Love, Ish

by Karen Rivers

  I nod.

  “Don’t nod!” she says. “I’ll cut your head.”

  I nod again. “Seriously,” she says. “Stop.” She sticks her tongue out a little bit, which she’s always done when she’s concentrating. She’s working on the area around my ears. I look so weird! I look terrible. My forehead looks enormous. I want to sob out loud, but instead I try to distract myself by thinking about the names of all the Mars missions that have ever taken place: Mariner, Viking, Kosmos, Spirit, Curiosity. My mind goes blank. I can’t remember. I can’t remember! I close my eyes. I remind myself to calm down. I’m a machine, I say to Nirgal, the Brussels sprout of planets.

  “No, you’re not,” it answers. “You’re the Earth.”

  “Can’t I at least be Mars?” I ask.

  “No,” it says. “You are what you are.” Then it adds, “Anyway, Mars is doomed.”

  “So’s Earth,” I tell it.

  “Exactly,” it says.

  “Are you talking to me?” says Elliott.

  “No!” I say. “I’m not talking.”

  Elliott and Gavriel look at each other. “Okaaaayyy,” they say at the same time.

  “What?” I say, defensively. “Maybe I was just thinking out loud.”

  Elliott steps back and examines my head from all angles. She carefully puts the blade down on a towel and wipes it. “I’m done,” she says.

  We all stare at me in the mirror. I look like I’m wearing a Halloween costume! My head is as lumpy as Deimos. I don’t know what to do with my face. I don’t know how to arrange my mouth and eyes so that I don’t look as scared as I feel.

  “Thanks,” I manage to say. “Now let’s go for a walk.”

  “Don’t you mean, ‘Thank you Elliott, you’re the best!’?” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. “I guess. I mean, thanks. Big Sister.”

  “Anytime, Ish,” she says, grinning.

  I wait for her to say something mean, but she doesn’t, she just runs her hand gently over my weird shiny head. Her hand feels nice. Then she goes out of the room, crashing down the stairs and whooping. Sometimes, I guess, you just whoop to fill up all that empty air in the staircase. Maybe I’ll try it sometime.

  “Coming?” says Fish-­boy, and I nod, taking one of the water bottles from where he’s put them down on the edge of the tub.

  “Coming,” I say, handing him the other one.

  We’ve only gone half a block when I remember something. “Hang on,” I tell him. “I’ll be right back.” I mean to run, but I can’t, so instead I slow jog back to the house and get my red Sharpie. Even the slow jog feels like a lot. Don’t even get me started about how weird my scalp feels out in the air like that, the warm wind blowing on it like the breath of a crowd of giants.

  I stick my pen in its regular pocket. I’m winded. I can feel my heart racing in response to the jog. It makes me feel like me, but also not like me. Me, with a naked head. Me, as an egg. Me, as a cancer patient. Me, as someone who gets winded jogging three hundred yards.

  I jog back to Gavriel, and it’s even harder going back. I’m sweating like mad. I can hardly breathe. My legs feel like noodles. I’m definitely not a machine.

  “It’s really cold on Mars,” I tell Gavriel between gasps, and he nods.

  “I bought a whole bunch of Mars books,” he says. “I’ve read, like, half of them. Did you know there’s a bookstore here where everything is fifty cents?”

  “You went in there?” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “To buy books. Why? Is that weird?”

  I shrug. “No,” I say. Then I go, “Dad says it’s not really a bookstore, it’s a cover for a drug operation.”

  Gavriel bursts out laughing. “It’s full of books!” he says. “The man behind the counter was about two hundred years old! He was really nice! He made me take extra books for free! Some of them are really dumb, though. They’re from the 1980s. They were from before we knew anything about Mars at all, but people still thought they knew enough to write a whole book about it.”

  “Ha,” I say. “I don’t think Dad has ever actually been in that store.” We keep walking, our feet making companionable stepping-­sounds on the trail. “I used to like to imagine about Martians and stuff. Can I tell you something?”

  He nods.

