The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  Here’s what’s real: Amber and I are twenty-eight years old, born one month apart in Thunder Bay, Ontario, but currently living in Vancouver, BC. She works part-time as a receptionist at the conference center downtown and I work as an extra on film sets (I once met Jennifer Love Hewitt) but we generate most of our income from selling the high-THC-content weed we grow in our bedroom.

  Here’s what else is real: we’ve known each other since grade three. At first, I thought nothing of her—she was just the tall girl who stood at the back in class photos. Then we were briefly friends, paired up as pen pals in grade five. We had to write each other weekly letters and she sealed her envelopes with stickers of cats wearing mittens. Then I got shy around girls for a few years and didn’t talk to her, barely knew her—she was just one of the Christian kids who had to leave the room during sex-ed classes. Then she was the girl known for being the gymnastics champ of eastern Canada, particularly impressive in the vault event. The local paper had pictures of Amber shooting off the springboard like a rocket, pirouetting through the air. Then she was the girl whose Olympic ambitions were dashed when she injured her shoulder. The girl who started drinking too much and hanging out at parties with guys like me and Marcus. The girl who stood with me outside in perfect silence, in -42°, when we were in grade eleven.

  We lost our virginity to each other two months after that, on her single bed, under a canopy of glow-in-the-dark stars she’d stuck to the ceiling. Afterward she pressed her body against mine and said she hadn’t been able to breathe properly since losing her chance at the Olympics, said she felt nauseated all the time because now she didn’t know what to do with her life—she was only seventeen but already fully heartbroken. She said she liked me because I calmed her down, because I didn’t seem to have expectations of her. I said that was true: I loved her for no reason at all. (It came out sounding dumb, but I meant it in a good way.)

  We are officially the only people we have slept with. Unofficially, during the 2.5 weeks we broke up in 2004, Amber had sex with a video-store clerk and I technically had sex (for about two seconds, in and out) with Tanya Vargas at a bonfire. But other than those 2.5 weeks, we have been together every day for the past nine years. We live in a suite as hot as a sauna, are vegetarians, and like to cuddle on the couch and look at LOLcats. I call her Slammer (she once spent a night in jail) and she calls me Tater-Toter (don’t want to talk about it) and we have a life together. We own one of those $300 blenders that can probably pulverize your skull, and the entire six seasons of The Sopranos. And we have our plants.

  We started with a few seeds that we sprouted between wet sheets of paper towel, then planted like an herb garden on our windowsill. We transplanted those into bigger pots that we kept beside our bed like babies in basinets. We fed them molasses and they grew past our knees, and that’s when we started selling. Just to Marcus and Amber’s sister and our former friend Brayden and some people I worked with on-set.

  It was Amber’s idea to go hydro. She had a master’s in environmental sciences (thesis: “Pacific Northwest Ferns and the Traditional Food Technologies of the Coast Salish People”) but couldn’t find work doing anything but waitressing or answering phones. We could have moved to Alberta where Amber would write dodgy environmental reports for oil companies. Or we could have moved to Chilliwack or Prince George, where minimum wages would stretch further. These were our options, and two years ago we sat on the couch and considered them.

  Amber packed the small pipe I’d bought for her birthday. The glass used to be pale orange with swirls of gold, the same color as her hair, but years of smoke passing through had darkened it to a burnished red. We passed it back and forth, and that’s when Amber said, “Or we could stay here and do this.”

  She said we’d probably produce more marijuana, using less space, if we grew hydroponically.

  “Dealing drugs,” she said, leaning against my chest, her eyes half closed. “It’s the best idea so far, right?”

  First we cleared it with our upstairs neighbor, Norm, who works nights stocking medical supplies at the hospital. He said our secret was safe with him so long as he got to partake in the product—marijuana helps him sleep when he gets home from work in the mornings. So we bought a pH and PPM meter. We bought a water pump, lights, nutrients. We went to a pet store and bought six kitty-litter boxes to use as reservoirs. We set up in the bathroom because it has good ventilation, but opening and closing the door and using the shower kept messing with the ambient temperature. We moved our operation into the bedroom.

