MOONRAKERS • 2

from MOONFACE MOONRAKERS IN BIG MOON CITY
otherwise known as —
my first novel, or, thinly-veiled rpf that’s not rpf where a taika waititi expy-cum-male kiwi carrie bradshaw moves to new orleans with his family and partner and grapples with work, art, bisexuality, cancer, trauma, parenthood, the weather, the past, the present, and the future.

keywords —
new orleans, new zealand, bipolar disorder, intergenerational trauma, mommy issues, cancer, lgbt, bisexuality, biracialness, jewishness, maori culture, taika waititi, family epic, parenthood, slow-burn relationship, domesticity, writing about writers, flashbacks, academia, drama (as in performing arts), female antiheroes, mlm erotica, recovery, intersectionality.

original art by generator lee

He’d moved to New Orleans in the late Spring of eight years ago pursuing a writing/editing job at a quirky little publication called Endymion, smelling way too tired for his age and running away from messes partially of his own making. New Zealand, for all its charm and its wonder, had become traumatic, occasionally even boring, overly well-trodden ground for Mako over the course of thirty years on the North Island, and while he’d known that he was essentially committing suicide in the disruption of his safety and routine and the wholesale uprooting of his life, he’d become so desperate for an other existence that he’d perceived no alternative choice but to leave.

The night before takeoff, he’d dined with Jem at the little Wellington wine bistro five minutes from the house they used to inhabit on Hargreaves Street, the one with the floor-to-ceiling windows Mako used to perform accidental peepshows in for the neighbors. At the time, they weren’t dating, just mutually in love and mutually determined not to let anything come of it. Their rendezvous was intentionally public, for they had long learned the advantages of being surrounded by random, arbitrary nonsense to temporarily attach fractions of their attention to in the event that one of them said something the other wasn’t quite sure how to handle immediately, so that if for whatever reason either of them went quiet, at least the silence wouldn’t be as absolute and as violating as it would be were they in a private setting. They only pulled this card on occasions such as this, The Day Mako Went Away For Likely The Rest of Time, Forever.

They’d ordered drinks first — Moscato d’Asti, light and fairly soft on the spectrum between soft and hard drinks, for Jem; some ridiculously intense Zinfandel for Mako, poured until a mere inch of air existed between its bloody horizon and the rim of the glass — then spent awhile trading comments of varying consequence about the nice May weather and the milquetoast government and the frankly awful dinner party they’d gone to the previous week (during which Mako drank slightly too much and nearly got in a fist fight with some Pākehā self-proclaimed expert on World Heritage Sites and “cultural preservation”) before finally, the air settled around them in such a way that it was okay to get down to business, neural handshake having totally set in by that point.

“You’re going to be okay,” is what Jem had said, suddenly so tender and so serious and just, no, way too much over the two glasses of wine that sat on the table between them. He’d paused for Mako’s reaction (which was indiscernible initially), then said it again: “You’re going to be okay, mate.” He’d said this two or three times more. He’d kept repeating it, Mako thought, to comfort the both of them, or perhaps even so the words coming out of his mouth wouldn’t manifest as something like “Don’t leave” or “I don’t want you to go” or “But this is your home” or “Please, please don’t leave.”

He hadn’t hesitated in telling him he’d miss him, though.

Mako had rubbed the tip of his finger along the rim of his glass and hummed in the back of his throat because it was soothing to do as much as it was to hear. “I’ll miss you, too,” he’d said, and his best friend of approximately fourteen years had just smiled softly at him in the pale light of the evening like something right out of a movie — as if their stupid lives could ever be so rosy and picturesque, though sometimes Mako really believed they could when they looked at each other the ways in which they sometimes did or when it was Thursday night and his entire life was about to change.

“Are you happy?” Jem had asked, nursing his glass of white. He always knew how to ask questions that were all knives wrapped in innocuous and concerned. Normally, Mako would have been confused and conflicted and never mad, but vaguely irritated with a question like that, but just then, when he’d been answering those kinds of questions for as long as he could remember and was right on the verge of not hearing those same questions firsthand anymore for an indeterminate amount of time, perhaps, he felt nothing but gratitude.