  “Well, when the pictures started coming back of that rock that looked like it was floating, and the one that looked like a pyramid, and the one that looked like a woman, I still liked to imagine that there was a whole Martian thing that we just couldn’t understand from here. Because we like to imagine everyone is like we are. And maybe that’s their whole population: the woman, the floating rock, and the crab.” I look at him. “You can laugh,” I go. “It’s lame, I know.”

  “It’s . . . ,” he goes, shaking his head. “Really! I kind of think maybe Martians are just really tiny. Microscopic. We think everything is going to be the same size and shape as us. Maybe they are so small we can’t see them! Maybe they are studying us, and we’re like giants or something. Big, kind of stupid giants.”

  I grin. “I thought that, too, for a while.”

  We are at the place where the path cuts down to the road for a bit. We walk by a few houses and then I say, “Wait a sec, hang on!” I jog-­walk up to the TRESPASSERS ARE NOT ALOUD sign on the Munros’ old house and I fix it. A-­L-­L-­O-­W-­E-­D. Then I add a smiley face so that whoever owns the sign doesn’t feel bad.

  “You know that’s my house, right?” he says, when I get back to him.

  “It is?” I say. “I think I did know that. I just forgot.” For a second, a clammy feeling comes over me. I did forget. What else have I forgotten? Is the Brussels sprout in there, just scrubbing away all my memories? I sit down on his lawn, which is dead, just like ours, and I cross my legs.

  “What are you doing?” he says. “I’m not mad! It’s kind of funny. I’m dyslexic. I can’t spell anything.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Now I feel bad.”

  He shrugs. “Don’t feel bad,” he says. “Dyslexic people usually grow up to own, like, Virgin Atlantic.”

  “Usually?” I say.

  “Well, once,” he admits. “That one guy.”

  “You probably will, too,” I say.

  “I don’t want to!” he says. “I just want to be a doctor.”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “I forgot.” I take another breath. I’m forgetting more and more stuff! What if I forget the important things! What if when I thought about wiping my memory of all my Tig-­related thoughts, it worked? Suddenly, I’m scared. I don’t want to lose Tig!

  “Just a minute,” I say. I close my eyes. I try to remember the oldest thing that I can remember. I imagine going backward through time and picking up this memory and looking at it. I think about Christmases and birthdays and sitting on Santa’s lap with Elliott when we were, like, two and four. I can remember that! We were wearing matching green dresses. In the picture, Elliott is pulling my hair and my face is all scrunched up like I’m going to scream. But am I remembering the actual time itself or just the picture?

  I try to pick something else, something that there isn’t a photo of. I try and try to think. I imagine the preschool, with all its finger paints and that weird goo the teacher would make with us. Then I’ve got it! I remember this one time that Tig decided to eat the goo. He started spooning it into his mouth like pudding. But then he choked on it. He couldn’t breathe. I thought he was dead. He fell right over. His skin turned a funny cold bluish color, which was extra weird because his skin was usually this warm caramel. I walked over to him and said, “Bye-­bye.”

  The teacher told Mom that I tried to put a blanket over his head. “I don’t know how she knew to do that!” the teacher said, like Mom had maybe been showing me some footage of covering dead people with sheets instead of child-­appropriate shows on PBS. Mom looked really embarrassed. I remember that, how ashamed she looked. Why didn’t I give him the Heimlich? I just wrote him off! Of course, I was little. I didn’t ev
en know the Heimlich.

  I open my eyes. Tig, I think. I remember! It’s OK.

  Gavriel plops down next to me. “Let me know when you’re done,” he goes.

  “OK,” I say. “I’m done. I was just trying to remember something.”

  “What were you trying to remember?” he says.

  “Just something,” I say, frustrated because it’s hard to explain. “I was just trying to remember something.”

  “OK, OK,” he says, holding his hands up. “Jeez. Fine. Something. Whatever.”

  Gav gets up and holds out his hand to help me. I hesitate for a second before I take it, but then I do. We walk for a little bit without talking. My legs are wobbly, like I’ve been in bed for two months, which I sort of have been. I mean, I’ve been up. I just haven’t really been going anywhere. I take a tiny tiny sip of water from Dad’s bottle. It’s nice and cold, so I take a bigger sip, but then I make myself stop. I don’t want to throw up on Fish-­boy’s pink shoes. Why does everyone have pink shoes all of a sudden? Weird. Anyway, I’d hate for that to be my legacy. “Ish Love? Yeah, I knew her. She threw up on my shoes.” No, thanks!

