Elysium

by Jennifer Marie Brissett

  Antoine pulled at him when Adrian slowed. A beat. And you don’t stop. They passed the graffiti practice walls on crumbling buildings designated for demolition with official letters from the city plastered on their doors. No one came to this place anymore. So the kids used the walls to work on their art. On the sides of these broken brick buildings were bold splashes of color. The smell of paint still lingered in the air. Empty spray cans littered the grounds among the other trash that Antoine and Adrian ran through.

  They headed for the foundation of an abandoned apartment building that still stood erect. Adrian followed Antoine as he scrambled down into the basement. Antoine held a part of a boarded-up window open. Adrian didn’t want to go inside. The fear made him crawl down fast.

  Don’t push me cause I’m close to the eeeedge,

  I’m try-in’ not to lose my head …

  Their bodies were small enough to slip through. Antoine could still get on the bus for a ten-year-old’s price even though he was fourteen. Adrian would be twelve and a half in the fall.

  They landed in the dark. Adrian was breathing hard. Antoine put his hand over his mouth to make him quiet. The thing that was following them growled by the window and paced back and forth, sniffing. Antoine stretched his neck to look behind them through a small hole in the wooden board. The animal was made of flesh and metal. Its green eyes glowed. The silhouette of its master was tall against the moon, with antlers that spiraled up like twisting metal pipes. The thing heard its master’s call. After a time, it padded away. The sounds of its feet grew distant, then silent. Antoine took his hand off his brother’s mouth and Adrian drew in a deep swallow of air because he had been holding his breath.

  “Where are we?” Adrian asked.

  “Shh. Don’t worry,” Antoine whispered.

  “It smells like piss,” Adrian whispered back.

  “I know.”

  “Can we go home now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you why before.”

  “Maybe Dad got better …”

  Antoine didn’t say anything for a long time. He walked into the light that shined through the large hole in the roof. Adrian went up to his big brother and gently pulled his jacket sleeve.

  “Dad’ll get better, won’t he?”

  Antoine looked down. A beat. “I don’t think so.”

  Adrian knew that it was probably true. He didn’t want to believe it. Everyone that got the disease went strange — grown-ups and children, too. The dust changed people. The disease made them sick. Over the past few days they had seen people change. Folks with scales running up and down their necks gulping for air like fish. Monkeymen with bowed legs swinging from lampposts. The dust was changing their dad. If they were lucky, only his body would change. If they weren’t, he’d catch the disease and he would be crazy, too. It would make him do things that he didn’t mean. He might hurt them. Antoine didn’t want to take a chance, so he ran, taking his little brother with him.

  Adrian began to cry.

  “Don’t worry, Adrian. I got you. You’re my boy. I’m gonna take care of you now. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

  They left that basement and walked uptown in the dimness of daybreak. The streets were a deserted mess. Cars stopped in traffic with no one in them. Newspapers and trash flying around. Smashed windows on the storefronts. And silence. Their footfalls echoed off the tall buildings. Behind the gray clouds it was speckly, like a monitor screen gone wrong. A small green dot hovered up there. Adrian watched it for a while as they walked until it blipped out of existence.

  Whenever they heard something or saw something move, they hid. Abandoned storefronts, an old wreck of a house, and alleyways all made good hiding places. Something moved. It could have been anything. It could even have been someone who was still normal. Antoine wasn’t taking any chances with Adrian’s life. So they took cover and waited for whatever it was to pass.

  Things fell apart so fast. Who would have guessed that the city could look this way so soon after the incident? That’s what their dad called it, the Incident. He seemed pained even saying that much. Now their dad was gone. But Adrian had Antoine. He was going to look out for him. He would always look out for him.

  The sound of feet came from behind them. Antoine pulled Adrian into the entryway of an office building. They quietly went inside, climbed the stairs, and went to the second floor window to look down. Two men were strolling by. They walked with bowed legs. One of them had something in his mouth. The tail and the squeal suggested that it was a rat. The dust did this, and maybe the dust would do more.