And he had said, “I don’t know.”

And he had said, “I’m happy for the opportunity, of course. The city is a hot mess, but in a good way, you know. It’s a cool magazine, it’s a cool job. They’re ‘honored to have me,’ which is always great for the ego, and it’s what I’ve wanted to happen for me since… since I decided what I wanted to do.”

And he had said, “That doesn’t answer your question.”

Jem had done that softly smiling thing again, but this time it was more knowing than sorrowful, more Leave-it-to-you-to-say-a-million-words-and-never-quite-get-to-the-point than I’m-so-sad-you’re-putting-an-ocean-and-a-continent-between-us. “How about a different one, then?”

“Shoot.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Live inside you.”

Then was the time to take advantage of the waitresses dancing between tables and the watery classical music streaming from some indiscernible speaker in the bistro and the Boflex men walking prissy dogs that passed outside the window. Then was the time to go fish-eyed and silent and momentarily thoughtful in the face of such honesty — but they both had known then that the likelihood of their relationship dying before either one of them did was going to spike the moment Mako stepped on his Qantus tomorrow, so better then than ever to talk about feelings.

“I don’t think that’s healthy or physically possible,” Jem had remarked, a knee-jerk deflection. Mako had since developed a kind of callus over the part of him that was sensitive to their hypermasculine emotionally constipated bullshit, so the spaces in his chest hadn’t begun to sing and sting in reply.

Instead, he’d put his head down on the table for all the public to see and murmured, kind of like the child he’d never actually stopped being, “Still want to.”

Jem had made a sighing noise. “Me too, mate.”

“D’you wanna go home and snog about it for three hours, while we can still make that decision?”

Silence for a while, then came the shushed reply: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

So they hadn’t. Jem had surrendered to holding his hand in public and holding his body in public and letting their temples commune while they swayed visibly with the force of gravity and their own impending separation in public, but they’d saved the snogging for years later, after Mako was already long gone.

In the weeks and months before leaving for the Crescent City, Mako and his mother had done the emotionally and physically excruciating work of selling Nana Victoria’s farm up in Raukokore, approximately four hundred kilometers north. They’d waited all through February and March for some happy and rich software architect in Tauranga to decide that he and his family wanted a nice! big! house! right on the Bay of Plenty!, then packed up Mako’s car and made the drive up to spend a week cleaning up the artifacts of both of their childhoods from the home’s bathrooms and bedrooms and living room and sun room and attic, in yellow rubber gloves and old blue jeans.

Up into the attic, Mako had dragged the Rubbermaid rubbish bin from downstairs and began to fill it with all of the things Nana Victoria had left in the world after her death and he and his mother had simply forgotten or refused to get rid of for the sake of their composure until then: the earth-colored clay flowerpots painted with primitive representations of daisies and violets, the assortment of Bay of Plenty sea shells that would have ordinarily given Mako pause had his objective not been to vacate the house entirely for the aliens that were coming to roost, the silver dollar plants that lo-and-behold had lost almost all of their dollars, the long since emptied wine jugs from places like Romania and Australia and California. He’d thrown away the old and rotting florist’s clay and florist’s tape and all of Nana’s watering cans eaten away by oxidation and covered in rust, the Japanese porcelain dish set that would probably garner a pretty penny on eBay if Mako had cared enough to do anything but let it hit the bottom of the trash can with a sharp clink-clacking sound of breakage, the likewise Japanese but almost certainly flea market fake scrolls decked out with kanji Nana used to tell him meant vague idyllic things like strength and peace, the ancient bottle of margarita mix whose insides had turned in the years since its sale from an appetizing apple green to gray-brown half-solid sludge. He’d paused at the mix CD labeled in Nana’s distinctive lilting scrawl “SOFT ROCK,” let it hover over the rubbish bin before tucking his T-shirt in and slipping it into the place between his abdomen and cotton blend Elton John, so he wouldn’t lose it or accidentally toss it. He’d thrown away the moth-bitten drapes, the moth-bitten bedsheets, Great-Uncle Harry’s moth-bitten World War II uniform.

