So, Amelia looked. She looked at the ravaged hands touching the precious photos and she nodded.
***
She knew the lunch invitation was a trap but not exactly which kind. Fernanda did not extend lunch invitations. It was Amelia who phoned her, tiptoed around a social activity once a year, and then Fernanda agreed with a sigh. Fernanda ended up buying her a free lunch and Amelia ended up feeling like shit, and then she wondered why the fuck she bothered pretending Fernanda was still her friend, but the truth was Fernanda had also lent her money a couple of times. Amelia didn’t like to think of people as walking ATMs, but that was what it had come to on more than one occasion.
Fernanda phoning Amelia was plain unnatural, but Amelia went along with it, went to the restaurant where they normally met.
Fernanda arrived before Amelia, which was another oddity. She didn’t waste time pretending pleasantries. As soon as Amelia sat down, she leaned forward, with an eager look on her face.
“Amelia, are you really fucking Elías Bertoliat?”
Amelia opened the menu, sliding a finger down the many options. Fernanda took her time choosing her food and drink, after all.
“Amelia, didn’t you hear me?” Fernanda asked.
“I heard you,” Amelia said, trying to read the menu.
“Oh, my God, are you seriously going to sit there without answering me?” Fernanda said.
Amelia raised her eyes and stared at Fernanda. “Why are you asking me this? How do you —”
“Anastasia is super-pissed off at me! She thinks I got you two back in contact and I’ve done nothing of the sort! But since I secured you the invitation for that show of hers and she didn’t hire you… okay, she has it in her head that you went and fucked the guy to spite her. And it’s my fault for telling you about her art show in the first place.”
“Elías is engaged to Anastasia?”
“You didn’t know that?” Fernanda said.
For a moment she believed that Fernanda had set this whole thing in motion as part of a malicious plan. She had sent her to the gallery, she had mentioned that Amelia worked as a rent-a-friend to Elías. For what? For a lark? Coincidence? Did it matter? Maybe she thought it would be funny. You can’t imagine what she does now! No, really, look her up. It had backfired.
Most likely Fernanda hadn’t even thought about it, it had been a lack of care and tact.
“How did she find out?” Amelia replied.
“She paid someone to follow him.”
“What, with that stalker app? That would be funny.”
“What are you talking about?”
Amelia chuckled. She reached for a piece of bread piled in a basket and tore off a chunk.
“Why are you so happy? Do your realize what this means to me? Anastasia does business with my husband. If she’s angry at me, I’m going to lose money.”
Fernanda had reached across the table and slapped the butter knife Amelia had been attempting to wield. The clank of metal against the table made Amelia grimace.
“I’m not responsible for your husband’s business,” she said, and she hoped that he did bleed money, that if Fernanda had started this fucking storyline with her gossip and games, she paid for it.
“Well, if that’s how you see it. But let me tell you something. He’s going back to Monterrey this summer. His father is demanding it and Anastasia is pressing for it, too. So, whatever you’ve got going, it’s not going to last.”
“Nothing does,” Amelia said. She grabbed the butter knife again and slowly, deliberately buttered her bread, much to the chagrin of the other woman. When she left the restaurant, she knew she would never be having lunch with Fernanda again.
***
She went back to the blood clinic. She was certain Elías wouldn’t appreciate the fresh mark on her arm, but fuck him. She sat there and they siphoned out the blood, and she recalled how years before, he’d abandoned her, how he had not returned her calls. So she’d gone to his apartment, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. She pictured him run over by a car, dying of a fever. A million different, dramatic scenarios. Instead, she walked into an empty apartment. The only traces of him that remained were the stars on the bedroom’s ceiling and the leaks slowly dripping across the floor.
It was that emptiness that she attempted to escape as the machinery whirred and the tourniquet tightened, the centrifuge spinning and separating plasma and blood.
It was that helplessness which she must combat.
She could not depend on him because Elías was not dependable. She knew that even before Fernanda had spilled poison in her ears, even before she walked down Reforma with her eyes downcast.
When he texted her and she showed up at his place, and when he noticed the mark, she told him to mind his own business, to mind Anastasia and his own fucking life because she had hers.
How he stared at her.
“You should tell me if you need help,” he said.
“And you should have told me it was her,” she replied.
He ran a hand down his face. Then he had the gall to try and reach out for her. Amelia slapped his hand away.
“What does it matter?” he asked, stubbornly trying to grab hold of her again. “What does it matter if it’s Anastasia?”
“I don’t like not knowing. I wish you would fucking tell me something.”
“You don’t tell me anything, either! Look at that!” he yelled, touching her arm, the mark there, “You just go off to sell fucking plasma, like a junkie.”
“Everyone sells it, Elías! Everyone has to!”
She shoved him away and he reached out a third time to catch her.
“I’ll tell you all if you want, fine, but there’s not much to tell. I’m supposed to head back in the summer. And the rest… you must know it, already. I care about you and I care nothing about them,” he said, brokenly.
It was not enough. It wasn’t, but then, she lived on scraps and bits of nothing. She let him hold her, after all.
