Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 21.

The philosophers and the priests and even the liberals.

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Chapter 21. The philosophers and the priests and even the liberals.

It’s a gorgeous day. The first time Marshall steps into Dick’s Diner while the sun is out. It looks more smooth in the slanted golden sunlight, more polished. It feels safe.

“Hey, Dick,” Marshall says with his forearms on the counter. “Can I use your phone?”

“Phone’s in the back,” Dick replies. “Waffles?”

“Good man.”

The phone is in the hallway next to the bathroom. It’s a landline with a cord and everything, very vintage. He surprises himself by remembering the number. He dials before he can stop himself though he fiddles with the holes in his jeans all the while.

She picks up on the second ring. All he can hear is her breath but she says nothing so he goes first.

“Hey, mama.”

A sharp intake. “Mars?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

A deep exhale. Of relief? Upset? Exhaustion? All of the above, likely. “Are you…okay?”

His mouth dries up. He cannot remember the last time Elaine ever asked him anything. Can hardly remember the last time they exchanged more than five words and it was never to make a tangible sense of okayness. Her voice is foreign to him, low and quiet. There’s a lucid quality to her presence on the other line, a sureness that he remembers only from being awoken at eight years old and her tearing him away into the night.

“I’m alive,” he offers as an answer.

“Don’t tell me where you are,” she says quickly. “I don’t know…” she trails off but he gets the gist. Someone might be listening.

“I didn’t expect you to pick up.” He kicks the wall.

“Then why did you call?”

“Because I hoped you would.”

“Okay.” Elaine breathes steadily. He tries to picture her, see her on the couch next to the landline with her legs tucked underneath her body, hair pushed back so she can hold the phone close against her ear. But she looks like a stranger like that. He can only see Elaine as she’s been, a crumpled napkin, a wilted thing on the couch covering herself in spit and vomit.

“Listen, I was just…Well I was wonderin’ if you knew. About all the stuff I did. If you knew all along.”

She’s quiet on the other end. She’s thoughtful and he’s never known her to be a thoughtful person. “I’ve been so worried, Mars. I thought…I should have raised you better. I should have raised you.”

He hears the door to the diner ring out its tinny bell, a customer entering. He turns his back to the noise and lowers his voice. “You sound…sober.”

Elaine laughs, crisp and buoyant. It’s a strangely refreshing laugh. “Yeah. Since you left.”

“What?”

“Since I read your note, I knew. I been sober since. Just in case you decided to come back home and in case you needed me.”

His heart squirms in his chest. He feels like he cannot breathe. “What about when I did need you?”

She swallows, audibly. “Oh, Mars…”

“You get sober now? Only because what you really need is me? Got another husband for me to take care of, is that it?”

He doesn’t mean to get angry. He doesn’t want to. He made this call to find comfort. But of course it was inevitable. It can’t be avoided any longer now that everything is over.

“I should never have asked you to do that,” Elaine says quietly.

“No. You shouldn’t have.”

“But if I went back to that day, I still would.”

Pressure on his eardrums, like changing elevation. “What?”

“I’d still ask you to do it,” she says. “I’m not a good person, but Eddie…well he was bad. It was better without him.”

Marshall is exasperated. He could kill her or he could crawl into her lap and cry for hours. “I was sixteen, ma. Do you know what that did to me? It’s the reason I’m on the run. It’s the reason I’m a violent, evil person. I will never feel safe because of that. I…am unsafe.”

He can hear her sympathy and still it does little to soothe his swollen anger. “I am sorry you had to do it and I’m sorry I had to ask you to do it. But I would still do it again. It was a good thing that you did. Maybe the philosophers and the priests and even the liberals would disagree. Maybe it is black and white. But I think it’s a lot more complicated than that, Mars. All I know is you saved my life by taking care of your pa. And, yeah, I know about the others too. I kept tabs on those kids when I could. Most of them, they’re better. Not all, but there’s always shit, there’s always horrible fucking stuff trying to make us bad. You’ve done good, baby. Bad and good. Can’t you be somewhere in between?”

He started crying at some point. Something about Elaine talking about philosophers and morality dislodges a thick feeling in his throat and hot tears are spilling from his blurry eyes down to his wide chin. He is feeling several emotions, all too tangled up in one another to parse apart in the moment.

