So, when Joyce and I got back to Monster Island we found Terrance alive and well. Well, alive anyway. Caught off guard, he’d panicked and tossed himself into the well (not a bad idea, actually). He forgot to take the rope with the bucket on it with him, however, so he’d been treading water for a long time (not a terribly good idea). It made me sick to think of having to drink that water now, but I suppose boiling it should kill even Terrance-germs.
Joyce’s grey face turned radiant when she heard Terrance’s voice. She rushed over to the well, leaned over and yelled, “Why is there a dumbass in my well?” and even though I corrected her that it was my well, she ignored me and quickly threw the rope down to Terrance. He clambered over the lip of the well and fell into the dirt, exhausted. She helped him sit up against the well and pushed away the straggly wet hair from his face. Then she ran to her shanty and grabbed a dusty blanket and wrapped it around him. She ordered me to start a fire and when I protested she gave me a look that could have stopped God’s Breath altogether, so I did as she said. Once she had Terrance near the fire she told me to go find Sam. She didn’t even look at me, all her attention focused on Terrance. Again I almost protested, but instead stuck my tail between my legs and ran off into the disorder of my Kingdom. Debris was strewn everywhere, and all that hard work Momma and I had done over the years to keep the lanes and avenues of my Kingdom clear would have to be undertaken all over again.
As I was walking among that anarchic landscape calling out to Sam, I noticed something: I was worried. Genuinely worried. Where was the big guy? Why wasn’t he back at Monster Island with Terrance? Not that he could even fit in the well, I don’t think. Especially with that wormy dick-face already in there. I had no idea. I was on what I’d like to think of as a date with Joyce, the first time she’d given me any attention in a long goddamned time, and I wasn’t thinking much of either of them. Same as I wasn’t thinking much of the oncoming storm, which I should have been much better prepared for. But the day I had marked off in my kitty calendar passed quite some time ago and I guess I grew complacent in the fantasy that maybe God’s Breath would not pass over us this year.
So, I was worried. But, just as the sun was setting behind The Swill Alps, I heard something. It was coming from a relatively small garbage mountain. One I was certain used to be much larger, but must have been chipped away by the gusts and tornadoes. I recognized it used to be Sears Mountain. God destroyed Sears Mountain! I also recognized the sound: sniffles and small cries.
At the heap, I pushed away a twisted lawn mower, tumbled a washing machine down it, and dug away at rotted paper and wood until I found the source of the tiny sounds: Sam. For such a big guy, he sounded awfully small and childlike in that moment. He was huddled among the trash, holding his knees, and crying softly. Just like me, Momma, and Papa had done, Sam burrowed into a mountain and took cover there. Pretty smart, though not the smartest. But smarter than I would have expected of Sam.
Sam’s chin seemed permanently affixed to his chest, like he was in shock or something, but I reached out and took hold of that mammoth face and said, “Sam! You’re OK!” For a few whole breaths Sam just stared at me, bleary eyed and lost. Then the lights came on.
“Clyde?”
“Yeah, big guy. Come on, get out of there. The storm’s over.”
“Clyde?” he said again.
“Let’s go, Sam. Come on. Everything’s fine.”
“Clyde not gone?”
“Does it look like I’m gone, dumdum?”
He reached out then and touched my face, his massive hand nearly suffocating me. I flinched and pushed his hand away.
“You’re here. Not dead,” he said.
“Kings are immortal, Sam, you should know that,” I told him, grabbing hold of his arm and attempting to drag him out of the garbage. “I should read The Aeneid to you. We kings live forever. Either down here or in the stars. Just promise me you won’t get all blubbery during the part about Dido.”
“OK, Clyde,” he said, still half-buried in garbage.
Just then: an explosion. Trash flying everywhere! But it was just Sam bursting out from the crevice he created and grabbing hold of me. He embraced me, lifting me off my feet and swinging me around. He squeezed me so hard I nearly passed out. I had to bang on his chest with my fists until he finally dropped me from that goddamned near-earth orbit of his.
“Geez,” I said, dusting myself.
As we walked back to Monster Island Sam kept trying to hold my hand. I wouldn’t let him, but he said he was afraid the wind would come back and take me away. Eventually, just as twilight took over, I gave up and we held hands all the way back, mine a pebble in his palm.
