The Martians

Chapter 25 Coyote Remembers

I followed her everywhere she went, and then she was gone. You don’t know what that does to you—loss. Or maybe you do. Sure, everyone does. Who hasn’t lost someone they love? It’s impossible to avoid. So you know how I felt.

After that it’s your friends who save you. Maya. Later on we couldn’t sleep together because she was with Michel, but it wasn’t like that with her anyway, except the once. She’s like a sister, or something better than that, some ex-lover friend, who is for you no matter what who’s there even when she’s not. Like when those high-altitude climbers hallucinate companions who aren’t there, keeping them company up in the jet stream, the death zone. She’s my brother.

And Nirgal. It is so strange to look at him and think that he in his genetic material is half me and half Hiroko. I don’t see how that can be or how it might explain anything. Who knows how that works anyway. It could be that genes are the accidental sign of some deeper thing, some morphic resonance or implicate order—but nothing can be said, probably we shouldn’t even use those names, because then it’s just another level, with the real cause still left below, unexplained. Sax always worried about how much was unexplainable. But we are pattern dust devils in the unexplainable. Flying on an unknowable wind. Hiroko and I collided like two dust devils spinning into each other—that happens—and the resulting dust devil was Nirgal, golden boy that he is. Such a pleasure it is to me to watch him flow through his life, fly through it always high, in good spirits, active, inquisitive, interested, empathic. Lucky.

But only when he was young, before the revolution succeeded. After that—things changed. Maybe it wasn’t that simple. He was always looking for something. Hiroko—she’s like a big hole in all our lives. The one that got away. And then Jackie was no help either. Let us not mince words here, that woman was a bitch. That was why I liked her, myself. She was tough, and she knew what she wanted. She and Nirgal were actually a lot alike in that sense, it should have worked. But it didn’t, and that poor boy wandered the world as lonely as old Coyote himself. And he didn’t have Maya—or he did, but for him she replaced Hiroko, not Jackie. Not motherless but partnerless. I felt for him. You see couples who have grown together like two old trees making one plant, trunks intertwined like the double helix itself, and you think, Yes that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It wouldn’t be so lonely then. But there you are. You can’t make partners by wanting them.

So it’s back to friends, and loneliness. And so I watched Nirgal live his lives like a second self cast loose on the wind. We all live the same stories. Nirgal is like a brother to me.

And Sax is my brother in wonder. In all truth, there isn’t a purer soul in the world. He’s so innocent that you can’t think of him as truly smart. All his intelligence is thrown in one deep hole, and as for the rest he’s a newborn babe. The interesting thing is to watch a mind like that try to use its one talent to educate the rest of him. To get along. After his accident—after those fuckers torched his brain I should say—he had to do it all again from scratch too. And that second time he got it right. He got all round. Michel helped—hell, Michel threw him like a vase. And I helped too I think. I took that vase through the kiln, through the fiery furnace. Now he’s my brother in arms, the person I love above all—but they all—well you know. There is no above and below in this realm. He is my brother.

As for Michel, I can’t speak of it yet. I miss him.

And Hiroko too, God damn her. If she ever reads this, if she really is alive and out there hiding as they all say, which I doubt, may she get the message: God damn you. Come back.