Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  Maybe that’s how Rachel felt. Tired of me fearing the future, always wanting to turn back. Always trying to turn back. Storm-struck in the belly of a whale, busy swallowing all the light.

  When I can’t stand the frigid temperature any longer, I follow the winding path uphill back to the main road. On the way, I see a young man leaning against the giant squid statue, his ball cap barely reaching the squid’s concrete underbelly. He holds one triumphant arm in the air, the other palm is brushing the bottom of the squid’s siphon. He’s posing for his buddy’s camera, as if he’s just landed the big one.

  And I think about those Newfoundland fishermen. The ones back in 1878 who pulled their giant from the sea. Imagine the men hip-wedged against the rowboat’s hull, leaning out across the choppy surf, trying to corral the squid’s magnificent body with their thick-braided rope. Weak armed, the men kept hauling in the creature, his flailing squid body the length of a school bus. Hand over hand, they pulled the sleek form toward shore, the bulb of its head poking up from the water, his monster eyes as big as basketballs. How the squid must have landed in a heap on that rocky shoreline, two sucker-lined arms draped across the men’s rubber boots.

  I can see the ruddy-cheeked fishermen standing in a circle, shirt-sleeves rolled up to mucky elbows, spreading the squid’s fins out like a tarp. An extraordinary creature laid bare, no longer a mythic tale from the phantom sea. Maybe an old man from the village emerged, with his lit pipe and heavy woollen pants. Patting the fishermen on the back, he squatted down, glanced into those elusive, giant eyes that once brought light to complete darkness, reached out to touch a tentacle, and allowed the mystery to slip from his hands.

  When I bend over and grab my knees, my mouth tastes like a backwater cave spilling stomach brine. My mind is reeling with thoughts of Dan and Rachel and what comes next.

  And I think, All our lives as predators, and not one reason to pray.

  Gindelle of the Abbey

  The kettle sings its wispy falsetto in the kitchen as you pull out the dark brown moustache from the locked desk drawer in the basement, coat the back with spirit gum, press lightly against the vertical grooves of your upper lip, letting the whiskers hang over, so you resemble not some aging metal rocker but a man descending, his eyes flitting toward loneliness.

  Jemma would never recognize you. She’s cocooned upstairs in a slumber so heavy not even the Australian face-roaming wolf spider you’d seen on YouTube would rouse her.

  It’s almost five a.m.

  You should be at the corner of St. James and Second by now in your torn green flannel sleeping bag.

  Forget the tea. Climbing up from the basement, in your father’s tattered three-button wool coat, you stop at the landing, listening for floor creaks upstairs. Soundless. You pull the kettle from the heat in the kitchen, wrap up three blueberry-bran muffins in paper towels, and grab your keys.

  On the drive downtown, lean, flat clouds skip across a sky the colour of an Arctic sea. In the rear-view, you smooth down the corners of your mouth, thinking human hair really does make the most convincing moustache. Though the last thing you ever feel these days is human.

  Saturdays are for corrugated boxes and crayon-etched cardboard signs. You tell no one about these weekly excursions. Especially not Jemma, who thinks you are on your regular fishing trip to Orion Lake with Ted the philanderer. The two of you bouncing over the water, angling for northern pike that grow two feet long and sport a mouth full of spiked teeth.

  Your own teeth are painted with nicotine-stain enamel. Over the years, you’ve learned how to use makeup brushes to create the right effect. Black wax for the chipped teeth. A base layer and blending shadows for your hollowed forehead and eyes. Wrinkles are something else. It can all go horribly wrong so fast. A few light passes with a black pencil and cream (just a touch) to build up the lines around the mouth. A lifetime of decay is what you’re after.

  Another rear-view check. Your face is the colour of a dried-out coconut shell. Lighting a cigarette, you take a few long drags then let it burn all the way to the stub.

  A weak sun dribbles through the cherry tree–lined street by the time you park before a line of three-storey homes with gingerbread trim painted the colour of Easter eggs. Grabbing two green garbage bags from the trunk, you shuffle east, body bent like a pulled nail, walking an hour in second-hand shoes so large you have to keep your heels flat just to stay inside them. From the coat and the cigarette, your body reeks of tobacco and mothballs bathed in naphthalene. You’ll drop the tackle box, wave hello, then strip down in the shower before Jemma gets a whiff of your exhilarating pits tonight.

