Scorch Atlas (14 page)

 

Back at home, locked in my bedroom, my stomach began to swell. At first the water simply pooching, then bobbing outward, more rotund. The grinding turned to stretching. My abdomen ballooned. I wiggled with the heft of it, learning to negotiate the rooms.
What rooms were left now, anyhow—the kitchen was ceiling-high with crap; the den buried in some kind of fluid; the basement full of worms.
Soon I couldn’t stand. My gut weighed twice as much as me. I spread-eagled on the floor. I stuck sewing needles in my belly button. I begged god to make it end. In the mirror my face was licked with burns and incisions that formed another face, one the wall had drawn. Three hours later my baby brother came out screaming in a flood of sludge. My father’s spitting image—full blonde hair, mustache and teeth. For days after I could feel the bleeding, the scumming over, the slow seal. So long the house had sat dead silent and now it swam with squeal. The baby babbled at all hours. He had the same voice as the wall, all gob. He got tangled in my webbing and refused to let me help him loose. When I tried to touch him, he’d cringe and wriggle. He came to the foot of the bed and bit my feet. We spent several days like that, at odd ends, learning where and who and how. He did not need me to teach him. On his second day he was toddling around the room. On his third he spoke the language of the wall. He said: EICHJUN LIBBVUT PEM. PIZZIT SVIMMY-NARGER IEH UNT SNAH. He collected nits and sucked their fluid. I couldn’t make him
stop. His small eyes seemed to want to puncture. If I played dead, he’d pet my face and kiss my ears—when I opened my eyes he went away. Still I couldn’t help but feel some great swelling for him, in a place I’d once felt something else. Outside the wall was growing. Its size displaced the water. It lapped the window higher every hour. I prayed aloud for the cod, but it did not come. Sediment ground our house’s frame. I thought of my grandmother elsewhere, already finished. Grandmother—I could not recall her name. I could not recall the lines of her face on those days when she’d held me—days when she’d—when she’d—what? On the bed my backbone tensed trying to remember. I stretched into my mind and felt nothing. No small indenture of where I’d come from. In my memory, where even moments earlier my father’s face had sat, I felt nothing but flat black blank.
Just the wall
. It was growing. I could hear it. It was forcing water through the window seams. Divots had opened in the ceiling. The pressure shook the walls. I grabbed the child and moved into the hall. It was raining there. The carpet sloshed thick at my feet. I climbed the stairs up to the attic where for years we’d stored our photo albums, birthday letters, Christmas ornaments, baby blankets. The worms had eaten through them. I put the remnants to my face and sniffed, after something clean inside. I dragged the moth-holed blanket, now a napkin, across my brother’s head to keep it dry. I could feel the wall expanding in my chest now. I could feel it want me at the window. At the small pane I rubbed the glass till I could see. The wall had reached the front yard, still moving, becoming huge, becoming all. This wall of nothing. This smudge of black.
My strum, my love, my humble.
My brother squeamed in my lap beneath me. He screamed for recognition. He didn’t have a name yet. I would give him mine, so I could remember. My name. My name. The wall was buzzing. My name I hadn’t heard aloud in years.
Was it even mine now? Would I want it if it was?
My brother spoke: YOU HAVE A NEW NAME. YOU WILL WANT IT. YOUR NAME IS AKVUNDTBLASSEN. YOUR NAME IS XICTYHIAY BLODDUM YAHF. YOU ARE HERE. THE NAME IS MINE. As he spoke, the wall spoke with him, becoming one voice, pronged together. I found myself echoed aloud and repeating, spreading my new name into my head. I drooled. My head was bright warm. I couldn’t feel my legs. I covered my lips with one hand, humming. I put my other thumb in Brother’s mouth. While he bit the blood out of my soft skin, I turned to the window and pressed my forehead flat and prayed into my palm.

—Would the slick sock of the ocean please consume me and not remember? Up here the sog goes on forever. Shopping malls and shooting ranges and apartment buildings deep beneath. A wronged froth foaming over our years together, awaiting evaporation under human sky. Now ripped to ribbons. Backyards buried. Our mottled sun. The crumbs we called plantations. Cemeteries weathered to no headstone. All my brothers and their women and their children’s children unmarked and eye to eye. The ocean’s face: a thick lick of grime and white rice and spit and petrol and old blood. Somehow I am up here. Somehow I am unsplit. Throat ripped in undone cattle. Skin tanned so thick I’ll never feel.

—I crack the crust open with my forehead. The water slaps my chest, succumbs me under. Sludge slick through my hair. Grit gummed up in my nostrils. Cold metal in my brain. With the slow sling of my blubbered arms I stroke along the lip. The wet so warm it’s close to breathing as on long August Georgia nights. Scum of green and lipids brimming, algae afghans worn on dead waves. I swear some of this pulp has vision, heartbeat, teeth. Open my own eyes underwater and blink into the depths with bubbling cheeks. Beneath there lies the city, chewed in chocolate eruption, crystallized beneath a billion gallons. Perhaps in god’s saliva, having drooled down in endless strings. Or perhaps his boohoo, stung, his translucent elbows and his knees, scabbed and wretched for our error, our soft days gobbling, furrowed, squeamed. Held breath burns. I am something. Way down, the billboards peel in blistered strips, shedding their color to the seahead. Face of a gone woman floating toward me, eyes as big as minivans.
COCA COLA. ELECT FOR GOVERNOR. 1-800. WE BUY HOMES.
Through the buildings’ windows there are rooms. Within each room, filled up airtight—dust, carpet, lost hair, water cups, unopened mail, microscopics—the space in which small bodies negotiated, paddled, swore.

