Why we continued to celebrate the new year every 365 days when it took this planet almost double that to revolve around the sun, I never understood. I’d have preferred the planet’s natural rhythms, forcing us to mark time in a slower way. Maybe then I wouldn’t find myself at the end of each Gregorian year having accomplished nothing, unchanged from when it began. The weight of my manuscript growing more ponderous with each subsequent revision, the sting of my loneliness keener with every solitary nightcap. My illness twisting my body into ever more painful shapes, turning the lithe young undergrads I taught into alien creatures. It seemed my mediocrity grew heavier and more burdensome as time passed, and perhaps a dilation of the calendar would lighten the load.
But others were nostalgic for the fast pace of Earth. Resentful, even, of the extra time afforded to us by this planet, the surplus thirty-nine minutes each day. Take Ezra, my best and oldest friend, whose life seemed permanently set on fast-forward. The man has never set a goal he hasn’t met: take up weightlifting, learn the violin, write a novel. I try to not let envy pollute our friendship, but I must admit, that last one felt personal. I’d always reassured myself that Ezra, a moderately successful investigative journalist, would never be able to do the kind of slow, creative work I did. But apparently all it took was one “novel-in-a-year” workshop for him to churn out a perfectly serviceable thriller manuscript, one that captured the attention of several different literary agencies before he abandoned it in favour of his already overstuffed work calendar. Compare that to the five years I’d spent agonizing over my own manuscript, without so much as a query letter to show for it. The hare beats the tortoise every time.
It was the morning of January first and I was meeting with Ezra, like we had every year for the past decade. Since the day I’d first sat him down, the glitter of New Year’s Eve still hanging in the air, and told him about my diagnosis.
He was twenty-five minutes late, not that I expected anything different. I was already nursing my second coffee when he arrived and ordered a whiskey, straight. “For the hangover,” he explained, though I suspected he was still tipsy from the previous night’s festivities. If he saw a bed last night, it certainly wasn’t his own.
After one drink he was already getting handsy with me, his fingers lingering on my good arm. “You look good, Rose,” he said, squeezing my non-existent bicep. Ezra was the only person who didn’t call me Rosen, but for whatever reason, it didn’t bother me. I liked the feminization of my name on his tongue.
“No, I don’t.” I shook him off, annoyed by the ease of his intimacy. For him, a touch meant nothing; for me, a traitorous flash of hope, followed by inevitable disappointment. “What do you want, Ezra?”
“You’re always so suspicious of me.” His lips stitched into an exaggerated pout, both endearing and deeply irritating. “Maybe I just wanted to compliment an old friend.”
“Calling me old isn’t a promising start.”
Ezra grinned. His face was smooth, flawless, save the crinkled skin at the edges of his mouth that folded and pooled like velvet. “We are getting old, though. Time is ticking.”
“For some of us more than others, it would seem. I, for one, look increasingly less like a human being and more like a tortoise with each passing day.”
“And I’m exempt from the perils of aging, I suppose?”
I glared at him over my spectacles, which I admit weren’t helping matters. “You most certainly are.”
“True as that may be,” he said, pausing for my good-humoured swat across the arm, “I am getting older. Which is why I’ve made a decision. A New Year’s resolution, if you will.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve decided this will be the year I finally settle down.”
I choked slightly on my coffee––a shame, considering the twelve-dollar price tag. The beans had been imported directly from Earth, or at least so the coffee shop claimed. “Uh huh. Sure you will.”
“I’m serious, Rose. You don’t think I can do it?”
“Not that you can’t do it…”
“Take a look at this.” He unlocked his phone and turned it toward me. On the screen was a woman with liquid black eyes and skin even paler than mine. Her hair was a reddish gold, long enough that it was cut off by the bottom of the photo. Underneath was a clipped bio: Sylvie, 32, geneticist. She was so beautiful that had she shown up as a match for anyone but Ezra, I would have assumed she was a catfish.
“See?” He thrust his phone closer to my face, triumphant. “We have a date on Thursday.”
“And I’m sure it will go fabulously.”
He frowned, clearly not enjoying my sarcasm. “Why are you always so pessimistic?”