23
Over the next several months we did become more like a family. After God’s Breath washed over us and left us standing, there was a shared sense of having survived something together. Despite the fact that Sam and Terrance were separated from Joyce and me, living through the event drew us all close, I guess. Even Terrance, once we got him out of the well and warmed up, was much nicer to me and Sam. When Sam and I strolled back to camp, he threw his blanket off and hobbled away from the fire to greet us. He didn’t embrace us or anything like that, but he shook my hand and patted Sam on the back and guided us back to the fire where he asked about Sam’s means of survival and how I managed to keep myself and Joyce firmly planted on Earth, still breathing. Joyce offered to fix Sam and me cups of her weed-tea, but Terrance wouldn’t allow it and got to preparing tea and dinner for all of us. He said he’d hurt his leg falling down the well but that it was the best-feeling injury he’d ever had. Boy, it was like he was a different person. Joyce relaxed back into her satchel, accepted the tea from Terrance, and just smiled. I had asked her why she was so happy and she said she was just “happy to have her boys with her, all safe and sound.” I thought that was cheesy but real nice. I guess I was also feeling a bit lucky to be alive, even though the nagging thought that there was nothing lucky about it nipped away at the back of my stupid brain.
From there, we went on to play house, so to speak. Not like Papa and Momma and me used to where we’d set up temporary walls around us so we could pretend to eat turkey dinners and watch stuff on the broken TV, like our favorite show, Don’t Eat the Body, which was a reality show where people were stranded on a desert island and the last person to not eat the body that eventually washes up on shore wins. Sometimes it didn’t even get that far. Sometimes the whole cast of the show would murder and eat each other before the producers could send the body as temptation to the starving cast. It was a statement, so I understand, about how weak human beings are—how much self-satisfaction and greed outweigh consequence and morals. It’s my favorite show, though I’ve only seen it in my imagination on that broken TV whenever Momma and Papa and me would Play House.
We played house in a different way now. Momma—I mean, Joyce… Joyce and Terrance built themselves a bigger shanty to share and they built a bigger one for me, too. Not just me, though. They said brothers should share a room, so Sam and I became bunkmates. After a dinner of Protein Beans or rat-meat stew, we’d sit around the fire until our eyelids grew heavy, just talking with Joyce and Terrance about our days and what we’ll do with the next day. Momma and Papa—again, I mean Joyce and Terrance, stressed the importance of plans. They said you need to know what you’re doing tomorrow and in the near future, as far as you can plan. They said that’s what life’s about. Having a future, and the best way to have one is to plan it. They said it could be as simple as planning to go braining birds out of the sky or hunting for a particular item in the ranges of garbage mountains enveloping us. Joyce would try to convince me to go weeding along the outside perimeter of my Kingdom, but I refused. She wanted me to venture, to show courage, and I laughed it off. A king cannot abandon his Kingdom, I told her, because in leaving it I am essentially granting lordship over the land to whoever wished to take it. And I wasn’t going to let her or Terrance or Sam have it just because Joyce wan
ted me to “take the first step” toward the day where I’d need to walk away from here forever. Again I laughed. I’d never leave. Besides, there’s monsters out there, loping hunchbacked and full of fever-sores. I wasn’t scared of them so much as I was scared of becoming one of them. I’m King Clyde, after all, and not a monster, I’d tell Joyce and she’d say, “OK, OK. Calm down, son,” and she’d pull me close to her and I’d wrap my arms around her middle, feel her birdlike ribcage flutter, and brush my lips across her salty neck.
But we did develop routines. Joyce would gather the weeds for tea, Terrance and I would occasionally hunt, and Sam took on the role of Guard. He’d stroll throughout the junkyard, ensuring there were no interlopers. I of course thought that was a little funny considering they, themselves, were fucking Out-of-Towners and now the biggest Out-of-Towner of them all (literally) was going to make sure no more Out-of-Towners tried to infiltrate my Kingdom. In the end, I was OK with that. Clearly my new family wasn’t going to leave, and now that they were my loyal subjects, I didn’t think they should. I guess they were no longer Out-of-Towners, themselves, by this point. That’s something I wasn’t aware was possible. From what Momma and Papa told me, no one could belong here but us. No one. And no exceptions. But, a king must have more than just land. He must have people. Right? Before they arrived I hardly understood that, myself.
