The Narvarian Treaty

–Jay Ruzesky   From The New Quarterly #133

They sold me a planet. I had to act fast so I bought it sight unseen. I would normally be more cautious, but this planet was a foreclosure going cheap – ridiculously low. A friend was a real estate salesman and had a line on it. He said no one else knew and if we slipped the right kind of offer in this minute and made it cash, they’d bite. They wanted it off the books. And he was right. I was signing papers a few hours later.

Bill shook my hand and said, “here you go. You’e now the proud owner of Narvi. It’s all yours. How about a drink?”

I suppose I’d wanted it for a while. I was in that place in life where people start looking for challenges. The kids were growing up and to be honest, one of my favourite daydreams was about all of us on our own planet in summer. I’d stroll along the dock with my white linen shirt open carrying two gin and tonics. My wife would be soaking up the suns in the chaise and I’d cover one of them with my shadow and bend to kiss her before giving her the drink. The children would be in the lake or the ocean or whatever and the days would go by like that- lots of reading and barbeques and hikes here and there around the planet until it was time to go back to earth and the routines of autumn. When I dreamed it, I saw it as a place to unplug and unwind, and ignored what I’d heard other people saying, “Having your own planet is great, but there are things you need to think about. First of all, are you going to rent it when you’re not there or is it going to sit empty, because a planet that sits empty for nine or ten months of the year is trouble waiting to happen. Another friend had talked about how hard it was not to do work on his planet when he was there; it seemed that there was always some part of it that needed patching or shoring up.

I knew I was being conned by my own romanticism but I dove in anyway. It was an investment, I said to myself. I could always flip it if it didn’t work, and if it turned out to be a dream come true, all the better.

Bill had some photos and we looked at them in his office before the deal closed.

“It’s more a moon than a planet,” he said. “I don’t want to misrepresent it. It’s actually a `moonlet or not even. I think the technical term is `irregular satellitewith a `retrograde orbit but there’s not a single MLS agent who is going to put it like that. Makes it sound like there’s something wrong with it, like it’s a Hyundai with a diesel motor that runs on cat urine. But Narvi is a gem. Let me show you.

I couldn’t argue with the pictures. It was a pretty little thing. Just 56.6 kilometers in diameter, and, therefore, easy as far as maintenance went; and the colour was fabulous: pearlescent. It was as if it glowed from within and changed from a sort of pinky white to golden to a ghostly blue depending on where it was in that retrograde orbit. I fell in love with it. It’s as simple as that. Even though I’d convinced myself that a guy was better off taking his holiday dollars and renting a place, I found myself pen in hand signing away like a movie star. I think the truth was that I liked the idea of owning it. I wanted a little piece of the universe I could call mine. No matter what, it would always be there in the heavens卜y own private piece of the sky.

Well, you can imagine how surprised I was a few months later the first time I set foot on Narvi with the family. The kids were excited all the way there; I could tell by the way their eyes bounced around in sleep as if they were watching popcorn pop. I should say that my wife was stunned when I first came home and told her. She wasn’t upset about me buying the planet, but felt betrayed that I hadn’t included her in the decision. “Is it your money or ours?” She got it that the sale had to happen without hesitation, but I could have called, she said. “What do you carry that phone around for anyway?Truth is, I knew I could have called, but I also felt this was my thing. I’m all for sharing, but I wanted this little deal to be my own. I wanted to be the one who was doing this good thing for my family. I wanted to provide. She makes more money, but the cash for the planet came out of the inheritance from my dad so I felt it was my right to spend it however I wanted. I didn’t tell her that though. I agreed and showed her the pictures and she fell in love with it too. Forgiveness was a ripe tomato, easily picked.

I was nervous when we landed. Would it be everything we hoped? Well, in a way, it was. I wasn稚 looking for that new planet smell. I knew Narvi had been around the block a few billion times and that there were going to be signs of wear and tear. What I wasn’t expecting was inhabitants. There was a whole goddamn race of people there: villages, temples, the complete disaster. And I know they’d seen earthlings before. There is just no way that they hadn’t, and yet they greeted us as if we were aliens. I didn’t know what language they were speaking. But they seemed peaceful enough and didn’t threaten us with weapons of any kind and that helped me let my guard down a little. And you know what? I’ll give them this. They treated us with nothing but kindness. You’d have thought they knew about the real estate deal and me buying the place, and they were honouring us they way you ought to honour your new landlord. We were feasted with some of the local fare. They ate this thing that was kind of like an oyster except the only water on Narvi is delivered by tankers that serve all the moonlets and I’m the one who had to arrange that. The things smelled like armpits but tasted like strawberries. Fabulous. And they, I call them Narvarians, they had this drink that was a bit like rice wine but had the kick of absinthe. Now as far as I could tell, these Narvarians claimed to have been on the planet since it first formed as a spinning mass of dirt when the galaxy was being shaped but I don’t think so. I suspect that at some point Narvi was connected to Rhea, one of the really big moons, and they must have walked over and then the two separated and Narvi found its own orbit around Saturn. So really, they were just visitors too and I wasn’t about to recognize any indigenous rights. Thing was, they didn’t seem to mind.

