Cataclysm Baby

by Matt Bell

  Then the song of farewell. Then the song of forgiveness. Then the song of funeral.

  Then the song of their teeth upon my throat, upon my haunch and perineum and tendons, the soft spots of the easy kill.

  Then in my mind only the face of my own father, the last human visage I saw, which I never again brought forth upon this wilding world, despite all my efforts to prevent his line’s extinction, despite all my attempts to raise these lost boys in his image.

  Virgil, Virotte, Vitalis

  Starting from the middle of the country, we follow the rumors, the talk that there are no more women, no more mothers or daughters, none remaining to bear our future forth except those afloat beyond the last lands of the west, collected aboard a ship, some tanker meant to carry them away, to keep them safe.

  What I know, despite those rumors: There are no women left, except the one beside me, this daughter disguised as a son, who I must somehow see aboard that ship.

  On our way west, I cull her hair every few days, steal her layers of clothing from abandoned storefronts, thick shirts and thermal underwear and patterned button-ups distracting enough so that what lies beneath might be harder to see, to suss out and desire. As we walk, I tell her that once this sandy stretch of waste was a plain state, was all fields of waving wheat and corn. Mile after mile, I offer her some bit of this world I’ve known, some memory of what once lay on either side of the wide freeways littered with abandoned cars. For a thousand foot-sore miles I do this, not running out of stories until we cross the last state line, the last desert. Until we enter the last city, perched at the far end of the earth, where we climb down to the shore, our descent cut with broken roads providing unsure passage, switchbacking to the crowded docks leading out above the tossing water.

  And there in the distance: The tanker we’d hoped to catch, too quickly departed, left without my daughter.

  What choice do we have? No other option but to go out onto the docks anyway, to push through this great crowd of men, only and always men, all armed, all fat with fury, all crowding the shore or else wading out into the oil-black of the water, its brackish thickness, their voices begging, cajoling, demanding the ship to turn back, to return to them these last few mothers and daughters, these final receptacles for the making of legacy, a continuation of our failure.

  We push through, my daughter’s hand in my hand, in the one not clutched around my revolver, my own six chances to clear the way. I pull my daughter close, wrap her tight in the leather of my duster, and in the distance the tanker taunts us with its purpose, its promise to stay afloat until all us men are gone, until at least the worst of us have passed, leaving the world for those more deserving of its inheritance—

  And then my daughter saying, Look.

  Then her eyes peeking out from the blanket of my coat, her hand pointing over the water, and her saying, Look, Daddy.

  There, Daddy. There.

  How few they are: All the good women of the world. All gathered except for my daughter, who should be among their number.

  How few, and how far, but perhaps still close enough.

  I nod, open my duster, tell her to get ready.

  I tell her, When I start shooting, you run for the end of the dock, and no matter what you keep running.

  I tell her, You swim as fast as you can, and pray they rescue you.

  She sobs once as I raise the heavy hammer of my revolver, but there is no time for goodbye, and no other word I wish to say that our thousand shared miles did not already allow. I push her out of my duster, follow her into the space my bullets tear free of the men blocking her way, and with each shot I get her one falling body closer to the end of the dock, our escape hung out over the water.

  And then my hand scrabbling fresh shells from my pocket, then my hand reloading, then six more shots making six holes in six men, making ten feet of running-space.

  And then my daughter, covered in the blood of those who would want only what she is, never who, men waiting to mar her, to tear her away, to hold back her body they desire.

  And then reload and fire, reload and fire, and then we run until there are no more men ahead, until we tumble off the edge of the dock, fall far into the cold waves, where the ocean fills my mouth and nostrils, drenches my heavy clothes so tight I can barely kick to get my head above the surface, to suck again the sickened air.

  What I know: My daughter is no longer nearby, no longer close at hand, but surely she can’t be lost.

  As I am dragged ashore by the kin of the men I have struck down, as they beat the angry stocks of their rifles against my face and chest, as they take from me what satisfaction they could not take from my daughter, then I tell myself that I know she swims on unmolested, that without us men to hold her back she kicks by the buoys that mark the end of this world’s dominion, makes what powerful strokes she needs to take her out past the breakwater, toward the waiting tanker and then into the future, that far flatness beyond.

  Walker, Wallace, Warren

  Now to make a memorial, a memory meant to outlast those recently gone from my head, lost through the holes eaten by this new wind blowing across my farm, bleached blank by the cloudy water that climbs thick and sluggish from my well. In goggles and duster, I gather my tools, go out of the house and into the ashy remains of the yard, this family orchard once lush and full of apples.

  And all around me: Only stilled wood, dead branches over dirty ground. Only this lonely world grown atop my buried children, my planted wife.

  With awl and adze, with hammer and chisel, I carve my oldest out of the first tree. I remake him as best I remember, shaping the roundness of his cheeks, grooving out the spaces between his teeth and toes.

