Excerpt from Finding Life on Mars
The next day she had left his apartment early, before sunrise, before he was awake. Gone down to the main street to find a spot on a rooftop. People were already starting to stake out their spots to view the running. They smiled at each other, waved. She got a position on a flat rooftop with a guardrail, stood there and watched the sun rise orange and dusty, felt the sweat intensify on her neck again. Her hair stuck there, uncomfortable, until she tied it into a bun.
An hour later she was hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred other people on a rooftop with room for twenty, wondering if it could support their weight - but of course this rooftop had seen a hundred such runnings and it was just her first. And what did it matter? It had been a good life, because she had taken chances and seen everything she could while she could.
A mile away, men gathered - and some women, too - nervously stretching and laughing and pretending not to be nervous. Raffael would be among them, but Madelaine could not tell one person from another at this range. She could feel their tension, could almost taste it with the dust on her tongue, see it building up around them like a brown haze.
She told herself she would not look for him, would just feel the spectacle without intention, but when the men came charging through the street below she could not help herself. She never saw him, though. She saw so many men, all of them just the same. They wore different clothes, had different hair, different faces, different eyes and hands and watches, but they were all the same that day: runners looking for life in a dusty street, steps ahead of death.
The bulls thundered along behind them, boulder-sized mounds of flesh and hair and bone, juggernauts of thunder, rolling drums of force. There was the maned beast that had eyeballed her the night before. There was a huge black bull with white flashes on his hooves. They didn't catch any of the runners that year. One young woman tripped and fell and skinned her hands but they just ran by and she picked herself up and chased them, fifty-five kilos of woman after ten thousand kilos of bull, running with her head back and laughter streaming from her throat as her hair streamed back from her head.
Madelaine had seen everything Earth could offer in those five years. Snorkeled off a hundred coasts, touched groupers and sharks and rays, hiked under Kilimanjaro, carried water in the Masai Mara, ran with wild horses in Montana. Climbed through towers and dungeons in European castles a thousand years old, eaten rice in a New Delhi slum even older. Thrown paint and been painted in Bangladesh. Painted coffins in Chengdu before eating scorpions off skewers from a Chinese street vendor.
Later, she had held a daughter in her arms, Olivia. Seen the dusty Martian sky, the ground so much like the Montana badlands. Seen Earth from space, seen alien moons, the tiny white Sun in the sky.
What good were eyes, what could they show her now that her memory could not? And what she remembered best was that young woman running after the bulls, chasing them with no mind for the consequences should she catch them, just the joy of life, doing, being.
An hour later she was hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred other people on a rooftop with room for twenty, wondering if it could support their weight - but of course this rooftop had seen a hundred such runnings and it was just her first. And what did it matter? It had been a good life, because she had taken chances and seen everything she could while she could.
A mile away, men gathered - and some women, too - nervously stretching and laughing and pretending not to be nervous. Raffael would be among them, but Madelaine could not tell one person from another at this range. She could feel their tension, could almost taste it with the dust on her tongue, see it building up around them like a brown haze.
She told herself she would not look for him, would just feel the spectacle without intention, but when the men came charging through the street below she could not help herself. She never saw him, though. She saw so many men, all of them just the same. They wore different clothes, had different hair, different faces, different eyes and hands and watches, but they were all the same that day: runners looking for life in a dusty street, steps ahead of death.
The bulls thundered along behind them, boulder-sized mounds of flesh and hair and bone, juggernauts of thunder, rolling drums of force. There was the maned beast that had eyeballed her the night before. There was a huge black bull with white flashes on his hooves. They didn't catch any of the runners that year. One young woman tripped and fell and skinned her hands but they just ran by and she picked herself up and chased them, fifty-five kilos of woman after ten thousand kilos of bull, running with her head back and laughter streaming from her throat as her hair streamed back from her head.
Madelaine had seen everything Earth could offer in those five years. Snorkeled off a hundred coasts, touched groupers and sharks and rays, hiked under Kilimanjaro, carried water in the Masai Mara, ran with wild horses in Montana. Climbed through towers and dungeons in European castles a thousand years old, eaten rice in a New Delhi slum even older. Thrown paint and been painted in Bangladesh. Painted coffins in Chengdu before eating scorpions off skewers from a Chinese street vendor.
Later, she had held a daughter in her arms, Olivia. Seen the dusty Martian sky, the ground so much like the Montana badlands. Seen Earth from space, seen alien moons, the tiny white Sun in the sky.
What good were eyes, what could they show her now that her memory could not? And what she remembered best was that young woman running after the bulls, chasing them with no mind for the consequences should she catch them, just the joy of life, doing, being.
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