The Incrementalists (25 page)

In a hotel room not that far away, four men were probably still working, having worked through the night, fighting to keep Phil out of trouble. I felt bad for them, and indebted to them, but not guilty. Without our night, theirs would have been wasted.

But all of our nights were well into morning by now, luxury slipping toward decadence. I got up and found the phone Phil had pitched against the wall last night. I turned it back on and put it on the mattress next to him. He opened his eyes.

“Looks like you’ve got some voice mail,” I said.

He grunted.

“I’m going to make coffee,” I told him. “It’s ten.” He caught my wrist and pulled me back to sitting on the bed beside him.

“Mmpht,” he said.

I stroked his hair, smoothing it away from his face, running my fingers over his temple. He reached a sleepy hand out for my breast. “But your coffee’s awful,” he said.

“Then you get up and make it.”

He was on his feet so suddenly it almost knocked me off the bed. I laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re secretly a morning person.”

“Have no fear,” he said. “I’ve sprung out of bed, in two thousand years of mornings, exactly never.” He stalked out of the bedroom naked.

I opened the curtains and found my phone and climbed back under the light cotton blanket to check my messages and email, thinking that, even after too much and too long, goddamn if love really can’t make everything new.

Clear morning light filled the room, and my first email was from Jorge proclaiming the salubrious effects and noble history of a good hot water spa. He was scheduling an important call with Liam and me for tomorrow. I opened the first of three nested emails from Jimmy, and the doorbell rang.

Phil

I put on some boxers and prepared the words, “You could have bloody called,” with which to assault whoever was on the other side of the door. I opened it, and it was Jimmy.

“Sorry I didn’t call,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me.”

“I don’t. Come in. Coffee?”

He came in. “Phil, why won’t you let me buy you a French press? The coffee is so much—”

“I’d never use it. I don’t want to spend loving attention on making my coffee perfect; I want to have it there so I can pour it and drink it.”

He shook his head. “Where is Ren?”

“In bed. She’s awake, if you need to talk to her.”

“Maybe in a bit.”

He took his coffee, and I took mine, and we sat on the barstools. He said, “It looks like you’re not going to be arrested.”

“Good,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You owe Oskar.”

“Maybe it’s not too late to be arrested.”

“Phil—”

“Yeah, all right.”

He drank his coffee, and he studied my face, and I knew he could read me pretty well, and he gave a little nod of approval. I was glad he approved. No, I’m not being sarcastic; I really was.

He cleared his throat and said, “I’m still worried about Celeste.”

“Who’s Celeste?”

He glanced at me quickly, his eyes wide, then they narrowed and he said, “That’s not funny.”

“Sorry. I’m worried too. If she really did trick me into killing Irina, we need to know why, and what—”

“We don’t think she did.”

I stopped. “All right. I’m listening.”

“Matsu seeded the memory, and we all checked it. If you want it, it’s a purple-and-gold lady’s fan just to the right of his north fountain.”

“Maybe later. What did you learn?”

“That Celeste was trying to kill you. Actually, she wasn’t aiming at you, she was trying to shoot Matsu, because if she’d gotten him first—”

“I know.”

He nodded. “Matsu only got there in time because he was watching for it, and he was watching for it because he noticed that her desk drawer was open. It was a close thing. She was starting to pull the trigger.”

“Maybe she’d have missed.”

“Maybe.”

“But all right. Good. I mean, not good, but I’m glad at least that I didn’t play into her hands. But—”

“But, yes. Why did she say it? None of us are comfortable with the idea that it just slipped out. She knows you. She knows you better than anyone. She knows you so well—”

“I get the idea, Jimmy. Jesus.”

“Sorry. Our current theory is it may have been Irina pushing through, seeing another chance to free herself from Celeste.”

I let that seep in and nodded. “Not at all impossible.” I sighed. “That reminds me that we have to start looking for a recruit for Irina’s stub.”

“We talked about that, between talking about what happened and meddling with investigating officers and witnesses.”

“Busy night. Have any of you slept?”

“All of us. In shifts.”

I nodded.

He said, “We’ve asked Ricardo, Tina and Sally to start looking.”

“Sally?”

“Karen’s stub.”

