Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  “What is known, I strip away. What is understood, I abandon. Only unconcealed may I venture into the merciless Unknown.”

  Werner grabs a wool throw from the couch to cover me up.

  “What are you saying, Poly?”

  I tilt my head back. My listless body is an empty urn. “I’m nothing but a muddled, prostrate mystic,” I answer.

  “You aren’t nothing,” Werner objects. “We need you. Alicia’s worried sick.”

  I think about Alicia. How we had drifted so awkwardly from lovers to friends. I was a flack jacket of a man, always dodging low-velocity conflict. After the breakup, she stood her ground. We were friends first, she told me, that isn’t changing. Even when my mother could no longer communicate, when the days and night slipped from her memory, Alicia brought in my mother’s favourite music and kept me company in her room.

  What can I offer her in return? My skin is too tight. My nails are too long. My third eye feels acid-stung and bloodshot. My thoughts keep wandering, never finding a quiet course.

  My legs start to wobble and I collapse to the floor.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Werner says, kneeling in front of me. He manages to hook his elbows under my armpits and lift me to my feet. I refuse to budge.

  He finally resorts to calling Alicia, who orders us to pile in her car, and we drive to our favourite watering hole to find Harlon, bent over the pool table, poised for a tricky bank shot. Alicia marches over and plucks the cue ball off the table.

  “Sit,” she orders Harlon. “Poly’s hurting, and no stupid beer metaphors, okay?”

  I drag my chair to the darkest corner of the bar. I knot my bandana, tighten my drawstring hood, and tuck my hands into my grey kangaroo-pouch pocket.

  Harlon waves at me, raising his pitcher like an offering. “How are you doing, brother?” he says. “Vision quest becoming too much?”

  I gesture at him to keep quiet.

  “That third eye takes in millions of images per minute,” he says, shaking his head. “Gotta remember to blink.”

  Angrily, Alicia pushes her chair back. “Really? Is that all you’ve got?”

  Harlon fiddles with his coaster. “Well, okay, I guess Nietzsche would say to get moving. All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

  “He’s done the Messiah marathon,” Alicia says, abruptly. “What else?”

  Harlon tugs on his lower lip.

  “Okay, okay, a good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arrival.”

  “The Tao of jogging in place?” Alicia raps him lightly on the forehead. “Poly’s stuck. Not still or at ease. Stranded.”

  I daub my aching third eye. It feels dense as a black marble.

  “Okay, okay,” Harlon says. He lets his forehead rest on the lacquered wood table. “Well,” he says, lifting his head again, “Martha Nussbaum would say that it all comes down to community, the ability to bond with another human being.”

  Alicia and Werner exchange a telling look. I know what they’re thinking. Is Poly even human anymore?

  Werner walks over to me and pulls the hoodie off my head, causing my blue bandana to slip sideways.

  He stumbles back, almost tripping over the barstool.

  Alicia jumps up, startled. I can see it in her eyes.

  In me, no regenerator of lost souls. I’m a fraud. A huckster.

  My third eye is nothing but a bottomless black sea pooling sorrow.

  Werner collects himself and gently guides me off the barstool.

  “Forget this crap, Poly. Alicia and I are taking you home to rest. If a sign comes, we’ll hail it down for you.”

  For days I sit on the edge of my bed, transfixed by the scuffed baseboards, the lint floating above the lamplight. I refuse to sleep.

  When Alicia shows up again she marches straight into the room, and without a word, places a huge plate of sushi in my hands.

  I look down at a firm mound of rice, the splay of pink fish sitting atop it.

  “Can you bring that salmon back to life?” she asks, pointing down at the plate.

  I look hard at the splay of exposed pink flesh and remember Parson Lake. Ten years old, my back arched to the sun, diving into a lake so blue I remember white. Feel the tingling ends of my puckered fingertips, my tired, sunburnt arms, pink and lean, not the muscles I had hoped to form doing Karate Kid push-ups.

  “Don’t swim out so far,” I can hear my mother shout from the shore, “not beyond the raft.”

  My head bobs as I wave back at her, my chin tapping water, paddling hard. I hoist myself up the raft ladder, keep glancing in the direction of the beach to make sure she’s watching. She’s got a book between her hands. Is she smiling? Can she see my cannonball leap? Then I am sinking, my eyes shut tight. When I open up, I see rippling coins shimmer across the water above me as I am swimming upward, breaking the surface. When I reach top, my mother’s face is blurry; she keeps drifting away.

