The Incrementalists (13 page)

I put my nose to the reed, and it was sweet and grassy, greener smelling than it looked, but inert. I pulled at its roots, but I didn’t really want to, and it made Wolfie growl. I put my ear up against it, feeling like an idiot for trying to hear a leaf talk. Wolfie watched me. “I know,” I told him. “Look at my Garden. Clearly I’m no plant whisperer.” But my thumb hooked in the reed. I followed the furled edge up, and it peeled open.

It wasn’t a hollow tube after all, but a tightly curled leaf. I thought maybe, if I could flatten it out, I would see the memory playing out on its surface like on a television screen. But the leaf had other ideas. I pushed apart the two bottom corners, holding them with my feet, and the top rolled up like a window shade. I pushed the right top up and the right bottom down, and the whole left side closed up like a fist.

Wolfie watched me struggle, his face a portrait of canine concern. He barked.

“If you don’t have anything helpful to offer, shut up,” I said. “Can’t you see I’m engaged in mighty combat here?”

He wagged his tail and watched me fight the leaf.

I anchored the bottom of it with my feet and wriggled my hand between the upper corners and pushed. I managed to stretch the furl open at last, my body in a painful
X,
like a racked man. And wedged there. “Great,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Phil’s voice sounded parched and distant. I let go to look for him, and the leaf snapped in on itself and wrapped me up inside it.

I was in the living room. In Phil’s chair. In Phil. The leaf held me motionless, and I watched through him, learned of the ritual he’d done that brought me into this strange world, and heard him talk of my reactions. Then the leaf opened, the reeds dissolved into mud, and I opened my eyes.

Phil was watching me closely, still holding my hand.

“Okay, I can graze now,” I said. “But I want pizza.”

Phil

Her voice was the same, but there was a glitter in her eyes. She was starting to feel the Garden, and the connection to it, and to all of us. She wouldn’t recognize, yet, the feeling of finding her family, but the first hints of it would be making their way into her spine.

There are good parts to this thing we do, this thing we are. Being someone’s titan reminds you of that.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I told her.

“That I want pizza? I’m pretty sure I do.”

There was nothing different in her expression, or her body language, but it was like there was a glow under her skin.

I shook my head. “Think about it, Ren. You. Me. Irina. Oskar. We will starve to death before we can manage to agree on a pizza. Or two pizzas. And I’m too hungry to even get started with them.”

“You and I will agree,” she said. “Those two can do whatever the hell they like.”

I opened the door, stuck my head out, and said, “Ren and I are ordering pizza. Flamingo. 702-889-4554. You two can do whatever the hell you like.” Then I shut the door before they could respond. Fortunately, my cell was in my pocket, so I didn’t have to ignominiously walk back in there to get it. I ordered us pepperoni, onion and green pepper. When I was done, Ren was looking thoughtful.

“What?” I asked.

“Do you ever agree on anything?”

“Not much, really.”

She shook her head. “Then why are you still together?”

“Can’t help it.”

“That’s the only reason?”

“On bad days, I think it might be. But I don’t know.”

“Two hundred pure-blood altruists and you can’t get along with each other?”

“Something like that.”

She squinted one eye. “That altruism thing has me stumped,” she said.

“How so?”

“Well, are you saying that no one, in all this time, has, I don’t know, gone rogue? Used these abilities for himself? Gone crazy? Become evil, whatever that means?”

I started to tell her she’d remember, but then I realized that wasn’t a given. “That’s all happened. I think of them as the Dark Years. Hear the capital letters? But—” How to put it? “Okay, I said we don’t agree on much of anything. But eventually, we did have to agree on one thing: If you’re going to live indefinitely, one lifetime doesn’t count for much.”

She frowned. “That seems like—”

“Let me finish. This is hard to explain.”

“All right.”

“You live a normal lifetime; actually less, because the first twenty or thirty years you’re someone else. Then, pop, you’re someone else again, and you can’t control who. So, what do you do to try to give your next Second a good life? When you don’t have a clue who that Second is going to be?”

She thought for a moment, chewing her lower lip, which I found adorable. “You try to make everything better?”

I nodded. “With as little risk as possible of making things worse.”

“So, it’s all self-interest and Rawl’s veil?”

“Pretty much.”

