Scorch Atlas (11 page)

The child’s mother shouldn’t see this, the father thought. He turned away and hid his eyes. He went back downstairs and locked the door behind him. He tucked a towel under the crack. Though for hours, through whatever insulation, whatever silence, the child’s voice still slammed his head.

 

Back in the living room, the father found the mother staring into the staticked face of the TV. Though the programming stations had been out for months, he still caught her watching rather often, usually with her nose inches from the glass bulb, humming in tune with the sound. For a while he’d refused to let her waste the generator, but now he didn’t even argue.

“Where have you been?” she asked. She didn’t press him. Her hands gripped both sides of the screen. She drooled.

The father watched her for another second, then went into the kitchen and he stood there.

And he stood there. And he stood there. And he stood.

That night, on the carpet, nestled in half-blankets wrecked by moths, the mother spoke her want for a new child.

“Surely it was some kind of error,” she said, pressed against him awkward, their limbs uncomfortable in tangle. “That first baby. That precious sorry little boy. My body needed flushing. We have to try again.”

The father didn’t blink. He could hardly hear her for the baby’s voice still lodged on his brain. He thought of the child there in the attic just above them, pressing its large pus-smothered ear against the attic floor.

“I wouldn’t try again for anything,” the father said quite loudly, to make the child hear too. He did not look at the mother. “No matter what kind of light was promised. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t even.”

The mother’s face became a knot.

“Are you so lost already you couldn’t imagine God’s grace?” She touched him, her fingers icy. He couldn’t look. His blood was still.

She got up out of bed.

She stood in the queer light through the doorway, seething, the gnatty skin crimped at her neck.

“If you won’t help I’ll find a way myself,” she said.

She left the room. The father heard TV static a second later, so loud he could feel it in his teeth. The walls around him seemed to sink. He spread out with his arms and legs in her absence, stretching, the carpet warm in spots. He spoke aloud and tried to reason with her even though he knew she couldn’t hear.

“God,” he kept repeating.

His tongue felt fat, electric near his throat.

Outside, the night was runny. The father cupped air in his cheeks. He breathed and swallowed, breathed and swallowed. He lit a candle and waded back into the muck. Underneath the surface there were currents. Hard clusters near his knees. He moved to where he’d pushed the baby under, if he could remember. He reached deep in with his long arms. The muck gummed his nostrils, shook his lungs. Reaching. Reaching. Nothing. The father bit his splitting
lips. He grunted, stretching harder. Hot wax dripped in slow strings down his other arm. He dropped the candle in the wet. Then the sky was nowhere. The cold face of the moon was blotted out with birthing flies.

He could not find the child.

The father called for his wife into the silence to come and guide him home by voice, but she couldn’t hear or wouldn’t come.

By the time the father made it back to the house the muck had dried across his upper half, a crust that came off in greasy chips. The stinking made him dizzy. He stripped to naked in the front yard. He tried to think of what he’d do if the dogs returned right then. He wondered if he’d fight or just stand and let them rip. He dreamed of incisors, shredding into cells.

He felt his stomach rumble. Mostly, his body had gotten used now to nothing. On worst days they’d eaten cloth or rubble.

What might the child have tasted like? he wondered.

What would the wife?

 

In the living room, still naked, mud-clung in long patterns, the father found the mother passed out with her head propped against the TV. She had a bra left on and nothing else, a see-through thing he’d long since gotten over. Normally he would have carried her to bed and tucked her in but this time he left her crooked and wet, eyes aglow.

In the morning she was still there, inch for inch. Her neck sat crumpled with the burden of her head. He moved to shake her shoulder. Gnats muddled in and around her mouth. The tongue, the meat, already rotting. She’d jabbed a kitchen knife into her stomach. Blood spread around her in an oval. Static seemed to gather at her face. The father stepped back from her, hands wet and trembling. He looked at what she’d done.

He could hear the dogs outside again, hungry, barking, bashing their bodies at the boards. The sheen of the mother’s blood did not quiver in their rhythm.

