The Martians

Chapter 31 Purple Mars

He crawls out of troubled dreams half-stunned and begging for coffee. Out to the family around the kitchen table. Breakfast a succession of Cassatts as painted by Bonnard, or Hogarth.

“Hey I’m going to finish my book today.”

“Good.”

“David, hurry up and get dressed, it’s almost time for school.”

David looks up from a book. “What?”

“Get dressed it’s almost time. Tim, do you want cereal?”

“No.”

“Okay.” He puts Tim back on a chair in front of cereal. “This okay?”

“No.” Shoveling it in.

School time approaches and David begins his daily reenactment of Zeno’s paradox, a false conundrum first proposed by Zeno, concerning Achilles and how the closer it came time to go to school the slower Achilles moved and the less he heard from the surrounding world, until he entered an entirely different space-time continuum interacting very weakly with this one. Wondering how Neutrino Boy can ever have become so absentminded, his father reads the coffee cups while grinding the beans for his little morning pitcher of Greek coffee. He used to drink espresso, a coffee drink made by vapor extraction, but recently he has advanced to a muddy Greek coffee he makes himself, savoring the smells as he works. On Mars the thinner atmosphere would not allow him to smell things as well, and so nothing there would taste as good as this morning coffee. In fact it might be a culinary nightmare on Mars, everything tasting like dust, partly because it was dusty. But they would adjust to that if they could.

“Are you ready yet?”

“What?”

He bundles Tim into the bike cart with a bowl of cereal, bikes behind David through the village to school. It is late summer at the 37th latitude north, and flowers spangle the sides of the bike path. Clouds puff like puffy clouds in the sky. “If we were biking to school on Mars it would be easier to pedal but we’d be colder.”

“On Venus we’d be colder.”

Schoolyard full of kids. “Have a good day at school. Listen to your teacher.”

“What?”

He pedals to Tim’s day-care, drops him off, then rides quickly home. There he writes a list of things to do, which makes him feel virtuous and helps to organize his inchoate feeling that there is too much to do, which in itself is helpful, which leads him to think that things aren’t really as bad as he thought, which gives him the inspiration to turn the list into a paper airplane and shoot it at the trash can. Not that any causation can be deduced from this sequence. But things will work out. Or not.

He decides that before working he will mow his lawn. You have to mow a yard before the grass reaches knee high, especially if you use a push mower, which he does, for reasons ecological, aesthetic, athletic, and psychopathological. His next-door neighbor waves to him and he stops abruptly, stunned by a realization. “On Mars these grass clippings would fly out the mower right over my head! I’d have to pull the basket behind me somehow! But the grass wouldn’t be as green.”

“You don’t think so?” says the neighbor.

Back inside to recover the list and check off mowing. Then he rushes to his desk ready to write. Immense concentration brought to bear instantaneously, or at least as soon as another cup of black mud hits the bloodstream. The first word for the day comes quickly:

“The”

Of course it might not be the right word. He considers it. Time passes in a double helix of eternal no-time, in the blessing that cannot be spoken. He revises, rewrites, restructures. The phrase grows, shrinks, grows, shrinks, changes color. He tries it as free verse, sestina, mathematical equation, glossolalia. Finally he returns to the original formulation, complexifying it with an added nuance:

“The End”

It says what needs to be said; and it’s twice as many words as his usual daily output. Time to party.

The printer prints out the typescript of the novel as he rides over and picks up Tim from day-care. Back at home he changes the boy’s diaper. The boy’s protests and the buzzing printer are counterpoint in the warm summer air. Davis warm summer air; 109 degrees, at least in the antiquated Fahrenheit scale used to accommodate twentieth-century American readers who cannot conceptualize Celsius, not to mention the eminently practical and extremely interesting Kelvin scale, which begins at absolute zero where really one ought to begin. At this moment it is over 300 Kelvin, unless he has miscalculated.

“Boy this is a stinky one.”

Which when one considers it is rather amazing: Diapers stink because of volatile gases released from poop, gases made of organic molecules that did not exist in the earlier ages of the cosmos, among the first generation of stars. Thus these smells are only possible after enough stars have exploded to saturate the galaxy with complex atoms; so every molecule of the scent is a sign of the immense age of the universe, and of life’s likely omnipresence as a late emergent phenomenon, and taken as such a cosmological mystery, in that it indicates an increase of order in an entropic system, i.e., a miracle. Amazing!

