Scorch Atlas (10 page)

 

 

 

 

Imagine how when the water rose high enough to cover the whole house. How you could see the tip of the chimney on the lip—
an eye
.

 

 

 

 

This is the cul-de-sac where I once socked my neighbor for saying my parents were going to die. Bobby had a stye over his right eye from not sleeping—bright yellow, oozing, swollen so big he couldn’t blink. He said he’d read the Bible and there was still time for absolution.

 

 

 

 

Remember how his was the first body I saw floating bloated on the rain, a school of malformed fan fish nipping at his back.

 

 

 

 

Remember how you never know it’s coming until it’s there and then it’s there.

Imagine how they swam until their arms ached, their lungs heavy in their chest.

 

 

 

 

This is a ruined veranda.

 

 

 

 

This is where I sometimes liked to hide.

 

 

 

 

This is the mouth of the sewer. Vortex of lost balls. Remember how on hot days you could see the heat rise in wavy lines. How on that first day, after six hours of torrential downpour, the manhole overflowed and bubbled, and the water spread out from around it, washing sludge and shit into the street.

 

 

 

 

This is a makeshift graveyard where we all buried our pets. No one could say who’d started, but you could count a hundred markers: cats, dogs, ferrets, snakes, hamsters, goldfish, lizards. The dirt was soft and loamy, fat with earthworms, ripe, alive. In April the flowers grew here first. Remember when Moxie died—followed by both Moonbeam and Skipper within hours, each living off the other, connected in the pulse—my father carried them one over each shoulder. He made me watch while he struck ground, heaving. The emphysema had him too. My mother began to recite a benediction and he told her to shut her mouth.

 

This is blacktop concrete, great for skinning knees.

 

 

 

 

This is a children’s playground.

 

 

 

 

Imagine secondary drowning where inhaled salt water foams up in the lungs.

 

 

 

 

This is a spacious 4 bed 2.5 bath colonial with formal dining area, fireplace, walkout basement, in-ground sprinklers and a kidney bean shaped pool.

 

 

 

 

This is the Anderton’s, the Banks’s, the Barrett’s, the Butler’s, the Carlyle’s, the Canter’s, the Crumps’, the Davidson’s, the Dumbleton’s, the Fulton’s, the Grant’s, the Griggs’s, the Guzman’s, the Kranz’s, the Lott’s, the Peavey’s, the Peery’s, the Pendleton’s, the Ray’s, the Rutledge’s, the Smith’s, the Stutzman’s, the Weidinger’s, the Woods’s, the Worth’s.

 

 

 

 

Imagine shallow water blackout, heart attack, thermal shock, and stroke. The skies alive in color. No light, no sting, no sound.

 

This is street number 713, abandoned since I was eight. Murmur of murder. Phantom life. The paint was green and chipping. The grass had grown up around the hedges, the trees leafless all year round. Sometimes in the evenings you’d see a light come on upstairs. Remember the summer some kid’s cousin went in during night. How he didn’t come back out for hours, and later they found he’d fallen through the stairwell and snapped his back. Remember the way I sat up all hours as a preteen already balding, staring through my bedroom window at the house with one eye and then the other.

 

 

 

 

This is the last square of the sidewalk.

 

 

 

 

This is telephone wire.

 

 

 

 

This is mud.

 

 

 

 

This is a rowboat, long abandoned, rotten, mired in stagnant water.

 

 

 

 

This is the steeple, still uncovered—the high mark of the flood’s thread. Remember the copper swallow of communion, the tab pressed against the tongue. Remember trying to imagine how my father could stand the burn of every evening; how his throat must have been mottled from all he’d poured through there, I imagined. How he’d seen me come home through the front door in my Sunday suit and spat.

 

Imagine the ocean approaching overhead. Imagine waking up under dripping ceiling. The puddle plodding on the carpet, the water already having filled mostly up the stairs. My parents’ bedroom on the first floor. The coughing swallowed, calm. Remember my mother’s wet head in the bedroom, a hundred thousand thin blonde protein fingers spreading out as I swam down to kiss her face.

 

 

 

 

This is a quiet evening.

 

 

 

 

This—I’m not quite sure.

 

 

 

 

Imagine nowhere. Imagine nothing. A world all swollen and asleep.

 

 

 

 

These are the tips of the tallest trees—the funny firs up to their wrecked necks, spreading out distended undersea. See the new nests brimmed with egg. The mothers’ wings weak, flown for hours after food over the flat, shimmering face of endless water.

They carried the child into the outside by his wrists and ankles, wriggling. His flesh had turned translucent. His mouth would often froth. They waded waist-deep into the sewage past the upended Mustang where neighbor Bill had tried to drive—the engine crusted over now, back wheels high in the air. The rain had wrecked the city, burst the sewers, drowned the roads. Downtown was underwater. Bill, like many others, had still believed in some way out. He’d spent hours out there with a lone rope trying to yank the Mustang free, his crazed face and muscles so stretched and shining it seemed he might burst open or combust. Finally it was the dogs that had gotten to him, mange-mottled packs of ex-pets combing the old neighborhood for blood. They’d ripped him limb from limb, to rib and tendon. Gnats made short work of the remainder.

