Never before has the Imperium pulled him off his sleeping mat, forced him to Sidera’s administrative capital, and prodded him up the Curative Estate’s steps when he wasn’t somewhat prepared for it. And he’s never come close to the second highest level. He’s never been up this high in any of the capital’s towers.
His pulse rocks his body. His sight comprehends three or four overexposed shapes. Wincing under another jab to the back, this one wind-driven, Atlas staggers with the guards’ artificial airflow and follows the specialist into a blindingly white chamber. The expanse is too bright, wide, too spacious for its contents, echoes too empty for the three affliction withdrawal stations lining the walls, the adjacent intravenous equipment and cupboards of varying needles, and the single inclined operating chair in its center. A mechanism far outshining the grandest of sunslots, the angled hole in the ceiling concentrates direct sun rays through a couple dozen glass magnifiers; it casts a circle of undiluted light. In which the chair lies. Thick restraints encompass the armrests and leg rests.
His pulse crawls up his throat.
If its thrumming didn’t paralyze his vocal cords, he would speak. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. He screams; it doesn’t release.
“Disciple of the Absolute—” The remedial specialist glances at Atlas, hooks a thumb inside his own coat lapel. “You have been called to undergo scheduled procedures due to the criminality of fostering tellanferum” is what he says but Atlas hears “idealism.” The specialist reaches the chair and, with the flourish of a crank, angles it backward. “Medicinal treatments shall follow according to section 47:L45.”
“Procedures?” Atlas stares at the chair.
The guards place him in it. They drag him down, strap him in, and stand watch at his left and right.
“What—” Atlas forgets use of his tongue. His chest weighs on his lungs and his gut aches till he stops breathing. “What proced—”
Expression vacant, stretching his surgical glove, the specialist pulls a long, multipart syringe from his jacket. He bends over Atlas, sinks the needle into his neck, and presses the anesthesia—
Atlas wakes.
He gasps and sits up on the motel bed, running his fingers through his hair, clenching it. He looks forward. His forehead crumples and he speaks to himself.
“I remember.”
His dream, one of two he’s recalled since he fell to Earth, wasn’t fantasy. He remembers why his memory lost grip on too many subconscious explorations to count.
In that white room, Imperium stuck a needle in him and, when he woke the next labor cycle, he was dreamless. At least one full cycle—one year it must have been without dreams. The curative personnel division placed a medical plug on his unsupervised thought and he didn’t have a subconscious to help him realize it.
Locking his jaw, Atlas rubs his hands on his pants until the curative specialist’s lightless eyes and sharp coat and thumb’s thrust into the syringe dull in memory.
He touches his stomach and grimaces. He lifts his shirt. Aching, blistered, a scab bulges and seals his gash; but he grazes its pink outskirts luring smooth beige inward and softens his face, which he touches next, feeling for the slits in his cheek, on his lip. Eden’s other cuts have disappeared.
His brows cinch. How long has he been asleep?
Something bangs on the door a meter from the bed. Atlas jumps. He scans the room for Gene, looks across the comforter’s furrows of a bed still made, looks to the bathroom, the open closet, but she’s nowhere. Sun soaks through the drawn curtains and glows a burgundy cone across carpet.
“One O’clock,” a man yells through the door. “That means pay or vacate. You got ten minutes.”
Atlas stands and hugs his chest. He whips his head in every direction, smooths out the bed’s wrinkles where he lay, straightens his posture. He glares at the door.
Gene bursts through it.
She stops, her hair swinging forward, door ajar, and looks to Atlas. He cringes in the sun burning her silhouette.
“Hi. I don’t—” She lifts a finger. “I mean—and you—sorry.”
He waits.
She waits.
“Could you elaborate?” Atlas asks.
Gene tosses her purse onto the bed and watches sun rays stretch ceiling’s stucco, hands around her nape. She sighs. “This has been a bizarre few days.”
He nods. “What does ‘pain or vacate’ truly mean?”
“I’m, like, really confused and I have work that I’m late for and an overdue electric bill and a poopy car to wash and heaps of laundry in my basket at home and heaps of spam to throw in my email trash and moldy dishes to pretend to accidentally throw in my real trash. And I forgot about all that. I just—”
“A spam is what?”
“My life and my priorities—”
“A spam is which?”
“—are just not what I thought they’d be and—I’m saying that—what I’m saying—”
“Provide me textual example of a spam.”
“I have a life.” Gene covers her nose with her fingertips and lowers her voice. “And this,” she gestures to the room, “isn’t it.”
Atlas closes his mouth.
Frowning, Gene drops her hand. “I got gas and talked to a few people in town, and they told me how to get home.”
He looks at his feet and she shifts on hers.
“And I—” She exhales. “I’m saying that maybe it’s time for me to stop—you’re a good friend. I just don’t know if I can juggle all this alien-on-the-run stuff with my secretarial job.”
Atlas’s squint conjures crow’s feet. “You’re expressing a bewildering loss of simplicity and safety of your past moments lived?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“You merely could have said so.” Atlas rounds his eyes and meets hers. “Refrain from delirium. We’ll simply part ways after you return to your home and your life will continue ordinarily.”