In the master bathroom, he’d waded through a sea of ointment tubes petrified by time, of untouched loofahs and too-touched loofahs, of relics like bottled Mercurochrome and even some Zimelidine that had Mako questioning every interaction he’d ever had with his grandmother in life, of bottles of waxified lotion that had been used up until near-emptiness and then forgotten about in favor of new things of shea butter and St. Ives. He’d stacked the old and dusty towels in one black garbage bag and balled the disgusting shower curtain with soap scum accumulated on the bottom into a separate bag meant for actual trash. He’d done away with Nana’s candles and the old tubes of nail polish and toothpaste and shaving cream they’d all used in their own ways in the decades prior — Mum’s once-favorite shade of Sally Hansen (“Soak at Sunset”), his teenage can of Barbasol, Nana’s toothpaste for sensitive teeth with added baking powder. He’d washed his hands, stared for five minutes into the metallic gray tile, and gone to see what Mum was up to.

That night, rather than retreating to their own designated rooms from past tradition, mother and son had gone to sleep in Nana Victoria’s California King, chilly from the lack of occupying bodies in the past several years. They’d spoken to each other about what to do with the television from across a respectful yet intimate six inches of mattress.

“It’s practically a dinosaur now,” Mum had said, voice hushed as if not to disturb the dead family members that definitely crowded into the room’s corners and curled their transparent bodies into the cracks in the ceiling above and the floor beneath. She brought a hand up between them to tuck a piece of silvery hair behind her one ear exposed to the air. “Can’t believe how much I paid for it at the time. Heaps, bro. You have no idea how much five-hundred dollars used to be.”

“We could always keep it,” Mako had said, then they’d grinned at each other. They’d laughed wheezy, silly little laughs into the air between them.

“Maybe we could give it to the school?” Mum had ventured.

“Like they need it. They probably have better TVs by now.”

“You’re right. We should just toss it. Everything else is going in the rubbish.”

Mako had slept facing his mother that night. The next day, they’d walked the 1980s television all the way from the farm to the side of the winding road nearest to it, where at the very least, small animals might create nests inside of it.

The day they’d headed back to Wellington, Mako had walked around the house — then cavernous after it had been emptied of all of their personal effects and furniture — with dust in his eyes and a stone in his gut. Oily, squarish spots where pictures had once hung had stared at him from the walls, daring him to remember the snapshot of Mum when she had gone off to college and rode her bike everywhere in denim bell-bottoms and cashmere turtlenecks; or the one of an angular and smiling Nana Victoria in her twenties alongside Great-Aunt Molly and Great-Uncle Harry, in the days when they were newborn adults and had just opened the general store in Raukokore; or the one of him with Cher the black sheep, his eight year-old hands sunk into her sable wool while the goats Joan Jett and Smokey Robinson dawdled in the background; or him with his first car, or him chopping potatoes, or him dozing on the couch.

The house sold for two-hundred and fifty grand. Mako still thinks about that number, whether or not he’d sold family history for too little. The ancestors, no doubt, would be horrified.

They’d made the final, ultimate movement in May. Flown three hours and forty-five minutes from Wellington International in Wellington to Kingsford International in Sydney, where they’d then spent the night at the Mantra before boarding a second plane the next morning to LAX. Fourteen hours of sitting. Fourteen hours of Kory, then only six, watching Disney movies on Mako’s MacBook and weeping out of sheer exhaustion, burrowing her little face into Mako’s chest while he carded fingers through her seasick hair and chewed Doublemint until it tasted like nothing but the inside of his mouth and did not smoke any cigarettes, dammit. Fourteen hours of Mum snoring like a freight train to the chagrin of all other passengers, and Kory napping with her body sprawled halfway across Mako’s lap, and Mako sleeping not at all, just staring at the window and the ceiling and the balding crown of the man seated directly in front of him, the crusty bits of eczema that peeked between the thinning hairs.

