Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  She staggers. Atlas flourishes his fingers and the wind curving around his shoulders blasts into a gust. Gene throws back her hair but it again shoots forward in tendrils, clouding her vision, mimicking her clothes’ forward dither matching Atlas’s.

  He cuts the stream.

  Lingering wind challenges Atlas’s balance until he steadies his feet, lowers his arms, and faces Gene. He pants. His hands fall to his thighs.

  Gene steps toward him; but her toes catch on her other ankle and she stumbles.

  “You,” she motions to him with both arms outstretched for stabilization, “and that—” She picks a lock of hair from her mouth, points at the horizon. “And what did.”

  Atlas straightens his back and slows his breath. “Clarification?”

  “Minotaur,” Gene says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do minotaurs exist too?” Her wide eyes widen. “What about fans of women’s soccer?”

  “I don’t—”

  “No way. I knew it. I saw before and I didn’t but now I do and—” Gene raises her voice, “and I always did. I’ve been driving around with a Greek deity in my friggin’ car. You made,” she cups her hands and, curving them together, mimes a sphere, “air move.”

  Atlas nods. “It’s restricted on Earth but I believe manipulating the winds is growing slightly less difficult as days pass. Practice may help.”

  “That was restricted?”

  “Yes.”

  Gene glares at the surrounding woods and plops onto the grass. She puts her chin in her hands. Atlas sits next to her. They listen as the breeze dies and leaves the summit still, warmer. Sun kisses hilltops farther than the one they’ve claimed, dousing amber lawns’ green and spraying flushes of shy fuchsia and bold ochre streaks across upward’s blue. Gene reclines into the hill’s slope. She settles her head into a grassy cushion and folds her hands on her stomach.

  “There’s been another world up there for my whole life. For everyone’s lives.” Her eyes dart from cloud to cloud. “How could we have not known? How can there be anything else—anything other than,” she gestures to the sunset, “this?”

  Atlas leans onto his elbows, forehead creased. He grazes grass with a finger. “I’m unsure.”

  “I wonder what would happen if a giant doorway just,” she fans out her arms, “opened up between Sidera and Earth.”

  He grins. “Your ponderings are unusual.”

  “What did you know about Earth?” Gene asks. “Before you came, I mean.”

  “They—the Imperium instructors taught us everything from prosodic meters to the languages to classical mechanics and geometria situs, Siderans’ term for a mathematical branch. But of Earth they taught us little. It was a world,” Atlas looks up, “beneath us.”

  “Why’d they teach you anything about it then?”

  “To proclaim superiority in a land, one must compare it with others I suppose.”

  “What about history?”

  “We studied siderum decus: a form of tribute to Sidera and Her Absolute’s sanctity, achievements, and triumphs through eternity, the half—the more of which I deemed unreliable. That’s the extent.”

  “Ugh.” Sprawled across the grass, Gene rolls back her head and sighs toward the east. “That’s so—” she clenches a fist, “so annoying. The Imperium’s horrible.”

  Atlas flinches.

  Eyes narrowing, he looks down his body and then at Gene, at the sky. “Yes.” He wipes his grimace, smiles, relaxes his shoulders down. “I believe it also.”

  Gene speaks one decibel over a whisper. “You never told me how. Not really.”

  “Hmm?”

  “How did you escape? There must have been a thousand guards and a million reasons not to.”

  He watches the sun dip below the skyline and remembers to breathe. The sun’s descent is nothing like he imagined. Clouds catch its blushing spectrum and grasp it between feathered bulges until the celestial spheres’ orbit revolves dusk above the east horizon.

  “The truest answer’s never revealed in ‘how,’ I suppose.” Atlas fingers the earth that cradles his elbows. “If one’s ‘why’ is strong enough, ‘how’ becomes meaningless. Mountains crumble, valleys rise, and constellation walls stand the height of your ankles when why drives you.”

  Gene twists to face him.

  “My most severe crime, Gene, was looking above the constellation walls. I did exactly,” he shrugs, “as I’m doing now. Punishable by death and worse.”

  “Do Siderans believe in God?”

  He stares.

  “Or, like,” Gene makes a face, “fate? Destiny?”

  His pulse jumps. “Prophecy.”

