Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  For days, Jess and Fran lingered around the reflecting pool, taking short dips, mapping out a year-after reunion in Europe. Fran insisted Jess return to bathe in the Andaman Sea. She knew the owners of a beachfront bungalow, and they could stay there for free.

  That night Jess dreamt she was wading out in sheltered Kata Noi Bay beach. Black clouds rolled in, the wind whipped up, battering the palm trees, bent and shivering toward the sea. She drifted out, the tide flooding her ears, she flailed, swallowed waves, then the scene went black.

  When her body surfaced, it wore her mother, Margaret’s, face.

  Nine days after surgery, there are forms to sign. Prescriptions packed in a neat white sack. Jess waves goodbye to the orderly who slips a rubber doughnut beneath her bottom and wheels her to where Dr. Jemjai is waiting in the hospital ambulance bay. On the way, they pass a billboard featuring two Thai nurses in tuck-waist dresses with white winged caps. “Phuket. Let your baby be born in paradise.”

  Paradise Lost, Jess thinks. Satan wore a satin lace teddy; the serpent slithered inside to keep warm. Pandemonium!

  Dr. Jemjai gives Jess a reassuring smile, while two attendants lift her into the back of the waiting ambulance.

  It will be a short hop from Phuket International to Bangkok, then an overnight stay for the early morning long-haul flight back to Toronto.

  Climbing into the back of the ambulance, Dr. Jemjai tucks a note inside her carry-on.

  “For your physician in Toronto.”

  Jess tilts her head toward him. When he holds his hand out, she closes her eyes, allows her cheek to fall heavy in his hands.

  “Drink more water than you want to,” he says. “Use the creams. If your legs become tender or swollen, seek medical help. Immediately.”

  Jess takes hold of his wrist.

  “I can’t feel anything below the waist,” she admits.

  “Good,” he says, shutting the double doors behind him.

  Wisps of cigarette smoke twine through Margaret’s nest of curly grey hair. She picks up the old red kitchen phone with the annoying buzz. The line is crackly, but she doesn’t dare hang up.

  “Terry?” she repeats, hears a murmuring crowd at the end of the line.

  “Yes, I’m at Bangkok airport.”

  Margaret presses the phone harder against her ear, feeling her chest tighten. She has lived through teen turmoil, his tough-on-the-outside talk, but the voice. Her son’s low tenor is now soprano smooth. Not soft on the vowels, not a lilt, but a young woman’s voice. A gun flash. The moment her son goes missing.

  “What happened?”

  “Didn’t you get my postcard?”

  Player’s Light dangling between her fingers, Margaret walks over to the refrigerator.

  Greetings from Phuket. She turns the card over.

  Hi. I’m in Thailand. There are stray dogs everywhere. One lady went out to rescue a lab from a flooded water buffalo field. She got so sick a few days later they had to cut her legs off. Not the dog, the woman.

  P.S. Sorry for the long disappearance.

  Margaret reads and remembers Terry, only seven years old the night she got the emergency call. An older German shepherd hit by a tow truck. Could she come? Harold was away again on business, wouldn’t be home for a few days. Margaret tucked her son, with a juice box, in the back seat of her Datsun, and off they sped to the clinic.

  A young couple was cradling their battered dog in a sleeping bag when she arrived. He was cut straight through the underbelly, a ragged slice from gullet to mid-stomach. Her hands were shaking when she placed the dog on the gurney to examine him.

  She found Terry a blanket and tucked it around him on a sofa in another office.

  It wasn’t long before she led the owners back to her surgery to break the news. The shepherd’s head was tilted sidewise on the table, a draped sheet across his lacerated gut. The bereft couple retreated to their car while Margaret shaved the dog’s leg and filled the syringe. Her sleepy son ambled in at some point, pawing his eyes, refused to leave. Margaret pulled the sheet around the dog, laid him sideways on the fleece-lined sleeping bag she spread across their laps. Terry found one of the dog’s paws and held it in his small hands. He stroked the fur tufts above the collar.

  Margaret cooed, “Good boy, you’ll always be loved.”

  Even after needle pierced skin, when the shepherd’s breath grew faint, through the last muscle twitch, her son held on.

  “My postcard? Did you get it?” the voice, a stranger on the line, asks.

