Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  I open up. Groucho Marx cop apologizes for the early hour.

  “My mom’s still sleeping,” I tell him. “She’s really stressed out. No thanks to you guys.”

  Keeping his voice low, Groucho says, “I’m sorry, son, but we’ve found more evidence at the crime scene.”

  Watching me carefully, he hands me a lumpy manila envelope. I reach inside, pull out a length of torn left sleeve and collar from my red Dengue Fever T-shirt. Damned chain-link fence!

  “Lab says there are trace blood stains on it,” the cop tells me. “I’m afraid they belong to the deceased, Mr. Trask.”

  “Cuff the boy! Cuff the badger!” Drudd rages from down the driveway, her arms waving madly. She starts blasting accusations, advancing on us at the doorway. “I was at school with the safety inspectors. Ronnie said he spotted you lurking in the coatroom on Friday night. Said you hopped a fence wearing a red Dengue Fever shirt!”

  Groucho pulls her away from me.

  I sniffle. Try to look meek and wide-eyed. “Dengue Fever is totally mainstream. Sick jams. Everyone at school’s into them.” I hand the torn fabric back to the cop. “Not even mine.”

  “Monster!” Drudd shouts.

  The cop orders her back home, but I can hear her pounding on the door when Groucho steps back in, saying, “Look, son, I have to ask. Where were you Friday, the night of the science fair soirée?”

  Vexed: The Memoir of Alex P. Jones, a Major Minor

  Tired. Sore. Like I’ve got a head full of flu glue. Did you get breathless, too, running upstairs to answer the door with me just now? Did your heart seize when that cop slapped the manila envelope in my hand? Dispel every thought, O Reader, you might have of failure. I’ve built stink grenades from hairspray, shot rockets through mini malls. Maybe, O Reader, you’re sitting on a cramped bus, thinking, when is that boy gonna get past the blowing-up-shit phase of his life? Feel me? Our simultaneous desires are mingling. Right now, you are crossing that artificial turf, watching the action unfold beneath a zing of electric lights. I can hear you breathing with me, O Reader. Without my strong, reassuring presence, you’re helpless, like some sucker waking from a dream, the image lost again the instant it appears. Here’s what I remember: Dad was flat on his back, eyelashes gone, head bald, tubes going everywhere. They had cooked his insides with chemicals until his mouth was too raw to speak. Then they marked him up, tattooed his skin, shot him up with radiation. Cancer ate him away anyway. Life after was a tunnel none of us could see through. Mom moved us to the suburbs, scaled things back to keep us afloat. So go ahead, cue the violins, brace for a shitstorm, and stop believing in the warm-and-tinglies. Like Badger discovered, it’s gonna hurt you in the end.

  Mom is frantic. Police call her on Monday to say they have found a second set of DNA on the Dengue Fever T-shirt fabric. Cops are asking me to volunteer a strand of my hair to test it tomorrow. All the local teens are being tested, but mine is top priority.

  Mom’s sister from Winnipeg has decided to fly in to help Mom through the latest family crisis. I take advantage of her distraction.

  We’ve got to act now, I’ll tell Badger. Share how Ronnie is trying to frame me for Trask. There’s only one move left. Dead men can’t talk. Ronnie needs a prompt exit, and we can set him up as the one who ravaged Trask.

  When I slip upstairs to share my plan, I find sis in her room, clawing apart her romance-turned-horror novel page by page, even gnawing on bits of book spine.

  “Nothing matters,” I hear her sniffle, followed by another loud ripping sound.

  While she’s pricking and pulling apart the last chapter — my triumphant third act Hog Badger death sprawl — Badger lets out a piercing cry. Glued to the back spine is a thick wad of extra pages.

  “An epilogue!” Badger screeches with delight

  Shit. I didn’t check when I doctored the updated version. Not even I saw that coming.

  “Yee-ka-ka-ka-ka-k-Yaa,” the eagles cry, circling high above the posse, who are boot marching toward their bloodied kill. “Our hills are free of the Hog Badger,” the men chant in unison. Dazed, listless, Hog Badger hears the faint sound of snowmobile boot crunching and lifts his head. He’s not even hurt. Snout up, he inhales the odour of cheap whiskey and rolls around in the snow to wipe his chin of the blood from his earlier kill. Looking for a defensive weapon, Hog Badger digs through his den. Finding nothing, he roots around the fallen beast outside, locating something he remembers flashing below the blood-matted fur.

