Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  “Don’t skip out on me, Gus. You know what happens.”

  Donny watches his younger brother’s eyes dart across the room and drop, taking inventory. Gus freezes at the sight of Donny’s workboots.

  He bunches the terry-cloth belt in his palms, squeezes the ball, then lets the belt drop like a fishing line to the floor. Gus pulls it back up, watches it fall again over his slippered feet. Donny pats the dusty couch cushion, coaxing his brother over with a smile.

  “Look, Gus, we can’t do our usual pizza run this aft. Got a date with a wrecking ball.”

  Gus bunches the belt in his lap, blinks wet, wandering tears. Donny wraps his arms around his big old stump of a baby brother, tries to hold the roots down, keep the disease from spreading. Root rot. Runs in the family.

  Gus sobs into his brother’s neck. “I want to come home.”

  Donny holds him close, tries to stop a lifetime of trembling. Five years, six episodes, a thousand pills, and dead-end dreams between them.

  He can see it in his brother’s puffy eyelids, the grey, candle-drip skin. New meds are doing a number. He looks more like her now. Same mess of auburn hair, same staple-sized crease below his chewed lips. How Gus loved to bite and chew his bottom lip while they built expansive basement cities out of cardboard and old sheets that Gus later trampled when Donny refused to make him mayor. Donny looks over his life like a cross-sectional drawing, his mind moving from room from room. He pictures his mother sitting back on her floral couch, the dim glow of her after-dinner cigarette, eyes going in all directions. And Gus at ten years old, past the biting and moodiness, withdrawing into his mumble mouth in the kitchen, doing an after-dinner puzzle in the same pajamas he’s worn all day. While Donny fucks off to his buddy Cheevie’s house for double dessert. Cheevie has Nintendo on the set, a mother who never once tried to pry open a bathroom door with a chef’s knife. Smooth exit, just like the old man.

  Donny loosens the belt around his brother’s waist. “Gus, we can’t. You know Pinky’s happy as horses with the house all quiet.”

  “Fuck Pinky,” Gus mutters, turning abruptly, sopping up tears and spit with his fuzzy sleeve.

  What’s he supposed to do? Gus left them broke with all his therapy and specialists. His brother wandering for days then begging for more money on their doorstep, sending his wife for depression pills. Pinky won’t let any more of his bad blood in. Last time they took him back, Gus sold Pinky on the Internet. Amazing how many lonely farts will drop the price of a used car on a mail-order Chinese wedding. Gus posted her picture on a dodgy-looking website advertising “Exotic Lucky Asian Brides.” Pinky was wrapped in white-and-pink wedding chiffon, a purplish-pink orchid in her hair, something bite-sized dangling on the end of a shrimp fork. Gus wrote that she was petite, submissive, ornamental. Some old goat paid Gus a fifteen hundred-dollar cash deposit in a coffee shop, leaving with nothing but a marriage licence application and the promise to spend eternity with “Pinky Cameroon Sparkle.”

  Cheap Chinese takeout, Gus said to Donny, flashing his wild smile at the front door, handing over a wad of fifty-and hundred-dollar bills. Donny could tell Gus was on a mounting high, had seen him go from glue-headed to God in a matter of hours. His head a red planet, light screaming through his skull. Gus said the meds were like sparks shooting off. Flash fireworks, followed by the inevitable hours of blind panic. Then it was like gravity had given up on him. His head floated in air, thin as the atmosphere on Mars. Claimed he was only trying to pitch in. Pinky threatened to move out.

  Gus threads his belt through the loops in his housecoat and ties it like a tourniquet across his bicep. The familiar phrase keeps rattling in Donny’s skull: Think you can save your brother? Can’t even save your marriage, useless fuck.

  “Pinky will come around,” Donny says, trying hard not to look restless, though Jesus Christ, he thinks, the guys will be leaning on shovels, fucking the dog till he gets back. “Her dad’s covering my new equipment loan.”

  Donny tries to offer an encouraging smile.

  Gus starts to flap his arms, extending his neck, a whooping crane in a stiff wind. Donny holds his brother’s arms at his side. Gus wrenches away, taunting.

  “Pinky’s got a face like the back of a shovel,” Gus bellows.

  “Shut it, Gus,” Donny orders, trying to wrap his arms around his brother’s shoulders, hold his burden tight. “I know it’s disappointing.”

