Mars

by Asja Bakić

  “You know, predicting someone’s fate?”

  “There’s no such thing as fate,” Carlyle said in earnest.

  I scanned the room for the young woman, but didn’t see her.

  “The walls,” I said. “What kind of stone is it?”

  Carlyle laughed and released my hand.

  “You like it?”

  “More than anything,” I replied, taking another sip of my now lukewarm tea.

  Carlyle excused himself to talk to the other guests. He hadn’t answered my question. Finally I caught sight of the young woman. She didn’t look happy.

  “Carlyle hasn’t said a word to me all evening. I’ll never get those damned pig ears!”

  “I doubt he’s mad at you.”

  “You never can tell with him. He’s good at hiding his emotions,” she said.

  “What makes you so sure he even has them?” I quipped.

  After our conversation, Carlyle didn’t approach me again for the rest of the night. He simply watched me. We were complete strangers to each other, the only two equals in the whole cave, in the whole settlement.

  Alone in the bathroom, I broke off a small piece of stone from the wall and wrapped it in a tissue. The stone wasn’t hard, but brittle, more than I’d imagined. I stuck the bundle in my pocket and returned to the party.

  As we were about to leave, I returned the dress to Carlyle and thanked him for his hospitality.

  “I had a wonderful time,” I said.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  On the way home, the young woman told me how Carlyle had praised her unexpectedly.

  “And he kissed me on the neck,” she said happily. “He didn’t seem to mind that you’re staying with me.”

  The scent of lilac had faded; the young woman smelled of citrus now. I couldn’t explain how or why. Maybe my nose had tricked me?

  Lying in the back of the closet, I unconsciously ran my finger across my palm. The more I thought about Carlyle, the more I liked him.

  I pulled the tissue from my pocket. I wanted to gaze at the glowing stones before going to sleep, but I found only gray, ugly pieces of concrete. Then it dawned on me. I placed the concrete on the head line of my palm and watched it glow green once more. My warm skin was the key to revealing the stone’s real properties. I contemplated this as I fell asleep.

  In the morning, the young woman greeted me with a hearty breakfast. She said Carlyle had come by again, but hadn’t wanted to disturb me.

  “He asked where you were. He even peeked into the closet to see I wasn’t lying.”

  I searched the closet in panic to make sure the tissue was still there. All was well—he hadn’t touched anything.

  “After breakfast, we’re going over to his apartment. He wants to speak with you.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can.”

  “Does Carlyle have a weakness? Something that gets him to relax and open up a bit?”

  “Of course he does,” she said. “Women’s stockings, with or without back seams, any will do.”

  I remembered I had a pair in my bag. I didn’t know why I’d brought them, but now they were a welcome sight.

  “Whenever I leave the settlement, I always buy hosiery. We have everything else here,” she added.

  I felt uneasy. I obviously hadn’t brought stockings to seduce Carlyle, but my wearing them would undoubtedly look like a desperate attempt to ingratiate myself to him. So I could observe and question him further.

  “You should put them on,” the young woman said.

  “Out of the question,” I replied. “I’m already warm enough. I’ll give them to Carlyle as a gift, unopened, like this. He can wear them himself, if he finds them so arousing.”

  “As you wish.”

  She was accustomed to my stubbornness by now; she’d learned to deal with it.

  “You know,” I said, “I think I’m starting to understand why you like it here so much.”

  “I told you Carlyle isn’t a cult leader. He is much, much more.”

  When I offered Carlyle the stockings, he looked at me with surprise.

  “I heard you like them,” I said.

  “I like it when someone wears them.”

  “What did you want to speak to me about?”

  “About you, of course,” he said.

  “What a coincidence—I wanted to talk about you.”

  The cave looked darker than it had the night before. The young woman sat down in a cozy armchair. I sat too, but in a rigid wooden chair. I didn’t want to get too comfortable. Carlyle remained standing. He stared down at us.

  “I like what you’ve done with the apartment.”

  “If you’d like, you could live in this building too.”

  “I don’t have the money,” I said, even though I knew no one ever used money there.

  Carlyle and the young woman laughed.

  “We only use money on the outside,” Carlyle said. “Here it’s useless.”

  “Because you know it’s fake?”

  Carlyle grew serious. He asked the young woman to leave us.

  “Everything around us is a lie,” I said, standing.

  I touched the wall of the cave and watched the color intensify, its glow shine brighter. Carlyle came up behind me, kissing my neck. I shuddered.

  “Doesn’t it excite you,” he murmured, “the thought of getting anything you want? Anything you can imagine is within your grasp.”

  “You mean, anything you can imagine? I haven’t seen anyone else with your gift.”

  “You have my gift. Look!”

  He unfolded my hand and slashed my palm with a knife.

  “You cut the skin like tree bark, let the blood flow slowly, and lick as long as you can,” Carlyle continued.

  But this was hardly vampirism. Carlyle knew the magic of people, the benefits of the living. He lapped at my hand like an obedient dog.

  “Imagine something small. Creation should begin with trinkets.”

  I imagined a marble. No, two marbles. Carlyle gathered my hand into a fist and held it between his palms.