  When I am done, I fill my ears with my fingers to hold in the sound of his voice, the last words he said to me before we lost him, still too close to the surface of my thoughts. I clench my eyes so his image might not get diffused by the weak sunlight poking through my goggles, a dimness forever threatening to steal him from behind my lids.

  Across the orchard, it takes weeks to rough in his sister and his sister and his brother and his brother. Upon a lightning-split husk, I stencil the twins that followed, then whittle out the other babies impossible to call boys or girls, their flesh too bent and broken upon their bones to name.

  Our last child, the one birthed runny as yolk, I do not carve it at all. I haven’t the talent to make its nothing form out of wood, haven’t the strength to try.

  On the first day of fall, I cut my wife’s body free of the centermost trunk, using my tools to recreate the inverted ribs of her diseased chest, the long-ago smoothness of her oft-emptied belly. With every skill I’ve learned, I remember her upon the wood: Her eyes exactly the proper shape and size, exactly the right tilt to complement the laughing smile last heard too long ago. Her nose alone I work on for days, slicing curl after curl off the bridge until it is the same nose whose tip I kissed goodbye every night, even at the end, when there was so little of it left. I spend a week curving bark into hair, and then a month recreating her favorite blouse, the many folds of its matching skirt, both worn the sun-drenched day we were wed.

  And then believing myself done, every cut and carved son as partially complete as he was in life, every doomed daughter dancing in wood around the figure of my long-missed wife.

  And then waking to forgetting her name. And then forgetting all their names. And then wishing I had carved those syllables into the trees, so I might know which child is which.

  And then telling myself it doesn’t matter, that their names are not important.

  It was not their names I loved. It is not their names I miss.

  Another weird wind blows, and then it is winter. And then there is me, no longer remembering any day when it was not winter. And still this project, seemingly unfinished: Always some new detail for me to add, some torso to reshape or dimple to correct. Some finger needing a nail, some foot needing the rest of its toes—because surely a child would have ten toes, ten f
ingers?

  Surely every child would have hair and eyes and ears and a nose?

  Surely no child could be as incomplete as these?

  And then one day berating myself for the lack of skill that left them ugly and warped, rent and ruined.

  And then who are these people.

  And then who am I to them, these ten perfect children made of trees, this one woman grown out of the applewood to raise them.

  And so sad she is. So alone. And how I wish I could join her. And how I wish I could be the father and she the mother and all these our children, so that none of us would be lonely again.

  And how sure I am that whoever made them is not the good one who made me, because who would be so cruel as to keep us apart, with this unbearable distance between wood and flesh, this unchangeable differential of atoms.

  All winter long I brush the snow from off their faces, so that I might study each one in turn, so that I might practice falling in love with them, as some father must have done, so long ago.

  When the snow finally melts, see then this improbable thing I find, sprung forth from the palm of some unrecognizable child: Some new leaf, some green branchlet blooming.

  See now how I hold it in my fingers. And how I let it lay its buds across my palm. And how every day I think again I might pluck its growth free of the trunk, so that its fresh promise might tease me no more.

  Xarles, Xavier, Xenos

  And all around me, only disappointment: Only my house, slowly sinking into the ever-muddying earth. Only my horses and my one remaining milk-cow, lying together upon their sides, moaning in the swamp of our fields. Only my crops, the husk-barren corn plants unable to grow past my kneecaps.

  Only my son, with his gray skin and strange skull, his cleft-lisped voice, his useless hands making the arts and crafts his mother taught him, as all around our world shifts less solid, less able to keep us above its porous skin.

  While I spend my days adding hopeful supports to our house, burying beams in search of denser ground, this son—this boy I no longer wish to claim—he makes portraits of his mother with the cheap watercolors we bought him as a child. He paints her eyes wrong, colors her hair black instead of blonde, and so every night I take away his papers and throw them into the puddle of our yard.

  Every night, I tell him, Again you didn’t paint her right.

  I say, Nothing better to do all day, and still you can’t remember your mother’s face.

  I say, All our house surrounded by this new swamp, this mad earth that swallowed our neighbors, that sucked deep your mother, when you would not set down your dolls to save her—

  This world has taken everything from me, and still there is my boy, sitting here doing nothing, while I have to farm, to herd, to build the struts and floats keeping our house atop this shivering earth.

  I say, What good use is a son, if he is a son like you?

  Oh, and the hurt in his eyes! So unfair he thinks me, so cruel! Perhaps so, but in no less measure than he deserves, when even after this speech he only puts away his paints to pick up his clay, ready to begin another set of misshapen family figurines, another pairing of plump mothers and dwarfed crack-chested fathers.

  What tears when I smash them with my fist, when I crush their bodies upon our food-bare table!

  What good tears, so that he might get them out, so that without them he might become the man I want him to be!

  For another week, I come in from the fields each night to pull down his construction paper mobiles, to crumble his finger-paintings, his collages cut from our family photo albums.

  For another week, I indulge his teenage wastefulness, and then I say, No more.

  Then I say, Follow me.

  With my rifle in my hands, I say this.

