The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  I watch what Amber watches out the windows, and soon there’s nothing she recognizes. No Earth, no moon. The sun is shown for what it is: a star like any other. Space is cold and lonely.

  Ratings drop because nothing is happening. They float, and there seems to be no end to it. Space, space, and more space. Then, like a puppy come to greet them, that small moon, Deimos, runs by. And there it is: Mars.

  First it is just a disk, then a sphere, then a craggy uneven rock that looks like a potato. They feel the heat of it: the delicate skin of their lips actually blisters.

  They land at dusk, in a valley that runs along the equator, a valley that might once have been a lake. There are striated dunes and a giant, extinct volcano. Amber and FirstMan put on their MarsNowTM suits, check their oxygen levels. They hold hands, the way they did during that final episode. They step out onto dust as fine as oxygen. They look up, and so do we, the audience, over three billion of us tuning in to see the first humans to walk on Mars. They look up, and we all look up together. We see a purple sky.

  That’s when I get up, go to my window, look out at the Vancouver skyline. Amber and I watch the sunset together. And I’m so used to seeing through her eyes that I know she’s touching the mystery—it will escape her soon, but she’s touching it now.

  “Amber?” says FirstMan, all business. “You okay? Your vitals have dropped.”

  “Hm?” she says. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  They climb to the top of one of the mesas, and decide to marry. Right then, right there. Because they know that to survive, they will have to be one flesh.

  “I do,” they say in unison.

  Then they set about making this strange place home, or at least making it recognizable. They inflate their MarsNowTM Settlement Structure, which provides them with fifty square feet of private space and two hundred square feet of communal space. Amber begins to grow tomatoes in her hydroponic garden—the first seeds do nothing, but the second batch sprouts. FirstMan spends his days collecting samples, taking pictures, looking for alien

  life-forms.

  Medical issues arise. FirstMan’s teeth begin to rot and Amber lovingly pulls several of them out with a pair of pliers. And Amber becomes pregnant. She nearly carries the baby to term, but miscarries in her seventh month—bleeds onto the inflatable floor, whimpering, then gives birth to a stillborn boy who has the same cheekbones as his father and the same curls as his mother. They name him Aleph Innocence—for real—and bury him behind their Settlement Structure, in the place they call the garden even though it’s just a barren patch of dirt.

  Then Amber gets sick. At first, it’s just a lack of energy, and FirstMan quizzes her, wondering if she’s depressed. “No,” she says. “I’m fine.” But she grows thinner and thinner. FirstMan takes her pulse and temperature, takes blood samples, records everything. Then they see it. We all see it. A tumor that protrudes from her back. A tumor that looks like a human face.

  FirstMan speaks to the camera. “Amber and I believe she may have contracted cancer from cosmic ray exposure,” he says. “Further tests will be needed to confirm the diagnosis.”

  He wants to use the surgical equipment and anesthetic that the MarsNowTM people provided, but Amber is convinced that the face is a sign of something—a sign that they are not alone. She lets him perform reiki, but won’t let him remove the tumor. Soon the cancer has moved through her like water through the veins of a leaf: to her lymph nodes, her blood, her bones.

  She becomes smaller and her skin is gray—she looks alien against the bright, swirling mountains of Mars. Ratings have plummeted because there’s nothing pretty or exotic about this reality show now, nothing but the kind of pain with which people on Earth are already too familiar. But I still watch. I watch as Amber Kivinen—former drug dealer, former vault champ, former player of strip-Scrabble—dies.

  FirstMan and I cry together. We cry in an ugly way. I am on the couch, no longer young; I haven’t left the basement in months or maybe years. And he has aged too quickly, his hair white like the Earth’s distant moon. He doesn’t address the camera; he says nothing. The thing he most feared has happened: he is alone. He has found no evidence of life on Mars, and he will die there with no one to bury him in that red dirt.

  I open my eyes and Amber is beside me.

  “Hey.” She’s wearing a MarsNowTM hoodie and leggings. “How long has it been since you took a shower?”

  Amber is here, on the couch, intact. This is real.

  “I thought you were dead,” I say.

  “You’re stoned again.” She closes her eyes. “You’re always stoned again.”