  Gus rises, shouting in his faux-Asian accent. “Twyme, twyme, moneyback gawantee.” He flaps and turns away. “Fuck Pinky.”

  “This is bullshit, Gus.”

  Donny can hear stirring in the back room, drawers open and close. Mrs. B. is on the phone in her office.

  “Not forever,” Donny says. “Give me some time.”

  Donny met Pinky in one of those mahogany and brass steakhouses with the deer antlers mounted above the bar. She was serving rib-eye steaks to men who chewed the fat over commercial real estate deals. Turns out her dad owned the place. Owned a half dozen apartment complexes and a US home-care franchise. Her family was an empire. His was a broken tenement. Pinky moved through the room, pale-blue moons dusting her eyelids, still as a watercolour. He knew he wasn’t worthy but asked her out anyway, tumbling over his broken syllables. She was working part-time, preparing for first year of law school. He was wedged into steel toes, lean and strong, the hungry eyes of a man on a mission to be more. On their fifth date, he made a nest of his long arms, cupped her bird bones inside, and called her My Lily Hands.

  Donny pulls Gus’s hand away from his brooding face, turns to see Joe pound down the stairs toward them.

  “Go away, Tomahawk Chuck,” Gus shouts up at him.

  Joe marches over and grabs Gus firmly by the terry-cloth shoulder. “Smoke break. It’s noon, polar bear, let’s migrate,” leading him toward the front door.

  Gus twists and breaks free, tumbling into a coffee table.

  “Everything all right out there?” Mrs. B. calls out from the office.

  “Under control,” Donny says. “Sorry, clumsy today.”

  Donny trails his brother to the front door. Joe raises a dismissive hand, motioning for him to stay put. Donny nods agreement and stuffs an envelope filled with pizza money inside Gus’s housecoat. Joe shoots him a puzzled look, stomping his feet.

  With barely a nod to Donny, out the door they march.

  Native guys float, they had told Donny. Mohawk or Cree, toeing twenty-storey beams, steady rivet gun in their hands. It was all bullshit. Joe strongly preferred the ground metal framing, but Donny needed him, his most reliable steel-joist man, to inspect a support brace on the fifth floor. Crew said he must’ve had a rubber backbone the way Joe bounced down in one piece. Whatever was on his mind back then never came back. He couldn’t manage on his own, so Donny found him a place with Mrs. B. he could afford on permanent disability. Once Joe settled in, Donny figured it would be good enough for family so dropped Gus off with a couple of gym bags, two weeks after his brother had set fire to their shower curtain. Abandon ship! Blame Pinky? Sure. He was fucking free.

  On-site by late afternoon, the front-load driver shouts down to Donny, “Okay to take another run?”

  Donny nods, directing traffic. Raising its toothy bucket, the driver steers the front-loader through tire-sucking mud, shattering glass and beams on a downward strike. Whining like a beaten dog, the low-rise splits. Burying his toe in sharp debris, Donny thinks, This is the job. Bid was strong. Overhead decent. If he can hold the margins, maybe he can afford to build an extension off the house in the fall. Give Gus his own entrance. Donny returns to his truck. He roughs up his estimate pad, knowing his numbers never add up. Not counting the new pickup, the payments he’s still covering on the second mortgage, he’s hardly pulling down a profit. Pinky will never go for it. Her private practice hours are brutal. Her parents would probably pull the loan. To them he’s nothing but a mid-level contractor racking up bills and a growing beer gut. Fuck it. He’ll find the money. Set Gus up
in some studio apartment close by. Take him out twice a week, get his meds back on track.

  Donny knows the drill. Pour concrete slab, pound the building out, pad an invoice or two. Take his commission off the top. Offer me an extra buck, he’ll tell the subs, I’ll throw in the townhouse complex too.

  Things Gus will do for a dollar:

  - Clean the kitchen floor with a soapy grey mop.

  - Commit to Cheerios in the morning and finish them.

  - Buy Marlee and himself cigarettes when she gets her Thursday cheque.

  After his brother leaves for the site, Gus pulls two turtle blues from his pillbox, his arms heavy rubber fins. He plods to the bus stop, watches the number twelve roll up. He stubs out his cigarette and climbs the stairs. Staring down at the fare box, he watches the coins tickle the steel throat then spit out a paper tongue at him.