Joyce and I also got to cleaning up the lanes and avenues of my Kingdom, clearing them of the refuse that cluttered them in the wake of God’s Breath. It was just like Momma and I had done on the previous occasions the windstorm had hit—before she swallowed a bunch of medicine and taped a plastic bag around her head. I still wonder where she even found a bottle of medicine, but assume it came from the garbage heap. And besides the self-help psychology books I was reading after her death, I also read up on medicine and how it can be potent for decades and decades. Still, who’s making medicine anymore? The world became a giant garbage dump centuries ago!
One of my favorite things to happen over the past months was a secret Joyce and I had. One day she found me at The Used Car Lot visiting my dead tree-bride and pretending to be an awesome Hollywood Stuntman and she told me to follow her.
She led me to the nearest wall of my Kingdom, found a big old metal drum and rolled that over. She climbed up on that and then pulled herself atop the wall and told me to do the same. There used to be barbed wire and spikes up there, but she’d apparently removed them, much to my consternation. I mean, she didn’t ask permission, and that was a line of defense placed there by the very Founders of what has become The Kingdom of Clyde. Still, I liked that she came for me to spend alone-time, so I clambered atop the barrel and hoisted myself up on the wall, too. From her jacket she withdrew this little grey square thing. Kind of like a very tiny TV. She said it was an iPod, which I knew about from some of my reading but never really knew what one looked like, though I realized then that the junkyard was full of these tiny things, especially at Mt. Circuit City. I’d never really tried to figure out what they were. It just never occurred to me. My heart pounded real hard, though, when she showed me the thing and told me what it was because I knew she must know how it works. From another pocket she pulled out earbud headphones. I knew what those were, but had never seen a complete pair of them as the wires were always torn or the buds were completely smashed to bits. Before she plugged the earbuds into the iPod, she told me to look out into the distance. I didn’t know what she wanted me to look at. Out there, under the close grey sky, was nothing but flat land stretching out into God’s Open Mouth, otherwise known as the horizon. In the distance, lightning was striking, burning up portions of nothingness. Cooking a world long since cooked already. It was a dry and cracked land, and there was nothing to see there, looking eastward. Joyce didn’t say anything, just motioned toward the distant lightning and so I watched it, kind of hypnotized by the constant glowing snake-strikes of the clouds. Then, suddenly, I was hearing something I’d never heard before—music. It was pulsing and throbbing and crazy. It made my blood move faster and my skin tingle. Joyce said it was this thing called hip-hop, which was always mentioned in books from the 20th and 21st century. She said it was Dr. Dre and I wondered how the guy found time to make such wonderful music in between all his patients, because, as I understand from books, doctors pretty much worked around the clock. Next, Joyce played me classical music, which I knew all about. She played me Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and then let me hear stuff from later centuries, stuff from people I’d never heard of: Max Richter, Philip Glass, and Clint Mansell. We’d sit there, one earbud in her right ear, the other in my left, just watching the empty land catch fire near God’s Open Mouth. Fifteen minutes was all she’d allow. We’d listen for fifteen minutes and then call it quits and go back to Monster Island to meet the others.
Every once in a while, just as a surprise, she’d pull me away from whatever I was doing and we’d go to that same section of the wall and listen to music. She said this was just between us, because I was young and was still developing and needed it. She said Terrance heard plenty of music when he was younger and that it wouldn’t do much good for Sam. She said she was keeping the sessions at fifteen minutes because she knew there wasn’t much charge left in the iPod’s battery, so she wanted to portion it out as best she could before the thing died forever. I relished those surprises so much I didn’t even think to bother her to let me listen in between them. I’d just wait.
Eventually the battery did die. We were listening to jazz music, a piece by Eric Dolphy called “Out There,” when suddenly silence took over. I understood what had happened and didn’t react—I didn’t want Joyce to feel my disappointment because I didn’t want her to think the gift she’d given me had somehow lost value. We were sitting there watching lightning and I had my hand on her knee and even though the music was over, possibly forever, I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to stay right there for at least the full fifteen minutes. I felt Joyce look over at me during the silence, but I kept my eyes forward. I kept the smile on my face. I kept hearing the music because once you hear it how could you ever stop hearing it? I stayed there until Joyce took my hand from her knee and, without words, turned and hopped off the wall back into my Kingdom. We walked back together, silent, because our heads were filled with music and there was no need for words.
