"Desert of the RL"

Daddy Issues says he wants to take her to the desert someday—Gobi, Jordan, Atacama. He thinks the desert is underloved, that more charismatic landscapes get all the hype but has she heard of salt flats, of pink flamingoes, of the Valley of the Moon? Daddy Issues says our lives are whirlwinds of simulations, our morality built in consumer choices—Walmart sinners, thrift store martyrs, a redemption of organic kale. Daddy Issues doesn’t use social media, refuses to milk data from his flesh. He wears plaid and vegan Blundstones, grooms his beard with fine-toothed sandalwood. He has two long dimples above his pouting buttocks, likes to joke that his rear end is luscious with negative capability. Daddy Issues once described a maki roll as pedestrian. Most nights, he buzzes Carly into his one-bedroom above the McDonald’s on Richmond Street, a lonely red IKEA bicycle on the wall among his paintings of pirate ships and giant squid and manga motorcycle starlets. As his floor fans turn their clicking heads, Daddy Issues talks about the street-names in this transplant town—Adelaide, Oxford, Piccadilly, how the fuck do you pronounce Grosvenor? Waterloo, Wellington, Dundas, Tecumseh, the great chief, tokenized vestige of the world we’ve tarpapered into a parody England, pretending the displaced aren’t still here. Daddy Issues is recently single after a five-year relationship with a woman who wanted him to get a so-called commitment vasectomy because she couldn’t have children and how’s that, he says, for a psychoanalyst’s nocturnal emission? When she asks him why the apartment is so bare, Daddy Issues says it’s because he wants to travel once he pays off his student loans and, incidentally, he recommends not leasing your mind to the knowledge factory. Daddy Issues left the academy to devote his life to art and yes tattooing is an art. Daddy Issues did half a masters at Western, ran out of funding writing a thesis on rogue AI and existential risk. When he told her this, Carly asked what he meant by funding and he told her about the acronyms, the councils, a colleague who’d gotten fifteen grand from OGS and spent it on a pony. She lay naked and sticky staring at his IKEA art picturing him in academic robes, riding over dunes, a degree in his mouth and needles in his hands.

Carly drives home past tan houses and clicking garage lights and teenage trees. She is not sure if she should call it dating, what she does with Daddy Issues. Six frothy weeks during which it has barely rained and they have not left the apartment. Carly is also not sure why she continues to think of him as Daddy Issues, a name which Aisha came up with when they were studying Freud in philosophy class because Ms. Katz is all gung-ho International Baccalaureate best standardized results in the province.
          Carly’s father was nothing like Daddy Issues. He was a dentist from Singapore who’d lived a decade in San Antonio, moved north for dental school, believed that the true test of the permanent resident was to build your own canoe. But Aisha had called him Daddy Issues and asked was he handsome and she’d said handsome enough but it’s not about that.
          Pools glint moonlight as she wends the cul-de-sacs, sprinklers whirling over parched lawns. She comes inside to find Gord chomping the head off a crown of broccoli. Sitting on the couch leg-spread and vein-necked in sweatpants while Grace watches Peppa Pig, Gord holds the broccoli by the stalk, eating straight from the head, a dandruff of green buds on his chest and thighs. He grunts hello as Carly trawls the fridge, pulls out peanut sauce, rice, slides yesterday’s pizza into the microwave. Peppa and her brother leap in mud puddles and Grace is boinging on the carpet, screaming, “Splish, Splash!” She’s talking to no one about passing lorries and how she might have to wash her trousers.
          The toilet flushes and her mother, Janet, appears with a new talk-to-the-manager haircut. “Where were you?”
          “Aisha’s.”
          “Sure,” Janet says, pulling Chablis from the fridge. “Hot date?”
          “Mum. Don’t,” Aisha says, spinning away with her plate. Gord’s hand is mining his sweatpants when she passes the couch. She slides him a look like gross and he grins, puts his palms up flat. “Just making sure they’re still there.”

