Scorch Atlas Read online

  Instead of our usual assignments, we read manuals on how to better keep our bodies clean. Diagrams were posted in our lockers. Baskets of dental floss and disinfectant were placed in nurse’s office with the condoms. No one really laughed.

  Then, one day during my math class, men in military gear barged in. They had batons and air masks with complex reflectors. They made us stand in line with our hands against the wall. We spread and coughed while they roughed us over. They pulled hair samples and drew blood. From certain people they took skin grafts. The screaming filled the halls. They confiscated our cell phones and our book bags. Our class fish, Tommy, was deposed. The walls were doused with yellow powder. Several people fainted or threw up. They put black bags over the windows. The school’s exit doors were sealed with putty. A voice that was not the cafeteria lady’s came over the loudspeaker and said what was being served. We’d eaten lunch already. We sat at our desks and said the pledge. We sat at our desks with no one looking at each other. The sub for our sub was reprimanded for attempting exit. They laid her flat out on the ground.

  We were contained this way without explanation. Because of the window bags, we couldn’t tell how many days. There was a lot of time and no way to pass it. We were not allowed to talk or use the restroom. We were given crossword puzzles and origami. The PA played Bach and Brahms over the rumble overhead. When the lunchroom ran out of leftovers, we were fed through tubes lowered from the ceiling.

  After the first rash of fistfights and paranoia spasms, they locked our wrists with plastic. They turned the a/c heat to high. The veins began to stand out on people’s heads. Their skin went red and dented, then bright purple. Their hair fell out. Their teeth and nails grew green and yellow. Their swollen limbs bejeweled with sores. Cysts blew big in new balloons.

  I felt fine. I felt an aura, my mother’s breath encircling my head.

  The costumed men carried the expired elsewhere. Those who weren’t sick were crazed. I watched a girl bang her face in on a blackboard. I watched a boy stick out his eyes. The rest of us sat with our hands flat on the desktops, not sure which way to turn.

  Soon the power was extinguished. False neon panels were employed. Peals of static began to interrupt the PA’s symphonies. A sudden voice squawked through with contraband report. Look what we’ve done. Can you imagine? Half the nation under quarantine. The buildings crumpled. The oceans aboil. The President’s committed suicide. And now, just a bit too late, we’re getting rain. The men burst in and shot the speaker with a machine gun. They said to assume the duck and cover. One spotty redhead whose glasses had been confiscated refused to get down. She walked around in small circles reaching from desk to desk to guide her way. The men zapped her in the neck with a large prong. She ran straight into a wall. She fell on the floor and bumped her forehead, and it spilled open on the white tile. None of the men would let me help them help her. They carried her out and wrapped our heads in plastic and went into the hall and shut the door. I heard the tumblers clicking in the lock. I saw the hall fill thick with smoke. There were sirens, screech and screaming. Something scraping on the roof. It wasn’t long yet until other. I didn’t try to think of what. Small Susie Wang huddled beside me, praying. She spoke in hyperventilated mumble. She put her hands over her mouth.

  I sat on the floor in the neon light with stomach rumbling and sounds of flame and stink of rot. I saw things moving toward me and then gone. I couldn’t remember where or why I was. I couldn’t find my name writ on my tongue or brain-embedded. I felt a burning in my chest. I fumbled in my pockets for my father’s map. I stared and rubbed the paper between my fingers. I read the sightings’ dot’s dates with my wormed eyes, connecting them in order. There was the first point where my father felt sure he’d seen mother digging in the neighbor’s yard across the street. And the second, in the field of power wires where Dad swore he saw her running at full speed.

  I connected dots until the first fifteen together formed a nostril.

  Dots 16 through 34 became an eye.

  Together the whole map made a perfect picture of my mother’s missing head.

  If I stared into the face, then, and focused on one clear section and let my brain go loose, I saw my mother’s eyes come open. I saw her mouth begin to move. Her voice echoed deep inside me, clear and brimming, bright, alive.

  She said, “Don’t worry, son. I’m fat and happy. They have cake here. My hair is clean.”