  They looked carefully before they went back to the street. Antoine walked as though he had no fear. Adrian had enough fear for both of them.

  They came to a subway station and went down to the platform. Antoine jumped onto the track. The trains didn’t run anymore.

  “C’mon,” Antoine said.

  “I don’t wanna go down there,” Adrian said.

  “It’s the only safe place right now. No one knows about it but me.”

  Adrian still didn’t move.

  A cold wind blew from deep inside the tunnel, carrying a nasty smell. Adrian turned his face away. He didn’t like enclosed places, especially dark ones. Plus mounds of garbage mired over the tracks from way down into the darkness of the tunnel, and he thought he saw something moving in there.

  “Adrian, I said come on!” Antoine said. “We can’t stay here. The only place safe from the dust is underground.”

  “I don’t want to go in there.”

  “I’ve been here a million times. It’s fine. It’s a secret place. Don’t you wanna see?”

  Antoine was always talking about the special secret places he knew about that he would show Adrian when he got older. Finally being in on his secrets was what moved Adrian’s feet. Antoine took his hand and helped him down onto the track.

  Death creeps through the streets over programmed

  beats. A rabid dog in heat on a dead end street. Oil

  slicks: the only rainbows canvas gray concrete.

  Shadows of skyscrapers fall when Mohammed speaks.

  Corpses piled in heaps. Sores and decay. Reeks.

  Placin tags on feet. A Nike Air Force fleet. Custom

  Made: unique. Still in box: white sheet. Ripened

  Blue black sweet. White tank top, wife beat BREAK.

  Hearts in two-step beat BREAK.

  Dance pray work whip beat BREAK.

  Neck back jump back kiss BREAK.

  Now shake it off.

  Their eyes soon adjusted to the darkness. They walked over the gravel that lined the area next to the train tracks. Strips of daylight slipped in from the underside of a grate above. The light illuminated the wall they walked past covered in graffiti, the bubble words so high passengers on trains would be able to see them. Antoine pointed out a small area where the words swirled to a round red dot surrounded by glowing white highlights. In it was a scribbling of black magic marker writing. Adrian couldn’t read it.

  “That’s my tag,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I wouldn’t tag something like that now. I didn’t know any better back then. I hope the guys that did this don’t catch me.”

  Adrian laughed. He could see his brother’s eyes smile behind the shadows. A beat. The guys who did this were probably dead.

  Adrian had always watched his brother work. Antoine sketched in his drawing pad, using magic markers to fill in the colors. The smell of the markers in his room was intoxicating. Cool beats and rhymes from MCs blasted as he drew curvy lines that stretched and twisted over and under and through. Spelling names, naming places, placing times, timing rhythms. Adrian begged and begged his dad for a sketchpad, too. When he got it, he did as Antoine did, only different. When he sketched, he drew faces. Faces of the guys down the way. Faces of the street lady with the shopping cart and the bags of cans. But the best work he would ever do was the memorials.

&nb
sp; Memorials would spring up on the sides of shopping centers, on the walls of the playground, by the barbershops. They seemed to appear overnight, and no one ever knew whose work it was. They’d spelled R.I.P. in large elegant curvaceous lines for the many brothers who had passed on before their time. Some from bullets, some for other reasons. No one ever tagged them. They would stay up for years. Someone obviously cared for them, refreshing the paint. Adrian had made two of his own by now. One for a kid he barely knew from school, who hadn’t had a beef with anyone, but got shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. One for his friend Steven who died of cancer in the summer of last year. Now that everyone was gone, Adrian felt lost. There were too many faces to remember. There weren’t enough walls to paint them all.