“Ah, right. They should be fine. Shame about Karen. She had the fire, you know?”

“I think Sally does too. This should help settle her in.”

I nodded and we didn’t speak for a while. I refilled my coffee and, at Jimmy’s nod, his. I sat back down again.

Ren came out. My heart did a flip-flop to see her, though part of me was disappointed that she was dressed. “Good morning,” she said. “I heard voices.”

“And a delightful good morning to you, charming lady,” said Jimmy. “You look well-laid.”

She laughed and went into the kitchen and started boiling water. Jimmy can get away with comments like that; I’m not sure how.

“So the question is,” said Jimmy, “is Celeste now actually gone?”

“Oh, no,” said Ren, turning around holding an empty mug. “She’s in the Garden.”

Ren

Phil looked about to puke. Jimmy looked constipated.

“You remember Celeste?” Jimmy said the way you’d ask a jumper if he remembered his chute. I’m pretty sure Phil was adding three and two and five and three.

“Hang on.” Jimmy dialed a number and watched me as he waited for someone to answer. I decided against tea and took the kettle off the stove.

“Ramon, when did Ren first start forgetting Celeste?”

Jimmy listened to Ramon, but Phil was watching me. “When did you remember Celeste?” he whispered.

I came around the bar to him and tried to wrap him in my arms, but he caught my hands. “When?”

“Oh God, no,” I said, understanding. “No, sweetheart. Not last night. Or this morning when we—”

Jimmy was watching us, listening intently. “Go on,” he said.

“I didn’t think about Celeste until I was getting dressed just now,” I said.

Both men nodded. Jimmy clapped a bracing hand on Phil’s shoulder. “We had thought Ren might be forgetting her during the periods that Celeste shared Irina’s body. When Celeste grazed, Ren remembered her. Irina’s death and Ren’s remembering coincide enough to mostly confirm that.”

“Okay,” Phil said, but his hand still wasn’t steady when he picked up his mug again.

I thought this was not the time to ask about the “mostly.”

Jimmy’s eyes searched me. “How do you know she’s in the Garden, Ren?”

“I just do,” seemed like a poor answer, so I tried working backwards. “I heard you knock,” I told Jimmy. “So I got out of bed to get dressed.” Any coyness around my activities the previous night seemed futile at this point. “And I saw Phil’s robe on the back of the door. It’s such a great robe, and I thought about putting it on, which reminded me of something I’d wondered the first morning I woke up in Phil’s bed after he’d staked me.”

Jimmy’s eyebrows shot up.

“Not like that,” Phil said. “Flaming spike. In the forehead.” It made me almost giddy to see the dimple uncloaking. “Every bit as life-changing as the other,” he said. “Much less fun.”

Jimmy laughed outright and I curtsied.

“Go on, Ren,” Jimmy said.

I walked back into the kitchen to forage for breakfast. “When I wore Phil’s robe the first time, I wondered if Incrementalists could squirrel away stuff, favorite clothes, keepsakes, photos, that kind of thing for themselves and their Seconds to create some sort of continuity between bodies. That morning I wondered whether Celeste had saved anything for me. This morning, I knew she hadn’t.”

“How did you know?” Jimmy asked.

“I remembered being her, and I knew I hadn’t.”

“Oh, thank God.” Jimmy let out a breath so profound I didn’t know how he stayed on his stool. Phil, on the other hand, was alert as a prairie dog on his. “You think Celeste’s memories have just gone back to the Garden like a normal stub?” he asked Jimmy. “And Ren has them now?”

“Ren, do you have Celeste’s memories?”

“I think so.”

“So maybe we’re just picking up where we left off?” Phil said. “With Ren integrating memories from Celeste’s stub and from the Garden.”

“Maybe,” Jimmy said. “Let’s go have you sit on the sofa and get comfortable for a bit, Ren. See what happens if you try to remember some more.”

“But I just found oatmeal,” I said, holding up a paperboard canister of a red-cheeked religious radical.

“Ren, I will take us for something glorious in an hour, but we’ll all enjoy peace of mind and better digestion if we know Celeste is truly back where she belongs,” Jimmy said, and stood, and we all heard his stomach register a loud and lengthy disagreement.

“You’re hungry,” Phil observed.