  A spark lighter.

  No one will expect a winter forest fire, he thinks, rubbing flint across steel. All I need is a spark.

  “He’s alive!” Badger shrieks. From my cage, I can hear her drop her book to the floor.

  No. No. No! If Badger loses that fury and fire in her belly, she won’t destroy the evil snitch Ronnie and eliminate nosy Drudd for good. It’s Monday, and the cops want to test my DNA tomorrow.

  Time for plan B.

  Ronnie and his rugby boys will be eating at their usual pizza place tonight. When they’re walking home, around ten, I’ll swoop down and blast them with two pounds of ground round. Badger will catch the meaty scent and be feasting on those bad boys by midnight.

  Mom is so wiped out, she’ll sleep right through it. I’ll leave a garden claw in Ronnie’s hands, then tuck a suicide note inside a manila envelope.

  Good. I’ve got Superglue, enough blowback-action to split a tree stump.

  I’m rocket ready. Except, no manual trigger thanks to Stemple!

  Never mind. Got the flint lighter from science class. Got a surly sis with a fat complex and a fierce overbite. Spark. Smoke. Boom!

  Slipping upstairs, I find Badger quietly purring in the hallway. It’s freezing out, and there’s a gust of wind coming down the hall. Before I can unleash on her about killing Ronnie, Badger’s beady eyes shoot me a fierce, shut-your-trap look.

  She gestures toward the front door that’s been blown open and says Mom is sleeping soundly for the first time in weeks, so get my scrawny butt into the hall and shut it.

  Okay, okay, just to keep sis on side, I go.

  Melty snowflakes are blowing in, forming penny-sized puddles on the hardwood. The wind gusts in, and hail strikes my cheek when I reach out for the doorknob. Around it hang the remains of my red Dengue Fever T-shirt. The one the cops found at the scene.

  Badger clicks up behind me and cocks her head, all sassy like. She’s sporting her I-knew-you-were-up-to-something-all-along face.

  “Gimme,” I snarl. “How’d you get that?”

  Badger just bares her teeth.

  In a flash, she’s gone and returned with the rest of my T-shirt clenched between her jaws. She is sawing at both the torn sleeve and the rest of the fabric with her poky incisors. Bits of collar poke out of her mouth before she ends up turning the entire T-shirt into an unrecognizable, saliva-soaked mess. Finally she trots up to me and spits out the gooey pulp at my feet.

  For fun, Badger gives my ankle a nip.

  Sis has been protecting me?

  A slow, aching sadness crawls from my gut to my stopped throat. I can’t find any words.

  Looking at my sis, I think back to the day my parents found her freezing and emaciated in a back field, brought her home wrapped in towels. Sure I whined about competing attention, but I came around. I’d bury yard mice and voles in the backyard, she’d find them, and we’d do it all over again. Dad chased her around, buried her droppings, loved her like crazy. Maybe I did blame her when he got sick two years later.

  Sis is dew-eyed, too, as we stand facing each other for a long time. Night falls and we’re still standing there, listening to our mother’s breathing, soothed by her long, restful sleep. When Badger finally nods to me in the hallway, I grab my ski jacket and we step outside.

  The moon is a pinprick in Badger’s eyes as we travel across town, tromp along the snow-packed school field, and head up into the wooded trails, on to where the forest grows silent and dim.

  I
n the pitch-darkness, we make our way to a clearing and lie flat on our backs, spewing vapour clouds from our mouths. Gleeful, we make zwish, zwish sounds as our legs and arms wing back and forth against the packed snow.

  Night angels, O Reader.

  In the gathering darkness, look up high. See the tree branches bow, their limbs muscled with snow.

  You, stretched out on the couch or plumped up on your bed with a back pillow and your big expectations of what’s to come.

  Listen. Let your body sink into the soft, snowy night.

  Yes, I’m talking to you.

  Keep your spine flat, your legs and arms loose, keep sweeping the ground. There. Feel that snap of cold on your cheeks. Taste the lingering sweetness in the whiff of pine-scented woods. Look higher. Count the soft-glowing river of stars. See the bright planets, like dazzling dots hovering high above the horizon. There’s Venus. There’s Mars.

  Relax. Concentrate. Listen.

  You’re tired of being left alone in the dark.