  We cut across the road to where the trail that leads around the lake picks up again. The trail is at least a bit cooler. There are lots of big trees. Pines, mostly. They’re, like, hundreds of years old. They are ancient. I think they’ve seen everything. A lot of people who have walked by these trees have died! Think about it. Now those watching, ancient trees have dropped their needles all over the path, like being without rain for so long is just making them give up. They throw long, spiky shadows over the dirt. With every step, we kick up clouds of dust. I think about how I always imagined kicking up clouds of dust on Mars. I think about whether I ever really thought I’d go. I think I did. Now I don’t. I really don’t. I know I won’t. I put my hand to my eyes to see if I’m crying, but I’m not. I feel OK.

  I kick the dirt extra hard and a huge cloud billows up from my foot and Gavriel sneezes.

  “Why did you do that?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I sometimes do things now and I don’t know why.” I almost tell him about sprout Nirgal, Captain of the S.S. My Brain, but then I don’t.

  “Oh,” he says. “That must be pretty weird.”

  “It scares me,” I say, honestly.

  “Oh,” he says. He scratches his stomach in that way boys have, pulling his shirt to one side. I see a flash of his muscles.

  “Do you work out?” I say. “Your stomach is muscly.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “All the time. My dad left me his stuff. Well, he left his stuff. I mean, obviously he left it. He couldn’t take it to . . . Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t think about you when I started to say that.”

  I stop walking and stare at him. His dad died from cancer. He told me that already, at the hospital, but I forgot and now I suddenly remember, which also makes me remember I’m going to die, too. I have cancer. It’s pretty simple, I guess. A straighter line than you’d think. Like you imagine your life is this elaborate line that twists and curls and makes beautiful pictures, but the real beauty of life is that it isn’t like that at all. It’s a meteor, streaking across the sky. Meteors don’t twist and turn. They just cut straight across, faster than you ever imagined. That’s like life. A straight line. Someone should put that on a poster in the dentist’s waiting room, probably, right next to that dead stars one.

  “It’s OK,” I tell him. “I’m sorry about your dad.” And it sort of is OK. I mean, it isn’t. I don’t want to die. But—and I’m sort of excited to think this—I’m going to be dead. I’m going to know what that’s like. It’s not quite like going to Mars, but it also is. Everyone wonders what it’s like. No one is brave enough to go. “I’m pretty brave,” I add.

  “Yeah, totally,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about Mars. I put in an application on that Mars Now site, but my mom says it’s fake.”

  “Fake?” I go. “What do you mean?”

  “She says she read somewhere that it was just a scam to get people to buy all the stuff, shirts and things. Hats. If you pay more, you get more points and then you get an acceptance, but it isn’t real,” he adds. He looks at me. My expression must have just changed to something like “shocked” or “horrified.” He quickly adds, “But maybe it is! I mean, I don’t know for sure! Don’t look like that!”

  “It’s not real?” I say. “It’s not.” I feel a big emptiness opening up inside me. It’s starting, I think. I don’t feel scared. Maybe a little, I guess. I sit down on this fallen-­over tree.

  Gavriel sits down, too. He takes a few gulps of his water. Big, healthy gulps. Glug, glug, glug.

  This one time, when I was little, we went to the Grand Canyon. We drove there. Everyone was fighting, so Dad had stopped at Best Buy and bought us each a cheap tablet. They were supposed to be like iPads but they weren’t. They were really crummy. I was watching a movie on mine that I really liked. I think it was about golden retrievers in space. Anyway, we got to the viewing spot and Dad made us all get out of the car, and I was mad because I was watching my movie and Elliott just flat out refused because if she stopped the game she was playing, she’d lose all her points. “This matters more to me than you do!” she’d yelled at Dad. I guess it was the year after Disneyland. The terrible truth about the adoption was already out there.