  On our porch—warped atop this land of mud-paths and quick-muck—I put my hand on his shoulder.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, and then I take it off.

  I say, I have decided I would rather have no son than have you.

  I say, I will give you a fifty-yard head start, and then I will shoot just once.

  If you aren’t killed, then good luck to you.

  My sensitive son, always he cries! So unfair, he says. So wrong to do this to my own child, no matter what our differences, sending him out into a world unstable and wet, where who knows which paths might lead to safety, and which to sinking death.

  I say, You don’t know, but I do. I know which paths, because I have tread them every day, growing what crops might grow, caring for what horse and cow might scrape through even now.

  You have done none of these things, even when asked, even when I wished to teach you to be the man that I am, and so you know nothing of the world outside our walls, outside the confines of your stupid and strange head.

  I say, I have never liked you. Not when you were a baby, and not now, when you are less than a man.

  I say, I do not know I want to kill you, but I suppose I want a chance. Just to see how this thing might feel, that I have daydreamed for so long.

  And then I kick him off the porch, and then I tell him to run.

  I wait until he reaches the sycamore slanted at the far border of my yard, slanted as crooked as his limping run, his trunk pulled this way and that by his heavy head, and then I raise the rifle.

  I pull the trigger, squeeze its weight made glorious, and then for an instant I am no longer disappointed, despite all this awful world: The short blaze of a muzzle flash, the uncertain flight of a bullet, the razor-edge of chance between one bad outcome and another, worse.

  Yaretzi, Yasmina, Yatima

  From between my wife’s legs quickened only this puff of womb-air, this gasp of baby-breath trapped for months inside her, followed by no body, no afterbirth, no cord to cut or miscarriage to scrape away. Afterward, my wife insisted she heard the sound of our baby girl crying, but what was I to say in the absence of that child’s shape? How was I to call her anything other than mad, when my wife insisted our baby was near, that she could hear her every move?

  If only my wife had lasted longer! If only she could have made it through the too many years of try, try again, through the eventual barrenness that followed all those pregnancies producing only air, only wet sound, then together we might have enjoyed what I first heard only in the weeks and months after her passing: A voice, tinkling from beside my bed, from near my right ear, whenever I sat in the rocking chair bought to rock the many daughters I did not believe had lived.

  And what words this daughter-voice says! What new machines she gives to me, filling this old tinker’s mind with complex combinations of horns and needles, with great spoolings of copper wire meant to circle the spindle of our house, reaching higher and higher—

  It takes time to build what she first tells me to build, but with the closing of the factories I have nothing but time.

  With the departure of every neighbor for miles around, it’s just me and the daughter-voice, together day after day, conversing in whispers while I rig new antennas atop the roof of our house, welding them from the left-behinds of those fled for more hopeful havens.

  When she tells me the house isn’t tall enough to reach the signal she’s promised, then I take her advice and abandon the low roof, begin my first true tower in the rock-stubbed field behind our home.

  When the tower is finished, the daughter-voice says, Close, but not quite.

  She says, Try again, Pa, try again.

  And then erecting a second tower taller than the first.

  And then a third taller than the second. And then a fourth and a fifth.

  Then a whole array of towers, of scavenged wood and steel hung up toward the heavens, an entire village rubbled so I might build the monoliths the daughter-voice commands.

  By the time there are a dozen towers dotting the field, it already takes a whole day to climb the tallest, to wrap bundles of wire around some new hanging dongle, some better apparatus designed with her help.

  By the time there are a score of to
wers, my back is stooped, my fingers arthritic. The daughter-voice is older too, her speech husky like mine.

  You take after me, I tell her.

  Upon the scaffolding of my newest height, I say, Your mother’s voice was softer, sweeter.

  With my wet face freezing in the high wind, I say, She never once raised her tone in anger. Not even when I didn’t believe you were real, when she was the only one who could hear you speak.

  And the daughter-voice says, Build.

  She says, Build so that you might climb, then climb so you might speak to her again.

  She says, All the world below is death, but above it other lands still float.

  By twenty stories there are no buildings below to go home to, everything scavenged for tower after tower, and so I build bunks in the sky. When the earth below is so wasted nothing will grow, then at twenty-five stories I plant a garden, lifting the last good sod with rope and pulley, hauling questionable seeds up ladders in satchels and packs.

  At thirty stories I realize I’m going blind.

  At forty, I lose control of my bowels for the first time.

  At sixty, I fall deaf in my right ear, and when I scream I hear only half the fear I feel.

  When the daughter-voice returns, I refuse to build another inch until she reassures me, and so she tells me to sit still, to put my good ear to the final horn I installed, to listen for what I can.

  At last! At last I think I’m going to hear my wife, but no, I do not.

  What I hear are several voices just like hers.

  Voices as similar to my wife’s as the daughter-voice is to mine.

  Other daughters, born of other pregnancies, other once-thought failures now flying at this height, this six-hundredth foot of upstretched steel. All these voices raised without me because I could not see them, could not touch them, because without sight and without touch I would not believe they were real.