A Chemical Fire (6 page)

As he makes his first sound I find a hammer on a shelf and bring it down and bring it down and bring it down onto his skull until I’m getting in, until he stops struggling and all that’s left is the hunch of half a torso coming out of cinders in the ground, stale blood pouring from the top.

I fall away from the tires and the lifts and the pouring skull of the torso and go back out front where Adena wakes with a good shake. “What is it,” she mumbles.

I tell her, “A teacher and a husband.”

Open Circulatory Systems

“Not us.” I take the safety off. “If she wanted to share something with me it was one more piece I knew, and if she didn’t it was none of my business.”

Her favorite food is spaghetti, her favorite salad dressing, by far, Caesar. She loves wood finishes, court-room television, turtle-neck sweaters, double-stick tape, books about history, any animal with small ears. She almost drowned in a lake as a child and that’s why she doesn’t like baths. She plays six instruments and her voice reminds me of wind chimes.

I know everything about my wife, but that’s for me.

“Way to pay attention,” Adena says.

The house was hit hard with fire. The picture windows we picked out in summer catalogs are rainbowed in waves or shattered. Our discontinued yellow vinyl siding melted to darkened stucco. The lawn: unkempt for a year, then flame-thrown. I used to treat bare spots with sick-green spread and pull the heads from dandelions across this grass. Now it plays host to blood-battles between ants and cicadas. Now the dead fall onto it and pull themselves back up without laughing.

To my left she says, “Do you even remember what she looks like?” I look at her and her square shoulders, her angled chest, her eyes that aren’t good enough.

The bronze handle is melted so I break in. I find the house crawling with earwigs and arthropods along the couch. Webs in the corners float with dried bugs, and everything smells of coffee grinds and ashtray. “It looks like someone robbed the place,” Adena says, looking past me at the floor of books.

“The fire did it,” I tell her. I see a victim appearing from the side of a house across the street, arms burned down to the bone. Two more figures are pushed against a picture window inside another, and I tell her, “Being here is killing us.”

“You need to know this and you know I‘m right. Be quick and I’ll worry about them,” turning around with her shotgun as a wind picks up.

Brown and black centipedes swivel between chair legs as I check all the windows and doors and the carpet is damp with wandering piss. I flip through mail and pretend, just for a minute, that it’s normal and I’m just a guy getting home and weeding out junk mail and bills. The kitchen is where I left it but empty. The living room moves with the dried fur of mice. The stairs are as they were and I have to head up them, to the top where I see the door at the end and suddenly I can’t breathe, the pulse is blocking the air so I sit, the gun laying down, breathe out and in, out and in. It feels like waves crashing and receding.

The sound of the shotgun pulls me up, going off twice. I scream down to see if she’s okay and she says yes, just move, but the hallway is a collapsed artery, holding me with rubber-soft walls.

Finally I go in with a great, stinging pressure to the back of my sockets like they’re ready to push the eyeballs out. I walk in and look around at the walls- the dressers, the closet, everything that’s not the center of the room, and my eyes hurt and the throat gets tight. I turn, eyes closing, flashing lights behind the eyelids and fingernails hitting blood in the empty hand, ready to break the gun in the other, and I just...I just don’t know.

I don’t know if I can do this.

But I know I have to so I shake and shout my eyes to open and they do. I see our bed and the covers are down. On it is a dust angel, the shape of a body left so perfectly, with the outstretched arms blurred into wings. This is our bed and it’s her. I see it and it’s her.

Then I scream. I scream until I can’t see. I leave when Adena pulls me down the stairs and out the door, and I’m clawing blind, my shouts tearing my throat apart until it has no more flesh to give.

“Stop it,” Adena warns, “they can hear you.”

I’ll never forgive her for bringing me here. She killed my wife.

Dismembership

For two days I wait for my strength to come back while she goes through the motions with blankets and food. She feeds me soup made of cabbage, carrots, onions, turnips and celery because they’re made of mostly water and cellulose; fibers that don’t digest. When I reach for more she refuses, saying, “I know how much to feed you.” She spoons me little dribbles of the chunky, watery stuff and says, “This is a negative calorie food. It’s so light your body burns more calories than it gains.”

What she means is this- food has to be processed. The jaw muscles work, the tongue pushes, saliva begins the breakdown of starches and this turns the food into a lump called the bolus, so it can be swallowed. The esophagus moves the bolus down to the stomach through a squeezing, squishing process of peristalsis. Then acid is produced and mixed with the food before passing it to the small and large intestines and more digestive juices, allowing the body to start absorbing the liquefied food. Finally, anything that isn’t absorbed is passed into the bladder and the colon to be eliminated. All of this requires energy.

“Metabolism is like a switch with an on position and an off position.”

What she doesn’t understand is that seventy percent of human metabolism takes place in the basal metabolic rate, which is technical for staying alive. Twenty-five percent is exercise, leaving only five percent to thermogenesis, or the absorption and storing of calories. For all that work, the energy burn-off is relatively low.

“We can get rid of that stomach if you leave it up to me.”

All the theories in the world fester in the absence of fact.

“Can you make out colors yet,” she asks, putting down the bowl to look through a magazine. Around us is a hangar filled with food. Clothes stacked to the ceiling. Rows of black-and-white family sizes wholesaled in plastic, sunflower seeds by the bucket and soaps by the dozens.

Like a clean pentagram we camp, surrounded by a circle of activated air fresheners. “You don’t want to know what the meat section smells like,” she says, “And I thought it was nasty at regular-sized places.”