  “Are you staying?” My mouth is dry and stale. “When did you get here?”

  “It was rigged the whole time.” She slouches into the couch cushions. Without the makeup, her face now looks terribly naked. “That’s Adam’s theory. The Japanese put in, like, two billion. So of course Tamiko gets to go.”

  “Tamiko’s going to Mars?”

  “Did you even watch the show?”

  I still feel fuzzy. I can’t remember how much I smoked last night, or the night before, and maybe there was a night before that too.

  “I voted for you,” I say.

  “Thanks. I guess.”

  I want her gone again. I also want to touch her hair. “You’re here.”

  “I’m here,” she says, but I can see that she’s lying. That she’s doing that thing where you float outside yourself, looking down at your own life. My girlfriend is on Mars.

  “I’m here,” she says again. Then she cries—silently, quickly wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  I put my arm around her and she’s as familiar as always—more familiar, even, because I sort of understand her. The desire to escape, to see the Earth from above. To see what God sees.

  But we’re here, on this planet of breathable air and koalas and ballpoint pens. We’re here in this room, on this couch. It’s soft as mud and it roots us to the earth. We’re in the garden, and gravity crushes us to powder.

  The Passage Bird

  When Shiri was growing up, her family lived so close to the airport that the bones of the house shivered when planes passed overhead. From her bedroom window, she saw the Fraser River; from the living room, the runways. She could tell time by rumbles in the walls.

  The year was 1971, her father worked as an airline mechanic for Boeing, and they lived in one of the small, identical houses built for company employees. Two parents, two children: a family constructed to fit the house. Like every other dwelling on that block, it had three bedrooms, one bathroom, an unfinished basement, and a front yard with a young cedar tree. Her parents appreciated the uniformity of the street. It confirmed that Canada was a new, safe, clean continent.

  As a child in Germany, her father had seen an Allied pilot drop from a burning plane, graceful as a diver until the parachute failed to open. Hirsch was six years old, the same age as Shiri now, and never forgot the sight of the pilot’s body crumpled on the ground, both arms bent at unnatural angles. That’s when Hirsch decided that the world needed competent mechanics and engineers, men who could fix problems, save lives. Now he came home each evening smelling of exhaust, his hands smeared with grease that could never be scrubbed clean. When he picked Shiri up, she buried her face in his overalls and smelled the sour odor of fumes, of flight. She’d never been on a plane but when her father lifted her in his arms, she imagined taxiing down the runway and rising smoothly into the air.

  “She’s meant to fly,” said the Hawk Man. “I can tell.”

  He too worked at the airport, flying his hawks and falcons on the runway to keep smaller birds away from the planes’ engines and windows. And though her parents didn’t observe Shabbat after moving to North America—they kept their heritage to themselves—the Hawk Man’s Friday evening visits were a kind of ritual. His truck pulled up in front of the house, the engine cut out, and Shiri and her brother, Dann, ran to the window. The Hawk Man! The Hawk Man! they shouted a
s he strode, lean and confident, toward the house. He always had a bird with him, perched on his gloved hand. A leather hood covered its eyes.

  “Good evening, Hirsch.” The Hawk Man shook her father’s hand. When sober, the two men were formal with each other. Standing on the porch, their differences were clear. Hirsch could block a doorway with his chest and there was a physicality to his commands. Leave that alone, he’d say, and snatch the comic book from Dann’s hands. Get down from there, and he’d wrap one of his thick arms around Shiri’s waist, pull her from the branches of a tree. The Hawk Man—much younger than Hirsch—looked like he never told anyone what to do, and probably no one ever bossed him either. He had an unkempt amber beard, suntanned skin, and two gold fillings, one in each eyetooth.

  Unlikely friends, as Shiri’s mother put it. Not that any of them, other than Dann, had many friends. They didn’t fit in this town. Other families went to church, Shiri noticed; no one else’s parents had accents; and other girls had straight hair that she envied, hair that hung prettily down their backs.

  The two men spent Friday evenings on the porch, drinking the beer Shiri’s father made in the basement and smoking cigarettes the Hawk Man rolled himself. Her father rested his hands on his hard stomach and the Hawk Man propped one long leg on the railing, leaned back in his chair, his bird’s talons wrapped around his wrist.

