Scorch Atlas (3 page)

The mother stood in the exact center of the son’s room, or what remained of it. The room could be divided into halves: here, from the window to the far corner, where the walls were smudged and plaster dappled and the scorching sat upon the air; and here, past the window to the closet, where much of her son’s stuff sat untouched: the shirt he’d slept in every night since he was ten; the blanket the mother had sewn for him while he was still inside her; the trombone he begged for and never played. Each item encoded with his touch.

Before the son had moved into it, before they’d had a son at all, the burned room had been the master. In that room they’d made the child. He’d been a glimmer in their flat lives. A thing mistaken in the mother as a tumor until the infant sledded out, unbreathing. They’d nearly given up, and now this light. They’d had another child not long after: a thin-skinned daughter, soft of bone, another error no less loved. The house could not contain them. They’d built a new room on the upstairs. The son had taken the old master, where fifteen years later, the air would burn.

They could have let him have the newer room instead.

They could have built several rooms—halls and halls and on forever.

The son could still be with them now.

So many nights the son had come through the house sleepwalking, knocking pictures off the walls. Sometimes he’d stood before her
naked, cut with muscle; the look in his eyes blasted, vacant, as she guided him back to bed.

The mother’s back ached. Her throat was dry as outside, wracked with unseen lesions, rheum. She lay down on the blackened carpet, the stink of old smoke hung around her head. She writhed and rubbed against it, smearing soot along her neck, her gown, her hair.

 

Upstairs the father watched the ceiling. He’d faked deep slumber through his wife’s long sobs. Another night. He knew he should touch her but he didn’t. He could not find a way to spread the intent through his body. He heard her fumble in the ill light. He kept his body fully flexed—mocked in the language of unconscious. She closed the door softly behind her. She’d always been considerate. She’d always kept measured ways around him, despite his caw, despite his bitching. He’d never figured out exactly how to express certain things—just saying them seemed too cheap.

Above the bed there was a skylight which when the room was designed had seemed ideal. Endless slumber under moon glow. An eye into the night. Instead the portal proved offensive—the sun’s angle woke him every morning. It let unwanted modes into his sleeping. He dreamt of black stars exploding in his cheeks; strange figures crawling through his veins behind his forehead; shit spurting from his pores. He’d covered the opening with foam rubber, causing the room to glow at a slight mute. The bed absorbed an aura. At dusk, the sheen of glass would reflect his head back at his eyes. The eyes were always open when he saw them, waiting until he nodded off.
Always there. Another self.
Finally one night while sleeping he’d stood with his feet sinking in the mattress and banged the glass out with his fists until he bled. Now they slept in open air.

In bed alone, the father thought of when he’d tried to teach his son to shave. How the child refused to let him help. How the son had cut his cheek so deep it spurted on the mirror. His son there screaming, face meat covered in white foam, blood sluicing and mixing with the lather; son screaming at the father to go away. That bathroom, where years before, when it was just them, he’d held the mother in the mirror, making four.

The father shuddered on the mattress, wanting a way to lie that would keep his back and neck from crimping, a configuration in
which he could finally click into deep sleep, deep enough to maybe never wake, while in the ruined room below him, his wife wallowed in rhythm, just the same.

 

The house had caught on fire seven times in seven months. Each time it had ignited in a new location, if contained:

Each time the house had glowed in brief fury under the canopy of night. Always under star strum. Always while they slept.

The parents wanted elsewhere. They could not afford to move before they sold the house. They could not sell the house. Each potential buyer who came for viewing left with a strange look on their face. The insurance company sent inspectors who could not determine a clear cause of the frequent combustion. Other buildings had caught fire in the local area from the dry weather, but none so many times as theirs. The insurance company had placed their file under review. Some people used the term
bad fortune
. The mother’s mother said into the phone,
Y’all aren’t living right
.

The mother could not understand what had changed. They’d lived in the house for twenty years. They’d never once had a problem, but now the roof creaked, and the fires. The mirrors came loose in
the bathrooms and fell forward, smashed to bits. The carpet curled up around the corners exposing the smooth green speckled foam beneath. There were often sounds of creaking, louder and more violent than the normal settling of a house: sounds of bones in fingers breaking, something crumpled promptly growing old.

The mother often felt people standing in the eaves behind her. Once, in the sun room, she’d seen her father. Sometimes she heard him in the air vents, in the shower, in the whir of the garage door’s rise. The main thing she could remember of him after all these years was how his teeth would fall out then grow right back in, one set after another.
What made her remember that?
That hadn’t happened. No, she knew he’d kept the sheddings in a small box in his dresser. When he was out, she’d go and look at them all corralled there, a field of enamel, yellowed, sharp.

For years she dreamed of those teeth appearing in her own gums.

For years those teeth lived in her brain.

 

Some nights the father would stand outside the house and still feel its walls surrounding. From enough distance he could pinch the brick between his thumb and finger, hide the light. When he did, his sternum shook, sometimes for days.

