the real world you’re running from. It keeps being there, even when you leave it.”

I dropped my head against him and tasted something cold, like graphite or shale, wrapped in a rag that had once been an apron, which had been a flour sack before that. I ran my tongue over my lips, but it wasn’t in the water-sprayed air. I closed my eyes and felt along the edge of buried memory. A fierce union man on a visit to someplace green and hilly. Phil would remember his name. I just stroked the profile of his Stand-and-Fight switch, and wondered if I had one too. My mom, maybe? The way she’d managed no matter what.

“Do you know why I have only the memories of my life to draw from when I’m trying to see my own switches?” I asked him.

He shook his head, still resting on the top of mine. “Something to do with Celeste, I’d guess,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, enjoying hearing him say her name like you’d say, “Something to do with the weather.”

“I guess, at least for now, she’s able to hang on to most of that stub.”

“Oskar and Ramon are right, you know,” I said.

“Fuck them.”

“It’s the perfect answer.”

“Fuck perfect.”

“I don’t know, Phil.” I rolled from under his arm to against his chest, my arms tucked in, and he put his around me. “I don’t know what’s right to do. I’m all conflicted and confused, and a thousand other modern and inconvenient things. And Oskar and Celeste are so decisive. Ramon too. If he has concluded that the best way to keep Celeste from hurting you is to get rid of me, there’s a part of me that wants to be noble enough to accept that.”

Phil’s body was rigid against mine. “Acceptance isn’t what we do,” he said.

I shrugged. “And anyway, Celeste was right, I’m no martyr.”

“Martyrdom isn’t what we do either,” Phil said. “We do better. Not perfection, not redemption. Just better.”

I grinned against his chest. “Perfection is overrated,” I said.

“Yeah. And all the perfectionists are just too good to be true.”

I laughed. “We should be The Betterists.”

“Sounds like pederasts.”

“We shouldn’t be that,” I said, looking up at him. “That’s not better.”

“No,” he agreed, matching my serious tone. “This is better,” he said, and kissed me. I stood in his arms and closed my eyes and in the same way all the meanings and implications and contexts of a massive idea can concentrate in a single symbol, all the sensations and emotions and nerves of my body concentrated in my mouth, and his kissing me was conversation and love and sex, tasting and biting, as demanding as it was responsive, as profound, and as subtle. I wound my hands over his shoulders. He still had his phone in one hand and I felt it vibrate against my back even before I heard it.

He stepped away from me and looked at his phone like he wasn’t sure what it was. I took it out of his hand and stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans.

“Maybe,” I said, “it would be better if we checked our email.”

“Better than what?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Better than standing here kissing you? Unlikely. Better than checking into a hotel somewhere between here and Phoenix and getting lost in each other for a couple more hours? Decidedly not.”

“Better than having your phone ring every half hour, no matter where we are or what we’re doing, until Ramon shows up at our door and starts reading aloud to us?”

Phil shuddered. “Ray doesn’t always notice if a man’s dressed or not,” he said.

I pulled his phone out of my pocket and handed it to him. He took it with a dimple-cracking grin. “You know, it’s not like its prior location would have dissuaded me from going after it,” he said. “Quite the contrary. In fact, perhaps in the interest of improved communication, you should start carrying it for me, and I’ll just reach for it whenever I feel the need to be connected.”

But I’d already taken out my own phone and was pulling up email. “Oh, fuck,” I said.

I tucked my back against him so he could read over my shoulder. I didn’t know the sender’s name.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Disturbance in the Garden?

Thursday, July 7, 2011 7:36 am GMT-5

Hi All,

So a weird thing happened to me. Anybody else? I’ve been getting together switches for some meddlework I want to do on a teacher at my kids’ school. She’s a nice lady, but a little overinvolved in the children’s home lives, if you know what I mean. She’s always asking my kids what they ate for breakfast, and how many hours of TV or video games they play. Like that’s any of her business! Details, if anyone cares, are the yellow Matchbox tow truck on top of the TV in the living room.

So anyway, I was keeping her switches in this adorable red-and-white sock yarn in the center row of cubbies in my wall of cotton blends. I went in today to wind in the plaid shirt she was wearing on the day in seventh grade when no one in the cafeteria would let her sit with them, and there weren’t any empty tables. Poor thing, she’d just walked around and around the whole period with her food on her tray.

So I went to add this to the skein and it wasn’t there! I found it later in the NYLON BLEND wall. I’d never make a mistake like that. I’d love to know if any one (Hello, any Salt reading?!?) has any idea how something in my own Garden could have gotten that out of place. I mean, I put it back, but sheesh.

Thanks!

Kate

Phil’s phone rang in his pocket, against my ass.

“Tell him we’re coming back,” I said. “It was Celeste in Kate’s Garden. I remember it.”

Phil

“I need to learn that expression,” she said as we came over the rise and Lake Mead dropped out of sight in the rearview mirror. “I’m guessing it has to do with frustration management.”

“A bad job of,” I agreed.

She put her hand on my leg and I covered it with my own.

“I’d have thought you’d have a sports car. Or at least something with manual transmission.”

“Last year I went through a brief spell of being environmentally conscious. I’m over it now. But I like the car. I hit a hot streak and paid cash for it. Used, but still. It was a good feeling.”

“A hot streak?”

“Yeah, you know. When everything is going right, and every laydown is correct, every call is correct, and all of your good hands hold up.”

“But…” she broke off.

“What?” I said.

“Do you need hot streaks? I mean, with what you can do.”

I stared at her, then pulled my eyes back to the road. “Honey,” I said. “I don’t meddle when I’m playing poker. That would be, uh, no, I don’t do that.”

“Oh,” she said.

“You mean, you thought I was cheating all this time?”

“I didn’t think of it as cheating. Have I offended you, Phil?”

I considered. “I don’t think so. Startled me, is more. It isn’t that I have such a high regard for meddlework, it’s that I have a high regard for poker.”

“You love the game.”

I nodded.

We were starting to get Las Vegas traffic now, and it was rush hour. Yes, Virginia, Las Vegas has a rush hour.

The Prius was nice, but too small to hold an elephant. I finally said, “So, you can sense when Celeste is in the Garden.”

She nodded.

A pickup truck cut in front me; I braked and said, “Can you tell what she’s doing there?”

“No.”

“Have you tried?”