  Antoine took him deep into the tunnel. He stopped at a metal door and opened it. He turned on the light. It was a maintenance office. Inside, there was a room with a toilet and another with a desk and papers all around. In the corner was a small couch, and beside it was Antoine’s stash — a box full of spray cans. Adrian picked up one with a red cap. It was heavy with paint and made a clack-clack-clack sound when he shook it.

  “We can stay here for a while,” Antoine said. “No one comes here anymore. We get power from the solar panel outside. So we won’t be in the dark. Move underground. Always gotta go underground.”

  Adrian sat down on the couch. The weight of his feet was heavy. So tired.

  “You bring your sketch pad?” Antoine asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good, me too,” he said. “You got anything new?”

  A beat. He did have something that Antoine hadn’t seen yet.

  “Yeah, I’ve been working on something but it’s not done.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Not yet.”

  Antoine smiled. “That’s cool. Now you’re thinking like an artist. Don’t never show your shit before it’s ready.”

  “Did you bring any food with you?”

  “A little. That store had a lot of stuff in it. I should’ve taken more.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “I think I’ll go back there and get more stuff.”

  “But those things are out there.”

  “I know, but we haveta eat.”

  Adrian looked away. Everything was so bad. And their dad wasn’t around to make things right anymore. Not like after their mom died. BREAK.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry,” Antoine said and flashed that smile of his. “They can’t catch me, son! I got this!”

  The smile was infectious.

  “Okay,” Adrian said and Antoine left him alone and, for the moment, safe.

  ** BREAK **

  >>

  >> .

  >> createdoc check_for_daemon.fi

  # check_daemon.fi -- check if daemon process

  # is running in the background

  ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep Gauns

  # if not found - equals to 1

  if [ $? -eq 0 ]

  then echo “Found daemon process…”

  .eof

  >> execute check_for_daemon

  >>

  .

  .

  .

  Antoine left two days ago and hadn’t been back since. Adrian waited in the cold maintenance office, too scared to move. The things were out there. Maybe they were in the tunnels. Maybe they were waiting for him out on the streets. It didn’t matter. Antoine was gone. And he probably wasn’t coming back. BREAK.

  As his stomach twisted with hunger pains, Adrian sketched. Magic markers squeaked and scratched over the paper. The rhythm of his hand made music on the page. He drew face after face after face. Over and over and over again he drew. Strange faces. Faces of friends. Faces of the fellahs from around the way. Faces of the kids at school. Different faces. He stopped and looked over all of the pages he had done. The faces had merged into one. They were his brother.

  Antoine. Antoine. Antoine. BREAK.

  There had been a hum in the tunnel that was now silent, and the lights began to flicker. Had Adrian understood what that meant, he would have left the room then. It meant that power was no longer going to the pumps that kept the groundwater out of the tunnels. It meant that the underground was about to flood. The silence soon became unbearable, so Adrian opened the door. Water was flowing almost up to the steps of the office.

  He packed his sketchbook and as many spray cans he could carry and walked out into the tunnel, stepping carefully through the dirty water. The further Adrian walked, the more flooded the tunnel became. He walked until the water reached his waist, holding his bag over his head. Wet and miserable, he climbed the stairs to the street. Adrian was afraid of running into one of those things. But he was hungry, and he wanted to find his brother. So he wandered down the long avenues of the city, listening to his feet scrape the ground.

  In his heavy knapsack he carried the several cans of spray paint that made up the colors of his essential palette: red, green, gold, brown, black, several cans of white, yellow and a small can of blue. The remaining cans he left in the box hidden behind the couch in the maintenance office. He thought he could get them later. He pictured them underwater now.

  He searched all of the places he knew Antoine liked to go — the old harbor that overlooked the next state, the cement park where the skateboarders used to hang out and practice their moves, the park in the square where the green market had met three times a week. All of them empty — no Antoine, no anyone. Only the lonely howl of the wind and the sounds of birds flapping overhead. And it was cold.

