Scorch Atlas (5 page)

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Authors: Blake Butler

BOOK: Scorch Atlas
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I watched, half-spinning, while they sewed me up, a long rosebud in my gut, matching the one I had inside me. I could still feel the gap from where the boy had been. I waited for him there inside my arms.
They did not bring him.
They did not bring him.
I screamed a sermon at the roof.
I screamed for him to appear before me. For what I needed. In the itch.
I suffered such a long stretch of expectation curdled in my yearning. The years and years of days unraveled. Everything at once seemed far away. Far and cold and small and wilting.
Please, I stuttered, scumming.
Please me
.
They hushed and shushed and there-there patted. They shoveled applesauce into my mouth. I spat the pap back at them out onto my bib, all dizzy. The lights went in and out around.
I continued:
Where’s my baby? What’s the number? Press him to me.
The answers sprang back from within:
You are not ready. The time is never. He won’t live.
And overhead, the flicker: day, then night, day, night.
 
Some evenings later, I took the child home in a sack provided by the state. He could not yet be exposed to sunlight, considering the sky—scratched and black and bumpy. I hadn’t seen a bird in weeks. The air was full and smelled of burning and in some winds, seemed to speak.
With the child, the state had sent a pamphlet of instructional directives. The list weighed twenty-seven pounds. I memorized the key points in my downtime, aloud and sing-song, a dream hymn—
-
There are holes in every home.
-
Consider the effect of certain light in/around/against the child and/or its skin.
-
If you become tired, someone is always awake somewhere. Rest well.
-
Try to smile.
-
Effective punishments of rash behavior in the infant may include: threat of hair loss, short confinement, gravel picnic, bad percussion, systematic slurring of education, heavy bath.
-
Sometimes, to invoke power, pretend the child is not quite there.
-
Sometimes put the child’s eyes to your eyes.
Despite whatever medication they’d injected, or what creams I might apply, the child’s skin kept mostly muddled. His rind was thick and multicolored, prone to sore. He often oozed. He smelled of
cabbage. He was in there, still, I knew. I had to peel his lids to see his pupils spinning—neon yellow, again like Father’s. He seemed easy in his body. He came up to my waist. At six days old, he ate two-fisted from the fridge. I could not keep anything slick or sweet around. He ate the meat before I cooked it. He drank the soup straight out of cans. He’d burp and laugh with his whole body.
His genitals were shriveled and oddly colored.
His fingerprints were whorled.
On okay afternoons, we went walking through the forest that had choked the half-backyard. The trees were gnarled and beat and bare of leaves, save for in spots so high above us we couldn’t see, in which case the blooms of mold became a canopy. There’d been a stream here somewhere once whose nightly murmurations sent me somewhat sleeping—but now it’d evaporated or sunk to mud. The yard as well was strewn with garbage. There were never any men. We ran neon tape behind us to mark the way. We walked into the fold. I showed him where I’d laughed once, and said what had been there then. The dirt often seemed to breathe.
At the wide-warped bow of land burnt by lightning, ripped wide-open, slick with mud, I told my huge son of the house we’d had there when I was his age, before the running, before the rape.
At the raze of black rock damming the river dry, I described the days I’d gone swimming with my brother—the water level just above our stomachs, the current ever-begging to take us down.
I did not tell him what I would have done differently, had I known then.
We glimpsed the charred valley where the sun rose sometimes
and the bulb of maggots over McDonald’s
and the crisp crust of something unknown on the cold sand where I and his father had dug our dinner. I tried not to speak ill of that sore man, that absence. I tried not to let on my vehemence. I spoke in rhyme and benediction. I kept any anger hidden, scrunched to a tight pellet in my stomach, seamed with heat.
Mostly, through all my talking, the boy blinked and cawed and chewed his lip. Sometimes he’d respond in giggles, grunting, sinking his teeth into his bone. Whether he understood or not, it didn’t matter—my words were seeping in. They’d spread his flesh and find a holster. He’d look back one day and understand.
I’d make this world somewhere to rest in. He’d remember.
We would not grow old alone.
 