  In the dissolving moonlight, under a starry wilderness, the only thing that matters now is to continue reading. Don’t let your attention shift. The fragments and fallen crumbs will pull you apart, may abandon you in places. Read on. The good part is coming.

  Monsoon Season

  Monsoon rains will flood the main roads by fall, but it’s early June when Jess lies bloated and raw in bed six on a shared ward of Phuket International Hospital.

  Morning rounds, four days after surgery. Dr. Jemjai arrives, bending from the waist, palms open, the way a magician reveals he has nothing to hide.

  “Any pain today, Jess?”

  She feels like a slow-tortured French prisoner in some noir European thriller, a brooding smile pinned to her mouth.

  “Like someone just shoved a pickaxe up my pelvis.”

  “Let’s have a look,” Dr. Jemjai says.

  Gently, he probes her abdomen, a two-fingered touch as if patting down a row of garden seeds.

  “Stop.” His hands too close to her hipbone. “Please.”

  When he lifts her gown to peel away the dressing, her stitches are bloodied. She feels wetness spreading beneath her bottom, imagines copper-coloured stains seeping through to the cotton sheets below.

  Finally, he nods to her. She breathes deep. “Wait,” she says. Deep inhale again. She closes her eyes while she slides two tight fists beneath the sheets. He parts her legs, checks the stent in her swollen vagina.

  She is a fucking French crêpe, folded in two. Pain radiates from her bowels, her stomach, oozes out between her teeth.

  He orders the nurse to push morphine.

  “Any bowel movements?”

  The nurse replies suai, shaking her head.

  Jess knows suai means either bad luck or beautiful, depending on the rising or falling tone. Her bowels were fabulous from the sphincter up but never beautiful.

  Jess forecasts the well-researched negative outcomes in her head. A rip? Necrosis, slow tissue death, choking off her blood supply? No. An infection crawling in, ten days before her scheduled flight back to Toronto.

  She thinks about her life before the doctor. Lost girl in a death march, then the collapse. Has he just split her body apart, or sewn it together?

  “When will you know?” Jess asks, pressing his hand.

  “Tomorrow,” Dr. Jemjai replies, patting her wrist. “We’ll see tomorrow.”

  On her first day at the Thai guest house, Jess awakened, cotton-mouthed, dry heaving into a wicker basket beside the bed. A knock forced her to her feet.

  “Feeling o-kay today, Miss?”

  It was the pretty Thai hostess last night who had checked her in. No, she was not okay. Definitely not. The long flight. Bloated stomach. Her whole body in a sweaty revolt from the inflight meal. She felt like … What was the Thai word? Khee nok: bird shit.

  She accepted the bamboo tray carrying a bowl of clear soup, little slivers of ginger floating on top. The tingling warmth settled her roiling stomach. She slept heavily into the afternoon, awaking in time to accept an invitation to join the others downstairs for cake.

  Trailing the succulent scent of sliced coconut, Jess made her way downstairs. She glanced in at the formal dining room that looked out onto a circular reflecting pool sprouting lotus flowers. A dark teak table stood in the centre, framed by three walls, all lined with silk-cushioned wooden benches.

  Once she stepped inside, a seated woman rose at the far end of the table. She held her hand out, introducing herself as Fran Günter.

  “I’m from Stuttgart, it’s in the south,” Fran said, her square, pink face sitting on her neck like the rubber tip of a pencil. Fran’s tone prompted Jess to straighten her spine. When Fran gestured for her to sit closer, Jess pressed her eyelid to stop its nervous jitter.

  A third guest arrived, introducing herself as Jo-Ann, an American from Virginia.

  “Call me Jo-Jo.”

  “I’m Fran Günter. This is Jess.”

  “So when do you all go under?” Jo-Jo inquired, without waiting for the answer. “I’m going on a Phang Nga Bay cruise with my lover, we’ll tour the temples. Ten days later,” Jo-Jo smiled, stretching her vowels, “everything changes.”

  Jess wedged her hands farther down between her thighs.

  Just then, the young hostess arrived, laying out tea and coconut cake on gold-rimmed plates, followed closely by a tall Thai woman in a tight-fitting turquoise dress.

  From her magnificent high-heel tower, the tall woman smiled, did a full twirl so a river of cinnamon hair plunged between her shoulder blades. Her long legs draped to a perfect patent-leather point on the floor. Between them, Jess saw not a bump or bulge.

