Scorch Atlas (6 page)

“Stop it,” I said. “Be good.”

He bit my nipple and I bled.

After feeding, we went into the living room and my boys tied me to the sofa. They’d caught Dan on the escape—
he hadn’t warned me even with a premonition—he’d slipped into the night
. The bonds gripped tight across my forearms, causing flesh to web and redden. The TV went on screeching. Their pupils bulged in crystal puddles. The stinging waves of whir flooded and coursed all through my babies’ eyes. I watched them watch till they were giddy-tired and then they came to sit around me on the floor. They demanded I tell stories of the way things were before.

As always, I took off on my childhood—how in the mornings behind my father’s shed I’d walk until I couldn’t see anything around me but long grass; how I’d lay down in the grass and look up at the ceiling of the sky and imagine being lifted off into the wide white
flat nothing, my hair fluttering around my head, a mask, and every thought of scratch or ache or shudder washed out of me into air.

They didn’t want to hear about that.

I went on about the circus—
the time I saw a man remove his head
—the zoo—
where babies grew in cages
—McDonald’s—
god, their value meals, what now?
—I told them about anything I could think of that had been good once—anything that made me sting.

“Shut up and talk about TV,” Tum said, slurring, his neck bulged fat with mold.

So I went on about my programs, before the channels all washed out. I told about our last game shows—
men in mud suits, grappling for food
—soap operas—
stretched to ribbons, the women bright orange and super-sewn
—the weather channel—
fat with layers, so many minor screens embedded into that one page, so small you couldn’t see
—the nightly news—
I won’t even say
—all the talk shows with people screaming who was whose daddy and eating pills and throwing fists.

This they liked. This made them rowdy. Tum clenched in fits and pinched my skin. The smaller two were crawling all against me. Joey bit into my wrists. They used their scissors on my hair and poked my stomach and threw glass against the wall. They blindfolded me and made me touch things and try to guess what they were—hot kettle, steak knife, razor, something pudding-soft about which they’d only giggle. With a gag and bag over my head, they spread me on the floor and fed again.

Through all of this I did my best to remain still. I thought of nothing. I was tired.

We were tired, I guess I mean.

Through the next days, locked in the bedroom, I began to try again—to try to wish or want, and yet in want of nothing, as there was nothing I could taste. The space inside the small room we’d once used for a nursery had grown engorged with dirt, the walls and carpet frittered full with raspy holes threaded by tapeworms and aphids, eating. I’d yank on wallpaper to let the looser dustings shake so there’d be something I could chew. My tongue took to the texture but my belly would not stop screaming, and the bug matter hung in gristle, my stomach so weak it couldn’t grind. I could feel my offspring moving elsewhere. I could feel the crawl behind my eyes.

The old ceiling sat around me. The new ceiling: a smudged sky. In the idea of those unbent stars still drooling—the false hope of short-lived water rain—I began to convince myself there would
be something somewhere some time again. I had scars all up my forearms. Larvae in my hair. My teeth ached. And deeper, in my organs, something else I couldn’t put a name to. Other eyes behind my eyes.

When the sound of scissors filled my forehead, I swallowed air until they wore away. I would rock and lick the salt of my kneecaps and laugh aloud and remember math. I’d been good at that crap sometime. I counted days in further scratches on my forearms. I heard awful noises in the walls. Above the static, a high pitched squealing. The bang of hammers. Thump of weight. I called the boys for water. I called the boys to come. I called and called and called until my voice broke my throat.

Through the window, too small for my body, I saw they’d took to piling our books and baubles in the backyard. The kitchen curtains. Their baby blankets. Grandma’s afghan. They’d learned some kind of dance. Out of the wood Dan had used to build a treehouse, they’d made an altar, tall as me.

Over time the room got smaller. The air felt liquid. I fell thin.

In the eaves I sensed a groaning.