Before I knew it, my fifteenth birthday was here. That’s how quickly time was flying with my new family. Suddenly, I was three inches taller, ten pounds heavier, and a whole damn year older. Joyce even made me a cake! Well, she sculpted some mud and placed it on a platter and lit some candles. She did this at night before we lit the campfire, so the candles’ glow was the only light in all The Kingdom of Clyde and that was fitting. The only light on my birthday from here on out will be birthday candles for Clyde! So it is written, and so it shall be done! But they sang me the happy birthday song, which Momma and Papa used to do for me and I nearly cried but I didn’t. It reminded me that in the time since the arrival of these Out-of-Towners I’d hardly visited Momma and Papa at The Memory Palace. It was almost like Joyce, Sam, and Terrance were casting a Forgetting Spell on me, intent on erasing Momma and Papa from my memory. I decided, while blowing out my candles and making the whole world go dark with a single breath, that I’d never forget them. Never.
I’ve visited Momma semi-frequently since my fifteenth. I’d talk to Papa, too, but since his head got bashed in he has rarely been much for conversation. He mostly likes talking about pennies and how 2049 was a good year and that I should spit-shine that penny every day and spend at least a half hour each day just staring at it, flipping it over and over in my palm. I pshawed him and kind of gave his grave marker a friendly jab, which knocked it over. Papa complained at that then laughed about how good I am at knocking things over. I laughed too and uprighted the cabinet door with “PAPA” scrawled on it back into its rightful place. He’d spend most of the time being quiet, though. Which was fine, because it was Momma that I really wanted to t
alk to. I’d take out my lock of her hair and stroke it and Momma would reach through the soil and hold me. Sometimes I’d fall asleep in Momma’s embrace and dream of Joyce. I’d dream of Joyce in her shanty with Terrance, making all that noise. Then suddenly I’d be Terrance and sweaty old Joyce was beneath me, her eyes closed, chest and neck blushing, mouth opened, and I’d quickly lose myself inside her and she’d smile and pull me to her by the back of my neck and tell me not to leave her. Not to ever leave her. To stay inside her forever. I’d wake up and find a mess in my pants and have to run to The Drinking and Washing Fountain to clean up. It’s happening more and more frequently and stripping out of my big rubber boots, pants, orange life vest, and shirt is becoming a real pain in the butt. Washing my own clothes was also kind of humiliating now that I have my loyal subject, Sam, to do that for me.
But sometimes I’d dream of Joyce, her naked body next to me, and my hand on her stomach. I’d be rubbing her belly and she’d smile and squint her eyes at me lovingly, the glow of firelight outside the shanty our only light. I’d just be rubbing her tummy when suddenly it’d split open like all them garbage bags filling my mountains, and blood would go everywhere. Joyce would convulse and I’d shrink away from her, covered in her blood, then something, along with all her guts, would drop from her ruptured belly. Something slickened in mucus and blood. Something orange and covered in sores. Something humpbacked, that crawled away from Joyce’s lifeless body, leaving a glistening trail in its wake. It’d crawl into the walls of the shanty and just bang into them blindly, haphazardly looking for an exit. When it crawled toward me, slow, wet, and twitching, I was paralyzed. The thing didn’t even have its eyes open. Just when I thought it would crawl past me and exit the shanty, it crawled atop me, small and helpless. It climbed onto my chest and held me and purred through labored, hissing breaths. I petted it, shushed it, and told it everything was going to be alright. I said it was going to be just fine. We’d patch up Momma and get her fixed up real good and the three of us would be just fine. With my hand on its hunched back, I felt its breathing go calm. Then it showed me its jagged yellow teeth and it tore a hole in my chest as easy as a burrowing gopher. I felt it slither past my rib cage and attach itself to my spine. Its teeth clacked onto that knob at the base of your neck. When I could move again I tried to stick my hand in the hole in my chest, only to find it closed up. Next thing I knew, I was on top of Joyce, who had a plastic bag around her head, and a blue-grey face. I’d try to rip the bag from her head but couldn’t. Instead, I’d finish inside her and tell her I was never going to leave her, but immediately find myself crawling around on my belly between long, orange legs loping in all directions. There was thunder and the choked murmuring and grunts of these creatures, but they didn’t notice me. I’d crawl out into that cracked, lightning-struck land, past all these monsters, until I fell off the edge of the Earth, right into God’s Open Mouth.
The Sun My Destiny Page 12