Aisha is talking about her project on renewables as they walk through the parched suburbs on their way to the bus stop. They’re walking through the sprinklers and parched lawns, glimpsing the jeweled blue of backyard pools and Aisha is talking Blue Carbon and TuNur energy, a whole giant belt of solar panels across the deserts of Tunisia but all the energy goes to Europe.
          Near the front of the bus Carly sees a man with a droopy stalactite of flesh hanging off his nose, a wobbly round growth as long as a thumb. She has seen him often on this route. Janet says he rides the bus all day because he likes to have people look at it, the nose. Rides the bus all day just hoping someone will stare into his nose and I do so now, stare at the ball of flesh hanging from his nose, the swinging tear-drop pendulum of it and she is watching the lawns blush by. She is thinking about flamingoes, about geese in artificial ponds. Thinking past the soundwalls and into the lawns of the suburbs, chlorine pumping into pools.
          Aisha whirls her finger like selfie, so Carly scooches in, tilts her face. As the camera clicks, Carly wonders if the click-sound is artificial. Lawns and cars whiz by, hungover students waddle in UWO sweatpants. She watches it all through her own pale reflection in the bus window. Aisha adjusts her teeth in FaceTune, asks if they’re too white.
          “God,” she huffs. “I hate my skin.”

At home that night, Carly looks up the TuNur solar project. Fleets and fleets of panels sprawling over the desert, a thousand square jewels gleaming, cloaked in heat-shimmer. She saves the picture and makes it her background, her home screen, lies staring at sun-gorged the desert on the far side of the icons as night falls. She wonders what it looks like from space, if an astronaut could see this sequined belt on the waist of the world. 

Carly met Daddy Issues at the Starbucks counter, waiting for her mocha. “Charlie,” the Barista said, and they both reached for the same cup. He had a GoodLife bag slung over his shoulder, his arms jungled with tattoos. Swirls of green, red, and black that reminded her of a book she read to Grace about a boy named Max with a jungle in his room. He looked at her hard, cracked into smile. There were three grey hairs in his beard, a few lines around his eyes. He could have been twenty, or thirty.
          “Nice to meet you Charlie.”
          “That’s just my Starbucks name. It’s easier.”
          “Good choice,” he grinned. He told her his real name was Gilles but people couldn’t say it right. “They say it like gills, likes a fish’s gill.” His tongue searched out of his mouth, flashed its silver eye. When he asked, she told him her real name.
          “I like your tattoo,” she said, pointing to one at random, surprising herself.
          “Want one?”
          She shrugged, meaning yes.
          “Come with me.”

In the morning she goes to the kitchen window and watches Gord weed the lawn, pluck the heads off dandelions. Around the neighbourhood lawnmowers roar, sprinklers gleek. As a child she thought dandelions had something to do with The Wizard of Oz, begged to meet the dandy lion. Gord often brags about his Par 4, the special fertilizer he gets from his friend who manages a golf course. Technically illegal, he grins at strangers nodding from the curb. Most years, their lawn is dizzy with green. Now Gord stoops over the ragged yellow scree, pulls weeds up with his head stooped. Holds the yellow heads in his hands and stoops to stare at them, as if they were a reckoning. Spinning away from the window, Carly grabs her phone wrong, watches it tumble slow-mo. She reaches through dreamy moment, swipes the phone but instead of clasping it she jams it straight into the corner of the counter. She knows before looking, confirms a white seam down the middle. A ragged tear through the deserts of Tunisia, a frayed belt of busted glass.

