Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Atlas taps his foot. Rests a hand on his door handle.

  Samuel writhes; Atlas exhales.

  Gene exits the building and Atlas’s hand falls to his lap. She carries some fabric. She opens the sedan’s back door and, unfolding the thick, navy blue velour, a sheen in each crease, leans inside.

  Samuel mutters into the upholstery.

  “Don’t—I want Eden.” He shakes his head inside his elbows. “—no, no. Eden—I want to go.”

  Gene frowns. She drapes the blanket over Samuel’s body and smooths it around his back. Voice trembling, Samuel mumbles.

  “Shh.” Gene pats his back. “You’re okay. It’s okay.”

  She sits on the edge of the seat and draws her hand down his arm, then up again, then down. Samuel quivers against each stroke but relaxes his jaw.

  “Go to sleep.”

  Atlas’s gut sinks. His hands clasp his knees. A wind similar whetting his palms, he watches breeze swell and evergreen quills scrape their shadows across the windshield wipers. Gene ducks out the back door with a dizzy pause. Once settled behind the wheel, she eyes the coniferous barbs dissecting Atlas’s cheek.

  “Are you okay?” she whispers.

  He stares forward. “Adequate.”

  An eyebrow raised, she turns the keys in the ignition and backs out of the parking lot. They return to the highway.

  Atlas sways toward the side window, lets his head tilt, his eyes lose focus, his ears numb. Heat presses his shoulder pressing the door. All charge that pricked his skin plummets lower than he can find it, to his dormant depths where it asks for rest, his middle sagging to its pleas. Samuel hushes to a mute; but Atlas isn’t sure if it’s simply the water in his ears or the drone of Gene’s acceleration. His heart pounds compensation for his shallow breathing, and his vision ripples the winding basins and asphalt softened with speed, smoothed with motion. He sees, in the mist of disjointed imagination, her hand brushing—

  “I can’t believe it.”

  Atlas looks to Gene. “Hmm?”

  “We’re here. We’re officially in Helena,” she says.

  He squints outside; not unfamiliar, roofs lie at mountains’ base and shimmer in afternoon sun. Greener grass and trimmed lawns erect a new world of posts and trees and manmade geometry over plains dispersing.

  Gene’s eyes widen. “Why are we here again?”

  “To discover the interdimensional key in form of coin spoken of by Minkar, who—”

  “That was rhetorical. But good job. You almost realized that one was a joke.”

  Atlas beams. “Yes?”

  “Mmhmm.” Gene pats his leg. “Good job.”

  He drops his hand where hers lay a second ago.

  “I know we’re here already and we’ve risked our lives and sanity and everything but,” Gene turns to him, “are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you one hundred percent sure you want to go to Sidera and get The Press-thing? Even if you don’t get any knowledge—” Her brow peaking, she speaks in one breath. “How will you get back? Are you going to come back? Are you leaving forever? What if the Imperium catches you and kills you or what if I’m stuck with Samuel in Helena for years and should I just wait for you by the car while I grow old and bald and want to eat Raisin Bran every day all day, like instead of showering and socializing—”

  “Gene,” Atlas holds up his hand, “I will return. If this travel is any indication, Sidera is a fraction of Earth’s surface area, and I can travel more quickly once its atmosphere strengthens my powers. It should require no more than three or four earthly days. However, if you wish, you may leave for your home the instant I’m gone.”

  “You don’t even know where this mystical prophecy is, let alone if it will help you or Samuel’s people open any gateway or Pylon thing or help anyone overthrow any government or get any answers. Also, are you stupid?”

  “Wh—”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Gene meets his eyes, “without you.”

  Atlas forgets lots of things.

  “I mean—” She looks to the road. “I mean I meant that. I mean,” her eyes narrow; her vehicle slows, “why are we here again?”

  “Ha. Very humorous rhetorical joke, yes?”

  “No. Where are we going?”

  “To the coin.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Ah.” Atlas turns toward the window and watches a gas station, two, three, four hotels, the passing vehicles and business signs peeking over roadside shrubbery. “I don’t know.”

  Gene pales. “You don’t know?”

  “Mmm.” Atlas scratches his head. “No.”

  “You don’t,” she hyperventilates, “know? Two thousand miles and you don’t know.” Gene slouches and glances at her car’s roof. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Gene, do not grow perturbed. Minkar said I would discover it.”

  “Oh, no worries then.”

  Atlas smiles. “Yes.”

  “Atlas,” Gene faces him and grabs the center console, “I am being sarcastic, you freaking alien.”

  He frowns.

  “How could this guy not tell you exactly where the coin is?”

  “Minkar is a vague being.”

  “Runs in the family.”

  Gene sighs. She trundles up a street inclined toward distant Rockies and turns onto an empty parking lot. She pulls into the first space behind a garbage bin and splintered fences, twists the keys, and, engine falling silent, rests her forehead against the steering wheel, hands dangling from its sweat-glossed pleather. Atlas connects patterns in his floor mat. They sit still. In engine’s lull, Samuel’s snoring blares like a trumpet and Atlas rocks with his pulse.

  A bang slams the vehicle’s side.

  Atlas jumps; Gene straightens; Samuel gasps. Eyes bursting open, he springs up and yells.

  “The cigars aren’t contraband!”

