His forehead crinkles. “Why would I?”
Silence surfaces. The woman, Gene, scratches her arm. Atlas coughs.
Gene says, “My last name’s Walker.”
Atlas bursts out laughing.
She raises an eyebrow. “What’s so funny?”
“Your name—” He catches a breath, clenching his stomach. “You’re a ‘walker’ and you’re named ‘Walker.’ Such is comical.” Atlas quiets and lowers his head, finding his staring place on the floor again.
“You’re a strange one. You know that?”
He budges his head up and down.
“You’re in good company.” She laughs.
They drive alongside curious gray mass, which heaves polished ridges, one after the other, down its channel wide as a peripheral Sideran island, longer than a hundred. It doesn’t click in Atlas’s mind until Gene’s vehicle speeds beyond towers and out of the city maze. It’s water. And the water reflects sky, sky without the hard edges of clouds and their highlights or shadows, without the emerging overexposure of horizon’s glare. Glittering through roadside tree branches, the river pulses sky into one element, one velvet, bluish flux.
Contamination purges would pale in the face of it; Atlas still bears the precipitation of it.
Gene looks to her right and gives a weak smile. Atlas avoids it. He brushes a chunk of yesterday’s hair, clung to the dampness of his tunic, off his shoulder.
“Did you just cut your hair?” Gene asks.
His eyes pursue the fallen lock, hand flies to his head. His heart skips a beat in expectation of punishment for bodily litter; but Gene doesn’t move, her eyes on the road. Atlas flattens his hair’s dry back section but, as soon as his palm leaves it, brunette sprouts stick up again. He frowns and nods.
She smiles at him. “It looks good.”
Atlas turns his gaze to the window and watches his expression more than the river. Warmth spreads in his chest.
His word becomes less a lie as they drive: he does feel healthy. At least, he’s less sore than he was ten minutes ago and unscathed compared to an earthly day ago.
Greenery engulfs stone and metal and the highway bends Gene and Atlas from the river, out of metropolis sprawl. Smaller buildings and thinner roads flicker between foliate plumes, pockets of razed woodland opening to suburbs at crossroads. Vehicle-occupied ramps before wide, horizontally-textured sheets of doors and portico porches bordering humming metal boxes and children sitting upon two-wheeled, many-barred transit devices and pickets and sheds and gabled windows flash at forest gaps.
Everything’s green, a color rarely seen on Sidera, a sage that burns into emerald as the sun rises. Unfamiliar birds hop from branch to branch, tweeting and singing, so many, so close, so varied. Nests of bramble climb hardwoods climbing sky, and all is a clever child’s garden rolling together manmade contraptions and lush tangles in a vertical labyrinth. Other vehicles veer onto different routes, into woods and solitude, and silence magnifies the car’s hum.
Gene pushes a button on the dashboard. Booms and coordinated voices, both human and inhuman, pour from all sides of the vehicle. Atlas jumps. He glances about and grips his seat’s edges, holding his breath.
“You,” Gene purses her lips, “don’t like Taylor Swift?”
“Swift? This noise is fast?”
She lowers her voice and changes the station. “I know what you mean.”
More braking and accelerating, stopping before lights Atlas doesn’t understand and then speeding past them, and Gene turns her vehicle onto a large asphalt lot strewn with motionless vehicles. A beige building stands in the center. She parks the car a few paces from it and twists a jangle, stops the engine. Atlas struggles with the door to get out and meets Gene around the vehicle’s front. She outstretches an arm.
Atlas lifts his hand. “I am able.”
“Are you sure?” Her eyes skip to the scuffs around his knees. He’s fortunate rain diluted their bloodstains.
“Positive.”
Gene ducks her head and spins around. She steps through the parking lot and up a set of outdoor stairs, glancing back at Atlas every few seconds. He follows close behind and attempts to obscure the winces that ensue. She frowns at him.
“Everyone uses the elevator.” Gene shrugs, slips her car keys into a small shoulder satchel, and whispers, “We probably should have too. Sorry.”