  “You have a powerful and complex imagination.”

  “You flatter me,” I said, annoyed.

  “Look!”

  He opened my hand. In my palm sat two marbles, the same two marbles I’d just envisioned.

  “Anything you want,” he said. “Anything.”

  The first things that came to mind were abstract nouns, inconceivable notions. I wondered whether I could make infinity materialize, or peace on earth.

  “And if I wanted something more?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if I wanted to carry out some dangerous plan?”

  Carlyle grew pale. I’d brought him to his limit.

  “You didn’t know what ink was, what palm reading was. What if I created something that you didn’t even know existed?”

  Like a confused child, Carlyle begged me to explain.

  “What if I could, at this very moment, conjure something horrible in my mind and then make that same thing happen? I could destroy your village, kill all your people.”

  “That’s impossible. The human imagination is limited. Work with what’s already here. After all,” Carlyle added, “I can answer your threats with equal force.”

  I looked at the two marbles—they were perfectly round. I hadn’t made a single beginner’s mistake. I was certain my buildings would stand straight, not lopsided like Carlyle’s, but I didn’t want to tell him that. It seemed to me that he’d made a mistake in divulging his secret. How did he know he could trust me?

  “You’re naive,” I said. “If two of us exist with this power, there must be others.”

  “Don’t you see?” He laughed. “It’s just us—there’s no one else.”

  What I heard Carlyle say then was staggering to me. The army had known about my gift before I did. They had tossed me to the bottom of a well like a pebble, just to see whether I could
get out.

  “They need you,” Carlyle said. “They’re running out of drinkable water, fuel, natural gas.”

  I looked at him, my fists clenched. They were beyond hot now—smoke poured from them, finally bursting into flame, illuminating the farthest corners of the cave. I stood in the middle of the room, thinking only of incinerating myself and everything around me.

  I knew what awaited me if I returned to civilization. The army would exploit me, the doctors would examine me. They’d completely use me up. My hands would carry out the desires of others.

  “A world that can imagine only the material shouldn’t exist,” I said angrily. “I’ll raze it to the ground!”

  The marbles slipped from my hand and rolled toward Carlyle’s feet. He bent down and picked them up.

  “What an article that would be … but there’d be no one left to read it. Are you really so eager to have everything burn?” He paused. “You can’t rebuild a world that’s been reduced to ashes. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  I understood then. His buildings were slanted because they were supposed to be. His dresses were transparent because that’s what he was used to. He’d come from a place where no one wrote using ink, or practiced palmistry. The head line didn’t serve for predicting fate, but to change it—to transform things from small to large, from material to conceptual.

  I looked at the guest and realized why green light emerged from everything we touched. It was the same green dwelling in me, and from me creation sprouted, like small blades of terrestrial vegetation. People could disappear, but everything else had to remain intact.

  HEADING WEST

  In the children’s room, on the floor, sit two sisters, playing. There are no toys around them. The room is disorderly, dirty. They make all-too-familiar hand movements—they stab at something in front of them and then bring it to their lips. It quickly becomes clear that the girls are playing lunch. There’s no food; they are only pretending to eat.

  “Mmmm, how delicious!” says one of them.

  “Mine’s even better!” her sister declares.

  They’re not imagining gourmet cuisine, just ordinary chicken and potatoes, a bit of soup, a warm roll, and, mostly likely, fruit, cakes—things they haven’t seen in a long time. One of them closes her eyes.

  “When we get there,” she says, “I hope Mama takes me out for cake right away.”

  “I’ll go with you!” her sister says. “And Papa should come too.”

  In silence, the sisters continue to dine on imaginary food while we hear their stomachs rumbling from prolonged hunger—first the older one’s, then the younger one’s.

  Their parents sit in the adjacent room, crying. They cover their faces with small pillows to muffle their sobs so the children won’t hear. They’ve used up the last bit of meat; only beans are left, but they have nothing to cook them in. Their eyes are red, swollen from crying. They’re draped in a dirty blanket. There’s no water: they can’t wash anything, not even their faces.

  For days Mama carried around a single egg to make pancakes for the children, but it eventually spoiled. Now they have none. They no longer have electricity either; they warm themselves by a fire they light in the middle of the living room. When there’s no wood, they use books. Each time, Mama cries while watching the books burn: she assiduously collected them for years to have something to leave the children. Now they’re slowly disappearing, one by one. Instead of being devoured by curious children, they’re being devoured by flames.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” the little girls assure her. “We’ve already read them all.”

  And they weren’t lying. After a while, there was nothing else to entertain them. Only books. They would sit by the fire and read. Mama explained that those books were heavy, that they were only for adults. But the children didn’t understand. They took her words literally.

  “They’re not heavy—look how easy it is to carry them.”

  The family has been slowly preparing for a trip.

  “When are we leaving?” the little girls ask every now and then.

  The parents fall silent.

  “We need to say goodbye to the neighbors,” Mama says softly.

  The only remaining neighbors are old and exhausted. Two little grandmothers on the first floor, so bent over that one of them can touch her nose to her knees. The girls often wonder how it feels to be in that position all the time.