  “Yes,” she says, folding the postcard in half. Margaret expels a sharp plume of smoke through her nose. “Are you in trouble?”

  “Had surgery. There were complications.”

  “Oh my God, Terry. Are you all right?”

  Silence.

  She thinks about when Terry stopped talking altogether. He was thin and twelve and being shoved and boot-wedged into school lockers. Margaret temporarily exchanged her vet’s licence for a recipe box, sent him to school with fresh-baked banana bread. At home, her life became sensible, Saran-sealed. Terry seemed happier, Harold more rooted, staying at home for longer stretches between work trips.

  They found crack in Terry’s room at sixteen. He was selling, not smoking, he swore up and down, but they didn’t believe him. By then he was wearing off-the-shoulder black T-shirts, a David Bowie glitter phase that left him bloodied at school.

  One night Harold arrived home from an underwriter conference, took the red-eye back to get an early start on the weekend. He found Terry making out with another boy on the basement couch, their freckled backs covered in bites and scratches. The boy with Terry had flushed skin, red rings around his eyes. Out of his mind.

  Harold erupted, ordered his drug pushing, punk-rock glitter girl out.

  Terry pitched his clothes in a suitcase. Margaret had no more energy to stop it.

  Margaret taps the spoon against the rim of her coffee cup. “What’s going on?” she demands, drawing smoke up through her lungs, holding the burn.

  “Will you come?”

  “I’m your mother,” Margret replies, firmly. She hears Harold’s car pulling up the driveway; a car door slam.

  “Yes, you gave me life and intermittent asthma. What I need now is a pickup at Pearson.”

  Margaret dumps a saucer into the sink. She takes a deep breath. “I’ll borrow Emma’s car. Mine’s kaput.”

  “What about Harold’s Lincoln?”

  The doorbell rings.

  “It’s easier this way, Terry, believe me,” she says, walking over to the front door. She pulls back the sheers to watch Harold in the driveway. Margaret glares when he slams the trunk, balancing a load of empty moving boxes he’ll use to haul out the remains of their twenty-eight-year marriage.

  “Thai Airways, flight 783. Two p.m. tomorrow.”

  “Hang on, hang on, Terry. Someone’s at the door.”

  The doorbell rings and rings, a sharp, quick, staccato rhythm.

  “Stubborn bastard,” Margaret mutters and then, muffling the phone in her hand, mouths through the side window, You’re late, at her soon-to-be ex-husband. She watches Harold jiggle the doorknob furiously.

  “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” Jess says.

  “No, got it. Thai Airways, 783. See you at the airport, Terry.” Margaret hangs up. She stands, watching Harold struggle with the knob, then slowly slides the front-door bolt back, leaving the chain.

  The next day Margaret searches the arrivals sign at Pearson. She finds the baggage claim and watches for a half hour as impatient travellers tow away the last of their luggage.

  She circles the empty conveyor then reverses her orbit, looking in vain for Terry.

  God, she could use a cigarette. She checks her watch again. What version of Terry will she see? Her brilliant drop-out with the sleepy hazel eyes? Her baby-faced son with the beautiful, long lashes?

  The passengers stream by. Terry is nowhere. Finally, a flight attendant taps Margaret on the should
er, delivering Jess in her wheelchair.

  Terry’s eyes are sunken back, his thin face is pallid. Margaret looks him over then nods to the attendant. She bends down to meet her son’s eyes.

  “I’m okay,” Terry says, his voice breaking.

  Margaret examines Terry’s long hair. Beneath his stretchy, apple-green sweater, her son has breasts.

  Terry tries to push himself up from the wheelchair. Margaret hooks her arm around his waist to steady him. Weakly, he stands, but his eyes roll back. He goes limp in her arms.

  The last thing Jess recalls before blacking out is a German shepherd riding the airport escalator.

  She awakens on a futon in Harold’s office, minus the desk, filing cabinets, and Harold. Margaret stands over Jess, holding a small silver tray with a single mug of black coffee and two tea biscuits on a side saucer.

  “What have you done?” she says, dropping the folded note with Dr. Jemjai’s medical instructions on the tray beside Jess.

  Jess tries to sit up. She can’t begin to say.

  “What happened to you in Phuket?” Margaret shouts, turns, and bangs her way back down to the kitchen.