  She said, “The earth is slurred and I am sorry.”

  She said, “You are OK. I have your mind.”

  Her eyes seemed to swim around me. I felt her fingers in my hair. She whispered things she’d never mentioned. She nuzzled gleamings in my brain. As in: the day I’d drawn her flowers because all the fields were dying. As in: the downed bird we’d cleaned and given a name. Some of our years were wall to wall with wonder, she reminded me. In spite of any absence, we had that.

  I thought of my father, alone and elsewhere, his head cradled in his hands. I thought of the day he’d punched a hole straight through the kitchen wall, thinking she’d be tucked away inside. All those places he’d looked and never found her. Inside their mattress. In stained-glass windows. How he’d scoured the carpet for her stray hair and strung them all together with a ribbon; how he’d slept with that one lock swathed across his nostrils, hugging a pillow fitted with her nightshirt. How he’d dug up the backyard, stripped and sweating. How he’d played her favorite album on repeat and loud, a lure. How when we took up the carpet in my bedroom to find her, under the carpet there was wood. Under the wood there was cracked concrete. Under the concrete there was dirt. Under the dirt there was a cavity of water. I swam down into the water with my nose clenched and lungs burning in my chest but I could not find the bottom and I couldn’t see a thing.

  DUST

  Dry flakes of charcoal came big as men’s heads, slather from some great fire overhead. The ash rained black into the evening, clung against the mud as some new second skin. Each inch sat spackled, crusted over. Each inhale brought a mouthful. The streets intoned with choral wheeze and incensed hiccup. We made facemasks out of old newspapers—the current editions no longer came. The mail service had gone under—one minor blessing: I stopped receiving bills. The finer dust came down in curling spigots. The sick began to bundle, hung at home. Count emphysema. Count belabored lungs. As well: asthma, croup and coughing. The air so thick we called it paste. Strung among the gusts came reams of loose hair. Blonde or black streamers stole from sore heads. Cells clogged the chimney, laced the evening. Though the TV went out again in interference, radioed men spoke the wreckage even in our sleep: whole apartment buildings ransacked in skin flakes; baseball stadiums filled to the brim; the faces of lakes and oceans so thick that you could walk forever. The plumes of powder flew over our yards. It beat against our windows, making bass. I learned to breathe in smaller rhythms. The incubated heat swelled so high outside you’d sweat forever, then more dust. Eyes encrusted. Nostrils clogged. One night, finally, the roof over my living room succumbed to all the weight. Somewhere in there, under all that dander, I often would regret I had not been.

  SMOKE HOUSE

  Nights at home now the house sat wordless, so still the mother could not sleep. The bed cramped small and dirty; the air above her suffocating. The mother in her nightgown, tight, worn ratty where she rubbed her fingers in worry circles. She got up and left her husband crimped with his back toward her on the mattress and went downstairs. She went through the kitchen stuffed full of flowers, long rotten, stinking. She went into the son’s room where plastic sheeting covered the holes the fire had burned. The pinned laminate tacked in short sheets over the studs to keep the outside out or inside in. There was no wind. Outside, the earth lay parched and cracking. The trees enfolding over black lawns. The sky only ever one dumb color.

  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 we
re 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:1. the downstairs foyer, where the family’s portrait hung, a value-bought multi-pack, the same shot the Dad kept crumpled in his wallet, and the daughter scratched with marker, hid in a drawer;

  2. inside a kitchen cabinet (the kiddie plates had stunk for weeks, their neon gobs still globbed in puddles, the countertop all warped);

  3. in the backyard, where several pets were buried, as were other things of which the family did not know;

  4. along the rooftop and through the attic, ruining several unmatched heirlooms and their plastic Christmas tree, made black;

  5. in the washroom dryer, ruining all the clothes the father ever really wore;

  6. in the guestroom closet, empty;

  7. around the son.

  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 h
er 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.

  - I’m not awake.

  - You’re talking.

  - That’s someone other talking for me.

  - How cute. How clever.

  - (sounds of snoring)