Atlas nods but doesn’t look at her. He catches a glimpse of something—a moving something out of the corner of his eye. As he bobs up the stairwell, turning with its turns, he searches the distant trees and their shadow. Clumps of branches skirting the lot hiss in breeze, otherwise unmoved. He shakes the itch from his spine as birches shake theirs and continues upward.
They reach the top landing. Skewing the mat at her feet, Gene unlocks a thick door, and they walk inside some low-ceiling compartment, Atlas narrowing his eyes in new dimness. At Gene’s touch, two lamps click into brilliance.
“This is the living room and over there’s the bathroom.” She gestures to the hall a few paces from the entrance and scoffs a laugh. “That’s about it. It’s home.”
Home. Atlas recalls the word.
Gene tosses her satchel into one lamp ring warming an end table. “I need to call work or today I’m fired.” She inhales through her teeth. “Are you sure you’re fine? Can you hang out here for a minute?”
Atlas opens his mouth. Closes it. Shifting his weight, he looks at her and says, “I’m satisfactory.”
“Okay.”
She walks through the cramped hall and into another room. Atlas stands alone.
Though his legs ache and balance is nonexistent, he stands for two minutes too long. He stares at the table in the middle of the room, among a couple armchairs, another furniture piece comparable to a throne fashioned for the fattest imperator conceivable, or what walkers call a couch, and a large, black rectangle against the wall. Glass ornaments and picture frames and candles scatter smaller tables. Next to the curtain-drawn window hangs a decorated cross.
He sits on the edge of the couch. Holding himself tall by his feet, his back a board, he runs a hand over the cushion at his hip. He moves his fingers to a throw pillow and its satin ridges. His brows tense.
It’s so soft. Despite their peculiarities, everything in the room is well-crafted and sound. Each lamp, vase, book vary in shapes and colors, sizes and textures, littering different unexpected places, but all lie perfectly in uniform disorder. It kindles return warmth to Atlas’s chest.
Until a shout from the other room startles him to stand. A pause, then another shout, this one louder and longer, and angry, halfway muted by wall’s insulation. Atlas hears enough of Gene’s bickering tone to compare it with that of a constellation guardian berating an inferior by one rank. But he listens further, and her voice dips with defeat and quavers with emotion; and thought tips more heavily toward the scolded underling.
“—just tell her I went then. I will next week.” Her voice erodes. “—know, but—yeah, I will. I have for this long.”
It trails into curt one-word mumbles. Lines etching his forehead, Atlas sits again and wonders what psychosis drove the walker to argue with herself.
As he considers her mental constitution, he spots some remarkably detailed image of Gene on an end table: her and another walker, smiling. Her hysteria doesn’t frighten him as it should. Disregarding the past half hour, the last time a being lent him civil words was too many labor cycles ago.
“Atlas—that is your name, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Will you place the calipers with which you labor somewhere farther from my laboring space so my spatial organization meets Imperium standards and I do not face correction?”
“Yes.”
The door down the hall clicks closed and Atlas’s head snaps up.
Gene walks into the living room and sets a glowing rectangle, much smaller than the one against the wall but with the same sleek finish, on the table by her satchel. Her shou
lders slump inward, her eyes reflective, but she breathes herself taller as she approaches. She wads a cloth dark with moisture.
“I called in sick.” She makes a face and sits in the recliner across from Atlas. “You sure you’re okay? You still need to go to the hospital. I hit you pretty hard.”
His pulse speeds. “I’m in adequate condition. I do not wish to go to any ‘hospital.’ ”
“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.” She raises her free hand. “But is there anything you need? Can you call someone? Do you have—oh, my goodness.”
She stands, hurries to the other arm of her cluttered compartment—the off-white-laminate one—and clanks around the cupboards. She returns with the cloth wad, a glass of water, and a dry towel. Mouth swished to one side, she juggles the items as she places the glass on the table before Atlas, the towel beside that, and holds out the wet cloth.
He watches it.
“Your forehead,” Gene says.