  Shiri’s mother brought them cheese and crackers and a bowl of pickles—Ruth didn’t bother to cook dinner because she wouldn’t allow the bird in the house. Shiri and Dann hovered in the doorway, behind the screen, staring. Dann was two years older than her, and braver, so he would talk to the men. “Can I have some beer?” he’d ask, and sometimes Hirsch would let his son taste the bitter, golden liquid.

  Shiri kept quiet and watched the bird shift its weight, or pick at the Hawk Man’s sleeve, or nip the hair at his temple. Every once in a while, he gave a gentle tug on the bird’s beak. “How are you, love?” he whispered. Or, “Ready to go, my dear?”

  The Hawk Man spoke directly to Shiri only once, when her father went into the house to use the washroom and her brother was sent to the basement to bring up more beer.

  “Come on out here.” He nodded toward the bird, a small brown thing with a sharp and curving beak. “She won’t bite.”

  Shiri wasn’t sure if she was more afraid of the bird or of him. Her brother knew things she didn’t and had told her stories. He said the Hawk Man always wore that glove because it had magic powers. What kind of powers? she wanted to know, and her brother said the Hawk Man could bring dead birds back to life, and that he could turn himself into a bird of prey—a hawk, of course, or a falcon or an eagle—that would swallow you whole. Can not, she said. Can too, he replied. “Sometimes people disappear,” Dann told her, “and everyone knows it’s ’cause they went to the Hawk Man’s house.”

  “She’s a sky hawk.” The Hawk Man unsnapped the leather hood and peeled it off to reveal the bird’s hard eyes. “Also known as a red-tailed hawk. But you can call her Rose.”

  Shiri thought of the gold chain her mother wore, with a delicate pendant in the shape of a rose—the only thing she’d managed to save from before the war. But there was nothing delicate about the hawk. Rose had a broad, cream-colored belly, yellow feet scaled like a snake, and a curved beak that ended in a knife’s point.

  “Don’t be scared,” said the Hawk Man.

  Shiri stepped onto the porch but the hawk turned with such a fierce, jealous glare that she looked down at her socked feet. When Shiri glanced up, the bird stared past her. Cold, superior.

  “Don’t mind her,” said the Hawk Man. “She doesn’t mean it.”

  “Where did you get her?”

  He took one of Shiri’s hands and stretched out her arm like a wing. “I turn little girls like you into birds.” He smiled and showed his gold teeth, two tiny suns in his mouth. “Would you like that? Would you like to fly?”

  She was about to say yes when her father gripped her arm and tugged her away. “That’s enough. Back inside.” He didn’t want his children near the birds, said they’d get their eyes plucked out.

  “She’s just making friends,” said the Hawk Man. “They’re both daughters of the air.”

  That’s when he said Shiri was meant to fly.

  But her father opened a fresh bottle of beer and said that no child of his would ever get on a plane; it was too dangerous. “Too much can go wrong.” He took a swig. “And I should know.”

  “What could go wrong?” said the Hawk Man, giving Shiri a wink.

  Her father shook his head. “Everything.”

  Everything did go wrong, though not in the ways her father predicted. Shiri and Dann didn’t break bones or lose an eye or get kidnapped by strangers. They grew, their changing heights recorded on a corner of the living room wall, until Dann was so tall that their mother couldn’t reach to make a pencil mark above his head. He could do fifty-six push-ups without stopping and was captain of the swim and debate teams. At school, when he bothered to talk to Shiri, he called her Shitty. But at home, he asked her to walk on his back to crack it, and he let her eat all the chocolate from the brick of Neapolitan ice cream. And even though they were too old for it, sometimes he helped her climb the tree in the front yard, gripping her hand so she could reach the tallest branch.

  Up there, they talked. He still knew things she didn’t: he taught her the cosine rule, told her which boys to stay away from, and explained matter-of-factly that their parents had probably never been in love.

  “Maybe they were,” she said. “But a long time ago.”