I’m pretty good with languages and it wasn’t long before I felt that I could make some sense of these people. I thought they’d be more pissy about us being on the planet all of a sudden, but they weren’t. They said there was plenty of room for everybody and I was welcome to share with them.

“You better believe it,I said. “Share with you alright.

And then I got to thinking, look, these folks seem kind enough and even though they’re squatters, we might be able to make this work. They’re pretty simple folk and if I just let them know that we’re here to stay, they’ll step into line.

One of the things I’d noticed was that they didn’t have any recorded music. For the first two weeks of our holiday, we sat around with them in the evenings (which were 53 hours long) and they’d drum their drums and clap their hands and dance their dances while wearing these big masks that opened up and had other masks inside (I like the masks and brought one back with me to hang on my wall). But there was not a single digital music player in sight. Other than the feasts, there was no music. It occurred to me that we could trade them the gift of music for their hold over the planet. I know I already owned the whole thing anyway, and if you want to stick to the principle of the thing, well ok. But I felt that I could make things happen and keep everybody happy at the same time. Everybody except my son. He didn’t much care for the idea of turning over his earphones for the duration of the holiday but I told him I’d buy him the newest gadgets when we got back to earth and I managed to convince him.

It worked. I asked to talk to the leader, this big guy with a fancy hat that looked like it was made of nebula tails. I brought him all of our musical equipment and gave him a demonstration of how it worked and he went for it like I thought he would. But he looked at me funny, as if he wasn’t quite understanding the transaction. I traded him all but one little corner of Narvi for all of our stereos and I got it in writing; I made him sign a legal agreement which stated that the planet was mine and he was allowed to stay through my own good graces and would be allowed to live on that one little corner in perpetuity. The Narvarian Treaty I called it. Still have a copy.

And then our guests arrived. I’d gone ahead and invited the whole family. We have a reunion every five years and it was my turn to organize so I said, “Hey, why doesn’t everybody come on up to Narvi this year? We’ll have a ball. I also invited some of the guys from work and my wife asked her book club. Now, this is another thing we’d been warned about. Get yourself a summer place and you’ll have an endless stream of guests; you’ll never stop washing towels until everyone goes back to work. But I had thought to myself that if there were things that needed doing around the planet, a whole team could get them done pretty darn quick. And summer works on beer, so that’s a lot of cheap labour.

It was all going fine until one night there’s a scream. We had a bunch of tents set up for guests to sleep in and some young Narvarian boy had been going around peeking into them to see who was in there. He happened to look in to one of them just as my niece Ashley was hooking up her bra and she screamed bloody murder.

I went right on over to the Narvarian territory and had words with their head honcho. “Look here,I said, “We can’t have any of this tomfoolery. You keep your young men out of our tents. In fact, you keep all of your people off of anything but this corner of the planet you signed off on. We have a deal. I have it in writing.

He wined and sniveled and said that they needed to go here and there to harvest the oyster-strawberry things and pick up the this and that they were fond of eating but I said “No way. I traded you for music fair and square; now you just keep to yourself over there.”

I was getting a little tired of it. Here I had bought this planet in good faith and had bent over backwards to make these squatters happy and now this guy is making demands and asking for more. When was that going to end?

I’ll tell you what kind of guy I am though. I am generosity personified, that’s who I am. I came back the next day with a whole case of macaroni and cheese. “Here’s some real food for you,I said. “Summer food. The kind of grub you’re supposed to eat when you don’t want to spend any time cooking.”

He looked at me like I was giving him poison.

“Hey, Chief,I said. “What do you think, I’m trying to poison off your people so you don’t take up so much room? What kind of person do you take me for?

He didn’t answer that, just slunk away quietly with the food and I thought to myself, “There is nothing I can do to make these folks happy, is there?”

That was about all I heard from them for the rest of the summer. The family had a good time – “Best reunion ever!” They all said. I was tempted to invite them back the next year but thought better of it.

About a week before it was time to head back to earth, I got to thinking, “What are the chances that those Narvarians are going to stick to their side of the planet once we’re all gone?And I knew the answer to that right away. None.

Around the barbeque that night, I let slip that I might be happy to have a couple of caretakers to live on the planet in the off season and it turns out there were all kinds of relatives ready and willing to take me up on the offer of a rent-free existence for a few months.

I kept in touch with them for a while, but the next year turned out to be busier than I thought and I really couldn’t afford to take the time out for a holiday. And the following year we were invited to a resort in Thailand. Then the kids were older and didn’t want to leave their boyfriends behind for the whole summer and to tell you the truth, the novelty of Narvi just sort of wore off. I get letters from the cousins who stayed behind but I tend to keep out of their business. Even if I haven’t been back there, I’m happy knowing that my very own planet is waiting for me. I’m just sitting on it for now and when the time is right, I’ll put it back on the market and make enough money to smooth out my retirement pension.

It’s good to know my planet is there. Sometimes at night I lie out on a blanket and look up at the sky and I swear I can see it even though I know I can’t.