He takes the cloth and brushes the damper section across his temple. It feels cleaner. After a drive of heat summoned via control panel vents, his tunic feels drier, though his sashes and armbands retain strips of water mingled with sweat.
“What I mean to say, meant to say—” Gene frowns and pushes up the sleeves on her cardigan: loose, lilac, thrown over a white shirt and dark dress pants. She sits again. “Do you have anywhere you can stay?”
Atlas shakes his head.
She nods and sighs. “I’m not so sure what happened this morning but it’s my fault. I need to make it up. There’s only one place to start, At—” She twitches her gaze. “Atlas. Is that your real name? No, of course—sorry, I didn’t—I’m rude. What’s your story, Atlas?”
He waits.
“How’d you end up in Pittsburgh?” she asks.
“I used a gold coin and the powers of air currents to rupture a portal in the ground of a sky dimension.”
Gene laughs. “That’s why I couldn’t open a portal to Hawaii—forgot to use a gold coin. Duh.”
He stares.
“But, really, are you foreign? I couldn’t help but notice your clothes.”
Atlas lowers the cloth and looks at his tunic and pants, at their more visible rips. “I have always had these.”
“Okay.”
He turns his scrutiny to the table brimming with objects of ambiguous purpose. “Do you possess a needle and some thread?”
Gene’s brow furrows. “Um, one second.” She leaves the room.
Returning a minute later, she hands the two materials to Atlas. He slips the thread through the needle and then through his sleeve, around a tear.
“No way.” Gene grimaces with sad eyes. “You can’t wear that now.”
Atlas freezes and looks at her. She stands, folds her arms, and scans the room, squinting into near distance.
Atlas rubs his torn sleeve between a thumb and forefinger. “I’m fond of my appar—”
“You know what,” Gene faces him, “you stay here today and then we’ll figure out what to do tomorrow. I’m fairly broke but a bit of shopping for necessities shouldn’t kill us. As long as it’s okay with you?”
“I don’t understand.” Atlas sets the needle and thread beside the water glass. “Why do you do this?”
“I’m trying to change your mind about pressing charges.” Gene skews a smile, but when Atlas doesn’t budge a facial muscle, she adds, “Actually, I’m doing this because it would be stupid to break a promise with myself.”
“And what promise would that be?”
“If I told you, then it wouldn’t be between me and myself, would it?”
Atlas leans back. “You are a strange being.”
Swaying in place, Gene nods and says, “In good company.”
III
Trust in Sight
“So,” Gene slips her hands under the table and twirls a loose thread on her cardigan, “crazy weather we’re having lately. I saw that mini tornado on the news yesterday. End of the world or what?”
Atlas sits as if skewered along the spine. “Mmm.”
“Yup.”
He blinks. Her face deflates a notch.
“Crazy,” Gene whispers to her thumbs. Ten still seconds. And her tone lifts back to its start.
“So.” She swishes the words that stick in her mouth until they blurt: “Do you like Pittsburgh?”
Atlas looks through pale yellow curtains and out the window streaked by sun. Past reflection of spinning fans and his ceiling-light-lined silhouette, skyward buildings enwall the same streets he wandered, midday shadows wetting their bases. Vehicles whir by and walkers walk, yelling into their small rectangles and entering skyscrapers and wearing their many colors, patterns, differences.
The inside of the restaurant is much the same, except for their corner. Gene and Atlas sit near the window, a few tables away from the bulk of conversation and bodies, enclosed by pastel wallpaper and feathered lighting. Sun trickles through the centerpiece’s flowers.
“It’s very unlike where I used to live,” Atlas says.
Gene sips her water. “Where did you used to live?”
“A land called Sidera.”
“Hmm.” She gazes at the ceiling. “Is that in Europe? I can’t pinpoint your accent.”
Atlas faces her. “Europe—that is a faraway empire, correct?”
A glint in her eye, Gene bites the inside of her cheek. “Yeah, I would call the EU a bit of an empire.”