It wasn’t that I thought Ezra couldn’t land a girl like Sylvie. In fact, I was certain he could. He’d dated many beautiful people, and I’d watched him reject each in turn: a woman because she’d gained ten pounds, a man because he’d lost the same. He’d leave someone over a revealed genetic defect, a family history of heart disease or depression. He was vain, and for such an intelligent man, surprisingly shallow.
“No one will ever be good enough for you,” I said. “You’re too perfect.”
I’d meant for it to be a jab, but Ezra only nodded, a thoughtful expression settling across his face. “This time is different, though.”
“And why is that?”
“Mindset.” He tapped his temple. “I feel my life slipping between my fingers, impossible to grasp. Just passing me by. Meaningless. Do you understand?”
I nodded. Of course I did. I understood better than anyone.
“I want a partner, a family. Don’t I deserve those things?”
“Sure, sure.” My illness meant I’d likely never have children, something Ezra knew perfectly well. In that moment I hated him fiercely, almost as much as I loved him.
“To love, then.” He lifted his near-empty whiskey glass, and I considered refusing the toast altogether. But when had I ever denied him anything? I sighed and lifted my coffee mug, the hot ceramic against cool glass making a dull, unsatisfying clink.
◊ ◊ ◊
Ezra and I first crossed paths in a fourth-year writing seminar on narrative nonfiction, at the very university I would end up teaching at for several years before I left Earth for good. He was the class darling, everyone fawning over his writing, which was stylish, if uninspired. The whole room visibly lit up when he sauntered in, twenty minutes late and without his pages, lips wrapped around a prohibited retro vape pen. Even the professor couldn’t resist his charms. He later told me he scored a perfect grade, despite handing in his final paper two weeks past deadline, without even a doctor’s note or teary-eyed explanation to aid his case.
It didn’t hurt that he was gorgeous. Dark hair and coppery skin, a pond-ripple of smile lines ridging either side of his mouth. He was broad-shouldered but slim, occupying that physical sweet spot between jock and fairy. But there was something else about him, too, a magnetism that kept my eyes slipping back to his face no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the readings.
Somehow, of all his desperate fangirls and boys, it was me he chose. I suppose I was good-looking back then, in a waifish, Percy Shelley sort of way. Tall, slender, white-skinned and red-lipped, with all the elegance of a Victorian tubercular patient.
A month into the semester, Ezra invited me to join him at a poetry open mic, his tone casual to the point of dismissive. I showed up forty-five minutes early, or perhaps Ezra was forty-five minutes late. Either way I was shit-faced by the time he arrived, drowning my anxiety in whiskey that I didn’t quite have the stomach for yet. Miraculously, this one-sided intoxication worked in my favour, allowing me to shed my awkwardness for the night. We ended up making out, then going home together, the first of many times we would do so over the next twenty years. Thus began our confusing, frustrating, impossible friendship. Ezra was part comrade, part drinking buddy, part love of my life.
When it became clear Earth only had a couple good years left, Ezra and I applied for the Mars pilot project, pledging we’d only go if we both were accepted. When we were, thanks to his superlative genetics and my double PhD, we paid extra to live in the same building complex. Do “just friends” uproot their entire lives for one another? Ezra was my person and foolishly, I assumed I was his too.
Everything changed a year into life at the colony when I got sick, a rare bone condition caused by a lack of terrestrial gravity. My health rapidly deteriorated: within months I was walking with a cane, and within the year my left arm was rendered completely useless. I stopped going out, spent most of my time reading and writing––though aside from a few long-winded essays in scholarly journals, I had yet to publish anything of substance. I still drank, but now it was a solitary, anguished affair.
Ezra, who attracted friends and lovers wherever he went, balked at my quiet, subdued existence. A night in for him was torture, a self-inflicted punishment far exceeding the horror of my illness. He would beg me to go out with him. Just one bar, just one nightclub, just the theatre for heaven’s sake. Put on his sweetest expression, using his honeyed tongue and some other choice body parts in his attempts to convince me. But in the end, I was trapped by my withering body, my embittered mind. And Ezra refused to be trapped with me. He simply couldn’t live that way. Not even some of the time, not even for me.