—Where Dad and I would wrestle. Where each night for a week before the raining my mom removed her brand new inset teeth, after a bird had smashed her first ones trying to fly straight down through her throat. Where in those last days I woke up choking on grasshoppers, the ceiling cracking. Water gushing from my ears. Snails in my breakfast. Sores in between my toes. I watched my father’s face lose its pixels by the hour. My mother sweating blood and leaving spots on sofa pillows, the fridge, new patterns for our wallpaper. The cat having learned an awful language. Unlike others, I chose sleep. Passing now, I kick to swoop down deep enough to touch our roof, but each time I dive I make it only so far, an arm’s length away before my lungs bunch and I must kick back numb and bubbling overhead.

—Coming up I find again the water’s face a rind. I bump and fumble with my back. The water wants me nearer, sucked into its gut. The mustache hairs on my top lip tremble. My brain goes Jell-o hot. I press and push, my blood babooning, until I birth a tunnel through the mud. My screaming lungs: a tulip blooming in fast-forward in reverse. Overhead the sky seems another surface, all reflection—as in, in the sky, I see the water. And there within it, me, muck-covered, huffing. I see myself seeing myself and we blink together, open-mouthed. I am older than I remember. I shaved my head once. I also had a child. We microwaved store milk in the bottle to make it warm. He’d coo and suck and sputter. I can feel him stretch inside me sometimes, reappeared back in there, unborn. Sometimes there is only color. I try to focus on my stroke: skull—slump—scissor—doggy paddle. My muscles ache in fever, sneezing. In want of something summered somewhere. I will go on until whenever.

—I will go on until the ocean spins and shoots its water in a funnel up to god. We here climb it—
we now? yes,
we
—fast and fisting, scenting something overhead—
scorch of several summers? Wilting forests? Surely bleach.
When our tongues hang out they sizzle. A buzzing scums our eyes—
we who? who, we? my brothers, my baby, my, my, my sunning hum
.

More than a mile above, the earth is made of milk and foam. I see my mother in an outline made of pummel on the sea. Her rotten hair spindling up into me. Her goddamn hair. I can not breathe. I can not mumble. I climb higher into the thinning and turn around to look again. Her body shrunk into a compass, each node stirring soft spots in my mind—

Somewhere below I hear the moan of those left over, rendered in tongues already half-forgotten or undone. I can recall the taste of years of toothpaste, our frozen dinners, the running rain, only when our sky height makes me vomit.
Come back down
, the them below us say.
We’ll have you this time. We will breed
. I shake the echo off and look ahead, focused on the rhythm of my sizzling sweat to kill all and any other sound.

—these newer birds, each made of metal, thorn and neon. They buzz around us by the hundred, snagging our skin in magnet. I can feel their nuzzle deep inside me, their squawk becoming logic, ways I know. Their shit drips down my white thighs with such weight I can barely further climb. I go dizzy. I see colors, hues no crayons had ever been. The others lost above me screaming. I swing my fists. I pop birds out of the air in rattle, their carcasses hailing into nowhere.

When I can breathe again, I climb on, my lungs humming with human dust. I hear the others,
yes, the others
, ahead of me up there, already grand. As I get higher it’s cold enough to numb my head. Here the clouds hang thick in filament. The sun a gummy gunk and running. My sore skin peels. Under my skin, another something. With the voices gone and no others, I only briefly feel afraid.

—UP
is on no compass.
DOWN
I’d have to learn to disregard.

—I slip a sheet of self under my tongue and taste tar. I can no longer see my mother. I climb to a clearing. She’s still right there, her bloated body continental—eyes a hundred evenings wide—her voice—
Remember the sky that morning? The way it cracked up as an egg? The foam gushing out of everywhere: the gutters, the children’s eye holes, the broken backbone of the sea?
Her rhythm pummels through me, moistening my brain with ugly dew.
Yes, come back down
, she snores into my stomach. The blood piddles and divides.
Come back and all will be well. We will learn.
Behind those oceanic eyes, though, such burn. Such unclear terror, laced with sting. I feel her weather. Fan her faint. I feel her finger in my knee.
My one, I swear, I promise, please
… I turn and continue higher. I climb until the land is covered under curdle. Until I can’t hear her singing and my head is full of pop. The air around me in a bonnet. The strum inside me strung with color. No nothing but a gleam. I could wrap my arms around it—I could breathe it in—I did.

—Some morning I will wake up. Come morning I’ll wake up and. And the summer in my elbows. Sun at my elbows, stuttered open. Some morning I will stand up and the floor will swish beneath my feet. My new feet, bruised and washed white. White I wouldn’t recognize, imagine. Imagine home. Some homecoming. I will move into those lost rooms, wet and depthless, and I will sit against the wall. I’ll sit with the wall and watch the years unwrap a second span. My head. My lips unwrapped and chapped wide open. My colors spilling lather in the reek. Somewhere sandwiched solid something. Zeroes. Greased. Goodnight. Hello.