Her stare diverts his. As a passing walker pulls the bathroom door a few paces from their corner, a draft tickles their table, and Atlas again feels the festering chill that riddles his forearms. His bare forearms, naked, naked arms. All the way up to his elbows! Jaw clamped, Atlas cradles his arms, his knuckles brushing the sleeves of a large T-shirt Gene gave him at her apartment. There was something about how she owns too many “oversized tees” and needed to get rid of them. Since the thought of a new material on his skin brewed further unease than already present, he tugged the shirt over his own damp, ripped tunic and pushed his old sleeves up and collar down. He hasn’t told Gene.
“Here you go.”
Atlas jolts. “I didn’t.”
He lifts his head, arms sinking to his sides. A familiar female, the walker that does anything Gene says, some type of lower servant or cheerful indentured vassal, has returned.
“I never said you did?” The captive makes a face and sets two plates of sustenance on their table before departing.
Atlas’s brows tense. He only knows by the pictures on their image pamphlets that it’s the “pizza.” Thank Imperium he received only the wedge version and not the disc. Gene takes a bite of hers and, chewing, shoots him a crooked smile. He looks at his plate. His breathing accelerates.
Raising his slice, he opens his mouth, cringes, and bites off a morsel. A male walker, exiting the bathroom, bumps into Gene’s chair as he shuffles around it. She turns. Atlas spits his food into a fern by the window.
“No, it’s all right.” Gene looks forward; the walker leaves. “What were we talking about?”
Atlas sets down his pizza. “What is your rank?”
“Uh—”
“I intend,” he smacks cleaner his mouth, grimace bridled, “do you like the pit’s—Pittsburgh?”
“I—” Gene purses her lips. “I don’t know. I know the city’s now more familiar to me than where I actually live—on the outskirts. I, um,” she wraps an arm around her middle, “pretty recently moved into the state because of some un-fun circumstances. Things happened, family got upset, and I needed to get away from it—get some independence, find meaning.”
“Have you?”
“I don’t know.” She scans the street outside. “It’s been a couple years now. Sometimes I feel like it was the right decision to move but mostly,” Gene glances at Atlas, “I regret it. I guess ‘finding yourself’ doesn’t work the way it does in movies. The friend who recommended I move to Monroeville—to be closer to her and get a decent job—left, he
rself, a month after I got here.”
“Misleading wretch.”
“Hmm?”
“I said nothing.”
“I was so young, and I’m not getting any older, it seems.” Gene grazes one of the centerpiece’s petals with her finger. “Sometimes I feel like a child lost in a big city.”
“I know the feeling,” Atlas says.
She smiles but it doesn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t have a single friend here. Which, you know, would be fine because I enjoy some silence but,” she peers through the window, “it makes my thoughts too loud sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could escape it all and think about stuff bigger—but, you know, quieter—than work, what’s on Netflix, coffee, what’s on Facebook, work, and how to get more money at said work.”
Atlas follows her gaze. “I also came to this Pittsburgh to begin anew.”
“I just feel so—” Gene windmills her hand, “so trapped sometimes. Like I’m standing on an open hill but invisible walls are squeezing my body.”
“As if you are so enveloped by freedom that you don’t know where to begin. You feel you can’t. You feel you shouldn’t make your own decisions because the entirety of your past tells you such is wrong.”
Turning forward, she hones her gaze narrow and keen and sees something beyond the Sideran sitting opposite her. “Exactly.”
“It is more than acceptable to lead your own life,” Atlas says to her face, because something of its far-sight resembles his when he’s alone with the sky. Mouth far from mind, he adds without intonation, “Anything different is walking death.”
Gene rests her elbows on the table. “To tell you the truth, I’m trying to figure you out and I’m doing a horrible job.”
“And me, you.” Forehead crumpling, he leans a centimeter forward. “You’re quick to trust me, to assist me in various ways, and yet quicker to construct these examinations.” He darts his eyes between hers. “Why?”
Gene looks at her knee. “I don’t know. I just know that,” she returns to fiddling with her cardigan’s loose thread, “you’re trust-able and worth understanding.”
“How?”
She shrugs. “There’s innocence in your eyes.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 3