In the floor where once I’d held my babies one by one and hummed, set in the wood I found a mouth. A man’s mouth—warm and easy. I felt his gender in the bristle of his bridge and the texture of his breath. By taste I knew it wasn’t Dan—Dan’s mouth crammed with rotting molars and gold loam. I could not remember other men. Yet when I came near enough this man would whisper, his voice ruined and raspy, beehive flutter. He mostly said only one thing, a name, I think, though nothing held. He would repeat until the words became just words, until even what short sleep came for me was slurred. To shut him up I’d spit between them, what dry saliva I could manage, and the lips would shrivel, bring a hum. You could hear him suck for hours, my taste some nourishment, a fodder. But soon enough again the wishing, formed in hymn.

Finally I took the dirt that would have been my dinner and meshed the lips over to make the floor full flush and proper. Then the world again was hushed and far off. I began to teach myself the words I’d need when things returned: the
yes
and
please
and
bless you
. The
ouch
and
why
and
I remember
. I tried to find Dan’s voice in my head, but the sounds from outside and there in me brought a blur: the electric storms, the shaking, the bright nights, the itch, the rip. I continued to continue to try. I waited longer and the trying became a thing worn
like a hairpin in my heart. Or more aptly like my fingernails—nearly an inch each by now, growing out of me some crudded yellow. In time I’d become sly and slouched enough to eat those goddamned slivers of myself. But before that I’d wish the mouth back. I’d lap the dirt and find a hole. One tiny nozzle down to nowhere, black no matter how loud into it I’d beg or bark or sing.

 

In the yard now the trees were burning. Grass was burning. The sky was full of ruptured light. I stood with my face pressed against the picture window, my face obscured by the house’s bug-hung panes. I beat the door until my fists hurt. Through the vents I sniffed the ash. My stomach grappled, squealing high notes. They’d crushed my glasses. I couldn’t see. I rummaged in my purse for lint or crumbs to chew. My purse now a bag of crap—still I couldn’t let it go, this bag of who I’d been—I carried it with me waiting for some moment in which the world would blink: the cell phone towers long dead and voiceless; paper money
blah
; the car’s battery long excavated so the boys would have power for their TV.

Wrapped in tissue, I found the tweezers I’d once used to tend Dan’s back. The skin across his shoulders, in those last years, had begun to grow a rind. The hairs came out blackened and endless, enough to knit a bed. In the evenings, while the boys slept, I’d had him lay down on the carpet in the foyer, and I’d straddle him as Mother, and I’d pick those damn things clean. I picked and picked and felt their popping. No matter how many came, I kept it up, while below me Dan squirmed and grumbled and said for this whole thing please to all be over.

On the floor now I bit and winced and sucked the tweezer metal—felt something real—his taste.

Somewhere later in some blackness I found my youngest up above me. At first it seemed he floated. His head was wet. He had black crap all around his mouth—something gunky, runny, rancid. He was breathing hard and sweating. I pulled him down and let him suck my breast and he was calmer then, designed. For several seconds he let me hold him curled in a J there on the carpet. I found his arms engraved with diagrams and runic symbols, long lines of creeping dot. His back was run with lumps and oozing. His hair matted, clogged with sore. He let me kiss him where it hurt. He
let me say his name in certain ways. He let me come with him back downstairs into the kitchen, where I took ice and cleaned his face. I combed the crap out of his lashes. I put a cube inside his mouth. Through the window the backyard glowed. I heard the other boys out there chanting in some rhythm.

The cords in Johnson’s neck pumped with flex. I could see his heartbeat, gushed and stuttered. I felt the tremor of his nostrils. He looked at me funny.

“You’re not supposed to be out yet, Mommy,” he said, rasping. “We aren’t ready.” His eyes were glassy, boggled, flat.

I rifled through my purse to find the photos tucked in the fake leather slits of my old wallet. I showed him a shot of us with some bald mall Santa. The fat man’s lap a wide seat for the boys, their faces unsmeared with these new days, their cheeks rose pink and full of breath. All this a month before the mall filled up with sludge and the sun went hyper-violet and the grass squirmed and the water swam inside itself. These other older days were ones I could remember. Whens to want.

Johnson smudged a finger on the print.

“Who is that one?” he said. He was pointing at himself.

“That’s you, my dear, my darling,” I told him. “When you were just a tiny boy.”