◊ ◊ ◊
After his first date with Sylvie, Ezra called me to insist it had gone splendidly and to invite me on their next one. That was the kind of friendship we had: one without privacy or boundaries. Some might call it unhealthy, and I would be the first to agree.
The following Saturday, I followed the new couple to an outrageously expensive restaurant in the colony’s downtown core, one whose claim to fame was that they grew their own steaks onsite. In the centre of the dining room, a row of clear glass vitrines housed shivering pallets of lab-grown muscle cells. A trellis snaked up one side of the glass, tissue twisting its way across like a perverted tomato plant.
The restaurant had been Ezra’s choice––despite my protestations, my own stomach far too queasy for these sorts of dinnertime theatrics. But Ezra insisted. Historically a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he relied on lab-grown alternatives now that animal products were no longer an option. And when trying to impress a paramour? Steak was a non-negotiable.
I promised Ezra that I’d try to be nice to Sylvie, but she immediately put me on edge. She was as beautiful as her dating profile advertised, but in a way that felt cool and flat, utterly at odds with Ezra’s warmth and charm. She was tiny, her body like a doll’s, every movement laboured and deliberate.
I tried to ask her about her work as a geneticist, a rare detail advertised on her monosyllabic profile, but quickly realized she wasn’t much of a talker. Mostly, she just watched Ezra as he spoke. Not that I could blame her. Poor woman must have been smitten, her eyes glued to his lips as he talked about the article he was working on, an investigative feature that would earn him more money than I made in a semester.
“It’s about aliens.” He waggled his eyebrows provocatively, like he was telling a campfire ghost story. “All very hush-hush.”
“Aliens? Really?” I scooped up a sliver of beef tataki from a shared appetizer plate, pleased by my deftness. After years of single-handed eating, my facility with chopsticks was stronger than my fork-and-knife skills, and I was glad the restaurant had given me the opportunity to show off.
“No such thing as aliens.” Practically Sylvie’s first words of the night, and delivered with a deep frown.
“Trust the scientist to be the skeptic.” Ezra nudged her arm, an affectionate gesture that elicited only a small humph in return. “Next week I’m interviewing four people who claim they’ve made contact.”
“And what are these aliens like, exactly?” I asked.
“Invisible to the human eye. Some kind of parasite native to Mars, though not necessarily exclusive to here.” Ezra lowered his voice, forcing us to lean closer. “They feed on their host’s energy, turn them into a shell of their former selves. Weak, sluggish, sometimes even mute. They’re calling it the wasting sickness. Only way to get rid of the buggers is if they hop onto another host, start feeding off them instead.”
“Typical.” I shook my head. “Of course people want to blame their health issues on the paranormal, rather than just accept that they’re disabled.”
“Could be.” Ezra shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t really care if it’s true, long as I get my byline and paycheck.”
The rest of dinner went by quickly, though Sylvie’s word count hovered steadily at five. The three of us went out a few more times after that, and she did an impressive job of maintaining her silent streak. I shouldn’t have minded her presence, quiet and unassuming as she was, but something about her unnerved me. Maybe I was just jealous of a new person encroaching on my relationship with Ezra, but I didn’t like the way she looked at him, with a reverence bordering on hunger.
“It’s going well, isn’t it?” Ezra said to me one evening, seven drinks deep and glassy-eyed. Sylvie had left early, no doubt in disapproval of his sloppiness, and I resolved to get him drunk more often. He slung his arm around my shoulders and kissed my cheek. “I think she might be the one.”
“God, really? Her?”
The words were out of my lips before I could think them through. I expected Ezra to react with anger, but when I turned to face him, all I saw was pity.
“Can’t you just be happy for me for once? Honestly, Rosen.” My name unsheathed in full, sharp as a weapon on his tongue. “Just because you insist on being miserable, doesn’t mean the rest of us should be, too.”
After that I didn’t hear from Ezra for two weeks. It was the longest we’d ever gone without speaking, though I told myself I wasn’t worried. The deadline for his alien article was coming up, so I assumed he was holed up in his condo, writing furiously. He was the kind of person who could only manage one responsibility at a time, so when work took priority, he tended to neglect his personal relationships.
When I finally heard from him again, it was in the form of a wedding invitation.