  Jess pulls her feet over the mattress, rises from the bed, taking short, deliberate steps down stairs to the kitchen.

  Margaret is pouring the dregs of the coffee pot into a chipped ceramic cup. She takes one sip and dumps the rest down the drain.

  Jess pulls out a chair, about to sit, then thinks better of it, afraid to rest without her rubber doughnut.

  “I should have called.”

  Margaret lets her hands fly. “You know, I always thought you were gay. You hated those ruffians next door and played around with my eye makeup. But this is … this is …” Margaret gestures wildly in Jess’s direction.

  “Sick?” Jess offers.

  “Extreme. Even for you.”

  A wave of nausea hits. Jess feels her head tilt back, the room pitch forward. She steadies herself on the chair back.

  “Well, at least your father’s not here,” Margaret says, tossing her toast crusts into the garbage. “He wouldn’t survive it.”

  “Left?”

  Margaret nods. “Sat there, took out a spoon, and started pile-driving his oatmeal back and forth. Finally told me it was all over. Packed two suitcases and vamoose.”

  Jess feels liquid trickling down her left leg. Blood? Urine?

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her mother is glaring. “Harold leaves, you come back as Cher. Think that makes you a woman?” She blots her mascara with a tissue from her sleeve.

  Jess feels a sharp ache spasm up her inner thighs.

  “Gonna need some time with this, Terry.”

  “It’s Jess now.”

  Margaret rips apart her wet tissue. “Jeeesus Christ.”

  “Give me a week, then I’ll go,” Jess offers.

  “You stay, I’ll go,” Margaret replies, tearily exiting the kitchen.

  It’s the same goddamn tragic farce, muses Jess, mumbling. Martyr Mother: a one-act drama. Margaret played all the parts.

  Jess manages to avoid her mother for almost two weeks. They are magnetic poles: she in Harold’s office, her mother at the movies, she upstairs, Margaret out for groceries. Each of them following their true north, pointing anywhere but home.

  She was the boy Margaret and Harold had raised. An only child. The product of unconditional love and pure sacrifice, Jess thought. Or maybe love was just an idea. Not just about what you could see, feel, and touch. Love had conditions. Love stormed into rooms, demanding answers. Fed on wild expectations, love was always starving, afraid to lose out. Maybe Robbie was right, she thought. Love was the greediest bastard she knew.

  With the house to herself all day, Jess closes the bathroom door behind her. Butt sore on the toilet, flipping through her instruction sheets, she takes the dilator in her sticky hands. Jess thinks then about her how her hands shook the first time she dialled Dr. Jemjai in Phuket. He told her he could make her Neo-Vagina look any way she wanted. He could emphasize the lips, so her Neo-Vagina would resemble a pouting face. Did he really say pouting face? His assistant sent her links. She clicked and cried, her palms tacky seeing the before and after. The transformations were clinical, remarkable, but the patient faces remained hidden. Blocked out, bodies detached, like they were caught in a criminal act. She knew all about trespasses. What about the bloody resurrection?

  The great burden of her body rushed through her life like metastatic tissue. One organ, spreading to the rest of her parts. She was the penis in a one-act play. Had a penis personality. A penis future. Hostage to an abnormal cell, her body cut and cut again, splitting her in two. Female, or male? What if you were a morphologic mistake? she thought. What if you were more?

  She was in a dream when she spoke to Dr. Jemjai the second time. Vaginoplasty, clitoroplasty, and labiaplasty had come a long way, he explained. Moist, elastic, hairless — these were the benchmarks of his profession now. He spoke about flaps and grafts and good vascularity. A hot blush washed over her cheeks when he told her the internal erectile tissues would leave her with orgasmic capabilities. He would leave the prostate intact, to preserve the clit’s spasm, keep the throb alive. The diagrams he sent looked like the tampon instructions she read as a boy with delighted horror in her mother’s bathroom. She saved money, accepted a loan from Robbie, and when everything fell apart at the bar months later, finally booked a flight.

  Dr. Jemjai’s office had sent materials, carefully walked her through each step. The doctor would take grafts from her scrotal sack, remove the testes, and invert skin from her penis, saving the nerve bundles for sensation. A penile inversion with flap technique. Her Neo-Vagina would be totally normal. Stop, she told him. No more technical specs. She wanted to hold onto the word Neo-Vagina. Turn it over on her tongue. An unexpected ache swept through her. Her head and heart couldn’t catch up.