  “Alberto’s Pizza,” Gus slurs like a drunk directing a cab.

  Brusquely, the driver motions him to the back of the bus. Gus sits in the last row, cracks his pillbox, and swallows another white. Blearily, he watches Bookbag climb on with two friends at the next stop. They sit at the front, but she waves back at him. Gus can’t lift his sweaty hand. They rumble on for ten minutes until Alberto’s red neon lights up. He yanks the cord.

  At Alberto’s, an alert hostess ushers Gus to a dimly lit back table. He’s blinking fast. Skipping ropes and twigs start to stretch and snap in his gassy head, his body in a flat spin. Seated, Gus stabs a fork into his leg so he’s lucid enough to order his usual Hawaiian Special. When the silver tray arrives, a large pie, thick crust smeared with pineapple and ham, he dips a wedge into his Coke. He orders a coffee, adds six sugars, then pockets the spoon. The table is pivoting, but he needs to piss.

  Along the restaurant corridor, Gus counts gold diamonds fringing the emerald carpet that he follows all the way to the men’s room. He teeters before the urinal next to a bank of stainless steel sinks. The burly man next to him bounces on his toes. Staring at him, Gus bounces too. The man zips. Gus pulls slowly at his fly. The man calls him something Gus can’t grasp. Gus unleashes random words bouncing in his muddy mouth then grabs his own crotch, fumbling furiously.

  The stout man drops his shoulder and drives Gus hard into the mirror. “Pull that faggot shit again, and you’re dead!” he shouts, before walking out the door.

  “Don’t you cry,” Gus says, seated on the bathroom floor, pounding his inner thigh. “Don’t.”

  He digs his keys into his thigh as he sits, trying to stifle tears.

  Gus finally rises, enters the middle stall, and unfolds the tabloid paper someone has left behind on the floor, carefully draping it across his lap. When he’s through emptying his loose bowels, he scoops out his shit with the newspaper.

  “Stuff in here could bring me down,” he mumbles, folding the mess up on his way back to the table.

  When he returns, the manager is waiting to escort him out. Obediently, Gus walks toward the entrance.

  Rain flooding the streets outside is gunfire in his head. He slaps at his skull while he waits for an overcrowded bus to stop.

  Donny watches his right boot sink to the top of his woolly, red-striped socks. Looks like the sewer lines might be a problem, he considers. Water ingress. A negative grade means death-by-defect, his grandstanding engineering prof always reminded them.

  For a mean minute Donny is twenty-two, wearing the same dirty wool socks he’d slept in all week. Late for structural engineering with Sullivan, the second time that week. Modelling assignment overdue. He doubled back to the apartment to get it. Almost out the door and on his way, when the phone rang.

  “Gus has gone off again,” said the day manager at the YMCA. “It was you or the cops.”

  Donny found Gus bleeding and sore, curled up at the end of his bed at the Y. Claw marks at his brother’s throat and wandering, empty eyes. Donny packed him into a cab. Another trip to the pound. Join the psych ward hounds who paw at their faces while the orderlies urge them to sit up, don’t shout, stay calm, keep away from the glass. Don’t leave Gus alone, crammed into that goddamnmotherfuckingplace overnight again, he thought, but had to drop him off with the docs anyway. Next day, he showed up to hear about the sucker punch, found his brother’s head covered in a gauzy mesh. The treatment team sat him down. Donny said: Fuck you. Doped up. Tied down like a dog. As good as killing him. Doc said: Irreversible condition. Risk of self-injury. Gus was winding up an anxious, hallucinating patient with his run-on mouth, so the man took a swing at his demon. Gus never raised a fist. Donny signed his brother out, crawled back to his roommate Cheevie’s with a six-pack under his arm. Gus spent two days sleeping it off on the couch, while Donny and Cheevie got wasted to Van Morrison and bowls of freezer-burnt chili.

  It was their semester at sea. Three young men on the summer prowl, a taste for Belgian brew on their lips. The Dukan boys, tough-jawed, beefy where it counted. Gus was swimming in blond university women who fell over themselves for a chance to kiss his boyish lashes. He was even-keeling it on meds, auditing Ancient Greek from the last row of the lecture hall, a chattering ballpoint in his restless hands.