  Alicia lowers my outstretched arms.

  Werner throws a comforter around my shivering shoulders.

  “Look, Poly,” Alicia says, stretching to tap the top of my head. “You need to get rid of this.” She pats my large head.

  “What?”

  “This anxious, truth-tuning radio frequency,” she replies.

  True. In my brain was an unruly buzzing. One minute I’d be with Harlon nailing kamikaze shots at a metal bar, the next humming game show tunes with Werner on the couch. No idea how I got here. Other nights I’d find myself listless, tortured by painful, plodding thoughts. And then the long, thin days. The times I’d remain expressionless, motionless. My life, sad, slow, and predictable. Like boy bands, or Macbeth, a crime that keeps returning to the scene.

  “This has to stop,” Alicia urges.

  Werner puts his arm around my shoulder, and Alicia takes my arm.

  I nod to them, walk unescorted into the living room, and stare out the bay window in silence. I cast my third eye beyond the row of bony poplars fringing the stream behind my mother’s house.

  “What can you see?” Alicia asks.

  “It’s raining purple asters.”

  My mother loved tea and burnt toast smeared with marmalade, I think. The bitter kind from Scotland in those tiny jars with the orange rinds that float in their strange, gelatinous spell. All those gold flecks in her hazel eyes. Marmalade. After breakfast, she wrestled weeds in the garden, wearing big yellow boots, while the sparrows chirped around the feeder she kept filled with millet. The males would perch next to her in the bushes, singing hopeful trills.

  When the cherry blossoms begin to bloom in a few weeks, the sparrows will show up hungry.

  My multiple knees buckle. Feeling light-headed, I let Werner and Alicia lead me back to bed.

  When I awaken, I’m not sure what day it is.

  Alicia pulls out a chair for me when I wander into the kitchen, dazed, holding my head. It’s dark outside. Quiet.

  My body feels weightless, sucked back into its mortal shrink wrap. There is no anxiety. Just a lingering sorrow. Werner jumps up from the table and promptly dresses up a plate of chicken wings with homemade coleslaw for us all. We devour three pounds between us. Later, we decide to stretch our legs in the living room, and from the bay window I can spot all of the planets, even Mars, a touch fainter than Jupiter, shining above Saturn in the southeast sky. Maybe life existed on Mars fifteen million years ago. There’s no proof. No alien colony. No Martian signal beaming a lifeline from afar. What would it take for us to believe in it anyway?

  Alicia and I decide to set up a folding card table in the middle of the living room, like it’s one of our usual Friday night games. We invite Harlon over for a few rounds of poker. The four of us play Texas hold’em, Follow the Queen, and Five Card Draw. When it’s Alicia’s turn to deal, Werner passes. Instead, he jumps up to throw another load into the washing machine, adding my trench coat, sport socks, and sweaty blue bandana.

  At the table, Harlon discards three cards and draws the same from
Alicia.

  “What do you need?” Alicia asks me, poised to deal.

  I stare down at my gut roll, thinking I am six feet tall, soft in the middle, third-eye blind.

  “I’ll take four,” I say.

  My last hand isn’t a good one, but I play it anyway.

  Two Bucks from Brooklyn

  Tu’s thin and crooked, a dark, jagged line against the chalky white kitchen. Hearing the knock at the front door, he turns up the backbeat blues, the tight rhythm shuffling his brain, then bright orange cubes break the sample line, so close he has to blink them away.

  Sliding the straps of a navy sports bag over his shoulder, he strides down the hall and pulls the double lock back.

  “Where you been?” Tu asks, seeing Lewis sweaty and tired.

  Lewis shakes his head. “Some fool comes running out at 110th Street station says he hears shots. People running. Bags flying. Police everywhere.

  “Gun?”

  “Fist fight,” Lewis says, shaking his head. Took two hours to get back to the Bronx. He glances over at Tu’s brother, who lies face up on the living-room couch, slipping in and out of an itchy haze. “Dar on the nod?”

  “Stash got hit last night.” The blue beats still bursting in his head, Tu pushes Lewis back toward the front door.

  “Why you uptight?” Lewis says, removing his backpack and letting it drop to the floor.