“Don’t go to that stupid clinic, anymore,” he said. “Ask for the money if you need it, all right?”
Because she was a coward, because it was always easier in the moment to lie, she nodded.
***
But she did not stop going to the blood clinic. She had amassed almost a complete new wardrobe, courtesy of Elías, which she kept at his place, but she did not ask for money. It baffled him, even irritated him. Instead, she continued to meet the occasional client on Friendrr, or helped Pili with an odd gig since Pili was a purveyor of constant and strange gigs. And the blood, there was the blood when she needed the cash.
Her life had not changed, not really. She still spent a great deal of time in coffee shops — connected to their Wi-Fi, draw-ing nonsense — but she also ventured to see Elías. He had many of her same habits. He did not work. He did not seem to do anything at all, although once in a while, he’d take photo-graphs with a custom-made Polaroid camera. This wasn’t but a faint echo of his previous passion and inevitably, he shrugged and tossed the camera back into a drawer.
One evening, Amelia opened the drawer and emptied it on the floor of his neat, sparse office, holding up the pictures and looking at them. He walked in, looked at her.
“I wish you would,” he said. She didn’t understand the last word he muttered before he sat down next to her and pulled Amelia into his arms.
There were moments like that when it was easy to forget that he wasn’t hers and she wasn’t his. There were moments when the phone didn’t ring, and it wasn’t his father or that fiancée on the line, and there were moments when she pretended this was New Panyu because she had never seen it, so it could be. It could be that the homes of the wealthy there looked like this: manicured and perfect.
Then came May and the rain was early, soaking her to the bone one afternoon, so that her clothes were a soggy mess as she hurried up the stairs of her apartment and the phone rang.
“Hello,” she said. It was Miguel.
�
��Hey, Amelia. You don’t need to go to Lucía’s home today. She’s passed away.” As usual, he spoke in a sunny tone. So sunny that Amelia stopped and held on to the banister, pressing the phone harder against her ear and asking him to repeat what he had told her. She couldn’t believe he had said what he’d said. But he repeated the same thing, adding that there was a lawyer who wanted to speak to her. The old lady had left something for her.
“‘A poster,’ the lawyer said,” Miguel told her. “You should phone him.”
***
It was indeed a poster in a cardboard tube. Sealed with Scotch Tape. Amelia placed it on the empty chair next to her. Lucía had died in her sleep, an easy death, so she did not understand when the lawyer asked her to sit down. There was more.
“The house, her furniture, her savings, they go to her niece,” the lawyer told her.
She had expected nothing else. The niece had only been mentioned in passing a couple of times, but there had been a certain importance attached to her name.
“Aside from the poster, she did leave an amount of money for you.”
“What?” Amelia asked.
“She also left money for her staff. She was a generous lady. It’s not much different from that, the amount. There’s some paperwork that needs to be filled out.”
When she arrived home, Amelia peeled open the tube and unrolled the poster on the floor. It was the Mars poster: Lucía with the cartridge belts, looking over her shoulder.
In a corner, a few shaky words had been scrawled with a black felt pen: Do what you want, Amelia.
Hellas, she thought. Mars is home to a plain that covers nearly twenty-three hundred kilometers. Hellas appears featureless….
And then Amelia could think of no more facts, no more names and numbers to go together. She wept.
***
It rained again and again. Three days of rain and on the third, she asked for a car to drive her over to New Polanco. In the derelict buildings nearby, people were collecting water in pots and cans and buckets. She watched them from the window of the car. Then the surroundings changed, Elías’ tall apartment building came into focus, and it was impossible that both views could be had in the same city.
As soon as she walked into his apartment, she looked for the sign advertising Mars, but it wasn’t on. The power might be down on that street. Elías’ building probably had a generator.
She stood before the window, watching the rain instead.
He wasn’t home. She had not bothered to text him, but she did not mind the wait. The silence. Then the door opened and he finally walked in, shaking an umbrella.
“Hey,” he said, frowning. “Didn’t know you’d stop by.”
Amelia held up the key he’d given her and placed it on the table, carefully, like a player revealing an ace. “I came to bring it back and say goodbye. I’m headed to New Panyu.”
Elías took off his jacket and tossed it on the couch, smiling, incredulous. “You don’t have the money for that.”
“I’ve got the money,” she affirmed.
“How?”
“Doesn’t matter how.”
“You’re serious. This isn’t some joke.”
“I wouldn’t joke about it.”
“Fuck me,” he said sitting down on the couch, resting his elbows against his knees and shaking his head. He still seemed incredulous, but now he was also starting to look pissed off. “Just like that.”
“I told you I’d go one day.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think… Shit, Amelia, Mars is a dump. It’s a fucking dump. Piss recycled into drinkable water and sandstorms blotting your windows. You think you’re going to be better off there? You seriously think that?”
He sounded like her sister. Marta had said the exact same thing, with more bad words and yelling, although toward the end of the conversation, she concluded it was for the best and she might be able to rent the room where Amelia now slept. Pili had joked about Martians dancing the cha-cha-cha and bought Amelia a beer. Her eyes held not even the slightest trace of tears, but Amelia could tell she was sad.