The stop in Los Angeles had been three hours and fifty-five minutes long. Mako had lain on the thin, patterned carpet of the waiting area with Kory curled on top of him like a cat for most of that time, his eyes closed and his arm loosely draped atop his daughter’s slumbering body and him no, still not sleeping, while Mum trawled through the airport for sustenance that at least looked like it was healthy. Then it was off to New Orleans, off to their vacant new house in the Bywater with its small labyrinth of international mail boxes, off to spending the first night on mattresses laid out on the living room floor, Kory still clinging to Mako’s chest like she depended on him for even the simple act of breathing (and in some ways, she did, and in some ways, she still does). Mako had slept then. Badly, of course, but he slept.

The next morning, he was astounded by the soaking, penetrating heat of New Orleans, the way it made his innards the consistency of fluxed butter, everything outside of the ten foot radius around him distorted by liquid heat waves, plants and asphalt and cars swimming in pure hot. When they all took off from Wellington, it was a rather chilly 50 Fahrenheit and the city’s signature wind whipped affectionately around their bodies, howling, “Goodbye! I love you!” to them in transparent tones. Walking down the cracked Crescent City sidewalk on their first day of North American life, however — mostly silent, captivated by the teeming vegetation bursting through pavements and graffitied wooden and iron fence posts, gazing with blunted surprise at the frankly insane potholes carved like alien moon craters into the asphalt road, nodding vaguely and only half-agreeably when Mum so bitchily remarked, “Infrastructure, eh.” — Mako believed in some faraway corner of his mind that by the end of the week he’d be dead and all his organs would have melted like hot wax in this 90-degree nonsense, that he would wake up full of nothing but blood and bone soup and find his daughter and his mother in much the same state and it would have all been, as usual, his fault alone. And this, of course, was just the beginning.

There’s something almost traumatic about moving from the Bumfuck, Egypt bottom right edge of the world into the swirling-loud synaptic-intense upper left center of it. Of going to live in a synapse. Of selling your possessions — in extremely consumerist/modernist as well as Māori essence, your very lived self along with them — to start almost entirely fresh, clutching your little plastic pill organizer and your family members all the while. You never quite recover from it.

“I keep dreaming about Raukokore,” is what Mako is saying on Thursday. “I mean — the place I grew up, sorry.” He’s playing with the small ceramic elephant on the side table, passing it idly between his fingers. Why do therapists always have inane knickknacks in their offices in movies and, astoundingly enough, real life as well? Story at eleven.

China pulls her face out of the wad of Kleenex she’s been blowing all of her internal organs into out of her nose for the past thirty seconds. “Okay,” she says, nasal and still very much honey-voiced. “Let’s talk about that. Is it bothering you in any way?”

Instead of answering, Mako gives the woman a deep and sympathetic grimace. “Are you sure you’re okay? I mean, I can wait ‘till my appointment next week if you want to take an hour to you know, decompress your skull, take a nap–”

“Oh, please.” China, a regular LeBron James, tosses her snotty tissue into the wastebasket near her desk, a whole yard and a half away from where she sits cross-legged in a pale teal living chair. Buckets, Mako thinks. “This is nothing. Tell me what’s going on.”

Mako takes a moment to orient his thoughts, to worry the inside of his bottom lip with his teeth and search the office for something to just look at — the framed photograph on China’s desk of a girl approximately seven years old in red overalls with lettuce hem. She looks just like China with the same thin, almond-shaped eyes; the same full and flushed apples of her cheeks; the same straight bangs cut off just below the eyebrows. China has never mentioned having a daughter, but Mako guesses she really wouldn’t considering the therapeutic nature of their relationship.

