TWENTY-FIVE

 

 

PASCAL WOKE VERY early the next day. He swayed almost imperceptibly as the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs followed the contours of pressure at forty-fifth rang. Jean-Eudes was breathing softly, and Marthe snored in her hammock.

Last night seemed wonderful, like a weight had been lifted away. He didn’t want to ruin the moment by moving, by bringing his body and the world into focus. But the idea of fresh stubble bothered him more and more. He couldn’t stand the thought of hair standing stiff on his chin, over his lip, on his cheeks, touching his pillow. His hammock creaked as he slipped out. In the dark, he shaved by touch.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

“You can turn on the light, Pascal,” Marthe mumbled.

“I’m done,” he whispered quickly.

He scraped the last of his face clean, toweled himself, cleaned the straight razor and hurried to the galley. Two cups smelling of tord-boyaux had tipped and rolled to the table edge in the swaying of the habitat during the night. He wiped and shelved them, then sat at the table and regarded his ten red toenails in wonder.

Marthe staggered out of their room soon after, adjusting her tank top and scratching at her hip. At the galley, she poured two cups of water and sat across from him.

His toes were so beautiful. For years, he’d never felt anything but ugliness, wrongness. It was a feeling that had taken a long time to sneak up on him, to realize that other people didn’t feel the same way. He didn’t mind being ugly, if only he could feel right. He desperately wanted out from under this feeling of wrongness.

“You’re going through a tough time,” she said, before sipping at her water with distaste.

He didn’t answer.

“Jean-Eudes says you’re sad.” She tried swallowing more, but gave up partway. “He’s worried about you, but he doesn’t know what to do.”

“He told Pa, too. It’s not anything.”

“Pa thinks everything that happens to teenagers is just adolescence,” she said.

He laughed nervously and tried to look blasé. “He’s right.”

But she didn’t say anything. She looked at him like Pa did when he was trying to figure out if he’d done anything wrong. His put-on smile melted.

“When I was about fourteen I think I realized that Venus doesn’t want us,” Marthe said.

“I love Venus.”

“So do I, but when I was fourteen, I didn’t think she loved us back.”

It was an alien concept to him. He didn’t feel unloved. Venus wasn’t about love. She was about hiding and showing. Mostly she hid, but every so often, in a break in the clouds, a strange timbre of sound, she hinted at her true secret self.

“Do you still think that?” he asked.

“She can’t physically eject us anymore,” Marthe said, “so she attacks us psychologically. She makes us hate ourselves. Others. Our lives. She’s hitting Émile too. Has been for years.”

“Is he okay?”

She shrugged. “He’s Émile.” She pulled close the container of tord-boyaux that had been full last night. “He got a taste for this too early.” She unscrewed the box, sniffed and pulled away. “Well, not this. Bagosse and weed are more his vices.”

“He’s been sending me his poems.”

“He writes poems?” Marthe asked.

“They’re beautiful.”

Marthe’s expression was hard to read. He didn’t have a lot of experience and she was almost a politician. It wasn’t hurt he saw in her eyes, but a kind of wistfulness.

“I’ll ask to read them some time,” she smiled.

“Is Venus attacking you?”

“No,” she said. “Yes. It depends what you call an attack.”

She sipped her water and he took up his. She set her cup down and leaned across the table, taking his hand in hers.

“It’s okay to be sad, Pascal. I was. Sometimes I still am. But sharing makes it lighter. I’ve always got your back.”

Even hungover, her half-lidded regard was penetrating. She reminded him of maman, and Chloé, what he could remember of both of them. His throat felt tight. He pulled his hand away and tucked his feet out of sight. Plateaus, tesserae and coronae of scars, red-pink and bulbous, padded the backs of his hands, a reassuring erasure of an alien body. His breath felt thin and insubstantial. Her words terrified him.

“I feel wrong all the time,” he whispered. “Everyone looks like they belong, like they’re right in the world. I can’t even look in the mirror.” He took a deep breath and leaned over. The vision of his ten bright toenails split and wavered through tears. “I put on maman’s dress.”

She came around and knelt in front of him, taking his hands. She was smiling.

“How did it feel?” she asked.

“Really good,” he whispered. His world was spinning.

“You didn’t put it on because you missed her?”

Pascal shook his head.

“Put it on,” she said, “as many times as you want. Maman would have done anything to make you happy, including giving you the dress off her back.”

He nodded.

“It’s stupid,” he said, his voice thinning and tears falling. “It’s just stupid.”

“When I was growing up,” Marthe said, “Pa was expecting me to like boys. Émile likes girls. Chloé liked boys. But I didn’t and it didn’t matter to him. Don’t worry. Be whoever you want.”

She was trying to soothe him, but making it worse. What if he didn’t know what he wanted to be?