Overhead he heard the baby breathing through the ceiling, smacking its gums.

Upstairs the child sat swollen even larger—now nearly five times redoubled. In its eyes the father saw translucence, the whirred white flesh of its cornea neon, raw. Its flesh was golden and covered in larvae. It was bigger even than the father.

“
The second woe is passed
,” it said, giggling and cutesy. “
And, behold, the third woe cometh quickly
.”

The father kept his face turned from the son.

“Soon your skin will rupture and your eyes will vomit grease,” the child continued, his voice now several voices. “Your balls will pop and worms will wriggle and the air will liquidate. The seas will rush to smash the sky.”

The breath coming off the child was spotted.

The spots, together, became light.

The father felt the thing behind his eyes spin centered, spraying.

“I don’t even see you,” he shouted. “You’re not there.”

The child guffawed. It slapped its thighs and spit up. In the spit there wriggled something. The father could not inhale. He hurried past the child and took the tools he’d long ago stored away. He left the attic again without looking. Downstairs he could still hear the child’s cracked cackle even with the door closed and locked again.

He carried his wife into the backyard by the armpits. The yard was wet and sunk with residue. The trees had rotted and fallen in. Vast shapes moved on the horizon. In the dead flowerbed he found a soft spot where she could rest.

In an hour he had a hole dug.

In another hour he had her under.

Atop the mound of overturned earth, he spoke benediction: what sacred phrases he could remember. His tongue gnashed at his palate though the words were hard to taste.

That night the sky rained soil.

At first the father thought the sound of the pounding on the roof was the child’s kick and stammer, the child’s long swelling, but through the crack over the high bedroom window the father saw the great crudded gashings of loose earth coming down. The sun hung somewhere muted, disremembered of its light. He tried to think and felt his brain’s wheels catching, grinding wells into his head. His extremities began to tingle, buzzed by the sudden loss
of flowing blood. He felt lightheaded, zoning, dumb. He hadn’t slept in several days. He sat on the wrecked mattress with his knees crossed. There was an impression left among the shredded bulges where for all those years his wife had laid, and another shaped like him. He rolled onto the ridge between their two spots and wondered how long until the ceiling gave, until the earth grew covered over. He chewed his tongue and breathed and breathed. He could hardly think of who he was. He said his name aloud so he’d remember. In repetition, each utterance grew slightly further off from what it should be.

Name, he thought. A son’s name.

Son.

He sat until his head grew so heavy he couldn’t hold it up.

Inside his head it was all one color. His heartbeat skittered in his throat. He did not dream.

He woke to a sour mouth some time later with someone standing over him by the bed. At first he assumed it was the child having come to smother, rub him out.

Okay, he thought. Let’s go.

As his eyes grew accustomed back to the room’s light, he saw the grim, loosed lines of his wife’s face. She looked many years older now already. She coughed up gravel on the mattress.

“Do you remember the first time you fucked me?” she said. “How sweet your kiss was? We bought a room in an old hotel. There were flowers in my hair. I’d never met a man like you. I thought you’d take me places. Light my insides. Do you remember the way you spurted? I’d only known you ten days. You called me another name. How wise your eyes were, rolled back in your head. I had my mind on television.”

She moved toward him, her body hulking. She put a leg up on the bed. He could feel the chill in her forearms, the hair there already grown out long and matted.

“Let’s make this baby,” she said, begging. “A new life. Please, my dearest. Squirt me up.”

He pushed her off. He got up and moved out of the bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him. He waited for her to pound or push but there was nothing. There was no tick, no garbled gobbling. The house was still.

The father opened the door and saw just a room. A room he’d lived and slept in for many years.

Through the window, instead of dirt now, the sky was pouring roach. The critters hit the earth and wriggled upright, already a foot high off the soil. Other bugs erupted from a new budding crevice—leeches, gnats, mosquitoes, wasps. He could hear the collective hum of wings and cilia vibrating in the air.