  “Got to meet Jello in Brooklyn.”

  “Fat man again? For real?” Lewis sighs. “I’m starving.”

  Tu puts a finger to his lips. Sliding the bag down his arm, he unzips and digs inside. With a glance over his shoulder to make sure his brother is dazed and dreaming, he pulls out a brick-shaped bundle.

  “Dar’s crew jumps the sidewalk in that rusty Impala and slams into the fence. Cops on foot after them. Dar gets out, springs across the empty lot, flinging his backpack behind him, and disappears. Cops catch up to the rest of the crew. I grab the backpack. No one saw a thing.”

  “Dar finds out, you gonna take a beating,” Lewis warns, shaking his head.

  “Came in so tweaked. Thinks the police got everything.”

  His heart motoring, Tu shoves the cellophane-wrapped brick deep inside the bag, below two pair of jeans and his three clean T-shirts. Into the large side pocket, he’s tucked his books, a handful of CDs.

  “We said no running,” Lewis replies, in an angry hushed tone. “Ever.”

  “Don’t turn down luck,” Tu answers sharply. He can feel the beat in his throat like a hammer tap, then synth flying in shades of green.

  Lewis yanks his backpack over his shoulder.

  Tu can feel Lewis’s anger simmering under his own skin so he grabs Lewis playfully around the neck. Turning his hip, Lewis sticks his leg out to pull Tu off balance, but he’s going to need another twenty pounds on him, because Tu leans back and easily drops the boy on his back.

  Helping Lewis back to his feet, Tu smiles and says, “I got you. We’re getting out.”

  “Whatever,” Lewis shrugs. “Better not take all night.”

  They step out into the hallway, fanning away the stench of garlic and burnt onion wafting down from 12C.

  “Meet you out front. Got to leave Dar something,” Tu says, and slips back inside the apartment, closing the door behind him.

  Tu paces the kitchen linoleum, synth snare splashing green across his eyes. He punches out Jello’s digits. “We’re coming.”

  “I’m waiting,” Jello says, and before hanging up, “You’re on the rise, son.”

  Angelo Putello (a.k.a. Yo, Yo, turn it up, Jello) was going to be the next notorious Italian rapper. Any minute now. Any second. Jello was jumping the beats, working his heavy hip swagger scalping Yankees’ tickets across from the House that Ruth Built. Business was popping, cops too busy cruising the stadium gates so they didn’t call down much heat. All the heat was on the mound. Sticky, shimmering days when the Bronx was painted white and navy and the-Sox-suck-balls-red. Derek Jeter was off the hook, hitting eleven games straight, and Yankees-Sox matchups were setting the city on fire.

  Game days, hardcore fans would join the regulars circling Jello, who was selling tickets and spitting his terrible rhymes.

  Flash the cash, you got me running

  Cuz Jeter’s hitting like he’s golden

  Nomah and po-po gonna strike three all day

  Batter out, beat down, like them Red Sox fans at Fenway

  One Saturday, Jello had flashed his tight roll of twenties at Tu and Lewis, who were selling bootleg CDs just off the subway.

  “Big leagues,” he told the pair. “You wanna move up?”

  Next Saturday, Tu and Lewis joined him across the street from the stadium. Jello taught them how to get triple face value. How to beat a loss. How to run scams on a nasty tourist waiting them out.

  “Shake your head. Tell him all you got is premiums. Then switch them out at the last minute. Leave him shitting in the uppers with the pigeons.”

  After late games, Jello would drive Tu and Lewis over to Brooklyn to catch the million-dollar views at Sunset Park. They would slip in among the Puerto Rican gangs and Chinese grandmothers, draining Coors cans from Jello’s trunk, watching Lady Liberty lord it over Manhattan.

  Tu was smitten. No other way to describe it. Jello was twenty-six, a Brooklyn-born Italian son claiming roots that ran all the way to the old country.

  “You got family up there in the projects?” Jello had asked Tu on the ride back.

  “Dar. Like some bite that never heals,” Tu replied and told him how his brother wound up selling drugs to make ends meet after their parents died. They were hit by a city bus, carrying groceries across East 147th. He struck a deal with his brother so he could finish school.

  “Ask me anything,” Tu would say, bouncing in the front seat of the ten-foot stretch of Mercury Zephyr.