As weeks got worse—the earth’s plates snapping; the flies at the window cracking the glass; the stitch of rhythm in the incision of the earth sinking in itself—my boy continued to grow faster. I could not sew fast enough to clothe him. He would stretch a pair of pants in several days. In his large hands I saw the wrinkles of other ways that I had known.
Soon he was a man.
Already he was grown so large I couldn’t fit him in my arms.
I called him different names for each occasion. He responded to them all.
It was cold in the apartment. The heater mostly did not work. We could see our breath in long shapes, crystallizing. The freeze air made him violent. He unstuffed the sofa and ruined my magazines. He took the heads off all his dolls.
Such a busy child. So eager. He didn’t mean to bruise my face. He only wanted, like me, something he could hold a certain way.
In the evenings, once he’d grown worn out, the apartment again reduced to shambles, I put my hours towards attempting to teach him how to speak. He’d already proved a want for learning. He liked to watch my tapes of old TV. I’d spent hundreds cataloging my favorite programs back when the broadcasts were still on air: the answers and storylines of which I could not at all remember. The people in those pictures seemed very different from people now. Their eyes were slightly wider. Their skin offered a sheen.
My son could somehow see them through his barbed hair, which no matter how quickly I cut it from him, would grow back straight and further black.
In the newsreels I’d acquired, letting the VCR spool on through the night, I let my baby witness the swan dive of our destruction as arrayed in mini-clips—the anchors with their powdered jowls and immoderate narration; the chapped condition of their smiling as they spoke about the way the world had come to rash,
and how the ground would split apart
and spit up blobs of black and ooze and stinking
and the missionaries with their long tongues
and the steaming craters of the moon, and
the pastures of dead cattle already rotten within hours, the
beetles and the fungus spreading over,
the mayonnaise on a sandwich no one would ever eat, and the
babies with their hair tongues
like my baby here
like mine
More than the programs, my boy liked advertisements. He liked to hiss or sing along in faction. At first I’d fast-forward through those sent from late night, the 1-800 numbers with women moaning, but then I began to find
that in those moments
he seemed most pleased,
most still and God-blessed,
and so I let him go on watching,
while outside the tides broke and swallowed cars,
and on the beaches the bloated continued rolling in, rotting even in the sun’s absence, clogged and ripped and lined with tumor.
These were other days, these ones prepared for us.
In these new days we no longer had to watch the mobs of wrecked men with their machine guns, ten-thousand piled up on sheets of concrete, the splintered knobs of bone so hushed,
the scum caked and ever-growing,
and all those thoughts of what for which I’d never get the time.
The words I could not somehow pass to baby. I’d wield a ball and call its name, coo it cutely for my young one, B-A-L-L, and he’d shriek back, KA-KEESH!
I’d put a finger to my forehead and say, MOMMY, and my child, taller than me, went: PAWOOO PAWEEEE!
Stubborn, like his father, with the straight white teeth to match.
The things I knew he’d never be.
There was something ever coming, I said inside me, and it does not have a name.
At night I locked the front door and watched for hours through the peep. I locked the door that blocked the hallway and the one leading to my room.
So many doors forever. There never were enough.
Each door had several locks.
One lock was combination. Another required keys. Another was simple slide-latch. Another was strictly ornamental.
Another you could open by whispering the right thing to it at the right time, which is the type of lock most humans have.
CATERPILLAR