  “You engineer the roads, I’ll rebuild Rome,” Gus liked to say to Donny, his steel eyes flashing silver whenever when he mapped out the Persian empire with mac and cheese.

  Gus was golden on the right meds. They found a doc and pay-what-you-can therapist. For the first time since Donny could remember, Gus was witty, sharp-edged, towering above the jocks in university busy bragging about their foosball tournament records and marathon fucking. Sharing beers with his baby brother in the pub was the best life Donny could have invented. Then the call came. Their mother’s garage door was frozen shut. Pills on the seat and the car mat. She had drifted off into an eternal sleep with a trunk full of groceries.

  Wasn’t long before Gus started skipping his meds, buying rounds at the bar for strangers then slipping out before the bill arrived. It was a G-force drop. So Donny packed up for Peterborough, left Cheevie with two months’ rent, and moved Gus out halfway through spring term.

  On the job site, Donny’s cell is ringing that special tone. Holding up an index finger to the impatient engineer, Donny thwacks his muddy workboots against his truck.

  “What? I can’t hear you.” Donny barks into his cell again.

  The engineer stomps off, rustling the papers in hands.

  Gus has confessed to leaving his shit (Mrs. B. says excrement) on the table at Alberto’s Pizza. Donny listens, but the phone keeps cutting out so he asks her to repeat it.

  “I can’t just leave,” he shouts into the phone. “I’m the fucking guy in charge,” he says, instantly regretting his tone. He punches the truck door, feels the sharp acid taste of warm Coke backing up in his esophagus.

  Beetles storming his lids, something loose crawling. Riding back to the HMS Shitstorm from Alberto’s Pizza, Gus paws his eye socket, fist deep, until he sees lime-coloured streaks. He slides the bus window open and breathes away the lingering stench of sweaty fish seat that’s making his stomach churn.

  At the next stop, the bus door opens with a shudder. Bookbag waves to Gus from the aisle and sits down next to him with her shopping bags.

  She’s dressed in black, wishbone-thin, a pimply teenaged forehead. Gus watches her smooth back her raven hair, bunch a ponytail she never fastens. Her fingertips sift and sort, shooting thunderbolts through his brain.

  Gus pockets his balled fist. He tries to focus on the brittle slogans screaming across her tits. No blood for oil. Draft beer, not war. Fuck yoga.

  Seeing the bulge in her breast pocket, he taps two fingers to his lips. She slides out a Player’s Light and hands it to him.

  “You okay, Gus?”

  Gus drives his palm heel into his cornea. Her voice, too shrill. He closes his droopy lids, makes a wish, opens — she’s still there.

  She gives him a friendly shake. “Gus? You good?”

  The bus tires screech. He wants out. The rain drive
s a fast-rhythm beat into his chest. He slaps the bus window, picturing himself climbing the stairs of his mother’s house, hands locked around a pair of scissors.

  He sees his sister Emma twisting the curling iron too close to her cheek. An orange ball bursts from the rod, ashes dusting her gingham blouse. Her mouth opens — a thousand night birds shrieking.

  “Let go, let go,” he mumbles.

  “Gus, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Bookbag says. “You have to go?”

  He pulls out the spoon he’s stolen from the restaurant, licks the metal, and sticks it to his chin and settles back into his seat.

  “Cool,” Bookbag says, sitting back with him, “like a shiny goatee.” She rakes her fingers through her tangled hair.

  “Savemesavemesavememoneybackguarantee.” After a while, Gus’s mouth begins running on bus rhythm.

  Bookbag pulls Gus’s hand from his face, gently turns it over. His whole body vibrates while she smooths the padded skin. “It’s okay.”

  Gus’s baggy body slumps down in its seat. Together, he and Bookbag look out the rain-spattered window in silence, watch the hanging duck breasts glimmer along the gluey sidewalks of Chinatown’s dim-sum drive.

  “This is me,” Bookbag says, rising uncertainly. “You all right to get back?”

  Gus hauls her back down. She stiffens when he slaps something into her hand. A wad of crinkled bills unfolds in her palm. Gus is rocking in his seat again.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll keep this safe,” she says uncertainly. “Four more stops then pull the cord. Make sure. See you tomorrow, okay?”

  Gus watches Bookbag climb down the stairs, light up, blow a silver plume through the open doors. He fans the sulphur sting, feeling sharp metal boxes clang and clip the corners of his skin.