  Keep moving. There is a particular light you mean to catch. A stolen, silent hour on city streets, where no one notices, and no one breathes.

  Scratching your balls with dirty knuckles, you make your way north. A sweaty early morning jogger looks over, startles, then speeds away from you on a diagonal sprint across the road.

  Down toward the overpass, the city opens its mangy mouth. Man-shaped mounds soak up hours behind cardboard shelters, their faces hidden behind sharp, piss-fed shadows. Drained of colour, the city here is more vivid than any mushroom hallucinations you ever had with Eddie back in Moncton. In a while, sin will come strolling past you in torn nylons, trailing bottomless grief. A young man they call Pitbull is sporting a scraggy beard and torn T-shirt, leaning against a brick wall smoking a cigarette. He’s so thin he could thread his own arms through the spent syringes at his feet. You light up and offer him a loosie from the crushed pack in your jeans.

  Itchy to the tip of your very fetching moustache, your greedy eyes feast on these ragged faces. Some nod, though you’re such a leering tourist, as sordid as your fucking moustache. A woman yells out from a narrow corridor. “Fuck you! Fuck off!” You want to hold all the sound. The rambling speeches. The dumpster lids crashing down from the alley. Jerking cars, their brakes squealing as someone floats across the road toward oblivion. Most here look as if their flesh were drawn in pencil, thick, heavy strokes around the mouth and ears, a certain hardness in the wrinkles that fan out to the edge of their cheeks. Their eyes are opaque. Not brown or green or round or almond-shaped or hooded with a glint of reflected light, but smudged into shallow sockets, blending in with the cracked pavement, the exact shade of decaying streets, as if erasure was a necessary birthright. The lingering stench of despair is so strong in your nostrils, you think you’ll never smell the bottom of it. It leaves your heart hobbled in places. You want to save this whole goddamn world, one shallow sentient being at a time. The urge to abandon your life and disappear into these streets is so strong, your shame walks on four legs and howls.

  “Motherfucking diesel surveillance moon candy on the cocksucking beach!” an old man shouts to no one, pushing a shopping cart with its thin, splitting metal ribs.

  There are words in his beard, life jolting in his eyes when you offer him your coat. He stops then lurches forward, his skin bitten with scabs at the hairline, more flaking from the tip of his long nose. Ignoring your offering, the man keeps scanning the alleys. Inside this jumbled verse is a low-frequency hum you are sure no one else can hear.

  Gindelle hears it too, you think.

  When you reach the corner at Second Avenue, you wave and smile at the old woman, barely visible beneath a tattered green-and-white-striped awning. Her back against the wall of the brick-front building, she’s balled up between a vacant Thai restaurant and the delivery door of a shabby antique place.

  “You look like shit, Red,” Gindelle of the Abbey croaks at you from her throne, two foam-filled green cushions that keep her bottom hovering a half-foot off the pavement. You grin, noticing her hand is still cupped in a queen’s carriage wave.

  “Firecrackers,” you say, flattening your sleeping bag alongside hers. “Bang, bang going off all goddamn night in the park.”

  She calls you Red, though your tattered hair is streaked grey, a touch of baby powder rubbed into the midline bald patches. One
Saturday Gindelle just leaned over and said, “You’re like those red dots on a map. Always moving. Never in one place. Restless bugger, aren’t you, Red?”

  Judging from her puffy eyes, she’s had a turbulent night. But her eyes have a perpetual glow, the way your mother’s always do, making breakfast in the rented bungalow in Moncton, not far from where the prostitutes circle Victoria Park. You think you can hear your father bitching about the squawking crows from the living room.

  “Get any sleep?” you ask Gindelle.

  “Cops urged us to move along after midnight,” she shrugs, wrapping a blanket around shoulders as thin as handlebars.

  “Bastards.”

  “No. One of them brought me coffee. We shared a powdered doughnut, and he told me all about his wife’s cyst. Told him one shot to the neck.” Gindelle makes a squeezing syringe gesture. “Gone.”