“You’re going to be back in less than six months,” he warned her. “You’re just going to burn through your money.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion.”
“You’re selfish. You’re just damned selfish. And you… you’ll miss Earth, the comfort of having an atmosphere.”
Perhaps he was right that she would miss it all, later. The city, her apartment, her sister, Pili, the café where she spent most of her waking hours, and him, too. Twenty seconds after boarding the shuttle to Mars, she might indeed miss it, but she was not going to stay around because maybe she might get homesick.
“It doesn’t matter to you?” he asked. “That you are going to eat bars made of algae seven days a week? That… that I won’t be around?”
She laughed brokenly and he stood up, stood in front of her, all fervent eyes. She liked it when he looked at her like that, covetous, like he wanted her all, like he might devour her whole and she’d cease to exist, be edited out of existence like they edited scenes in the movies.
“Cut the shit. Come with me to Monterrey. I’ll rent a place for you there. I’ll pay your expenses,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“Mars or bust, then.”
“Yes.”
She scratched her arm, scratched the spot where they drew blood and an indentation was starting to form, and looked at that spot instead of him. She couldn’t see it with her jacket on, but she could feel the scar tissue there, beneath her fingertips.
“I told you. I always told you. New Panyu —”
“Years ago,” he said. “When we were 19. Fuck, you don’t keep the promises you make when you’re a kid.”
“No, you don’t.”
Her throat, she felt it clogged with bitterness. The words were hoarse and she put both her hands down at her sides, giving him a furious glance.
“Fine, fine, fine,” he said, his hand slamming against the living room table, equally furious. “Fine! Leave me!”
Amelia crossed her arms and began walking to the door, but he moved to her side, reached for her, a hand brushing her hair.
“No, it’s not fine, Amelia,” he whispered.
She opened her mouth, ready to halt him before he committed himself to something, but he spoke too fast.
“I did… I do love you.” Gentle words. Sincere. All the worse for that.
The hand was still in her hair and she was looking down at her shoes, frowning, arms tight against her chest. She had not come to converse or negotiate. She had come to say goodbye, even if he had not given her that courtesy once upon a time. Now, for the first time, she understood why he had taken off so suddenly, wordless. She knew why he’d made their first film a silent movie, a goodbye with no dialogue. It was a wretched mess to part from each other. He had cannily figured that out. He had probably imagined the tears of a girl, the pleas, and cut it all off brutally to do himself, and her, a favor.
Or he did not figure out anything. He merely fled and she was giving too much thought to his actions.
A mess, a mess. She could not even remember the names of Mars’ moons as she stood with her arms crossed, her breath hot in her mouth.
“You could buy a ticket, too,” she suggested, even though she knew he never, ever would. If he’d wanted it, it would have already happened, years before. But he had not.
Elías sighed. “It will be the same there. Nothing will change. I know you hope it will, but Mars won’t fix anything,” he told her.
“Maybe not. But I have to go,” she said. “I just have to.”
He didn’t understand. He looked at her, still disbelieving, still startled, still thinking she somehow didn’t mean it. He still tried to kiss her, mouth straining against hers, and she squeezed his hand for a second before heading out without another word.
Mars, Final Scene, Alternate
INT. CELL — NIGHT
SPACE EXPLORER awaits
THE HERO in her cell. The stars have gone dim. The building where she is held is quiet, all the guards asleep, and she waits. She waits, but nobody comes. From her cell, she sees a rectangle of sky, tinted vermilion, and faded paper-cut moons, which dangle from bits of string (there is no budget to this production, none at all).
THE HERO is coming, he is nearing, sure footsteps and the swell of music. But the swell of music hasn’t begun yet and the foley artist is on a break, so there’s no crescendo, no strings or drums or piano, or whatever should punctuate this moment.
There is the cell and there is the vermilion sky, but the script says she is to wait. The SPACE EXPLORER waits.
But she presses her hands against the walls, which are not plaster. They are cardboard like the moons. They are not even cardboard, but paper. And the paper parts and rips so that the rectangle of vermilion becomes a vermilion expanse, and she is standing there in front of the ever-shifting sands of Mars.
She holds her breath, wary, thinking she’s mucked it up. She turns to look at the other walls around her, the door to her jail cell, the hallway beyond the door. Then she turns her head again and there are the moons, the sands, the sky, the winds of Mars.
She wears no spacesuit, which means that it is impossible to make it out of the cell. But we are not on Mars. We are on Mars. The moons are paper and the stars are tinfoil. So, it is possible to step forward, which is what she does, tentative.
One foot in front of another, the white dress they’ve outfitted her in clinging to her legs and her hair askew as the wind blows. A storm rises somewhere in the distance.
She sees the storm, at the edge of the horizon, dust devils tracing serpentine paths, and she walks there.
She does not look back.
There are only two plots. You know them well: A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes into town.
FADE TO BLACK
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to Lavie Tidhar, who wrote the introduction to this novella. Thank you to Paula R. Stiles for her copy-editing and proofreading. I am grateful for all the people who backed my campaign to fund Prime Meridian. Most of all, thank you for reading.
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