I’m half kidding. Back on Earth at Gran’s, nothing smelled like nature. High-efficiency shower heads, faucets, urinals, and laundry, and still the city imposed water restrictions — the hallways of DesertGreenComplex were eternally bad with body odour, cheap lemon cleaner, and smog the filters hadn’t scrubbed. The government-subsidized apartment blocks had been designed, like all low-income housing of the mid-twenty-first century, with a strict adherence to sustainable architecture: waste wood converts into heating gas; biomass generation equals a carbon-neutral building; each complex treats its own sullage and blackwater; the roofs have solar panels and (you’ll never believe it) gardens — all perks advertised sixty years before Gran dragged us into the place with her dogs. There were three retrievers back then, I think, but that number altered drastically depending on breeding and whelping seasons — the dogs were her excuse of a livelihood.
“People will always want a dog,” she explained to the neighbours. “It’s like wearing your heart on a leash: safe.”
She’d change the quote depending on who she was pitching to: hope on a leash, security on a leash, kids on a leash, etc. And for stores, she had the pedigrees and bloodlines. Dragging three kids and three golden retrievers into a one-room apartment, you’d think the neighbours would hate her, but by the time we arrived, the complex was well used. Ground-level ponds had transformed into teal, algae-ridden bogs, and the heat-regulating blinds adjusted on a timer instead of the original Intelligent Response to internal/external temp and sunlight. Bio-bins and recycling overflowed the courtyard and streets. Everything was trash — every summer I can recall, the patches of weeds that separated the vehicle and bicycle lanes burned to dirt with droughts and pet piss. Even Gran’s prize-winning golden retrievers turned into garbage cans — their shit twenty percent compacted plastic fragments, dental floss, and Rinella’s handmade beads.
Merven slept in his junker’s truck, claiming that Gran, Rinella and I more than filled the apartment. Add to us the dogs — every doorway had a collapsible baby-gate for when we got sick of the swarms of puppies, but there weren’t a lot of doorways. I slept in the living room on a Murphy bed, and Rinella crashed on the couch. Only Gran had her own room and I resented her the luxury. When they weren’t in use, Gran’s puppy crates took over our balcony, stored in stacks next to the rain barrel and the funnel collector. The kids in the apartment above us used to chuck rocks into our funnel, and when it was my turn to scoop pebbles from the barrel I’d take extra time and peer across the street.
Gran’s apartment looked overtop of the monorail straight at another apartment complex, where occupants sat on their balconies in dust masks and goggles, taking in the exact view I was: other balconies full of barbecues, broken chairs and appliances, bicycles, dying houseplants, and, invariably, water collection barrels. The dark spread of the funnel collectors looked like a bloom of black flowers, all faced skyward and yearning for rain. Look to the ground and you got the monorail train, and under that, the cracked asphalt of the street. Back in the apartment — eau de hot pavement and dog. I thought it was normal. It was only after I’d left for Corporate training and returned home to visit that I realized the apartment’s backhand of piss-paper, dog, and weed might have been part of the reason I’d never made close friends.
Was I an angry kid? Not really. Frustrated, sure, that Gran’s main emotion seemed to be panic. The cost of water, we’d blown next week’s food budget, et cetera. At the table with her breeding charts and puppy adverts, she was as useless as her worries. Patchwork finances and lifestyle Band-Aids — it was all next litter of pups should cover a few months’ rent, or, this dog show will raise our profile — she never tried for an escape from that place.
So early mornings I’d smash the Murphy bed into the frame, stuff a training bra with toilet paper (and get reamed by Merven for that later — Did I want to wipe my ass with my hand? That shit cost money), and do the absolute minimum at school. When school ended I’d meet up with the true dropouts (I wasn’t brave enough to quit attending classes) and steal neon coolers at BlackLightBowling. Evenings saw me stroll home buzzed, open a text, and giggle when I tried to tap the pictures bigger — it was normal that our district accept hand-me-down supplies from the richer ones, but that we were still using outdated, physical books?
Rinella had moved out, although no one could tell. She sat at the table in her embroidered kimono-style wrap and strung cheap jewellery or broke bud with her fingers. Merven would finish his weekly shower and yell at Rinella he couldn’t go to work smelling like pot. Rinella would answer she didn’t realize the junk-hauling business was that fucking fancy. Merven would counter, “Better than dropping night school to make ass-ugly necklaces,” and Gran would beat Merven down with an oven mitt, yell at Rinella to shut up and be useful — clean the pup pen or wash the damn floor.
The oldest dog farted during fights — a round, fruity smell that in the heat made the stench of the apartment rival DesertGreen’s sewage treatment. So I’d rescue both of us and take her for walks in the street where, if I looked up, I could watch the entire scene again through Gran’s eighth-floor window, right next to the night clerk who never raised his blinds and a hundred other compartmentalized families.
On the walks — there’s no comfortable way to say it — I’d take the dog to the top floor of a parkade and tie her leash to a rail so she didn’t get lost. Then I’d bend over the railing, breathe as fast as possible with my head hanging over the spiral abyss of car ramps, and hyperventilate. The trick was, as soon as you felt a tingle — the start of the oxygen high — you swung upwards and choked yourself until you collapsed. Speed Dream to Nirvana — or at least to escape, to grab the blue-black static that chewed, gnawed, boiled the marrow from vision and sound. O2 flashes were the closest I got, if not to God, then to a similar truth: there was more. Something else. Something we stood right at the edge of.
There had to be.
“Hey dreamer, can we go now?” Barry turns the hatch wheel and opens the junction that leads to the ExothermWearables and the rovers. He’s being cute, but I can hear the concern in his voice. We need to get to the telecommunications tower and check the status on the dish — hike all those stairs cut into the hillside — and there’s under three hours of daylight left. I know I’m zoning out.
“Sure,” I say. “Yeah, of course.” I can’t tell if “dreamer” is a dig, an endearment, or a nod to the past, and I don’t want to get into it. I tap up a picture and stats of the rover bay doors.
“Nina.” Barry shines a flashlight over the dark galley. Habitat has full power now, but lighting isn’t essential and we don’t want to push reserves until after we have a solid communications line to TitanMineZero as well as the satellite. You never know.
“At least let me check.” If it’s possible to drive up the hill, I’d like to. The stats from the rover bay, which we can see through the window is dented and blocked with silt, confirm the damage.
“We knew that,” Barry says.