“I was sixteen, ma,” he repeats slowly. “Sixteen years old. What were you doing at sixteen? Joining a fucking cult?”

She is breathy now. “We were seventeen then.”

“But you stopped caring long before that. All I knew growing up was what you were taught, what you passed on to me: Do what you are told.” He steels himself against the hot anger boiling over his eyelids. “I have never chosen something for myself in my life. I have let other people dictate my actions since that moment. I told myself: no, this is good. I am helping someone in need. And you know what? It was all your need. I didn’t even consider myself. You taught me not to consider myself. I did it for you and it killed me. I can’t say fucking no to anyone now. I can’t do anything for myself.” He takes a shaky breath that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. “I don’t know what makes me good or evil, ma. But I know that I am not me when I do what someone else tells me to. I know that I am supposed to be good. Not in between. Good.”

Elaine is quiet for a while. If he wasn’t so caught up in the battle going on in his chest, the foreign feeling of big crying, he might have heard the quiet argument spilling through the kitchen door, the hushed phone call, distant sirens. As it is, Marshall is fighting an internal war and choosing his words carefully. He can hear nothing but the insistence of his own beating heart saying that he was meant to be something else before his path was chosen for him. An artist, a lover, a landscaper, a living thing that appreciates every step every breath every good thing that makes being alive a lovely thing.

“You’re not coming home, are you?” Elaine asks.

He sniffs. “No, ma. I can’t come home. Not even if I wanted to.”

“But you don’t.”

“I don’t want to come home. I want more than this. I think…I think I can give myself more than this.”

“Okay,” Elaine says. “I’d ask you what you were gonna do, but…”

“Yeah. What are you gonna do, ma?”

She laughs again. Listlessly, but there’s life there too, or something like it. “I dunno. S’pose I’ll just sit around and wait for someone to tell me what to do next.”

He moves the feelings around in his mouth, tucks them under his tongue where the taste is less bittersweet. And he thinks of something good he could do. “Well, I’ll tell you then,” he says. “Stay sober. Go live the life you should’ve lived once Eddie was gone. And find something that makes you happy, ma. You don’t need to lie and say that I made you happy. It’s okay. But there’s something out there for you. So go find it.”

She sighs. There’s a slight shuffling on the other line like she’s turning the pages of a book. “You ever paint anymore, kid?”

“Not right now, or not yet,” he says. “I’ll get there.”

“Good…” Can almost hear her listless nodding, running her hands through her hair. “Be safe, Mars.”

“You too, ma.”

They hang up without saying I love you. It’s all out there now, no need to lie. Was it a healing moment? Did Marshall get what he hoped for? He hasn’t hoped for anything in a long time. But he does now. He has hope and a lightness in his step.

The first thing he sees upon returning to the dining area is June. Just the back of her head but he can tell by the righteousness in her posture, the softness of the curls on the back of her head. The second thing is Jerry leaning over the counter, bald head gleaming, trying to look down June’s shirt, his eyes bulging with a cartoonish a-wooga sensibility. The third thing he sees is Dick, next to June, reaching for a gun attached to the underside of the bar beneath the till. The fourth thing, like a recurring nightmare, is the alien blue and hellish red of police lights, tires skidding into the parking lot.

It is a weighted moment and it seems that every little thing Marshall has philosophized in the past twenty four hours toggles his brain, calculating, deciding in a fraction of a moment what to do and the decision surprises him. He wants to live. Against all odds, shown just how easy he is to leave, how unloved he has felt for so long, he still wants to keep going. It’s Joy the bartender, he thinks in the split second when his muscles tense, the tight packed ropes in his thighs, knees bending slightly. It’s Joy and that one small act of kindness, kindness that he can replicate. That’s his only rationale and it won’t play out, won’t compute in just a few minutes but it is the driving force behind his preservation.

Dick has only just wrapped his hand around the firearm, a small handgun, when Marshall’s surging body clears the counter and tackles him to the ground. The gun comes down with both of them, clatters across the floor.

Marshall has never held a gun before. Marshall does not believe in guns. Marshall grabs the gun, pushes himself back against the bar. Points the gun at Dick on the floor. His eyes find June’s and he wonders what it is in his own eyes that makes her stand stiff, at attention. She never once looked at him this way on Pleasant Farm.

“Do not let the cops in here,” he says steadily. “Tell them I’ve got a hostage.”

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