 

The son was underground. The seventh fire seemed to have begun inside his mattress. It had engulfed him in his sleep and cracked his teenage skin. They’d assumed at first that he was smoking, but they found no butt, no match, no lighter. The son had been good at school. He’d been respected. He had a girlfriend many others would’ve liked to touch. He was on the swim team and wrote A papers and he won when he played chess. His flesh had partly melded with the mattress. His burning browned the wall and let the moon in. It made a pattern on the ceiling. The ground he was in now was rife with larvae. The mud was bright red and cold and endless. There were sounds that moved through the earth that people above it could not hear.

Before his exit, the son had taken a picture of himself every morning upon waking. He kept the pictures in sequential order, hidden, on the hard drive of his computer. He wanted to one day be
able to look at the files and observe his catalog of aging. He’d never told anyone about this practice. The pictures were still there, saved, somehow preserved amidst the heat.

If the mother had known about the pictures, she would have kept them hidden,
for herself
. She would have noticed how, in the last several months of photographing, something began to creep into the film. How in the air around her son’s head grew a small buzzing, aligned in the photo as a slight blur. How over the last weeks before the son’s death the photos had begun to grow so ruined you could not see most of his face—how the film grew embedded with fields of bright botched color: shades of pink and brown and orange and green—and somewhere inside that, strange—his eyes.

 

The daughter had begun to convince herself that this was all her fault. First, she’d made the house swell, though not enough. She’d recognized a short strain of curse in her surroundings that continued to grow worse as she got older. Everyone she liked at school got sick or moved away. When she touched the television screen it shocked her. When she picked out a loaf of bread at the grocery, she always found a spore of mold inside. She always bumped her head against things. She was always itching. She couldn’t sleep.

But it was much worse than all of that. She’d hurt a man once, without intention. He was crossing the street and she looked at him and he smiled. A car hit him from the side. He fell on the gravel and spurted blood. He looked her directly in the eyes. She still had the dress she’d worn that day, with the spattering across it. She’d buried it in the transom of her closet, under the old dolls and books and raincoats.

Another time she’d been staring at an airplane and it fell right out of the sky. Just like that. She didn’t know what was wrong with her but there was something. She could feel a bump deep inside her forehead. A murmur in her hair. She knew the house kept burning because she was in it. Because it wanted her made gone.

And now, because she hadn’t listened, her brother turned to char. Who knew what else she had made happen. Who knew what else she would destroy. She tried to explain these things but no one would listen. She felt older than she looked.

In the night, with her parents elsewhere, she sat in her closet with the old dress and pressed the man’s brown stains against her face.

 

I know you’re awake.

 

Her left hand’s thumb flicked the metal wheel that ground and spit a flame into the nothing—the yellow neon tremble of fluid burning—the shimmer of incendiary air suffused with fume. The mother’s hand trembled just slightly. She’d always had small fingers, good for sewing, good for cleaning out one’s ears.

The metal lighter really had belonged once to her father; in fact, he’d meant to take it with him. Eight years old, there, at the coffin, she’d slipped her hand into the gone man’s pockets, not understanding, maybe after money, maybe scent, the teeth,
some
something to remember
. The lifeless head’s lips grinned—he could feel her rummaging around him, tickled. She’d found the lighter there over his heart, soft-brushed and gleaming, full of fluid. No one was looking. She’d hid it in her best dress, cold against her skin. The lighter was always cold.

Sometimes now, thirty years later, she still felt the soft slur of something strumming when she smoked, as if it were her father’s smoky dead breath that ballooned behind her cheeks. She couldn’t even remember how he died.

The mother held the lighted lighter in her son’s room again, inhaling the scum of the blackened walls with the tobacco smoke, the outlined spot on the floor where once there’d been a bed, where once on that bed she’d sat reading the child stories till he was old enough to read them back, cut from her voice.

The mother took the lighter to the window. She went to press her face against the glass, to butt it hard and feel the impact, then remembered how the glass was no longer there—how it’d been cracked by heat or kicked out by men in flame-retardant coats to let water through. She felt her head go on out into the evening, into the cupped light overhead. There was no moon or streetlamps glowing, no trees still lit up in tall torches as when the backyard had caught ignition. Just long black and stagnant fields of air, the wind settled, calm again, under glass.

The mother felt the lighter’s metal getting warm. She kept her fingers close against it. She sniffed the air inside the room that’d burned her son. She leaned against the window’s empty frame, the air so arid she could smell its quiver, a flux between here and there, surrounded.

 

That night, instead of burning, the first rain in many months and miles poured on the night. The water poured as something above had come undone, a full urn busted and expulsing. It graced the nearby empty creek beds and the dead lawns, the ratty sprats of trampled fields. It pocked the long face of so much dried mud, in which so many other things were buried. It slicked the roofs from which now many had jumped, or dreamt it, or wished they really would.

The rain did not announce itself. It came.