  “Booker T. Rosa Parks. Dr. King. M.L.K. saw the truth and set it free,” Tu replied, defiantly.

  “Makes you want to jump his ass,” Lewis offered, smirking in the back seat.

  “Destiny in your DNA,” Jello agreed.

  Jello traded stories about his great-grandfather, an Italian stonemason with callused hands who crossed the Atlantic to break brick in support of la famiglia. His bisnonno had boarded a steamship from Naples and two weeks later sailed into Ellis Island, crowding on deck alongside barefoot men in dusty derby hats to watch the Statue of Liberty rise up from the fog. All he had was a bag of tools, one creased hunk of bologna, and a striped shirt in his burlap bag. Sorted and inspected, he joined the other “guineas” who made their way to Brooklyn then crawled out of their East Side slums.

  Jello described the stiff-backed Sicilian men bent over bricks — in Manhattan, East Harlem, and Brooklyn — right down to the cigarettes that had hung from their bragging mouths. How his bisnonno had carved out a piece of every building on their block in Bensonhurst.

  Standing over his sleeping brother, Tu watches Dar blink yellow-tinged eyes, mumbling, tossing his head side to side. He thinks of those Sicilian men. All the seasick bricklayers waiting in line while the doctors pulled down their eyelids to check for disease. And feels the familiar gut-punch-sick at the sight of his brother. Turf wars. Two crews beat down, five come back. Police chasing them at the park or on the way to school. Finding his brother slumped in dark corridors, getting beaten up over spillage, then dragging his ass back onto the streets.

  One mistake was all it took after their parents died. They had nothing, and no one. Dar got drunk at a house party, copped keys and went on a joy ride, pissing off the wrong crew. For protection, Dar became a corner watcher, a dealer, a crook. Freedom, a threshold Dar could never cross.

  Lime-tinged music filters in from the kitchen, then a whirlwind synth beat shaves spikes of soaring golden hues into Tu’s brain, like a sound compass to his soul, sends his heart spinning free.

  See it now. Into the wide open he would sail, and dig his heels in.

  Since Tu belonged to a beaten
corner of the South Bronx, but not to the project gangs, he knew he wanted an island to himself. After Jello, he was flooded with dreams of bricklayers, of immigrants writhing up from the mouth of the Hudson to dig ditches, lay down tracks, the tenement tramps who had built the city with their bare hands.

  Tu unzips and handles the brick. Like a rapture humming hard in his head, he holds the blue beat in his throat, feels it expand, like a soft breath rising up from deep in his chest He shoves the brick inside the duffel’s zippered pocket, thinking hard times are on their way out.

  Looking through the window, he can see it all so clearly, beyond the drab walls, the grass-patched courtyard littered with broken bottles. He and Lewis will set up again in Brooklyn, take along hip hop, leave the conga-playing Puerto Ricans, cue the Bronx Remix, leave Dar’s mad ghetto to hit bottom.

  Tu stands and closes his eyes, picturing Dar’s grey and dusty corners, the street a maze of gaping cement craters, sidewalks piled with dirt and garbage like they’re living on Mars.

  Leaving his drowsing brother, Tu heads out the front door to join Lewis. Turning to face the door, he grips the knob, pulls the door back so hard he can feel his own soul rock as he imagines his Lady Liberty reaching out to him over the harbour, whispering, The light is on and you’re almost home.

  Tu and Lewis skip the turnstile jump and pay the two-buck fare.

  Packed tight, the D train is oily and hot. They watch strap-hangers file on and off along the fast track to Brooklyn. Tu presses his face to the glass to count sycamore maples. Fifteen. Lewis gestures for him to keep a sharper eye on the duffel. When the subway doors finally slide open at Bay Parkway, they climb down the stairs, wander past windows filled with creamy cassata, chocolate-covered marzipan, fresh-made zeppoles drizzled with honey. Lewis keeps rubbing his belly.

  “Damn, I’m hungry.”

  Radiating out from 18th Avenue, they pass two Chinese takeout joints, a laundromat, and a bodega, then a long stretch of red-brick row houses.

  Tu notices an old couple on their stoop, sipping espressos from gold-rimmed cups. An Italian flag sprouts from a potted fig at their feet.

  “Look here,” Tu points. “Owned their own stoops in less than fifty years.”