“Yes.” Jimmy sat back down, chastened. “Oatmeal would be lovely,” he said.

So I put the kettle back on and found cinnamon and brown sugar in the pantry, both unopened, and a box of raisins. Say what you want about Irina, but she knew how to lay in provisions against a siege. Phil and Jimmy sat on stools, Jimmy quizzing me on what I remembered, Phil mostly just watching, but when Jimmy misremembered Celeste’s middle name, Phil corrected him.

“Are Celeste’s personal, life memories different from what you remember in general?” Jimmy asked as the water started to boil.

“They have more emotion to them,” I said. “And more images. They don’t bubble up to the surface of my mind, the way the others do, but the bottom keeps getting farther away.”

Jimmy nodded. “That all sounds right,” he said.

Phil came in and got the coffeepot to top us all off, and kissed me as he walked by.

“What was her social security number?” Jimmy asked.

I told him, and put the three bowls of oatmeal on the breakfast bar.

He sniffed his happily. “How many children did she have?”

“None,” I said, and opened the fridge to look for milk. The oatmeal was too hot to eat and I was hungry too. “But she was close to her nieces and nephew, and then their kids, and they thought of her as another grandmother.”

“What did they call her?” Phil asked, smiling.

I pronounced the silly word gravely. “Except one,” I said, remembering as I shut the fridge door. “There was one little girl who wouldn’t say it, and called her Great-auntie Cece instead.”

Then I had to sit down.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Phil was crouched in front of me, hands on my knees. “Ren, what?”

All I could think was that, if the fridge door had still been hung backwards, I wouldn’t have whacked my back on the handle. “She was mine,” I said.

“What?” Phil demanded.

“Celeste was my Great-auntie Cece.”

“We knew that,” Jimmy said. “And you used to. Did you just remember again?”

But I could only shake my head and remember one summer when it was so hot out at the lake house that we’d nailed tied-together bedsheets up as hammocks on the second-floor porch. One of those torpid nights, glamorous Great-auntie Cece, who never noticed children, came out into the moonlight after all my cousins were asleep. Leaning against the railing, with her elegant bathrobe billowing around her like white smoke, she had told me a story about a powerful magician who fell in love with the little bird who loved to fly up and sing at his window in the tallest tower.

One day the magician caught the bird in his hand and spoke to her. She must have been enchanted, he told her, for he could see that, hidden within her, there dwelt a dreaming princess. In order to return to her true form, she must eat, from his hand, the seeds of a pomegranate. For pomegranates are poisonous to singing birds, but juicy and sweet enough to feed a princess on.

But the bird thought,
It is true, I have sometimes felt I was not truly a little bird, but I do not think I am a princess. I too much love to fly and sing. This man wants to make minced bird soup of me,
and so she flew away.

Long after, after she had forgotten she was ever anything but a songbird, a woodsman set a trap for her. He baited its trigger with the dried seeds birds love, but which no princess would consider food. The little bird saw that there was no sweet fruit to eat, but she thought,
This man loves my songs and flying,
and so she let him capture her. The woodsman sold the little bird at market, and she lived in a cage and did not sing until she forgot how to fly.

“I ate the fruit and not the birdseed,” I said.

Phil was holding my knees and shook me by them, but all I could see was the moon-bleached face of my beautiful aunt who leaned down over my makeshift hammock to kiss me with cool lips, and whisper, “Someday you will meet someone who shares your hidden dreams, who knows, even before you do, when you’re ready to become what you are inside, not because he can see the future, but because he can see you. Whatever he offers you, even if it looks like wicked fruit from a poisoned garden, take it. Until then, learn yourself well enough to know what truly sings inside you. Because once you do, it will take only one other in the whole world who hears it to set it free.”

“I ate the fruit because she told me to,” I said.

“Ren, you have to make sense for me.”

I managed to get my eyes focused on Phil, on his handsome, powerful magician’s face. “You asked me why I didn’t have to think about taking the spike,” I said.

He nodded.

“It was because of Celeste,” I said. “She prepped me to take it.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Phil.

“I was ten, and she meddled with me.”

Phil sat down against the cabinets.

“She all but programmed me to take her stub,” I said. I looked at Phil.