  Legs splayed like a Russian gymnast, Jess takes a deep breath on the toilet. Knees spread, fingers slick, she works her way inside. Holding her dilator like a pen, she lubes the tip, holding it at a downward angle. She double-checks the angle in the pocket mirror. Careful, she says, spreading her labia, pushing the dilator gently along the gummy pink wall, every quarter inch a miracle. She removes it again. Don’t force it, she thinks, just relax. Probing depth and diameter, the dilator disappears a little deeper, filling Jess with elation and fear. Will she tear up, bleed out if she pushes too hard? She checks the depth mark. Another half inch. Progress. In a few months, she’ll work her way up to the six-inch dilator. Here’s the measure of a life. Inches give her meaning. It’s been over four weeks since her surgery — a lifetime since she shared Dr. Jemjai’s guest house with Fran.

  Her pants bunched around her ankles, she gently removes the dilator. Pressing her knees together, her whole body convulses, thinking about Fran. Is she on her own? Is she folded up in some grass-roof bungalow praying for morphine? They had tried to speak twice a week since the surgery, always with Margaret out of earshot.

  They had joked about it, but each already knew the answer.

  “No. Do you miss a lung tumour?”

  “No. Do you miss acid-wash jeans?”

  The penis was passé. Neo-Vaginas were about to take off, Jess said, cheering Fran up after a bad patch of spotting. On the spot, she made up commercials in a TV pitchman voice Fran loved.

  Need a flawless look for that exotic Berlin clubbing? Try Neo-Vagina. It’s like lipstick between your legs!

  Try the racy new Neo-Vagina. German-engineered perfection under the hooded flap.

  Back in their Thai guest house, they’d planned a one-year-after celebration to parade their post-op, post-modern chic right down the Champs-Élysées. When Fran decided to get a tracheal shave, the calls stopped. Jess consoled herself, thinking that even with a local anesthetic, Fran could be raspy and hoarse for a long time.

  Standing up, Jess feels a sudden fullness below her waist. Her legs are weak. Are they swollen? Oh God. No. H
er breath accelerates. Can’t. Get. Enough air. In.

  Pulling up her pants, she heads for Harold’s office, picks up the phone. She starts to dial 911, hyperventilating.

  “Terry?” Margaret enters the room with her shoes on and a bag of groceries.

  “A clot!” Jess bursts out.

  “Not likely,” Margaret says, taking the receiver from her hand.

  “False alarm,” she says calmly into the phone. “Bye-bye now, operator.”

  She settles Jess back onto the bed. “Breathe in through the nose for two, out through the mouth for two.”

  Jess tries to speak but her mother gestures to keep still.

  Margaret makes a show of filling her own lungs. Jess extends her arms out, beginning to cry.

  “It’s anxiety. Terriers are terrible for it. A Jack Russell once bit off my fingertip when I snapped my clipboard too close.”

  Margaret begins rubbing her son’s shoulders. “Your father had them too. Anxiety attacks. So bad I got him to wear a rubber band.” Margaret points to a spot on Jess’s wrist. “Nasty client email. Snap. Prostate rash. Snap. Snap.”

  Jess laughs.

  “You’re all right now,” Margaret repeats, and rubs her son’s back in slow circles.

  Jess feels her entire body go slack, wanting nothing more than to curl up in her mother’s arms.

  “You’re all right,” Margaret says, in a soothing tone.

  Jess presses her palm to her racing chest.

  “Okay,” Margaret rises abruptly. “Girls are coming over for bridge tonight. Make yourself scarce. We wrap up at eleven.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jess says, holding her breath.

  “It’s all right,” Margaret answers. “You’ll be on your own soon anyway.”

  Disappearances. Jess is used to them, she thinks. Especially in five-floor mazes like this one, where salespeople make brisk, efficient escapes whenever she comes near. Attention shoppers: Grotesque mistake in women’s privates, plus two-for-one on ladies low-rise thongs.

  She remembers how a security guard once escorted her out from the mall after a senior pitched her purse at her in the women’s change room. Seeing her on the escalator, teenage boys pointed, fist-pounding each other. Men glared, reddened faces overcome by the unexpected. Ravaging. Bitter. Monsoon.