“I have this… thing.” Mako places the elephant legs-down on his thigh. “It’s like… every time something happens that makes me step back and like, meta-think, and realize that my brain doesn’t work the same way it used to, I remember being a kid and being normal. Of course I was never really normal — ASD and all that jazz — but I used to be mostly stable and just, emotionally okay like other people, and now I’m not and I’m like, painfully aware of that every time I dip into a depressive phase or realize my thoughts are racing or that I’m talking way too fast or can’t talk at all, and then I dream of Raukokore, because that was where I was more normal, and I try to pinpoint the time when I stopped being normal, and it always occurs to me that it was probably when I moved back to Wellington after my Nan died, and just… I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“Do you think it’s useful to try and divide your life this way?”

Mako’s brows caterpillar. “What do you mean?”

“I mean–” China pauses to sniffle. “I mean, what are you getting out of dividing your life into these two… I’m going to call them oppositional phases. Normal and not-normal. Bipolar and not-bipolar. What are you getting out of that distinction?”

Mako traces his eyes over the ceiling tiles and each infinitesimal gray pinprick within them. “I guess nothing. I just… it feels good in those moments when I know for sure that I’m crazy to look back to a time when I wasn’t and know that I have that potential, at least, to be normal.” A laugh bursts out of him. “Or maybe I don’t anymore. Maybe there are all these things I can’t go back to. I can’t go back to New Zealand, I can’t go back to being, like, sane, I can’t… I can’t go back to the life I had before, and I don’t know how to deal with it.”

“Does it make you unhappy that you can’t go back?”

And of course she would ask that, the deceptively obvious question that makes his whole head spin and begins to place everything in tiny little boxes with legible labels and clearly-marked capacities for neuroticism and general mental bullshit.

Mako says, “No.” Stops, squints at the spot on the wall just above China’s head. “No? Kind of. There’s a part of me that is really calm and really accepting and one with the universe or whatever, who’s okay with living with all these choices that I’ve made and the fact that I’m a sick person and I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life, but then there’s another part that’s always screaming at me because oh my God! What if I fucked up my whole life and Kory’s whole life and Jem’s whole life moving us halfway across the world? What if being sick ends up losing me my job and my house or my life, even, depending on how bad it gets? What if… where did all that potential go, the potential to go through life talking to people and making plans and raising my kid and being in a relationship without feeling like my head is on fire like fifty percent of the time? Is it gone? Will I ever know what my life could have been like if I hadn’t hit the genetic-environmental lottery and ended up like this?”

“No, you won’t.”

Mako looks at China.

China looks at him, twisting her inky hair into a loose bun that rests at the nape of her neck.

“You’re right.”

“I know this.” China smiles, a Mona Lisa knowing whisper of a thing. “That part of you that you’re talking about — that voice? Don’t be afraid to sit down with it and love it, okay? Because that’s all it wants. It’s just scared and in need of some reassurance. That voice isn’t you.”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure that by definition it is me.”

“I’m pretty sure that by definition you aren’t your illness, which that voice is a manifestation of. It isn’t you, Mako. It just happens to live with you.”

Mako casts his eyeballs heavenward. “Choice roommate.”

“All it wants is love.” China retrieves another Kleenex from the box atop her thigh and tweaks with it her pale, button nose. “Whenever it starts screaming at you, just talk very gently back.”

That night, Mako opts out of cooking dinner to lie in bed for two hours, curled around Jem’s usual pillow while his family negotiates their culinary choices in his absence. Internally, silently, he berates himself for his selfishness; for his unforgivable abandonment of two grown-ass adults and one adolescent in favor of indulging his own depressive urge to block out every moving, breathing aspect of the world for a little while; for his inability to last an entire week without slipping into that inevitable pit of exhaustion and incompetency — why can’t he get his shit together, he wonders. Why isn’t he normal?

He sits up in the bed and finds his dim, gently warped reflection in the small television across the room.

“I love you,” he says to it.

His reflection simply stares back. Later, eating Mum’s Māori take on ratatouille from a plastic yellow bowl while Kory tries to get him to feature in her Instagram story, he feels slightly less than frenzied. He’ll have to thank China for everything next week.