  You found her sitting alone one Saturday under this awning. She looked up at you and pushed over to make room, offering you a stale biscuit from one of her tote bags. Guiding you around her sacred steeple with pride, you could tell she knew how to stake out a plot of land and build a life around it.

  Gindelle’s cape is stained with grease all the way from Saskatchewan. Something about a farmhouse and a fall. The grain farm she and her husband built was set way back on a dirt road. While she worked in the garden, her husband liked to sneak in and pluck the sweet red peppers, barely ripe from their green canopies, eating them like apples. When he dropped dead seeding canola, Gindelle tried to keep things humming. Almost snapped her back coming off the tractor. Chronic back pain, emergency rooms, pain killers, dirty overalls, loaded up on morphine. She finally quit the farm. But the heroin high she developed to sleep pain-free again? A woman her age? Who would believe it? Not the people parading past. Not even you. Later, thinking of Gindelle’s life on the farm, her fall and this brutal, graceful landing — never a word of self-pity from her lips — you close your eyes and savour these Saturdays.

  You rifle through your pocket. “A new bakery was handing out samples,” you say, offering her a blueberry muffin wrapped in paper towel.

  Gindelle shreds her cake with a short row of chipped lower bicuspids, her neck puckering like congealed gravy while she chews.

  “What’s up today?” you ask.

  “Repair the chapel, then to the cloister for prayers,” she crackles, pointing up to the split awning, her laugh an untamed elegy above the growing traffic hiss.

  You swap stories on your side of the double lane. Crossing that road is like playing chicken, especially on weekends. Gindelle calls it motor-car bingo and has two broken toes to prove it. She was here before the office towers. Before the mall shoppers lumbered past her corner on their way to the food court and five levels of free indoor parking.

  You tuck your garbage bags and your backpack behind the brick pillar by the antique store’s delivery entrance, decide to patch the leaky awning with duct tape when Gindelle does her usual food court scavenge.

  “I hate bran,” you say, holding out your last muffin to her, then lighting a cigarette. Jemma bakes when she’s anxious. Jemma is frequently anxious.

  Gindelle tucks the plump muffin in her bag, folds her feet underneath her, the white socks and sandals barely visible beneath her scrawny bottom, though she sits tall as Jemma at her wheel.

  From her potter’s wheel, Jemma will spin clay into exquisite glazed bowls she fires in the backyard kiln. She sells the art she loves, sometimes shatters the work she doesn’t. Her studio is littered with shards and curses. When she throws again and centres the lopsided clay between her hands, forging a hypnotic, spinning shape, so smooth along the outer edge that when she pinches it, the mouth opens and pulls the wobbling mass into something new; you could almost weep. Her potter’s hand, her heart’s extension, is cupped grace, was how you first fell in love. The promise that a world, once misshapen and broken, was fixable.

  “Red, hand me one of them.” And you offer Gindelle a cigarette and a light.

  The spinning mess in your head could sully most of Manhattan, or Moncton, where you were born forty-one years ago, hating the river valley, the French you could never master in school. That fucker, Doucette. And you with your fighting temper and fake jiu-jitsu holds, choking your thick Acadian accent. You’d hang out in borrowed, long-finned cars, cigarette pinched between your teeth, ripping around Lewis Street with Eddie and your three best friends. Hair goop. Hockey-stick slashes. Selfish pricks. Eight bucks between you. You owned the city. You fucking hated the city.

  Lost for a moment in that grainy picture of youth, you think, sitting here on the wet pavement, you’re a ghost in your own glossy life.

  Gindelle scratches her scabby elbows. She removes her ball cap, sports a snow cone of white hair atop her tiny head. Fifty cents in the overturned cap she sets in front of her to start the day off. You’ve got a few coins, too, you say. Skipped a meal or two so you could buy a Big Mac later.

  A young couple strolls up to your corner. You watch the man’s gaze lower to where you both huddle, then quickly cast ahead to a distant doorway. Window-browsers. Tire-kickers. They’ve got concerned faces, but not enough follow-through. You and Gindelle know to wait for the real action; the weekend shoppers sipping five-dollar lattés. Better yet, the charity canvassers sporting clipboards and hipster beards. Best is the old guys with wild hair and battle scars, often good for a few quarters, or a half sandwich from the sub place down the street.