“Couldn’t you do more good if you were rich and powerful?”

I grunted. “You’d think so. But most of the time, money and power make you spend all of your time dealing with money and power. If you don’t, you tend to turn into an asshole. Most of us make enough to get by and don’t worry about anything more. Usually at least one of us is wealthy at any given time, which is a pain for that person, but useful for the group. Right now, it’s poor Jimmy. His last recruit invested in Google before taking the spike.”

She thought some more, her forefinger tapping her eyebrow. “Self-interest is a little easier to accept.” She curled her hand into a fist. “But couldn’t a group, a subset, all agree that they were going to become powerful, and give each other powerful Seconds, and—”

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry to interrupt. I don’t like to dwell on it. That’s exactly what happened, and it didn’t turn out well. Those memories are hazy, and go back a long, long way, but I know it happened. There was almost a full millennium of fighting among ourselves and making everything worse. I know it was ugly. No one wants to go back there again. We learned.”

“God,” she said. “I’ll remember this?”

I hoped so. “It’ll start coming back as impressions and half memories. But you can always go to the Garden and graze for as many of the details as you want. It’s a good idea to, actually. I do it from time to time, just to keep myself in line. But don’t tell Oskar, it’d make him feel superior.”

“Can’t have that,” she said, and gave me a six-thousand-watt smile that looked nothing like Celeste’s.

Her mouth was soft and yielding and strong all at once, and her tongue tasted like lemons and unabashed laughter; her hands on my back felt like she was trying to pull me into her, and one part of my mind wondered if I were crushing her, while another part wanted this to never end. We were somehow both standing up, and I was just starting to think that falling over was a real possibility when she stiffened and pulled her mouth away. I dropped my arms and she took a step back. She fixed me with her eyes like she was trying to see into my skull and said, “I’m not Celeste.”

I thought the best thing to do was stand there like an idiot with my mouth open, so I did until she walked past me, opened the door, and went back to the living room.

I wasn’t hungry anymore.

EIGHT

How’s the Head?

Ren

Three pizzas came. For four people, we got three pizzas in three separate deliveries, and we moved all Irina’s flowers from the breakfast bar and sat there and ate. Or Oskar and I ate, Phil and Irina picked.

“You discovered your Garden,” Irina said. “Phil stayed with you and guided you. Oskar grazed. I just sent messages. I’m not so hungry.”

But she looked hungry, and I suspected she just didn’t like pizza, even though she’d ordered her own. Phil sat beside me, and I told Irina and Oskar about my muddy Garden, and they were nice enough not to laugh. Oskar called it “postmodern,” and Irina said it wasn’t, but Phil said it sounded like Ramon’s grid, with its mad swarm of data points filtered by tracking axis lines, which made me feel a little less like a freak. “It’s just a signal from noise problem,” Phil said. “We all solve it differently.”

“Sounds like you all do everything differently,” I said, and Irina and Oskar laughed.

Irina climbed off her barstool. “I’m going to put a slice of this in the oven. Is yours warm enough, Ren?”

I looked at the empty box Phil and I’d been eating from. “I’m fine,” I said.

“Oh, for the love of all the gods in heaven and all the bullshit on this stupid earth, Phil!”

Phil’s eyes got round and he set his beer down softly. “Irina, don’t—”

“I made this myself! Her mother’s recipe. You heathen!” Irina brandished the mummified tuna casserole at us over the bar. “What did you do, just turn the oven off and leave it?”

“Maybe.”

“And you’ve been eating pizza and Froot Loops since? Are you children?”

“I like sugar cereal,” I said. “I didn’t get it as a kid, so it feels grown-up to me.”

Irina looked from me to Phil and back as though trying to evenly distribute her disdain without spilling any.

“I thought you were just baking it for the smell,” I said at last. Which earned me a quick sideways glance from Oskar.

“I wasn’t meddling with you!”

“No?” Phil asked her. “With the mint sprigs tucked into the flowers, and the tempting offer of a hotel breakfast in bed tray?”

“No.” Irina stood, her monkey hands clamped to her bony waist, and I tried to imagine what she’d been like young. Her personality was a third of the age of Phil’s, but she felt like someone’s grandmother, and I just wanted to kiss him again.