  It’s not ideal to live where you grow. We keep the heat at twenty-eight degrees Celsius, and when the plants are in a vegetative state, we have to leave the lights on for eighteen hours a day. And there’s that skunky, sticky smell that coats your skin, your throat. But this has become my habitat. I’m used to the heat, the humidity, the stillness, the silence. It’s like the garden of Eden, except better than the original. Every plant here is the Tree of Knowledge, and you can eat from it whenever you want.

  So I don’t get why Amber would want to go anywhere else, especially to a red, dead rock. I thought we had an understanding. We’re not married; we don’t have kids; we don’t have pets. But we have our plants and we have each other. And we’re committed to this kind of noncommitment: growing weed in our bedroom, ordering pizza from the gluten-free place up the street, watching whole seasons of Arrested Development all at once. We sat on this couch and made a decision. We were—I believed—committed to going nowhere. Going nowhere together.

  Why? I asked. Why Mars? Why now?

  Because I want to see the Earth from above!

  Because it’s an amazing opportunity!

  Because it’s the first mission of its kind!

  Amber sounded like a convert to a new religion. Still, I wasn’t super worried because I knew this: her parents were coming to visit the following week, and her father—this freaky, alcoholic Finn—would never allow his daughter to go to Mars.

  When we were growing up, her dad coached peewee hockey and would put me in goal without a helmet, which was supposed to teach me to be less afraid of the puck. He still addresses me by my last name, Watkins, and it still scares me. My fear is made worse by the fact that I’m in love with his daughter and have a crush on his wife. (This might be the only secret I’ve kept from Amber, the fact that when her blond, big-boned mom sat in the bleachers, it made me play harder, skate faster, flinch less when the puck flew at my teeth.) What you need to know about Amber’s father is that he hates our cannabis business and blames me for his daughter’s life going nowhere. But now he was my savior. He would come to town, and he would bring his vodka and his disapproval.

  And then here they were, in Vancouver, after driving for a week straight from Thunder Bay because Amber’s mother has a fear of heights. (She is unlike her daughter in this regard—in fact, everything in Amber’s life, from gymnastics to weed to Mars, can be read as one long attempt to be nothing like her sweet mother.) We all went to a pub that served burgers and craft beer, and Amber told her parents about her plans to move to Mars.

  “Mars,” said her father. “You mean the planet.”

  “The planet.” Amber shifted in her chair. “Fourth from the sun.”

  “The planet.” His accent sounded dangerous. He crossed his arms, leaned back, and I had never loved him until that moment. “Mars.”

  But then he raised his glass. He was the kind of man who gave speeches when he drank, and he gave one then. He talked about moving from Finland to Canada, knowing that he may never see his homeland again. He compared the winter in Thunder Bay to the inhospitable atmosphere of Mars. He mentioned the Shackleton expedition but didn’t seem aware of how it had turned out. He said he was proud that his daughter was an adventurer and that she came from a long line of explorers.

  “We are Vikings.” He drank, then slammed his pint glass on the table. “And we will die as Vikings.”

  Then he looked over at me and asked if I was still stan
ding around in the background of movies he’d never seen.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yes.”

  I wasn’t hungry; I didn’t finish my chickpea burger. And when we got home and her parents went to the hotel they’d booked—they couldn’t stand the heat in our place—I rolled a joint as thick as my finger. I wanted to be brain-dead, body-stoned, obliterated. I wanted the kind of high that tears you right out of your skin.

  I lit the joint, listened to the paper crackle, inhaled. Amber didn’t join me. She did crunches and push-ups and I watched as beads of sweat rose on her freckled skin like blisters.

  “Can I come?” I said, holding the smoke in my lungs.

  “Where?” She wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Mars.” I exhaled, toked again. “Fourth from the sun.”

  “You missed the deadline.” Her body moved up and down, up and down. “You didn’t apply in time.”