He looked confused. He pointed at the tanned and unblemished captured image of some younger husk of me.

“Who is that one?”

I felt my size.

“That’s me. Your mother. Who loves you more than all. Who would give and give and give and give.”

He took the photo from me, stumbling. His eyeballs jerked and spun. He wiped the grime from his mouth across his face. He looked at me. He was in there.

“No,” he said. “You’re lying.”

I told him how I’d never lie. How all I wanted was to have my boys together all around me, loving. He snorted through his nostrils. He looked into the slathered backyard with his brothers: the rash the steam the broiling. I felt the roof just slightly shift. Johnson looked at me again, something grunting, an idea hung between his lips. He kind of grinned to flash his teeth, the greening grubby things—they’d used their toothpaste on my eyes. One short, overtly hairy hand came up through the air to point.

“Mommy?” he said. “You?”

“Yes, yes me, my dear,” I said, breathing the moment. “My sweetest Johnson. My precious baby.”

His whole head clouded. His soft skin bluing. He cricked his neck. He pinched his fingers deep back in his mouth, pulled something out, and ate it. He shook his head horrendous.

“Not a baby,” he said. “I am fire. I know who you are now. I can smell everywhere you’ve been.”

He reached and dug his nails into my arm. My blood bubbled in splotches. Johnson’s tongue was white. I felt something seeping sink all through me as he pulled me hard toward the back door, through the smudgy glass of which I could see now shapes moving in and at the light. Several massive crosses propped erect and glowing, crowed beneath the sky that seemed to open. What wasn’t burning lurched with insect, the grass and limbs and hills and neighbors’ houses washed in crease. The air itself was sweat. This was what had happened.

I ripped my arm away from my youngest and fell back onto the cracking kitchen floor. I skittered to stand up as he watched me, still holding the photo crumpled in his hand. His eyes burst veined and raw. The smear of his etchings and bruises seemed to form a pattern. He shrieked out for his brothers. His tone was crystal, wounded as we were. The house around us shuddered

I turned from my son.

I ran out through the kitchen’s side door into the garage. My stomach swished, my knees gone goofy. The night was wrecked and drooping. The air was eaten through with smear holes. Large patches of blue mold hung on the burped crust of the moon—the moon that in recent months had grown smaller, sucked away by something much larger snuck behind it. The air was hot and made me sneeze. My blood. My blood. I ran into the forest half-blinded, thumbed by branches that made long scratches on my skin. I could hear the boys behind me. They whooped, calling out my maiden name. They put inflection in their voices to make it sound in trouble, hurt, causing a receding part of me to stir. I plugged my ears and thought of elsewhere. I thought of wrapping my arms around a younger Dan, my heart wet and drumming through my shirt.

I ran until I couldn’t see.

I ran until my brain was lather.

I ran until I felt the bottom fall out of me, drumming, and tumbled facedown on the earth.

Somewhere in the dead grass between the sanitation yard that’d once been a school lot and the rotten playground where Dan and I used to bring them through several summers, I knew I could not go on. I fell and scuffed my soft hands and rolled around with dirt. In this new dirt I still could not find the mouth—
what had I become
? My skin had opened up in several places, the center of me oozed. The smoke from our small house plumed in odd tufts on the horizon.

I waited for the boys.

I waited that they’d catch up and lift my body, carry me on their young backs to our home. To the small house where they’d grown up. Where I’d loved them and they’d eaten and we’d breathed. Such air we’d had together. The night was sticky. I was cold. Blood gushed down my forearms. Something throbbing at my forehead from all directions. All I could see was straight above me. Above and on and on and into nothing. I felt dumb for having run. I felt weird warmth brimming in my eyes. My gone eyes. My warbled wanting. My boys needed me to feed. They needed something like the rest of us. They’d had no great chance to change. Such long, bombed days of wait and television. Such backward years; such years to come. I would get up in a moment. I’d go to them and say their names. I’d fill their mouths and kiss their earlobes. The days would wash. The boys would listen. The sky would come uncombed and gleaming. I could sense it. I could seem.