“Gosh, look at the time,” Phil said, and stood up. “I’m going to go pick up Jimmy from the airport. We can run by the store and get you some tea on the way, if you want to come with me, Ren.”

“That’d be great,” I said. “I have a meeting at The Palms at five.”

“Can you drop me off there, too?” Oskar asked, and I was unreasonably disappointed that Phil said yes.

“Well, I’m not going,” Irina said. “I have some grazing to do.”

We got tea—four boxes, two herbal, two black—at the grocery near Phil’s house. Phil also got Lipton instant iced tea, lemon juice, and a lilac-scented candle. But when he caught me looking at the instant iced tea, he said it wasn’t for me. After we dropped Oskar at the front of the hotel and pulled back into traffic, Phil reached for my hand. “I knew you weren’t Celeste,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be.”

“Who’s Celeste?”

He laughed. “Never mind.”

So for a few miles, I didn’t. I adjusted the A/C vents to point right at my face and leaned my cheek against Phil’s shoulder. He put his hand on my knee and squeezed it, and I watched the tropical trees and the brilliant sun, and felt the space between our bodies fill up with wanting and curiosity.

“Celeste was the most recent dominant personality in the stub you got,” Phil said after a while. “I was in love with her, or tried to be, over several lifetimes.”

“Do I remind you of her?” I asked.

“Not anymore,” he said.

“Do you miss her?”

He shrugged, lifting my head a little on his shoulder. “I don’t know. She killed herself, and that makes me sad.”

“Is suicide one of the things you, I mean we, aren’t allowed to do? Like choosing your own Seconds?”

“It’s not that we aren’t allowed to choose our own Seconds, it’s that we can’t. And, no, suicide isn’t forbidden. In fact, Eleanor and Gaston have stayed together and kept their ages roughly in synch for quite a while that way.”

“I can’t decide if that’s awful or sweet,” I said.

Phil chuckled, its rumble amplified in my ear against his arm. It made me want to wrap myself around him and feel his laughter everywhere. “I think it’s both,” he said. “But with Celeste, it was just sad.”

I nodded. “So now Oskar’s in the Salt.”

“Yeah. Celeste would have hated that.”

“She must have been pretty sure she’d stay dominant in me,” I said.

“We all were,” he said. “First time in a long time I’ve liked being wrong.”

I squeezed his arm and smiled. “I have a meeting with my boss at five o’clock, and then we’re meeting with his boss either after that or tomorrow morning.”

“Let’s make it tomorrow. I’d like to see you tonight.”

I nodded. It’s stupid how big little things are in the very beginning of anything. “Won’t you be meeting with Oskar and Jimmy and Irina tonight?”

“And Ray. But I think you should be there too. That’ll make six, which isn’t great, but we can call in Matt if necessary; he’s next after Oskar.”

“Is he on Oskar’s side?”

“Now you sound like Celeste.”

“Who’s Celeste?”

“No, it doesn’t matter. We don’t really have sides. Celeste thought Oskar was an extremist, and dangerous because of it. He thought she was cautious to the point of irrelevance.”

“And you?”

“Different arguments, different points along the axis. On Germany, I was with Oskar; I wanted us to do more. With Fox News, I agreed with Celeste; what Oskar pushed was unsubtle. With Cambodia, we all blew it.”

“Suicide seems like a drastic step for a moderate person,” I said, as we pulled up along the curb outside baggage claim.

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I still don’t quite believe it. There’s Jimmy!”

I climbed out of the car to find myself folded into a hug like a cashmere coat. Jimmy looked like an Arabian thug but smelled like vintage leather and good wine. A tiny ruby winked in the pierced flesh of his earlobe like blood in black velvet. He kissed both my cheeks, and then hugged Phil every bit as long and as tightly, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. He threw open the Prius’s back door and tossed in a vintage Amelia Earhart suitcase. I tried to offer the front, but he refused and positioned himself squarely in the middle of the backseat like a Pasha, completely obscuring the rear window.

“So, Ren!” he said, “How’s the head?” and laughed when I groaned.

We laughed and talked our way back to The Palms, and I got out and waved good-bye. Phil winked at me, and I promised to head over when my afternoon meeting ended. Jimmy and Phil drove off and I went up to my room to drag myself back to the real world before I had to meet Liam.