The dogs were at the front door. They smashed themselves against the frame, howling, hungry, chewing each other. They’ll be inside soon, the father thought. His stomach gurgled. His brain began to click. There were things that he might have known once. Places he had been. Days and numbers, thoughts, corruptions, wishing, exits, lists, and vows. Everything seemed to wriggle in his shoulders. He spoke a thing he knew aloud—it came out wrong.

Upstairs, he found the child again. It had swollen through the attic. Its body pressed against the roof, warping the beams. Its huge bright red pupils spun for focus. The father recognized in the child’s face, even so bloated, certain of the mother’s features, and his own. This thing they’d made together.

The father wanted to kiss the ruined child’s dappled lips. He wanted to climb inside its size and live forever.

The child was saying something. Its voice had also grown enormous, even larger than the house. The child’s tenor seemed to scratch the room, to turn the very air to liquid dust. The child’s voice echoed in the father’s head—a self inside himself incanting with each the word the son then said. At first the words seemed, to the father, nothing, nonsense, a voice thrumming through his skin to rip it, though with all of these words coming out now, the father began to feel something soft inside him glisten. His body washed, an old tide rolling.

All these words, the father felt, were words he knew he wanted—these words were written in his flesh and on his flesh and all around it, in the dirt and water, on the air.

And now the massive baby lay before him, coocooing, while outside the earth began to writhe.

And now the father opened up his numbing mouth and gave his son a name.

When the final crudded current first burst somewhere off the new coast of Oklahoma, I was seventeen and cross-eyed. The storm spread in a curtain. It came and cracked the crust that’d formed over the fields, the junk that’d moored up in our harbors. It washed away most everything not tied down and most everything that was. All those reams of ugly water. All that riddled from the sky.

My family huddled hidden under one another in the house our Dad had built alone. The house where we’d spent these years together. The old roof groaned under the pouring. The leaking basement filled with goo.

LOST:
my gun collection.

LOST:
every board game you can think of.

LOST:
mother’s bowling trophies (30+).

LOST:
our hope for some new day.

For weeks after the onslaught, I spent each afternoon up to my knees, shoveling mud from off of what remained of our crushed huddle. The sun had come back black, redoubled. What hadn’t sunk or gone to mush now sat neck-deep, blobbed and burbling. The earth was bottomless and greedy. It promised to swallow whatever stayed out long enough to glisten. Me and my brothers, though; we fought hard. It was the twelve of us, blonde and hungry, each often nipples-deep and digging through the night. In the mornings, in the dew light, with the sun so hot it singed our hair, the gunk would form a crust—then we could take turns together sleeping, though you could never fully close your eyes. The mud might shift or moan. I’d seen trees get sucked in suddenly like spaghetti into lips. Sometimes, in my basement bedroom, you could hear the screaming through the soil—the folks from other homes who couldn’t fight the heave. I’d watched the Johnsons go down treading, their old muscles ripped and overheating. Mrs. Johnson’s bright yellow noggin with curled hair ribbon bobbed on the surface a full day before it sunk.

It wasn’t long before we fell too. One by one, I watched my brothers fizzle. Eleven boys, aged eight to eighteen, each so tired
their pupils spun. You couldn’t do much once it had you—the mud held tight and suckled quickly. I watched with sore hands as each one tuckered, went under deep, their small heads gone.

At night I drummed up stories for our mother in her linens, so fat she couldn’t fit out from the house. Her gut had swelled to fill the bedroom mostly: the ocean swelled inside her too. She ate in misery. I didn’t blame her. She’d lost the most of all of us. I sold excuses for each drowned baby:
Derry’s gone to Grandma’s, Momma. Phillip’s run off with a girl.
She watched unblinking as I went on. She hadn’t spoke up clear in years. She sometimes croaked or cracked or gobbled, or sputtered gibberish, glassy-eyed: YHIKE DUM LOOZY FA FA, she said. ZEERZIT ITZ BLENN NOIKI FAHCH.