Past tomato sauce and chocolate powder, past the bakery dotted with gray-green breads, past tables of over-sized books and variety pack underwear, past rows guarded by the monoliths of this departed culture I find the pharmacy and tear through it. I know where to look and I know what I’m doing. I know milligrams and I want nothing else. Fuck everything but time-releases cheated on with splitting and crushing. Fuck the shriveled world like these displays of sitting fruit, this pathetic failed suicide stumbling and drooling with disappointed family.

I find what I need and swallow it. Then I swallow some more. I’m pushing and throwing through bottles with a woman’s screams in my ears when everything kicks in and the sounds twist away, lost in the insulation of the compounds. I welcome the monster into my heart. I let it tear as it wants to tear, burn and build and play in the black sand and shit of what this has become. I see only flashes, a scrapbook of what it wants me to see filled with photos of a new place built by broken things shove-assembled together, of fires lit and stamped, of arms coming up to defend.

This is right. Let the anger of the lost pour through me, the drowning of a billion destinies and plans, of legacies marching on and on into the brink of flame. Let me pay back the plans for babies and music and record keeping and record making. Let me put to rest the idea this was all going somewhere, let me sit at its grave and say everything’s square now. Let my fingers form revenge, and to hell with who I am.

Hours of this war pass. They feel like seconds. When I’m seeing live again I’m marathon breathing and covered in cuts and blood. I find Adena hiding behind the door of a plastic play set, covered in motor oil and ripped cloth with slices on her face. She pulls away from me, a look in her eyes as she screams for me to get away. I reassure and promise her but it does nothing. She’s seen me from violent angles, knows what I’m capable of, the ripping apart of this place under drugged fingers, and from the look of her she got in their way. She won’t listen anymore so I leave her there.

It’s obvious there’s no going back now so I find an axe and the door and open it, putting the barricade back behind me and walking out through the putrid crowd and into a wind storm, all the time hacking, hacking, hacking.

Folk Lure

I pass a library collapsing into itself, a thousand years of words naked to the sun and rain. A thousand years of broken hearts and huddled knowledge left to be chewed by the bacteria and oily mandibles. All of man’s progress left to decay to the bitter end.

In front of the town hall a burn-woman gets too close so I swing at her neck and take her to the asphalt. With the courts to my back, I finish the thing. When she’s in pieces I turn to the doors of town hall and see it swollen with victims, pulsing like an injury. “Stay,” I tell them but they don’t, the scab giving way, the stilted legs pouring forward and down the stairs. I have no weapons further than the axe and that takes time, so I get moving and get faster through the streets. I find a food market but there’s too many of them so I keep going, hungry, out, my back naked without a pack and supplies.

I come to a grand intersection and find it crawling. Victims everywhere, bumping and twisting. Their moves seem more desperate now; not at all like the slow gestures they’ve being dealing in. They’ve taken on the twitchy needs of beetles and flies; their food and light bulbs are my skin and meat. I even see one or two bending to the ground where the skin dust collects, scooping it with dull hands and shoveling it to their mouths, gnawing at the dry stuff to choke it down. Even this is flesh I suppose, and when supplies are low humans have always adapted.

But there are more now than before. I lose count at forty and this, this is just one place. What was something to keep one eye on has become something for two, this crowd not possible for navigating, the smell and sound of me getting to the air and a reaction setting in. Their hunger has reached danger level and for the first time I’m beginning to doubt if I can handle it out here.

Behind me, I learn, is every one of them that’s spotted me since I left. A blood storm is converging with me as its eye.

I find the closest auto, a utility van, and I run to it, check the door and find it locked. Looking in, seeing it empty, seeing the cage in the back for holding the tools and supplies, I know it’s okay to betray the safety of the window so I pull the axe back. I swing at it and contact, swing and contact while the wall of them tightens like a fist around me, only feet away and eager to have me while still lifeless in the eyes. Finally I get through the safety glass enough to pull it apart along with my hand skin, push my arm through the sting and grab and pull the lock up, pull myself up and through the hole, feeling hands on my ankles as I panic my way in. I close the door as fingers fall on it.

The van surrounded at all sides and its integrity broken, I know the cab isn’t safe. With no key it’s a wait until the excitement dies down. Then I can run out and away and evaluate what has to be done. For now I find the cage in the back has a hatch between the seats, the key to it in a storage slot on the dashboard, so I open it and go to the back with the axe.

The walls are a system for holding an electricians wires and clips and tools in place, leaving the middle of the floor open. I put the axe down and search through the tools with a soundtrack of hands and chests banging on the sides, but find nothing to survive with.

I think of Adena, hiding from me back at the store. The only other survivor and she thinks I’m a murderous beast. To her credit, at least she’s right.

The rhythm of hungry hands eventually settles into a calm one and I use it to fall asleep to. Even in my dreams, everyone is dead.

***

My alarm clock is the sound of skull-bursts and ricochets.

Out front, a victim is spread across the hood, his black and gray brain flung out onto the windshield as he slides off the van. Then, further away, another one walking until his head ruptures.

Sniper fire.

I push the cage open and look out, the view much quieter. All the windows in the buildings look empty, unbroken, nothing that would bring gunfire down. Then I look up to the roofs and see a man up there waving slow and purposeful and yelling something from the top of a hotel.

The space around the van is clear so I step out. Nearby are more of them, coming closer, pushing at each other to reach me first. The closest he fires at and kills, the kind of kill with quote marks.

He yells something down ten stories of open air but I can't make it out. I shout, "What?"

“Metal door, asshole,” he points.