  “We could have applied together. They probably want couples.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be into it.”

  “They probably want people to, you know. Propagate.” I giggled. “Name the animals, that sort of thing.”

  Amber finished her push-ups, sat back on her heels, looked at me. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to see her seeing me. I closed my eyes.

  “It’s really competitive.” She stood and walked past me to the bedroom, her stride cutting the humid air. “So, yeah.”

  The earliest memory I have of Amber is from grade three. Our class was sitting on the carpet in a semicircle, listening to Madame Potvin read us a story about a frog. My best friend Marcus was beside me, tearing his shoelaces into small, stiff-with-mud pieces. Amber sat cross-legged on my other side. And as Madame Potvin turned a page of the book, the power went out. The fluorescent tubes above us flickered, then the classroom went black. Kids screamed in exaggerated fear of the dark or made spooky, ghostlike sounds. But not me, and not Amber. We sat very quietly, side by side. Madame Potvin raised her voice to tell the rest of the class to stay seated and calm, and Marcus threw his bits of shoelaces at my face because he knew he wouldn’t get caught, and a couple of kids started to cry.

  Amber and I were a still-point, a star at the center of a galaxy. She turned toward me and smiled. And that smile literally lit the room: the lights buzzed back on.

  After her parents’ visit, Amber set up a Facebook page (“Send Amber to Mars!”) and a Twitter account (@AmbersQuest) and kept a blog where she posted about her training. And she rarely slept at the same time as me—normally we went to sleep when we put the plants to bed, turning off those LEDs, curling up together and drifting off in the pitch-dark of our bedroom, where the windows are blacked out.

  But she started staying up at the kitchen table, the laptop open and shining its pale, alien light over her skin. She was chatting with other applicants on the MarsNowTM forum. I know this because I looked at her browser history, clicked through a few pages of her conversations.

  AmbersQuest: Anyone out there? Can’t stop thinking about life on Mars tonight.

  FirstMan34: Living on Mars = unimaginable. I think what appeals is that the simplest things will be extraordinary, u know?

  AmbersQuest: For sure. Eating a meal. Taking a shower!

  FirstMan34: Going for a walk. Watching the sun set.

  I wanted to punch that FirstMan34 guy. But I didn’t say anything because I was trying to appreciate having Amber around, even if she was always in another room. Soon I didn’t even have that meager comfort. Soon she went off for two months of training at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, best known as the location where the first atomic bomb was created.

  There she took workshops in risk-taking, team awareness, nonviolent communication, conflict resolution, and “applied human relationships,” i.e.: kindness and love. (The MarsNowTM people are investing eight billion dollars into this project—most raised from donors, broadcasting rights, and advertising—so they would prefer that their two astronauts don’t murder each other.) She also took classes in basic medicine: how to reset a broken bone, how to clean a wound, how to suck alien venom out of your own skin using your mouth.

  Now she’s on TV. Every Thursday at seven p.m. (Pacific Standard). She was one of twenty-four final competitors, two of whom are eliminated every week. The show is filmed in stunning locations around the world, the idea being that the competitors will see the breadth of what Earth has to offer before two of them are chosen to abandon this planet forever. I’ve watched Amber on live-stream as she drank protein shakes in Latvia, and “shared” during “group” with her fellow companions/competitors in Kenya, and floated in the zero-gravity MarsNowTM training capsule in New Mexico.

  She has not been eliminated. Farzad from Iran was eliminated. Talia from New York was eliminated. Fernando from Argentina was eliminated. Even audience-favorite Cawaale Abaaskul from Somalia was eliminated. Engineers and pilates instructors and physiotherapists were eliminated. But Amber Kivinen—drug dealer, former vault champ, onetime president of the Thunder Bay Calvin and Hobbes Fan Club—remained. Why? Because she had a story.

