Love in the Time of Global Warming

Part 6

Chapter 6: THE LOTUS HOTEL

 Venice used to have nightmares about the world ending. I knew because I’d hear him cry out and I’d run to him. He’d be saying, “It’s all our fault.” Or, “The polar bear told me the ice would melt.” Or, “The giants woke up and said ‘No more!’ ” Once he told me he sometimes had to hide himself in his dreams, using his mind, so the dread monsters couldn’t find him. It was hard work; he never felt really rested and there were dark rings under his eyes. Sometimes he peed in the bed and I’d hear his cries before my mom did. I’d strip off the sheets and help him change, and then he wanted to come into bed with me. He’d lie on his back with his knees bent up over my legs and I’d curl my arm around his waist and put my face against his neck. His skin was always so warm and soft except for the dried, dusty patches on his knees and elbows. His heart would beat faster than usual for a while, while I pressed the tender spot in the webbing between his first finger and thumb to relax him the way my mom taught me, and told him stories about boys who could magically make plants grow or repair the holes in the sky, until he calmed down and fell asleep.

 I was wildly protective of Venice since the time he was rushed to the hospital as a baby. I’d been watching him while my mom was painting downstairs; he had a fever—we thought just a flu—and I was putting a cool cloth on his forehead when his body convulsed. Seeing him moved by some unseen force, it was like the Giant nightmares. I screamed for my mom and we went to the hospital where they said he had viral meningitis. I wanted to stay overnight with him, holding him in my arms while they restored his body fluids intravenously and got his fever down, but they wouldn’t let me. My dad and I left my mom there and went home. I didn’t sleep the whole night.

 Later, when Venice struck out in baseball, running off the field with his head hanging, or when he was teased about being so smart, the teacher’s pet, I saw that shaking baby and wanted to sweep him up, away from harm. As if I had that power.

 Venice never said exactly what he saw in the nightmares but he told me he was afraid the world was going to end. I told him it wasn’t; I told him we were safe.

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I drive as fast as I can away from the store from hell. I am stocked up with supplies I managed to dump into the back of the van before I tore away from the blinded Giant. Pain scorches when I move a certain way, and there is dried blood on my hands and on my thermal shirt. “We don’t need any more blood on our hands,” the man had said. I would rather be dead than part of a world like this. I keep thinking I’m going to throw up again, and my hands won’t stop shaking no matter how hard I grip the steering wheel; it’s like I have a violent fever that’s trying to burn away the sickness of what I’ve seen and what I will become. I blinded someone. Something. I stabbed him. It. I pull over and open the door and vomit precious nutrients into the street.

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 Parts of the streets around the hotel are flooded with murky, mucked-up water. Who knows what lies under there? It rushes past me, black and frenetic. In the distance random fires, the only uneasy light, burn among piles of garbage.

 I stay on the higher parts of the road. It’s hard to know where I am because so much is gone. But I recognize the oddly shaped angular brick building standing like a Giant’s slice of cake above the mire. An orange butterfly swoops past my windshield. I park and get out and limp after it toward the hotel.

My mom took us to the Culver Hotel to see the lobby with the milk-glass light fixtures and dark wood paneling, the velvet couches piled with brocade pillows. The actors who played the Munchkins stayed there when they filmed The Wizard of Oz. They swung from the chandeliers and fire escapes, my mom had said. Those crazy, drunken Munchkins. And we laughed. My mom loved this place. I can see her getting excited about an antique chair, a glass lampshade, as if she’d discovered some rare artifact. For her love of this place alone, I’ll go inside; I’ll brave whatever dangers. For what if she’s somewhere here?