“That’s not what—I don’t want to—” Gene breathes out.
“I understand.”
“But I—”
“There’s little need to contend with yourself.”
Gene’s eyes light up. Jaw dropping, she raises her hands and waves them about the room, motioning to everything and nothing. She stares at Atlas and grins.
“Gene,” Atlas looks her up and down and shrinks into himself, “do you require assistance of some kind?”
She points at him. “No, I don’t need to fight myself. I can do anything I want, right? Anything?”
“No?”
She glowers.
Atlas swallows and says, “Yes?”
“Then I’m quitting my job.” Gene throws her arm through the air. “Who needs money anyway?”
“The anti-collective.”
“I can’t tell you,” she draws a lungful and slows her words, “how much more I’ve felt these last couple days than I have in my whole life.” She looks around the room, then to Atlas. “This isn’t my life, definitely. But it might be better.”
He stiffens his posture. “Oh.”
“So, you know what?”
“Yes?”
She frowns.
“No?” Atlas says.
“Let’s go.” Gene swings the door open. “Let’s drive somewhere that’s nowhere and do something that’s nothing and stomp on reality because—” She looks dimensions past Atlas’s shoulder. “Because life will be stupid unless you do stupid things.”
Gene grabs her bag and keys and reaches for Atlas’s hand. He flinches but doesn’t recoil. She wraps her fingers around his, holds his palm in hers slightly clammy, and smiles, the two emotional tones to her expression a perfectly imperfect complexity. Atlas’s hand falls limp. Gene squeezes it as she turns to the open doorway. Peering over sunlit treetops, Atlas tenses his fingers and curves them around her hand until fear embeds as some kind of comfort and it feels the raw midday it is.
They rush out the door and downstairs to her vehicle. Atlas looks into sky and, s
tretching his neck toward glimmers unbridled, angles his cheek to the breeze.
IX
Driven
“And that’s how I won the bet against Amal. It wasn’t because I spoke like a Nordic Viking but because I acted like one.”
“What became of the male-man?”
“That’s the thing. James wasn’t a mailman in the first place. He was a pirate the whole time. And it all worked out perfectly for my wallet but, more importantly, for my pride. Ha!”
“I don’t understand.” Atlas shuffles his shoulders up his backrest and squints out Gene’s windshield. “What is a pirate?”
“It’s what Kayla was,” Gene says.
“Wasn’t this Kayla, as you say, a ghost?”
“No, that was Reese.”
“Oh.” Atlas’s lips curve upward. “I believe I understand. Yes, that is humorous.”
Gene too smiles and taps her steering wheel. “All because I was baited into going to some costume party.”
Atlas’s forehead crumples. “Costume party?”
She doesn’t hear him and he stares out the window, at the blurred ferns hanging their many-fingered hands over road’s shoulder and the lawns between and another of several rooftops peeking above distant trees every minute or so. Then sky steals his eyes. It’s bluer today. Thicker than Sidera’s cloud wisps, white brushstrokes traverse the hemisphere without a hurried thought or a planned destination, swaying, soaring, breathing their sea, drinking their air.
“Atlas—” Gene grins, bites her lip, and looks at him.
He looks elsewhere.
Her grin falls and brows tense. “Never mind.”
Atlas touches his cheek to the window and peers upward as much as the car’s frame allows. He finds the sun.
“Does your sun always travel this quickly?” he asks.
“Heh. My sun?” She shifts her mouth. “Well, I guess driving with friends can make time fly by. It’s been maybe,” Gene checks the glowing numbers on the dashboard, “wow, six hours since we left the motel. No wonder I’m starving.”
“Sidera has no time.” Atlas lowers his voice. “Or friends.”
Frowning, Gene gazes out the windshield and swings her vehicle around a bend, over a rickety bridge wide enough for one vehicle. Thinned and less frequent forest patches indicate their return to Pittsburgh’s fringe. A road sign flashes the remaining distance to Monroeville.
“I believe you.” She squeezes the steering wheel. “I believe all of it. But why here? If you’re really a part of some race from a golden sky dimension and are now fleeing another race with abnormally fast birds and bad manners from another dimension hidden on Earth, then why?” Gene breathes in. “Why are you in Pennsylvania?”
“I needed to escape.”
“Yeah, I heard. But,” she presses her lips together, “what are you going to do now?”
Atlas faces her.
“I mean, what do you want to do?” Her smile contorts and voice lowers. “On—on Earth?”
He stares.
“Watch movies? See the world, join a comedy club, learn to dance?”
Leaning into his seat, Atlas inhales and asks, “What do you want to do?”
“I, um.”
“I wish to be free.” Atlas’s eyes glint a reflection of road’s horizon. “To, each day, step without a thought for its thud against the earth existing to satisfy another’s will.”
She mirrors him. “Yeah.”
“I was hardly an obedient citizen.” Atlas picks at a thread on his pants. “One cycle, soon after completion of standard education, I discovered that if I burned coils of rubber bindings in the forges that Imperium would evacuate Taurus’s laborhouse for the remainder of that cycle. They had no evidence,” he rolls his eyes, “that it had been my hand in doing so but, the next cycle, they hung me from the roof’s edge by my wrists. I believe they were too resentful to execute me. It would have shown weakness on their part.”