In philosophy class, Holly leans over whispering about the zooms, the plans to trip pre meme dance. Ms. Katz asks if she’d like to share it with the class and she says she’s supposed to meet some real fun guys on Friday. Giggles and snorts peal through the classroom. Ms. Katz stands with her hands on her hips, her body saying not funny, a sliver of mirth in her eye.
          Ms. Katz does her assignment-time desk-tap and everyone starts pulling out their Chromebooks. Mrs. Katz asks us the students write out our social media philosophy, so I open a Word doc and sit staring out into the green sweep of June, thinking about Daddy Issues, what he said about meme-stitched selves. She sits thinking about how kids get a bad rep for their phones, her English teacher called them the “head-down tribe” but the adults she knows are the worst offenders—Gord, her mother, her grandfather. She looks over at Aisha’s page: “The Dick Pic Era.” Holly’s screen just says “Pics or it Didn’t Happen.” IB philosophy, the pride of Central Collegiate. Keys clack like plastic rain.
          Outside her locker, Holly flashes the baggie, the little brown mottle like an embryo. Black brain, white limbs. The plan is Holly’s house—she has a private basement with her own door. They discussed MDMA, but decided organic was safer. None of them has tried shrooms before.
          “How bad could it be?” 
          “It’s only poison,” Holly grins.  

Grace is Greenpeacing, their mother’s term for a toddler lying on her back and screaming inconsolably. Grace wailing in this case due to a failed chocolate mousse experiment. Weeks of chocolate mousse this, chocolate mousse that and now tears and abjection because the expectation was moose. Because where is the moose, Grace pled, tear-swollen, pointing at her favourite antlered plush toy and then descending into speechless rage, sobbing and howling, her face smeared with leakage, snot and spit mingling, the child barely able to manage a breath until Carly appears, kneels beside her sister.
          “It’s alright,” she tells her sister, herself. “Should we take a bath?”
          “Okay,” Grace sniffs, rising up, taking her sister’s hand and following her to the tub.
          They pour Frozen-brand bubbles into the water, strange shades of pink. Carly produces Scuba Steve and the pink plastic narwhal/unicorn, the plastic yogurt tubs and the bath colours and the bath crayons. They watch the water pour. Carly grabs some toilet paper, blows her sister’s nose. Grace grabs the footstool and proudly peeing, farting, grinning, her cheeks still red. They climb in and contemplate the square eye of the faucets. Carly tells her sister about the secret city inside, where benevolent house sprites live. Grace puts her head in Carly’s lap, leans back and kicks, brags that she’s swimming. Her scalp warm, her brown hair dark and flowing like tendrils. Grace crawls behind her, starts splashing with joy. “Tattoo!” she cries, astonished. For her birthday, Carly received a crate of stick-on Peppa Pigs, covered an entire leg with cartoon pink. 
          “Don’t tell Mum.”
          Grace giggles, runs her fingers down the river of her sister’s spine. Rubs harder and harder, as if she could scrub it off. “It’s so big,” she says. “Bigger than my hand!”
          Carly spins into her sister’s joy.
          “Will I be as big as you some day?”
          “Yes,” she says.
          Grace swims around to the front, thinking hard about this. She sits in the bath, slumped and wide-eyed and pondering. “When I’m as big as you, will you be as little as me?”
          Carly wants to laugh but doesn’t. Instead, she just shrugs, says maybe, cuddles her sister and runs her fingers through her hair. Their mother appears, thanks in her eyes, wine in her hand, and Carly imagines herself shrinking. She thinks her sister growing, sprouting, while she shrinks smaller and smaller, as little as her sister and then even more tiny until she is insectile, until she can swim into the faucet, seek the secret cities in the deep unseen.

Daddy Issues is telling her about the desert of the real as she stares up at the red IKEA bicycle in sepia Paris, the fans clicking all around her. The AC is on but it doesn’t work right, can’t fight the heat and Daddy Issues is saying about the French philosopher who inspired that line from The Matrix and it’s weird, right, because what it means is that the real is impoverished but Daddy Issues doesn’t think that’s fair to deserts. The symbolism is barren, parched, inert but what he thinks about is tarbush and prickly-pears and agave, lizards and cats crawling the dunes at night. He thinks about groundwater, about the streams running beneath the sand because life is always there you just have to look for it.
          She shows Daddy Issues her broken phone and he pinches it like dirty underwear, asks why we even call these things phones. She shrugs and stares at the ceiling where the traffic lights smear green, change to red as Daddy Issues starts talking about “pics or it didn’t happen,” what that really means. He asks don’t people see the irony of something not being real until there’s a simulation of it? She ponders this, looking up at the bicycle, then at the McDonald’s light playing in the small wall mirror next to the front door. She knows he will answer his own question, and he does so quickly. Tells her it’s because technology moves faster than language. She stares into his neck tattoo, Marvin the Martian tilting his blaster, wondering if language isn’t a technology too. Around her the fans whiz and turn, huge as black steel sunflowers.
          Daddy Issues asks what she wants to do tonight and she says ice cream, meaning outside, public. He thinks hard, too hard, and she wants to remind him that they’re consenting adults since she turned eighteen.
          They go to Dairy Queen, where she orders them an Oreo blizzard with two spoons. She sees him looking around, eyes switching. When the counter-boy turns the ice-cream upside-down he flinches, arm shooting out to grab it.
          “It’s alright,” she laughs. “You’ve never had a Blizzard?”
          “That’s not ice cream,” he says.
          “No,” she gleams. “It’s delicious.”