  “Yeah, or fate or destiny.”

  “I don’t believe in anything.” Atlas looks to the sun’s last beams above the trees. “Belief lies at the root of the Sideran individual, surety being only in his Imperium. I’ve grown tired of it. I want knowledge, truth, not belief.”

  “I think some things,” Gene frowns, “have to be believed in.”

  Grasping grass, Atlas sits up and waits for day to bow to night and time to prompt their leave. Gene does the same. She looks at him.

  She says, “And I believe in truth.”

  * * *

  Her car quiets, cools under the blackness of a waning moon, and Atlas squints at Gene’s apartment building for five seconds too long for comfort, five seconds too short for words. Gene plays with her keys. She sighs and slips them into her purse balanced on the center console.

  Goodbye, Atlas thinks. He straightens himself and wrings his fingers over vehicle frame shadows painting his leg. The day was pleasant. I will leave you to your life and me to mine as I should have before.

  Inhaling, Atlas scans the windshield. He grips his door’s handle. “Good—”

  He stops.

  A shaded figure stands a meter from the building’s nearest stairwell, his hands in his pockets, hair skimming his jacket collar. Atlas grinds his teeth.

  He thrusts open his door. “Istum crinem foedum ex capite tuo vellam.”

  “What?” Gene snaps her head toward him. “What’s wrong?”

  He pauses. A foot on the parking lot’s asphalt, Atlas turns, spots Gene’s bag, and reaches for it. The first item he touches, wrist bulging purse’s rim, is what his hand expects; he curves his fingers around its textured handle, weighs it in his grasp. He settles both feet into asphalt, pulls the weapon from its hiding place, and holds it to his thigh, its slide pressed against his leg, trigger smooth on his finger.

  Gene yells something along the lines of “ewhaa” and yanks her half-empty purse onto her lap. She lunges for the passenger’s side, clawing at air, but Atlas slams his car door shut.

  She shouts through the windshield. Her words ring clearly enough, loudly enough to comprehend this time. Atlas chooses not to.

  Clenching and re-clenching the handgun’s grip, he strides toward Samuel Covey. They make eye contact. Atlas takes two last steps, bores his stare into Samuel, and raises his weapon, its sights aligning with Samuel’s chest, the mute black forcing a sheen under moonlight. Samuel lifts his hand from his pocket and rubs together his fingers: one jerk of a microscopic movement. Atlas flinches. He squeezes the trigger.

  It’s stuck.

  Tipping it upside-down, Atlas shakes the pocket weapon. He again aims. He presses the trigger. Nothing. His eyebrows upturn.

  “This is,” Atlas frowns, “not correct.”

  “Safety is on, Attie.”

  Samuel steps toward Atlas until his lapel brushes the weapon’s muzzle. He smirks.

  “Don’t hold it like that, dearest.” Samuel pinches the 9mm’s barrel and moves it upward, toward his heart. “Is it even cocked? And use both hands, thumbs on one side, parallel to the barrel-el.”

  Atlas adjusts. He glances at Samuel.

  “No, no tea-cupping, you pansy.” Samuel sighs. “Angle your support hand.”

  Pursing his lips, Atlas does a double take and drops his weapon
. He curls his fingers into a fist. He throws it into Samuel’s nose.

  Samuel groans. He recoils and steadies and shields the flush emerging where his cheek and nose meet.

  “Hey now.” He rubs his nose, quells the twinkle in his eye. “Hostility is a modern, wide-spread problem. How can we fight this world’s rampant obesity if we’re busy picketing violence?”

  Mouth agape, Gene jogs to Atlas’s side and looks between him and Samuel. “You. And you.” She bends down and retrieves her gun. “And this. And,” she pouts, “no. No shooting.”

  “Hi, Denim. How’s Levi?”

  “Atlas, you know you could’ve killed him?”

  Atlas lifts a palm, charged, pulsing, familiar, and glares at Samuel. “You promised never to return to this place.”

  “I promised a girl I’d lasso the moon once.” Stretching his jaw, Samuel folds his arms. “Well, no, I actually followed through with that one. It was glorious.”

  Atlas tenses his fingers; a gust sweeps through them.