  “I’m Lydia,” she said, and her hands floated up to her fine-boned cheeks. “Look at you. I’m so happy you’re all here. Welcome to Dr. Jemjai’s Guest House.”

  “You’re gorgeous,” Jo-Jo blurted out.

  Jess snorted, muffling her mouth with the cloth napkin. She leaned forward, in love with Lydia’s heart-shaped mouth. Though the pills had softened Jess’s face, swept with dark bangs to soften her harsh jawline, next to Lydia’s beatific beauty, she was a gorilla in the mist.

  “Where are you from?” Jess asked.

  “Suphan Buri,” Lydia smiled. “A farm in Central Thailand.”

  Lydia told them that when her family’s rice crops were ruined by swarms of plant hoppers, she went to work in the Bangkok bars. The first year she managed to send enough money back home to save the paddy fields. Four more seasons of rice-stem borers and the only way to help her family survive was to stay. She met Dr. Jemjai at a lecture he was giving on best practices in Thailand’s gender reassignment clinics.

  “I walked right up to him, told him that a monk had told my father that I would bring the family honour as a girl. He offered to perform my surgery if I could help him run the guest house. That was five years ago.”

  Fran cleared her throat. “My father ran coal mines in the Ruhr Valley.” She made a gesture of wiping her hands clean.

  Hating the bleak mines, she pursued a career in journalism as Arnt Werden. When she was exposed as the son of a wealthy German family, her disgraced parents tried to chase her off with hush money.

  “Did you run?” Jess asked.

  “In these heels?” Fran joked, pointing to her slingbacks. “I took an assignment covering exploited migrant workers from Cambodia and ended up wandering into a field of orchids in Doi Saket. They grow cattleya hybrids. Lavender-blue orchids with frilly petals and slate-blue lips. Vivid blue lips, can you imagine?”

  Jess took a slate-blue bite of her coconut cake, felt the petals fall to her feet.

  “I saw poor workers struggling in the fields. Violence in factories,” Fran said, keeping a hand on her chest. “Why should I hide? For myself, I had everything.”

  Jess thought of the working girls at the bar and Robbie pouring out free shots for them on Fridays. Fringed with feathers, Robbie’s face beamed behind the bar when she told them to put
their suffering on a layaway plan and lit up a glowing row of B-52s. God it was so easy to fall in love with Robbie, Jess thought.

  Despite years of vitamins, hormones, liposuction, and laser therapy, Jess had never held a real lover. A crude, midnight circle of one-night stands, sure. Men who’d fuck anything in a short skirt, yes. She was their shape-shifting, Queen Street trannie. Fuckable. Transgressive. Freak. Subject, object, verb. No agreement.

  “We’re all works in progress, right?” Jo-Jo said and touched the bridge of what Jess could tell was an expensive aquiline nose.

  “Okay, ladies,” Lydia said rising. “I know you’re excited. Maybe a little scared of the dilations, the diarrhea…”

  “Shoving a shunt up our cunts,” Jo-Jo added, then turned to Jess and shuddered. “Twice a day? Nasty.”

  Lydia wagged a telling finger at them. “But what the girls usually want to ask is, Will my coochie make me come?”

  “I want a vagina, like any woman,” Fran interjected.

  “Like Eamy, that sweet Thai Ladyboy who made up my face at that Boots makeup counter. Said her old Swedish boyfriend paid for her boobs.”

  Lydia folded her napkin twice. “Some kathoey stay with the farang for money. That’s how they can afford to live and talk like women.”

  “Well, I say if every fuck is closer to losing the prick, lose the prick at any price,” Jo-Jo chimed in.

  Jess felt as if a long knife trimmed her soul. She was all concealer and three-layer cover-up, pencilling her lips to erase the rough outer edges of her life. Still, she bled. Robbie was gone, probably for good. Toronto was an indifferent stranger.

  While they chatted, she mentally extracted her organs and laid them out on the table. Heart, lungs, spleen, liver, plopped down and seeping. She counted each one then tucked them back beneath her skin. Okay. There. She was all there.

  Lydia stood, apologizing for an early exit. She urged them to keep talking. And not to be shy about exploring their vaginas — how they fold, curve, contract.

  “Keep taking your meds,” Lydia advised, turning back. “The pills will play tricks in your head, but remember you’re already brave enough.”