Holly is dressed in cat ears, whiskers drawn on her cheeks, and she’s passing the grog and heating hot knives on the stove and asking if anyone’s feeling it yet. She has NONONO written on her forehead, though the makeup is already starting to leak in the heat. A novelty tail trails out of her jeans and she walks around swinging it and rolling her eyes, staring into the tea in her hand. She sips and grabs a spoon, pulls up some of the shroom grog in the bottom and says she’s thirsty, real parched. She does wild-eyes and makes her voice gravelly and says she feels like the bog monster, thirsting for grog.
          Holly passes her the grog and tells her this part is essential, by far the most potent, time to ingest. The dank slimes her tongue, slurps rotten into her guts, a taste like sawdust on her lips. It’s only poison, she thinks as Aisha takes out a bottle of SoCo and cranks Peggy Gou and announces two truths and a lie which means, inevitably, Carly lying about Daddy Issues, telling the truth about Daddy Issues, telling the truth about Gord eating full crowns of raw broccoli. Lana is singing about Norman Rockwell and Aisha passes Carly the blades and she spills a hot rock onto her jeans, sits there watching it burn, not knowing what to do until Holly grabs it with her bare fingers, flings it hissing in a glass of ice water. Carly tells the truth about the bleach kit, about the ex. She lies about the pony, tells the truth about the girls your age comment at which point Aisha goes nasty. “He fucking said that?”
          “What does he look like anyway?”
          Aisha grins: “Let’s creep him.”
          “He doesn’t have social media,” Carly says, and it’s only when she says it aloud that it becomes suspicious and possibly absurd. It’s only when Holly grabs her phone and searches “Tattoo artists London Ontario” and asks is that him that it makes sense that he would have a second house, a house with cottage porn and family photos on the walls and of course that is him in a tracksuit at the playground, of course that’s his beard with three grey hairs like a mutilated spider. Standing with his stately wife with twins in the stroller, the wife with droopy graceful eyes eating red and green Goldfish, the whole family biting from the same monstrous double banana split.
          “Shit,” a voice says.
          “Are you alright,” says another, and she is, of course she is, because it was only ever a delusion. She is alright but she is also on the bottom of a strange ocean, an ocean where the weeds are stringy and sick, lurid shades of blue.
          “It’s fine,” she insists. “I’m fine,” she says rising, staggering stumbling, shivering and it is not so much the betrayal as the shift in the terms, in the ground. The walls are blue, she notices. A trembly, teardrop blue and Holly is saying tracers, saying shit, saying peak. Holly is laughing and Aisha is saying no this is serious and Carly is saying she’ll be fine. Holly looks at her phone and begins to laugh wretchedly, asking Aisha to read the message and is her mother coming home. Aisha gigglingly confirms and so the girls are grabbing blue bags and packing up bottles and Carly’s stomach is turning, trawling and it’s only poison, only poison as they flee the basement and walk out into the hot wash of Talbot, the sky ravenous for rain and a thin breeze coming up from the river, shouts from downtown and she is okay, she tells Aisha and yes she is sure but look at those lights. The traffic lights. They are out of control and can you hear those pigeons and I just saw someone riding a bicycle with no head he had no head I swear.