Gene grimaces. “What’d you do when you were free from work?”
Curving his hands around his knees, Atlas lifts his head. “I committed the most grievous crime. A sin more severe than conspiring to escape or isolated defiance.”
“No way. Really?”
He nods.
“You’re not going to tell me?” Gene asks.
“Tell you of what?”
“Sorry.” She shakes her head. “That’s probably none of my business.”
They drive over a highway occupied by two others and along a treeless hill: emerald grass, faraway views, open scape and massive arc severing intangible sky with the earthly corporeal. Atlas raises his slack fingers to the window, skimming its air-conditioned coolness and the timbre of living carpet’s velvet ocean beyond. Gene eyes him through her peripheral vision.
“How did you escape, Atlas?”
“By the Absolute, if I fully knew how, I would compose a universal address to answer the apparent tens of thousands that would kill for understanding.” He skews his face but traces turf’s curvature with unwavering eyes. “I simply retrieved my gold coin, which was to open a portal, planned ahead, reacquired my affliction—” he tics harder his expression, “I intend, reacquired my powers—”
“Your powers?” Gene gawks at him, her trembling lips releasing the next words a second delayed. “Your powers—powers that were reacquireableish?”
He glances left. “Yes. Maintain concentration. I reacquired my abilities—”
“No, say ‘powers.’ Stop thesaurusing.”
“Cease fabricating words and I will.”
“Uh-uh. Shakespeare did it more than I do.”
“ ‘Shakespeare’? Put an end to it, Gene. Not a soul comprehends what you’re coining.”
“And you can do what telekinesis with your powers?”
“My abilities?”
A gleam in her eye, Gene scoots to the edge of her seat and grins at Atlas. “Yeah, your powers.”
“I will show you.” Atlas motions to the roadside. “Stop here.”
She makes a face.
“Do you wish to see?” he asks.
Gene bobs her head up and down.
“Then stop your vehicle.”
Revolving the steering wheel, Gene decelerates, pulls onto tessellated road shoulder cracks grinding an earthquake up Atlas’s frame, and cranks the gear shift to park. Atlas exits the car and she follows. They start up the hill’s incline. A breeze brushes their backs, the grass swaying, clouds scattering. Atlas looks behind a shoulder.
“The Imperium has warned Siderans for countless full cycles of the burden our inherent affliction places on us,” he says. “Powers will entirely consume the simple-minded citizen—drive them to pride, disloyalty, sickness, or even death. In summary, powers, reserved only for those superiors who vow to risk their lives in protecting the collective, destroy you—body and mind.”
Gene picks up pace. “But they don’t really?”
“Not,” Atlas opens his hands to sapphire sky and curls in his fingers, “in my experience.”
Their steps slow near the hill’s apex, their knees heavy, heels tight, but scalps electrified under flurries of dusk unwinding. The sun sags above the west horizon. Its drowsy smolder soothes Atlas’s skin but doesn’t depress its bristles.
“At the start of every labor cycle, a citizen is to insert his or her arm into an affliction withdrawal station and have that citizen’s budding traces of power drained. It’s a promised exchange—citizens’ labor and loyalty for the removal of their natural affliction. The removed energy is then run through a system of lines that gather at the Energy Storehouse in Eos, the administrative capital. I’m uncertain for what specifically they use the power.” Atlas turns to Gene and walks backward. “Everything in Sidera possibly. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps they simply store it away.”
“You just got your powers back because you weren’t draining them every day—cycle?” she asks.
“Yes.” He smiles. “Do you know how it feels to wade sky?”
“I do.”
Tensing his hands at his sides, he lifts his chin to the western horizon, its copper flare, to the distant cherry blossoms and church steeples that break day’s last multicolored beams with mahogany silhouettes.
“My influence on Earth is significantly limited for reasons,” Atlas squints through sun rays, “I have yet to clearly define. But I should manage.”
Closing his eyes, he angles his hands down, his palms to earth’s pulsing rotation clothed in green, to its tactile energy connecting and connected with all things. He breathes in. Breathes out. He tunes his ears to the rustle of leaves thirty—no, forty meters from where he stands. Wind rolls through his sleeves, out his collar. He stretches his fingers and air weaves between them. Raising his hands toward treetops, he unveils the invisible force under his heart, brings it to the surface and down his arms. It flows as spring runoff. As a million shuffling, bumping sparks that burn and shiver and caress from tissue to bone to the tips of his fingers, blooming awake the parts of him he didn’t know hibernated. He opens his eyes.
Atlas rotates his wrists and releases his power. With a rush, wind streams out his hands and joins the breeze, pushing it farther than his eyes perceive, farther than swaying branches, beyond the swish of flower petal clusters. Leaves break from their twigs, ride the current, hurtle the hill’s crest on the whirlwind that sweeps a self-sustaining, invisible corona around Gene and Atlas. Leaves flutter through Gene’s hair.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 10