  I was still trying to always be good, at that point, trying to keep the peace. I put the movie down and I got out of the car and I stood beside Dad and there, in front of me, was this huge chasm. Obviously, the Grand Canyon is a hole, right? I hadn’t really thought about what made it so beautiful. Just looking at it was so huge and great and everything. It was amazing. I hadn’t realized! I mean, I was a kid. What did I know? But it wasn’t the orange ground and the rock formations that were so astonishing to me. It was all the emptiness that all the other stuff was just a shell for. That’s what I realized. I felt like the air whistled through me like music, like there was a pipe flute in my heart, playing something beautiful. That sounds corny, but it’s true. I felt light. Like air.

  On Mars, there’s a canyon called Valles Marineris. It makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk. It’s so big, it’s nothing but empty space. I think part of why I wanted to go to Mars was to see that. If the Grand Canyon made me feel like flute music, then the Valles Marineris would be that much more. It would be a whole symphony. My head throbs. I’m not ever going to see that Valles Marineris, I think, sadly.

  “I don’t feel good,” I say, and even as I say it, I realize that something is really wrong, and then there’s another crackle, just like the first one, but bigger. I’m the Earth—the Brussels sprout was right!—and this earthquake is the big one, the one that’s going to destroy everything, the one that makes the tidal wave that wipes out the whole country, the whole planet, all of us, the one that’s going to open up the canyon that cleaves the world in two.

  I hit the ground hard. In the very far distance, I hear Gavriel yelling, “ISH ISH Ish Ish,” but his voice is like a rock echoing when you throw it into the canyon and Elliott won’t get out of the car and Mom and Dad are going to have a fight about it and Iris is standing there, silhouetted against the setting sun, looking like everything I wish that I was, and ISH and Ish and it doesn’t matter, it’s too late.

  I can’t go back.

  Chapter 22

  It’s different this time.

  Mars, I mean. All of it. The glass is cracked all around the dome. The plants in the biome are wilted and dead. There’s hardly any movement. Walking seems hard. Everything does. I sit in the dark and I look up through the glass to the place where I know the Earth is. I try to remember how colorful everything was, all the time. How we didn’t have to work to make it bright, it just was. I try to remember why I wanted to come here so bad. Something in my head feels like it’s alive, shifting slowly, and it hurts so bad. I can’t stand it but I don’t have a choice. I hold myself as still as I can. I’m sitting n
ext to Gavriel and he’s holding my hand. His eyes are closed. Everyone seems like they are barely breathing. I guess we aren’t. We aren’t because we aren’t in suits and the glass is cracked, so we probably don’t have any time. The radiation! The perchlorate! The carbon dioxide!

  Tig is holding my other hand. No one is talking. I want them to say something, to tell me it’s OK. I love them both so much, I feel like my insides are lit up with it. I guess I love you, I want to say. I’ve never felt like this. It’s not like I want to kiss them, nothing like that. It’s not like a crush kind of love. It’s this whole other thing, I can’t explain. It’s belonging.

  Beyond the glass, the stars are the same as they always are. I want to talk to them about dead stars, and about us, and about Mars and how we came here and then everything died and I guess we are going to, too. I’m not scared, not even a bit. I’m not scared because there isn’t a choice. I’d be scared if I were swimming in the lake and I saw a crocodile seeing me and then slowly sinking under the surface. I’d be scared because I’d also think, “Maybe I can escape!” The cracked glass means that we can’t escape. There is no choice here. Death is inevitable and that makes it not scary. Nothing can save us from this. I wonder what happened, but I can’t ask, there’s no one to ask.

  Tig’s and Gav’s skin looks so white, it’s glowing like light, and that’s when I realize their hands are warm. Everything is glowing. I pull my hand away from Tig’s and it’s glowing, too. “This is weird,” I try to say. I miss my mom and dad and Iris and Elliott. I miss the house and the lake and Lunch Island. We didn’t do our sleepover. I just wanted to do it once. Once would have been enough. I even miss the school, even though I only really went there for one day. I miss the hospital with the terrible art. But there isn’t a reason to miss anything, because I suddenly figure out that it’s all in me. It’s all a part of me. I’m my own everything. I’m my own forever. I’m a Universe of all things me. It makes sense. I’m a god. I’m God. We are all our own God. We are planets. We are canyons. We are striving to be beautiful. We are becoming empty space.