  Samuel holds up his hands. “Don’t get so put-out. I’m here because I knew you’d be here and all patched up and because I talked to someone who knows someone with a bird—”

  “And?”

  “There’s a Sideran,” he angles his ear to Atlas, “here.”

  “Correct, Accend.” Atlas rolls his eyes. “I presently stand before you in the general vicinity of ‘here.’ ”

  “Hey, aspiring but reject male model,” Samuel points, “don’t stupid till I’m done. There’s another Sideran on Earth. Better yet, in the next state over. Yay! Another friend!” He scrunches his eyebrows, straightens his posture until it’s unnatural, and bends his knees until he’s at Atlas’s level. “My associate, in whom I much delight, resides upon this earthen juncture—that is, as the walkers say, Earth—leaving me positively content for his being and desiring immediate comradeship. I daresay. Right?”

  Atlas steps backward.

  “Oh, look at you,” Samuel says. “You are just so excited.”

  “I am not.”

  “You can’t contain yourself. You want to see your Sideran friend so badly.”

  “I do not.”

  “Calm down. We’ll go see your pal now to spare you any further torture.”

  “Gene.” Atlas turns to her, moisture flocking to his waterlines.

  She narrows her eyes at Samuel. “Wait, why do you think there’s another Sideran here?”

  “I don’t think.” He taps his head. “I know. It’s confirmed fact.”

  “Confirmed by whom?” Atlas asks.

  “By me. And you’re coming with me, Tiny Titan, to go say hi.”

  “For the love of the Absolute.” Atlas drags a hand down his face. “Why, in all eternity, would I consider coming with you?”

  “Curiosity. ’S what you do.”

  “And if you’re deceiving me? I’ll go with you still?”

  “Curiosity. ’S what you do.”

  “I’ll concede from a curiosity to know, of a truth, you’re lying and accompany you on a journey to see another personally irrelevant Sideran which, by all logic and probability, doesn’t exist?”

  “Yep.” The corner of his mouth lifting, Samuel leans into Atlas. “You’re that weird, chubby kid who climbs onto the roof just ’cause Mom says that if he does, he’ll fall off and die.”

  “Do you consistently veer out of comprehensible English’s limits?”

  “You’re not the only one who likes disregarding the limits.” Samuel shoves a finger into Atlas’s shoulder and says, “Stop with the pompous questions and listen. This Sideran could be the answer you never had. How’s he on Earth? Dunno. How did your two-year-old self escape from your labor camp without a single enemy secret? Dunno. But he might know what you don’t. He might break down our interdimensional warfare problem.”

  Atlas flicks a hand forward. “Go to him then.”

  “Can’t. Only a Sideran can release this pesky barrier protecting him.”

  “Why?” Gene asks.

  “Because Harry Potter and the Power of Three and Willow Rosenburg and—” Samuel clenches his jaw. “Great Gatsby, stop with the questions. It’s magic. I don’t know how it works. But I haven’t even told you the best part. Go ahead and guess what my source thinks this mysterious Sideran likes to do based off a few raven Candid Camera shots. Guess.”

  Atlas stares.

  “Wrong!” Samuel says. “The Sideran likes rebellion. He’s a rebel, an adversary to the Imperium. And, hey—what a kooky coincidence—so am I. He somehow escaped Sidera and is currently, by the overhead looks of it, organizing something seriously questionable in a hidden stronghold out yonder, a.k.a. West Virginia. Like, armed guards, like, barbed wire satellite castle—you get me? One of our ravens saw the chickpea vanish and return, muttering something about using ‘their people against them’ and getting the ‘riled followers to Earth’ and—”

  Atlas raises an eyebrow.

  “And other completely obvious and deliciously defiant stuff. The Accenda would love his help. So, let’s go, chickpea number two.” Samuel gestures to the apartment’s exit, to a stretch of lamp-yellow road furled over moonrise horizon and a single low car reflecting streetlights off its jet finish. “Our working together”—he shrinks into half a bow, hands up—“for a few quick hours, could be the beginning of your dimension’s liberation.”

  Gene glances at Samuel, then Atlas. “We should talk inside.”

  “Why are you the Accend to seek this supposed Sideran?” Atlas asks.