They slung in wriggling ropes of segmented flesh: fat and spiny, bright with mold. Some squirmed big as my forearm. Some small enough to creep inside an ear. I’d never seen so much color. The leaves of trees were eaten, stranding craning skeletons in midsummer. Those who’d thought to brave the hail and made it now stayed indoors, their skins lesions with teethmarks. Bronze tanks patrolled the city. There was nightly concern over what to eat. You could imagine anything infested. Bugs showed up nestled in every crevice: in the bed sheets, in the oven. Some nights I just chewed the clumps out from my nails. I heard of an old man buried in his basement. I heard of young ladies smothered in their sleep. Fat cysts and burrowed nodules and red growths of sludge. No skin was safe. No simple evening. The national rate of suicide quadrupled. Sale of aspirin, rope, and razor blades became condemned. Other ways became more messy: one night a hundred dove off some skyscraper hotel. People began to wonder what _____ wanted. The airwaves filled with preaching: how to repent; what might save us; whom to look to; what to think. At night you could practically hear the low sound of our prayer, a billion lips all mumbling together into themselves. Meanwhile, by now, the cities lay covered in chrysalis, silken tents stretched across expressways, over homes. Our front door sealed shut with hive building. The cocoons crushed each time a thing moved. We waited. We blink-eyed through the night. In the end, the great unveiling: ten billion butterflies humming in the sun, fluttering so loud you couldn’t think.
TELEVISION MILK
Moths and blackbirds flooded the front yard. The trees uprooted, clogged with smoke. Someone was out there somewhere. We’d been waiting for forever. Downstairs the kids were naked, screaming with TV. They heard language in the bad transmission. In recent days it’d told them to shit straight on the floor. It told them to rip their clothes up, break our mirrors, lock me upstairs in the bedroom. My husband’s scalp now hung from the ceiling along with several hundreds skins of local cats. In the long night you could hear them squealing. You could hear the children’s chortle. They made cat meat casserole, cat meat salad, fur flambé. They fed me through the keyhole.
Dan and I had once felt love. We’d made three sons—blonde heads each, like his, six endless blue eyes. They began as sweet boys with careful manners. I did what I could do to keep them near. Before the schools closed I’d been very active in the PTA. Sometimes I subbed for their gym classes, which made them blush. The school’s halls wormed with stabbing, maggots, grease, collapse, and homemade bombs. One boy in our neighborhood had his eye out. You should have seen what grew back in.
I didn’t want my children to grow up frightened, unprepared. We enrolled them in karate. We bought them safety helmets, pugils, latex gloves and boots and masks. Dan wrote out lectures to read aloud before dinner, new forewarnings. His voice contained a smidge of squeak, a female banter, yet he still seemed to command the boys’ attention. Sometimes he had to use his hands.
I‘d always dreamt of becoming Mother. As a child myself I slept surrounded: a billion plastic babies, each with a name. I would make them kiss and lay against me. I’d whisper them my want. I’d been afraid, as I got older, that I’d never meet the proper man. That I’d end up old and alone with no one nowhere. In the night I clasped my hands. I prayed. I asked. I asked. I looked. I watched. I praised. I found. Though Dan hadn’t been quite what I expected—balding and broke and older—he filled me full. He warmed my mind. He’d known the proper times to say the proper things.
In the end his blood had run all black and made another pattern on the carpet.
We’d made these babies despite the way at night the sky seemed drooping; the way sometimes the air hung thick as mud; so many buildings everywhere gone tilted, smothered, sucked into the earth or slung with sludge.
The TV static made our house vibrate. My teeth rattled at my brain.
The children let me out around the time for dinner and brought me downstairs to milk. It’d been several years since I’d nursed but somehow my glands could still produce. At first it’d taken some coaxing, a pinch, a punch, a howl, but eventually they had me gushing. I fed them each one after another, oldest to youngest, one by one.
Joey came on voracious, always starving. His skin was turning yellow. He blamed me for our trouble finding food. He gripped my left breast like a baseball.
Tum—awkward and fumbly, just near an age he might have begun to dream of women—he took my nipple in his mouth with his arms crossed over his chest, eyes anywhere but on me.
The youngest, Johnson, was losing his baby teeth so his was the easiest to handle. His mouth was soft and loose and nuzzled my areola without pain. Sometimes, when the other brothers had run off, he even let me hold him in the parcel of my lap and coo and clasp and hum a song. He’d always been the momma’s boy beyond his brothers, the love-lump I could nudge.
That night, though, he couldn’t keep me down. He kept hacking my milk across the carpet. His eyes were puffy. His teeth seemed slanted. He batted at my neck with fury in his eyes.

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