  Hers is a conversion narrative: she was once just a failed gymnast, an underemployed twenty-something edging into her unmarried thirties, a woman who had been arrested for marijuana possession. And now she’s on television; now People magazine has published a fluff piece about her diet regimen: The meal plan that will take Amber into space! (You guessed it: egg whites, Greek yogurt, oatmeal with hemp hearts, kale smoothies, chicken breasts, and the occasional indulgence—a square or two of dark chocolate.) According to her one-on-one with Ryan Seacrest, before MarsNowTM she was depressed and “going nowhere.” Yes, she had a loving family and a boyfriend (that’s me), but “something was missing.”

  Her story might not be any better than yours or mine, but having been raised in her father’s church, she knows how to sell it. I was lost but now am found.

  “This is what I’m meant to do with my life.” She speaks breathlessly, in fast-cut TV segments. “This is real. I can feel it.”

  Never mind that the grow-op was her idea. And never mind that even though she’s publicly sworn to focus, to cut all liabilities from her life, she still calls me. Yes, she still calls me. Last night, she phoned from the set because she needed me to look in the medicine cabinet to remind her of what brand of acid inhibitors she uses.

  “Won’t they have state-of-the-art Tums on Mars?” I said.

  “Fuck off, Kev, please. I’m serious.”

  “You just got the no-name kind from Shoppers,” I said. “Extra-strength.”

  “I can feel my stomach acid all the way up in my throat,” she said. “I can feel it in my head. It’s burning my eyes.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Is it? Do you think it can get into my brain?”

  “Slammer, your stomach acid can’t reach your brain.” I was sitting in the bathtub, which is the place Amber and I go to cool off. The ceramic was cold against my back. “And anyway, you’re going to Mars. The landing will kill you first.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. Just like she couldn’t help but call me. She now calls me in the same manner she used to call those other guys, the skateboarder or the video-store clerk—because she can’t stop herself. Because I’m the secret she’s keeping from everyone on this planet.

  “You’re fine,” I said. “Take a breath, okay?”

  “Okay. I’m doing it.” She inhaled, exhaled. “I’m breathing.”

  “And you look hot,” I said. “In that little uniform they make you wear.”

  “Oh, god.” She laughed. “Thanks. Thank you.”

  And it occurred to me that when Amber is on Mars, when we are light-years apart, we’ll still watch the same sun set.

  During her weeks of competing, I kept the op running. Kept the lights the correct distance from the roots, maintained the water’s pH at 5.8, fed the plants with a homemade cocktail of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium in the form
of Epsom salts, along with a teaspoon of a micro-nutrient mix that contained copper, zinc, iron, molybdenum, chloride, and manganese.

  I didn’t leave the house except to buy groceries and lottery tickets. I kept track of the days only so I’d know how long Amber was gone (five weeks) and how often to change the water (every 1.5 weeks). Four times I switched out the water solution, using tap water that had been aged for three days.

  Patience is the key to a successful grow-op. It’s tempting to overfertilize to try to speed the growth process, and it’s tempting to harvest early to get at the product faster. But harvesting too early will give a dark, depressing high. And too late will make you feel like you’ve been brained by an asteroid. I waited for that perfect time because I wanted a Goldilocks high—not too heavy, not too light.

  I tapered the nutes, then fed the plants distilled water to get rid of any chemical aftertaste the plants might hang on to. Then I waited. I waited until some of the leaves had curled and fallen off the plant, scattering softly on the floor. I waited until the pistils turned a shade I can only describe as “amber.”

  A few clients came over to purchase. A girl named Bronwyn who brings me and Amber whatever raw-vegan desserts she’s made recently—this time it was coconut-almond macaroons. Brayden, that graphic designer/skateboarder who once had his cock in my girlfriend’s mouth but thinks I don’t know about that and who now gets charged triple. And Marcus, who also moved to Vancouver after graduating and who has suggested that I followed him out here. (Not true.) (I followed Amber.)

  When I told Marcus that my girlfriend was in training to go to Mars, he said, “Shit, dude.” He is exactly the same as he was in high school. The apelike arms, the studied nonchalance. “Mars?”