The phone rings, carrying to him in electrons flying through complicated continuous pathways of metal the digitalized voice of his beloved, re-created in his ear by the vibration of small cones of reinforced cardboard.

“Oh hi babe.”

“Hi.” A quick exchange of information and endearments, ending with, “Remember to put the potatoes in the oven.”

“Oh okay. What temperature again?”

“About three-seventy-five.”

“That’s Fahrenheit?”

“Yes.”

“Hey that reminds me, I had an epiphany when I was changing Tim’s diaper!”

“Did you. What was it?”

“Um—uh-oh. I forget.”

“Good. But don’t forget the potatoes.”

“I won’t.”

“I love you.”

“And I love you.”

When the printer finishes the stack of paper is waist-high. “Three! Three! Three!” says Tim.

“Many threes,” he agrees, feeling some alarm at the length of the thing, as well as guilt for the trees chopped down to publish it; but doubt is the peripheral vision of courage’s foresight. “A genuine bug crusher all right.”

Tim tries to help by pulling out pages and eating them.

“No, wait. Continuity is already abused enough in this, stop that.”

“No.”

He boxes the typescript in three boxes, fending off the ravenous child. “Here have a cookie.”

He gives Tim cookies while addressing and stamping the boxes, exhibiting that ambidextrous bilateral competence so characteristic of contemporary American parents—all boasting hypertrophic corpus callosums, no doubt, could one but see them. “All right, let’s walk these down to the mailbox, if we hurry we’ll get there before pickup time. I’ll have to carry them so you get in the baby backpack, okay?”

“No.”

“In the big-boy backpack then. Yes.”

Ten minutes of ingenious wrestling gets Tim into the baby backpack and onto his back, a victory on points only as his lip is split and he is now vulnerable to ear boxing.

“Ow stop that.”

“No.”

Now a squat to pick up the three boxes, and his ears are grabbed rather than boxed as Tim tries to stay in the backpack. A mighty jerk and lift and he is standing, toddler counterbalancing the weight of the boxes cradled against his chest.

“Oof! This would be sixty-two percent easier on Mars! Here, let’s see if we can walk. No problem. Oh the door isn’t open. Hmm. Here, can you open it Tim? Just twist the knob? Please? Here I’ll bend over just a bit more . . . oops. Never mind, I can do it now. Here, let me do it. Let me.”

“No.”

“Okay, we’re up again. We’re off. Oh—what about the potatoes in the oven! Will we remember that when we get back?”

“No.”

“Yes we will. Tell you what, I’ll leave the door open and when we see it we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, door open, put potatoes in oven.’ Off we go.”

Into the street. Winding village lane, flanked by flowers and trees. Terraforming at its finest: flat desert valley, now blooming with plants from all over the planet. All overlooked in the long march to the postbox carrying forty kilos of paper and a writhing toddler.

“Ah. Oh. Ow.”

Sweating, trembling, he reaches the postbox and rests his load on top.

“We made it. We’re here at last. Can you believe it?”

“No.”

The typescript boxes are almost too big to fit through the slot. Push them in. A nearby stick will serve well. Beat them through one by one.

“You should have eaten a few more pages. I know just which ones I should have given you.”

“No.”

Last one through. Mission accomplished.

He stands there for a moment, sweat overwhelming the evolutionary purpose of his eyebrows and stinging even his spirit’s vision. “Let’s go home.”

“No.”

They start back down the lane. The sun is setting at the end of the street, and the clouds in the western sky have turned gold, orange, bronze, violaceous, burgundy, pewter, and a touch of chartreuse. Walk on my friends walk on: Even if posterity laughs at the silly boxed lives we lead in the late twentieth century, even if we deserve to be laughed at, which we do, there are still these moments of freedom we give ourselves, walking down a lane at sunset with a child babbling on one’s back. “Oops, we left the door open.” Like a Zen master his boy whacks him on the side of the head, and at that moment he experiences an enlightenment or satori: The planet wheels underfoot. The signifier signifies a great significance. And the potatoes are to go in the oven. Happiness makes him light on his feet, very light, so light that he is almost floating, so light that if you tried to quantify this quality, if you could put him on the scale of human feeling and weigh him, his weight (in Terran kilograms) would clock in at exactly 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197…