◊ ◊ ◊
I reasoned that either the invitation was an ill-conceived joke, or else Ezra had truly lost his mind. That it might be legitimate simply didn’t occur to me.
I went to see Ezra at once. To my displeasure it was Sylvie who answered his door, her red-gold hair shimmering in some nonexistent breeze. She looked radiant in a lace blouse, and her chalk-white skin had taken on a new rosiness not unlike the glow of a pregnant woman.
“Hello, Rosen,” she said. Her lips stretched into a smile that showed all her teeth, neatly stacked like a row of glistening mints.
“Hello, Sylvie. I hear congratulations are in order.” I still didn’t believe Ezra was truly engaged. But finding her there, at his home, had given me pause.
“Thank you.” She dipped her chin, a picture of propriety.
“And where is the lucky fellow?”
“He’s resting. Seems to have come down with some sort of sickness. Just awful.” As she gestured for me to come in, I realized this was the most I’d heard her say at once.
I followed her through the living room and kitchen, which had both been redecorated in softer, more feminine shades. A sinking feeling began to twine around my chest, growing tighter with every room I entered. Finally, I reached Ezra’s bedroom.
I hadn’t been inside for years now, but nonetheless it was immediately familiar to me, save for a cloyingly sweet smell somewhere between week-old roses and cat piss. I assumed it had to do with the new presence of a woman in his bed, a thought that I found deeply distasteful.
What I found inside disturbed me greatly. Ezra had always been strong: six feet tall and lean, a picture of good health. Now his t-shirt ballooned around a scarecrow frame. His eyes blinked open, obscured by a milky film. It had only been a few weeks since I’d last seen him, yet the man in front of me was barely recognizable as my oldest friend.
“Rose.” He sat up in bed, hunching slightly. Through the thin fabric of his shirt I could see the stegosaurus spikes of his spine.
With Sylvie hovering nearby, I couldn’t bring myself to ask about the alleged engagement. “How are you?” The question sounded feeble even to me. “How’s work?”
He stared back blankly until Sylvie jumped in. “Ezra will be taking a leave from work,” she said. “It’s all a bit much, between his illness and our engagement. But he was working too hard, anyway. Some time off will be good for him.” She lay a hand on his forehead, looking very much like a mother tending to her sickly child.
“But what about your article?” I directed my question at Ezra, refusing to participate in this ventriloquist act Sylvie was trying to pull. “What about the people you interviewed who’ve made alien contact? Who are suffering from the wasting sickness? What about them?”
Ezra’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something but couldn’t get out the words.
“What is it?” I rushed to his side. “What are you trying to say?”
“His piece got pulled.” Each word like a razor, extracted from Sylvie’s reptilian smile. “Terrible news. Ezra was so disappointed.”
“But that can’t be!” I looked at Ezra, whose mouth was still gaping open. “The publication spent so much money on it.”
“Oh, Rosen.” Sylvie adjusted her blouse so it dipped low on her chest, revealing a healthy amount of cleavage I didn’t remember her having before. “That piece was doomed before it began. You know as well as anyone that aliens don’t exist.” She laughed, but the sound was abrupt and unconvincing, like it was her first time trying it out. “Ridiculous,” she said. “Right, darling?”
She lowered her gaze to where Ezra lay, looking more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him. “Right?” she asked again, her question sharpening into a command.
Slowly, like the gesture was painful for him, Ezra nodded twice. His eyes slipped back shut and I waited several moments before realizing he’d fallen asleep. As though all his energy had been siphoned off by some mysterious force. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, and I was no stranger to sickness.
I watched him sleep, this beautiful man ravaged by illness or something else. Should I call a doctor, I wondered? The police? Should I seize his weakened body and drag him back home with me? Nurse him back to health, coax him, finally, into loving me in return?
Instead, I quietly excused myself and thanked Sylvie for her hospitality. It occurred to me that my life could be simpler, happier, if only I let it.
Perhaps this was just how love worked. For one of you to thrive, the other needed to suffer.
Isabel Armiento (she/her) is a Toronto-based bookseller and writer, working as the editorial director of Aardvark Book Club, where her curated picks are loved by thousands of members. She has been published in places like Reader’s Digest Canada, The Green Line, and This magazine, with work forthcoming in QT Mag.