          She drops her phone and picks it up, stares into the broken desert. She scrolls through the contacts, considers his name, looks at the photos but can’t look because she’s nauseated as they arrive at the thumping school. Aisha and Holly find friends and Carly stands at the fringes among the smokers in a soup of loss and want not knowing where the drugs end. She stands next to a Kermit with teacup in the suffering dank of a desire that makes fools of us all as Ryan Brady jangles her cans and says, “Hey there uncanny girl,” and she tries to smile like “Ha ha but don’t get too close.” In the gym window she sees the slinging disco ball and she knows she can’t go in, can’t possibly enter that Xanadu of smoke-machine smell and strobing pulse and snuck mickies and melancholy boners and so she is walking into the grass. Walking alone into the dark lush of the soccer field, so prim and tame and Aisha shouting is she okay and of course she is. Of course she is fine because she’s kicking her shoes off and isn’t it dank bliss the feel of the soil on her back, her fingers in the grass like a creature. The girls shouting after her and she says she’ll come inside in a minute so the giggle off and she lies there feeling the turf like a hairy creature, rubbing each trimmed blade and she is sorry, she whispers and her knuckles stumble on some tufts. Soft balls that she grabs and finds to be the half-decayed heads of dandelions and she is sinking into a cool violet fear when her phone beeps and of course it’s him, asking if she wants to come over after the dance. It’s Daddy Issues texting casually and the reading makes her sicker, sweatier, but he’s saying he hopes she’s safe.
          She doesn’t write back. She simply rises, walks through the turf careless of her shoes because the earth is cool on her feet and then she’s jangling over the sidewalk, tinkling uncanny across Richmond, past the cyclists and the pawn shop prowlers, a man pawing the sidewalk for cigarette butts.
          At home, thankful that the lights are off, she sits on the back steps thinking of her mother, of Gord, of the alien hotels on the Singapore waterfront. There are solar-powered supertrees there now, luminous vertical gardens, an airport with a forest inside. She opens her palm and finds the dandelion there, crushed and sweaty and ragged. She rubs its flesh into her palms, grabs her phone and stares at the gut-rot string of his messages. Is she alright? Where is she? Does she want him to pick her up? The messages turning worried or jealous and she braves the screen’s nausea long enough to delete the messages and block his number before creeping inside, taking the faucet by its stainless steel neck and swiveling it for a kiss. The kitchen alive with ticks and hums. The Tron-bright blue of the digital clock. In the bathroom, she turns on a light. Looks at herself for a long time in the mirror. She turns the bath on, lets it run as she watches the streetlamps glowing orange on the window, stares into the small wall mirror where a woman stands. Lank hair, a blade of grass slumped on her brow, soil smudged up her neck. She closes her eyes and sees dunes jeweled with solar panels, a bright red bicycle flying through the night and she knows that if the real is a desert there are rivers in its guts.
          Carly tenses, hearing footsteps, floorboards, the door swinging open slow. She thinks her mother, or, worse, Gord. She looks for her mother’s face and then down to the pink pyjamas, the soft brown curls, the tiny rolls of fat around the wrists. Her sister stands there squinting. “What’s wrong?”
          “Nothing.”
          “You dirty.”
          Carly laughs as her sister approaches, tests the water, stands contemplating it for a long time. Carly squirts water between her hands and her sister giggles, peels off her pyjamas, heaves a leg up with great difficulty and wiggles proudly into the bath. Grace leans her back into Carly’s bare chest, asks Carly to tell her a story.
          Once upon a time there was a mean man, a man with a lot of tattoos and three grey hairs in his beard and this man had two lives, two houses. “Two houses?” Grace gasps, turning around, eyes bright with wist. “Two families? He must be really big.”
          Carly chuckles, squeezes her sister, takes a handful of bathwater and lets it run between her fingers as the first light creeps pink on the window. Her sister thumbs a clump of dirt from Carly’s brow, says “Wow” again and Carly reclines into the sound, the water, the poison and the joy and the grope of word for world.