  The sky above remained gray, the blue never returned. The dust had settled and formed an even layer on the ground. Adrian ventured out during the day and spent his nights huddled in the small corners of high-rise offices, his knapsack of spray cans for a pillow. Once, when passing the city hall, he saw an elk. It was wandering between the parked cars, then striding along the sidewalk puffing white cold smoke. It stopped for a moment and the two stared each other. The moment passed, and it made a slight sound like the whinny of a horse. For a moment, Adrian thought it was trying to speak. But then the elk turned its head and walked away, disappearing down the long corridors of the streets.

  Adrian found canned stuff left in abandoned shops that was still good. He felt loneliest when he ate. Mealtime was when he and his father and his mom and Antoine used to talk. Mostly Antoine, though. Antoine would tell jokes that he’d heard, or dreams that he’d had the night before, or stuff that had happened that day in school. Now meals echoed the silence of the crunch or the swallow and nothing more. BREAK. Adrian didn’t understand when his dad said, “Adrian, you could rule the world if you put your mind to it, but Junior … I don’t know about him sometimes.” How could he not know that Antoine was the center of the universe? Adrian could see it. He could plainly see it.

  Adrian painted on walls. The once forbidden places now belonged to him. He chose the cement side of a government building first. He worked all day. First he laid out the outline in white, checking his sketch pad to make sure he got the proportions right. His fingers were covered in gloves with the tips cut off, and his face was masked so he wouldn’t breathe in the paint fumes. By nightfall, his mural neared completion. His brother’s large face stared back at him. He put the finishing touches on it before he lost the light. A light spray here, a little highlight there, and the metallic finish he wanted on the letters was complete. Instead of R.I.P., he put only a name: Antoine. That’s when it hit him. The only way Antoine would be away this long was if his brother was never coming back. Adrian crawled into a ball and spent the night sleeping next to the mural he created. It was a stupid thing to do with those things still roaming the streets. But it was the closest he’d ever be to his brother again.

  He painted another memorial on another wall. And another and another. He decided that his brother would not be forgotten. Antoine’s image would live on forever and ever. One time he gave h
is brother that sly smile that he remembered so well. Another time, his brother looked down, serious and considerate. It became a mission to paint his brother’s face everywhere there was a blank wall. What else was there to live for? He went back to his old neighborhood — an empty ghost town of whispered memories. He painted on the wall of his old apartment building. This was where Adrian intended to create his greatest work: Antoine set in the night sky, floating as if living amongst the stars and above him an eagle with wings outstretched, hovering as if carrying Antoine into the heavens.

  Something made a sound behind him.

  >>

  ** BREAK **

  Found daemon process…

  >>

  >>

  He lingered over his finishing touches on the mural. He didn’t want to leave it. Stupid. He slung his knapsack over his head and ran. They were close behind him. Almost upon him. A voice from above said, “I got you, son.” Adrian felt his feet leave the ground as he was taken into the sky. The sun blocked Adrian’s eyes. He saw spots and lines of blinding light. Strong arms closed around him, wings outstretched. Feathers flutter flutter against the static gray sky. He looked up into the face of his father, changed but it was him.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said.

  And he flew his remaining son safely up with no mention of his namesake.

  >>

  >>

  ** INTERRUPT **

  ERROR: SYSTEM FRAGMENTATION

  ERROR: SOME DATA LOSS

  ** SYSTEM RESET **

  .

  .

  .

  10.

  They started as little nubs burrowing out of her back. At first they itched like tiny insect fingers crawling up and down just under her shoulder blades. She tried to ignore them. Then she tried to hide them. Even the thick sweater with the holes in it couldn’t cover the growing bumps. Adrianne didn’t say anything to her father. He so desperately wanted her to be normal. She didn’t know how to tell him that it was happening to her, too. He was so busy worrying about finding their next meal that he didn’t seem to notice her strange behavior. There was a sweet pain in knowing that she was becoming like him. She wasn’t sure that he’d see it like that.