  “She can’t see our faces, how does she know who she’s talking to?”

  “She can recognize voices,” the other sister replies.

  On the floor above them, both apartments are empty, and it’s like that all the way up to the tenth floor, where an old couple whose children left a few months ago still resides. Their children sent home a little money, but the old people have nowhere to spend it. They stuffed the money into pillowcases to make them more comfortable.

  “Do you think they have hair salons there?” the younger sister asks while intently chewing the air.

  She touches her hair. She’d like to have curls that fall to her shoulders. Sometimes she dreams of having hair all the way down to her bottom.

  “Definitely! They have everything there,” the older one replies with an equally full mouth.

  “Will Mama take us to the hair salon to get our hair done?” the younger girl continues her line of questioning.

  “Of course she will. It would be stupid to walk around all ragged and dirty when we don’t have to.”

  The parents worry they won’t make it until the following weekend, when they’re finally supposed to depart. Their parents have died: Mama’s father, Papa’s father, Mama’s mother, and then Papa’s mother, in that order, all in the space of a year, all from great privation and suffering. There is nothing more to keep them there; they need to help themselves and their children, to embark on a journey no matter how afraid they are of what awaits them.

  Papa often squeezes Mama’s hand in a show of support: together for better or for worse.

  “But everything just gets worse,” Mama says when she feels Papa’s grip.

  In the morning, they find a humanitarian aid package in the torn-up, deserted street. They’re overjoyed. They divide it up evenly, giving one part to their hunched neighbors, another part to the elderly couple. Then they look at what they have to share among themselves.

  Unfortunately, the canned meat has been opened already and is full of worms. It’s inedible. The cookies are all right. Powdered milk, powdered eggs—everything that’s not perishable seems fine—but there’s no water. They’ll need to find some. The city’s infrastructure is completely destroyed, the water supply inoperable. Before fleeing, some people constructed makeshift wells. Maybe there’s something there.

  The whole city is covered in a layer of dust. Papa often reflects on this. He was a chemical engineer, Mama a literature professor. They had a nice life. They imagined it could only be better for their children, but they were wrong.

  “You never know,” one of the little grandmothers says. “Life is unpredictable.”

  The other old woman nods in agreement, but because she’s bent over, no one sees.

  “We’ve suffered,” she adds. “But there’s no use despairing. The dinosaurs didn’t survive, and they were enormous. We’re tiny but resistant, like cockroaches.”

  The parents smile at their comments, but there’s really nothing to smile about. It’s difficult likening young children to cockroaches. Children aren’t resistant to anything. When Mama and Papa look at their daughters, they see butterflies with short lifespans, not cockroaches. Or two hummingbirds, as they sometimes call them—not knowing that birds descended from dinosaurs, that birds survived what even cockroaches perhaps couldn’t.

  From one day to the next, the children would eat their imaginary lunches and dinners, their abundant breakfasts and brunches. They’d open their bags and pretend to take out apple cakes, pineapple cakes, chicken, peas, mashed potatoes—everything they’d once loved to eat, everything they
’d once eaten for real. Sometimes the girls would eat their imagined meal so quickly and voraciously that they’d begin to hiccup. They’d wash down their food with pretend lemonade and fruit juice. The pulpy kind, especially good and nutritious.

  The days passed so slowly they felt like years. Toward the end of the week, Mama began to pack. She prepared three backpacks: two large and one small. She fastened necklaces around her older daughter’s throat—gold, the most resilient and solid of all the elements. She adorned all her own fingers with rings. The rest she hid in her bag. She didn’t want to show the driver everything right away, concerned that the smugglers would get greedy and raise the price for the trip to Ancona.

  “We don’t have much,” she told the neighbors. “I don’t know if it’ll be enough.”

  “They’re humanitarians, they’ll be sympathetic,” the women assured her. But no one really knew.

  They’d heard stories about migrants who’d been thrown into the sea when they didn’t have enough. And even without gold around their neck, a person was heavy enough to sink.

  Just before their departure, Mama went to throw Zola’s The Belly of Paris into the fire because there was nothing else to use for kindling. This time, the children cried instead of their mother. The food in that book had been a great consolation: they could no longer see plants, vegetation, anywhere. All that chicory, those bunches of spinach, celery, huge heads of cabbage, artichokes, leeks, red onions, tomatoes … The list went on as Zola enumerated, and the children along with him.

  “Mama, don’t!” the little girls begged. “Please, please don’t!”

  Ultimately, instead of Zola, she tossed an old photo album into the flames. The little girls carefully placed The Belly of Paris in their backpack.

  “Celery, pumpkin, onion, cabbage,” recited the younger sister, sweeping her hand across the novel’s stained cover.

  Food had taught her to read and speak.

  They needed to bid farewell to the neighbors somehow. The parents were anxious. They didn’t know how to tell the old people they were finally leaving.

  “Who will take care of them?” they wondered, though they knew the answer.

  They knew their departure meant imminent death for those left behind. The aid packages were coming less frequently, and getting smaller.