  “Yeah. And they’re friends, at least.” Dann picked up an insect from one of the tree’s needles. “I’ll pay you a dollar to eat this ladybug.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Then he swallowed it himself, just to watch her face. “There.” He coughed. “Not bad.”

  He was like that sometimes, needing to prove something. Maybe that was why, on his sixteenth birthday, he got drunk and, on a dare, dove off the Moray Bridge. He fell into the Fraser and never came up.

  Shiri was fourteen and hadn’t been invited to join Dann and his friends, so she was asleep when it happened. But she could imagine the way he must have stood, brave and foolish in the cool air. She imagined that last breath he must have taken, filling his lungs. She imagined his friends cheering him on, whooping and laughing while they waited for him to surface. Then waiting longer, too long, their cheers dying out.

  Then she decided to imagine that he hadn’t drowned. She’d once seen a raven near the river, so she imagined that Dann turned himself into one as he fell. That he hadn’t hit the water but had soared away from it, invisible, as black as the sky.

  His body was found two days later, bloated with river water.

  He was so transformed that the funeral required a closed casket. They didn’t sit shiva—who would visit them, asked Shiri’s mother, they had no family outside the thin walls of this house. But they did sit at the kitchen table, watching the Fraser flow past. The house was quiet without Dann to slam doors, to whistle while he made a mustard-and-chicken sandwich, to tell his little sister that she smelled like dirt. The only sound was the thunder of engines overhead. Shiri’s mother stood and closed the curtains so they wouldn’t see the water. Now only the runways were visible from the house—smooth, clean stretches of concrete.

  “There,” she said. “That’s better.”

  Ruth was a survivor—that was the word Shiri learned in school for people who’d lived through the Holocaust camps—and she understood that what was important was to live, to get through. She did not dwell. Even in summer, she wore long sleeves to hide the numbers tattooed on her arm.

  As a boy, Shiri’s father had seen his parents carried off in a train to the camps while he hid in the neighbors’ cellar. And when his son died, he did the same thing he’d done then: he went into hiding. He started sleeping in the basement, on the old, dusty couch with its protruding springs. Soon he refused to come
up for meals, or to take a shower, or to go to work.

  “Will he stay down there forever?” Shiri asked her mother.

  “How can I know?” said Ruth, who seemed to have grown heavier overnight, her ankles thick with fluid and her skin sagging from the bones of her face.

  Shiri watched the closed basement door. Her father was so quiet you’d never know he was down there.

  At six years old, he’d spent weeks in the cramped earthen room under his neighbors’ house, playing with a faded deck of cards and reading any books they could spare by the light of one small, smudged window. He heard life above him—footsteps,

  muted speech—but saw no one and ate only what the neighbors brought him. They were so good to me, was all he ever said of it.

  Shiri knew almost nothing about this time in his life, except for the stories he told, stories he used to invent for his children before bed. About a boy who could turn himself into a mouse and burrow into the earth. The mouse dug deeper and deeper until he found an underground river.

  “Like the Fraser?” Dann asked, and Shiri used to imagine underground log booms and hauls of yellow sulfur.

  Like the Fraser, her father said with a nod. Except the water flows like tar, and the boats are steered by blind men, and the fish don’t have eyes.

  Because Hirsch no longer went to work, Shiri’s mother got a job in a clothing store called Eve’s Fashion Shop. It was in the Richmond Square Mall and catered to women who worked as secretaries and receptionists, women who needed suits and blouses and fake pearl earrings.

  Her mother worked until the store closed, so it was Shiri’s job to cook dinner and care for her father. She made tuna sandwiches, rice with stewed tomatoes and ground beef, or soup from a can that formed a gluey skin as it cooled in the pot. She left some on the stove for her mother, then made up a tray and carried it down to the basement.

  Her father kept the room dark. Once, her mother had flicked on the light and Shiri saw him, vulnerable and startled, blink into the brightness. She preferred that their interactions remained blind, so stepped slowly down the dark stairs, the tray gripped tightly in her hands. The basement was cooler than the rest of the house and smelled of mildew and of her father’s unclean body. She held her breath as she took one step, then another. She could see his outline on the couch. She breathed through her mouth. “Dinner’s ready.”