  “Can’t go home. Eden,” Samuel rolls a shrug, “is not happy. I want to make amends and she wants the most important job done by the most important job-doer, even if I do jokingly help her prisoners escape sometimes.”

  Eden did survive the gunshot. Clutching his jeans’ sides, Atlas looks down and loses his hearing in the rumble of a quickened pulse. He breathes. The cotton in his ears disintegrates.

  “Eden?” Gene angles toward Samuel. “That awful woman I shot?”

  “You’re the one who shot my girlfriend?”

  “Your girlfriend? Eden’s—”

  “You shot. My girlfriend.”

  “Uh.”

  “You shot my girlfriend.” Samuel faces Atlas. “She shot my girlfriend.”

  “You should know,” Gene says. “You apparently talked to her since it happened.”

  “ ‘Since it happened.’ Oh, like it just ‘happened.’ Like you just accidentally—whoops—” Samuel snaps, “shot my girlfriend.”

  “She was torturing and killing—”

  “Eden gets shot every other day in Elisium so I thought she just picked up competitive dreidel or something.”

  “Dreidel?” Gene mouths.

  “You know what—” Samuel points at Atlas. “This is all your fault. Siderans are the core of oppression, cruelty, and evil and you hate rainbows. I hope you die in your sins.”

  Atlas’s forehead tenses. “A girlfriend is what?”

  “I can’t believe you show up here, tell us you’re in love with the woman you helped us escape from a day ago, and ask Atlas to drive with you to West Virginia because that same murderous non-woman, who almost killed him, told you to,” Gene says.

  “You’re human.” Samuel eyes her up and down. “Don’t act like you know things. And Eden has depression. Do you have depression? No. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Atlas looks past Samuel’s shoulder, vision blurring, stomach aching. He stares at Gene’s apartment. Then at the car parked outside the complex.

  “Good heavens.” Gene buries her face in a hand. “Thanks for your help before and no thanks for bringing us into this in the first place. Now, you need to leave. Atlas isn’t here to fight your wars. Or start them.”

  “Uh-uh. Humanity has no say in the matter. This has nothing to do with you—our war, our lives, our business.”

  “A giant war is everyone’s business.”

  “Great. Humans again overstepping their boundaries and acting s
uperior when they’re really glorified Snausages.”

  “Oh, like we do it all the time?”

  “Slavery, eugenics, imperialism, corporate greed, climate change—”

  “Bloodshed, torture, deceit, abduction, spying with giant flocks of ravens that chase cars—”

  “Depression. One out of every eight Accenda is affected by depression, Denim. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Where’s this war going to take place?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Earth.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I’ll listen to a word you say when you’re not dumbing all over.”

  “Holy graces above. I can’t—”

  “I’ll go with you.” Atlas focuses his vision and meets Samuel’s eyes. “I will accompany you to investigate this Sideran rebel.”

  Samuel grins and Gene gawks. She steps halfway in front of Atlas, blocking his view to Samuel and the vehicle on the lonely roadside.

  “Are you,” she throws her hands in the air, “insane?”

  “My mentality is functional,” Atlas says.

  “Atlas, you don’t just hop into the car with some stranger right after that person hurt you and then drive far off to a place you’ve never been, not knowing what’s going to happen when you get there.”

  Atlas scratches his head.

  “Wait,” Gene’s voice rises behind a grimace, “no, my case was different. But that,” she motions to Samuel, “is the biggest, worst, most tacky—”

  “Not tacky,” Samuel says.

  “—liar I’ve ever seen.”

  “I must go.” Atlas frowns. “I must try anything possible for the Siderans awaiting liberation. This war could free them.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be freed. Maybe their why isn’t strong enough to escape or overthrow the government. Maybe,” Gene leans toward him and whispers, “Samuel’s people aren’t going to want to free the lower class after the upper class is killed off.”

  Irises in deep sea slumber, his eyes glaze the stairwell shadows bobbing over her shoulder. His frown deepens.

  Gene studies it. “But this isn’t about them.”

  “I have to know,” Atlas says, blinking sight back. “What is my purpose, Gene? What am I to do on Earth? Learn to dance?”

  She looks down.

  “Truth is almost always found in discomfort.” He peeks over the shadow sashing her shoulder. “And it’s what drives me.”