The child’s first word had been
rot
. He’d been staring at his wrecked head in the mirror when he said it. He touched his reflection on the eyes. When the parents tried to take the shard away, he squealed and hugged the glass. He seemed pleased with his image, even after his body had begun to distort. Where once he’d had the father’s features, his skin expunged a short white rind. First in his crevices—armpits, nostrils, teeth holes, backs of knees—then the chest and cheeks and eyes. The parents tried so much to wash the gunk away—they tried soap, peroxide, bleach, hot water, rubbing, prayer—nothing made the child clean. The thick white mush became a second skin. It smelled of burnt rubber and stung the nose.

In the evenings, the dogs threw themselves against the house. The father had been able to keep them off for several days with a shotgun until they learned he had no bullets, then they chewed through the siding on the garage and got into what little food the father had scavenged from nearby abandoned houses. The dogs wolfed down everything in seconds that the father had been determined to make last.

With the floodwaters up to their chests, the parents stopped and held the infant boy above their heads. They wore rubber
gloves to prevent their own infection. In the low light the child cast no shadow.

They were looking at each other then. The father opened his mouth to say something but did not. The mother opened her mouth to say something and also didn’t.

Together they held the child. They held him up until the blood moved into their shoulders and their arms began to shake. They lowered their son down slowly until they couldn’t help it. They laid their son down on the muck.

The baby floated. His head sat nuzzled in the algae on the lip, awaiting strange baptism. His cackle seemed almost a language. It made the father’s insides curl.

The father and the mother had been to service every Sunday for decades—until the pastor fell into spasm in midst of prayer—until the muck had lapped to cover even the steeple in its valley. All those wooden pews now underwater. All their prayers and hymns and paper money. The father remembered the taste of his dry mouth just before it filled with the copper lap of communion wine. His ass falling asleep beneath him during the sermon as he sat holding his son just so to keep the boy from screaming. He remembered the pleat of his khaki pants. Choke of his necktie. Squeak of loafer. The squelch of radio static on the drive home as his wife flipped from station to station each time a song she liked ended, searching for another amongst the noise.

The child’s second word had been
nothing
. He hadn’t had time yet to learn a third. The foam had begun to flake off of the carpet. He couldn’t keep food inside him, couldn’t see through swollen lids. The parents had gotten on their knees and begged to god to send an answer. They kissed the Bible, crossed their chests. They did not receive word.

As more time passed the child’s condition worsened. The boy’s hair was turning gray, then a mesh of colors. He sneezed several times a minute. He had to suck air through a tube. Things could not go on this way, the parents said to one another—their child was miserable and in pain. They felt his suffering in their stomachs, hot and dry and spreading out.

They’d come to a decision.

Among the muck the air was threaded, webbed like lettuce, grinding light. The father put his gloved hands across the child’s face. He inhaled and closed his eyes.

 

Back at home, still braised and reeling, the parents found the front windows busted—ones they’d thought too high for dogs to enter. The living room was shredded. The dogs had eaten the innards of the mattress where the parents had slept with the baby coddled between them before his infestation. The dogs had eaten the sack of half-green leaves the father had climbed several trees for, another makeshift dinner. They’d scratched the walls and shit all over the carpet.

The mother sat in the floor limp-limbed and wept in sips of stuttered air.

The father watched her, saying nothing. Something squirmed behind his eyes. He turned from her for the attic. The attic where he kept the rope. The stairs creaked beneath him as he clambered, his raw joints cracking, the wood old and rotting, giving out.

In the far back corner there, sitting upright on a bale of insulation, the father found the child returned from where they’d left him. The child’s eyes were red around the pupils, reflective in their centers. Though he no longer had the white rind, he’d swollen to twice his prior size—his head a bulbous, pulsing thing. The room stunk of rotten melon. The room seemed very small.

The mother and the father had had the child together after endless months of empty luck. The mother had suffered numerous miscarriages. They doctors said her womb was ripped, polluted.
A common problem herein
was how they termed it. The parents continued trying anyway. This was before the floods, but after the malls and movie theaters and markets had all closed. After the sky began changing color—neon pink, then white, then gold. People had been collapsing by the hundreds. The earth’s face was cracking, spitting open. Hordes of grasshoppers. Gobs of bees. But then this child—their hope, their glimmer—it appeared inside her made of light. The parents were so excited they couldn’t even pick a name. They spent hours on suggestions, thumbing phonebooks, testing the sound of certain syllables in their mouths, but nothing seemed quite to come together—nothing was their son.

Because no doctors’ doors were open, the father performed the delivery himself. He coached the mother through her hee-hee breathing, the grunt and groan, the blather. Afterwards he couldn’t flush the memory of his wife’s brown blood all sputtered on his
hands. There was still a spot on the carpet that stayed no matter how hard he tried to scrub it out.

The father knew this wasn’t actually the child now here before him in the attic—he’d watched the bubbling go still. It was some mirage, a function of his grief. He couldn’t keep himself from staring.

The ruined child opened up its runny mouth.

“
One woe is past
,” it quoted, its voice cragged and rotten, an old man’s. “
And, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.”
Smoke rose from its speckled gums as the words came. Spittle popping on its lips.

One woe? the father thought. More like ten thousand. You could probably fit a billion woes in every day depending on how small you sliced the hour.

The child repeated: “
Two woes more hereafter
.” It seemed to gag on its own tongue. It looked into the father, blinking. It said, “My anus is a portal.”

The room around them slightly rolled.