  As the day drifts, the city spills weekend explorers. Families emerge from parked cars. Teens ooze out of suburban buses. Couples push strollers hung heavy with bags, hurrying to catch the green light, racing Gindelle who is sitting high on her foam-padded throne. She’s queen of these streets. Watch them throw coins at her feet.

  By noon, the cloud bottoms are burnt aluminum pots. Gindelle tucks her blanket underneath her chin.

  “It’s really coming down now,” Gindelle says. “There go our tips.”

  The rain flies into your doorway at a sharp angle, begins dribbling then slamming in through the awning. You push Gindelle’s cart behind the pillar. A crash of thunder and you remember that flash rainstorm in Moncton the day you packed up the rental truck, threw in your hockey bag next to a used Fender telecaster, and you and Matt and Eddie, who made all his own skins and never played the song the same way twice, were set to jam all the way to the Big Smoke. Split gas. Skipped any towns without a truck stop. Kept your lizard Smoothie-Rich warm while his tail flicked out the open window, a fresh pile of leafy greens and crickets in a Ziploc for the road.

  Then someone heard a shot, or maybe that’s how you remember it now. Couldn’t have been. The collision was probably six blocks away. You and Matt were waiting at the curb with boxes, mangling your beef jerky. Five minutes away, near the old fried chicken place, Eddie’s front tire had skidded out and he fishtailed across the road, sliding into oncoming traffic. The only thing in Eddie’s pocket was your number. Your father got the call. The thought of you and Matt standing like orphans on the curb stuffs you with disgust. Christ. Anyone could have eaten asphalt that day. You and Matt just sat at the kitchen table, capsized, blotting your eyes before your stunned mother. Next day, you tossed your keys across the rental counter, drained a half-bottle of whiskey with Matt in the woods, and neither of you said another word. No one had an escape plan without Eddie.

  You excelled in science at Dal. Came home summers to fight with your old man, mean as any Moncton winter.

  “Get a fucking job!” shouts a lanky kid on his longboard, passing your corner as you pack up in the rain. With a little hop, he does a flip, tumbles, cursing when his board falls away from him.

  “Go shit yourself!” you yell back, so the kid comes toward you with speed.

  He spits in your direction, but the wind returns a fat, slick gob into his eyes. He can’t even see you. You’re the looming threat to his invincible ride. An accident waiting to happen. Like Matt and Eddie and Moncton that day, then Smoothie-Ri
ch ended up dying three months later, after a cold snap, and you hid in the garage, baggy-eyed bawling as you pitched a month’s worth of freeze-dried grasshoppers into the trash.

  The skater flips you off. You look into his bloodshot, watery eyes. Can tell by the skunky scent he’s twelve feet high.

  You are these Saturdays. Imposter. Trespasser. Thief. Smuggler of stories and a fake ID. Recorder of foot traffic, and oneline taunts, while the streets darken Gindelle’s skin, steal life from her exhaust-choked lungs. You are circling the underworld with Gindelle of the Abbey as your queen. A dime bag of weed in your pocket for later, propped up against a metal newspaper box, you’re free.

  Thunder roars. A flash rips the sky in half; the light slaps the inside of your skull clear. The awning is useless, so you carry Gindelle’s things with yours around the block and unpack the blue tarp from your duffel. She waits while you tuck one end of the tarp beneath the “cardboard only” dumpster, then slide the other beneath your duffel.

  Into the sagging cardboard cathedral you huddle next to Gindelle, who touches the shiny nylon roof with its sad, sagging walls. Gindelle agrees to keep an eye out for cops, while you relieve yourself behind the Chinese import place.

  “Bring me back a paw-waving kitty?” she says, winking.

  You don’t tell her that it’s actually a Japanese beckoning cat, and the only reason you know this is because of your trip with Jemma to Chinatown for herbs. Jemma’s acupuncturist had sent you both there for a fertility boost a few years ago, after yet another set of cramps and spotting. She had passed another rubbery piece of tissue into the bowl and you both retreated to your own corners for three weeks. You stayed in the spare room. And when she decided to visit her mother for a week, you spent the nights traipsing across the east end.

  When you return to the makeshift tent, Gindelle’s lips are turning bluish, so you tell her to go warm up in the food court, before security runs her out. She promises to return with Shanghai surprise.