  Gene makes a face at Samuel. He whips his head. Lip curled, he pinches the blanket halfway around his shoulder and lets it slide off.

  He blinks. “What the—”

  Bang. It again strikes; the sedan tips onto its left tires and rattles coming down, as its weight evens and settles. Atlas grips his seat. He, Gene, and Samuel skip glances around the vehicle, the parking lot, the fences clattering, trees reeling, loose gutter downspout clapping its building . . .

  Atlas’s eyes slow and heavy brow rebounds tall. After significant struggle, he lowers his window a couple centimeters and holds his hand to its gap. Coolness kisses his palm. Silk whistles through his fingers. Helena’s wind beckons his, humming beneath sore ribs.

  “Drive,” Atlas says.

  Gene turns the ignition and, snapping her head toward the rear windshield, jolts her vehicle out of the parking space. She veers onto the street.

  Wind chases them. It responds to every twitch in Gene’s right foot, matching and then exceeding their speed in a teasing race. It bellows, churns into an invisible tsunami that floods their road from sidewalk to streetlight, trunk to treetops, a divine dam break that gushes under sedan’s chassis and skates it into its deluge. It heaves them forward, around a corner, and past a dozen vehicles that honk and swerve down connecting streets. A couple dozen more walkers glare from the roadsides, run for nearby shelter. Some lose their footing; some tumble across lawns into restaurant brick and hardware store aluminum; one man catches on the lowest branch of an evergreen and there cleaves as confettied dust clouds tear a frayed swath down the town’s commercial hub.

  The wind concentrates, funnels under Gene’s back bumper. It lifts till her two back tires only shave asphalt. Though she kicks the brake like a potter’s pedal, she runs three red lights.

  “I CAN’T,” Gene wrings the steering wheel, “STOP.”

  Atlas twists to the back and looks over Samuel’s shoulder. “Don’t attempt to. Let yourself be guided.”

  “ ’KAY, POCAHONTAS, I’LL LET IT DRIVE US OFF A CLIFF.”

  Samuel folds his arm
s. “If the feminine Titan sings about painting with all the colors of the wind, then I’m jumping out.”

  Atlas squints at the road traveled and holds a finger to his window’s slit. He closes his eyes.

  “Turn,” he says.

  The wind curves around the sedan and turns as Gene turns the steering wheel. They drive onto the main highway, away from shops and traffic and pedestrians. Gene exhales. But the current accelerates, gathers air from walls’ absence, swirls in gusts from grasslands, and she holds her breath. Samuel buries his face between his knees. Atlas angles his head toward the window. The speedometer’s needle revolves past ninety.

  Wind bends road signs and flattens grass, blasting dirt into the windshield, over Atlas’s window. He keeps his eyes closed.

  “Slow your vehicle.”

  “Does it look like I can?”

  The current pulls back and Gene steps on the brake. Her vehicle decelerates. They drive out of Helena’s suburban threshold, farmland on either side, a glistening strip on the horizon ahead.

  Air slips from Atlas’s fingers and he knows: it thrusts instead against the vehicle’s back left.

  “Turn to your right,” Atlas says.

  Gene looks at it; only grass takes the roadside. She stays course, but the wind skids her left tires forward, sliding the vehicle onto the road shoulder. She grinds her teeth as she wrenches the wheel wrenching the car back into her lane.

  Atlas opens kyanite eyes with facets glinting. “Turn to your right.”

  Gene throws the steering wheel right, shrieks, and drives off the road. She hits a wire fence and drags one of its wooden posts along a dip, under power lines. She, Atlas, and Samuel jerk to every mound of dirt and grassy clump. Then the tires again grip asphalt. Jaw dropping, Gene looks over the dashboard and grins at a new, small road now streaked with grass tracks and littered with fence debris.

  “Look—” She bounces in her seat. “Road.”

  They follow it around a bend, wind quieting. Atlas presses his hand to the window’s gap and feels nothing. His eyebrows cinch.

  “Stop,” he says.

  Gene parks. Atlas throws open his door. Without shutting it, he pushes off the vehicle and runs. Motion’s air grazes his cheeks, breaks upon his chest, locks his pupils on distance that stirs currents that tingle his bones bounding for their siren call. He sprints across fields and for the horizon’s shimmer. It’s a lake.

  His shoes gritting sand and rock, Atlas stops at its shore and stares into a deep, somehow sentient mirror that glazes all but the far, blued mountains of a bowl into reflection. Wind holds its breath in an anticipatory hush, lake’s ridges soothed glass-flat. Nothing and everything lie beneath. Atlas steps toward the depths; they show him naught by vision and a universe by imagination: the same claustrophobia and agoraphobia darkness settles in the gut. He brushes the water’s edge with his shoe and watches a ripple birth a dozen more that dissipate toward nonexistence.

  “Atlas,” Gene shouts and slows her run, “what in the world—”

  “It—” Atlas points at the lake. “The coin is in there.”

  Panting, the purple under his eyes faded but face red, Samuel stops by Gene. “Jump in and see if you discover Atlantis.” He gasps. “It’s named in your honor after all.”

  Gene turns to him. “Really?”

  “Yeah, Atlantis literally means ‘Island of Atlas.’ ”

  “Huh.”

  “If you’ve got time, you should read up on it. There’s this pretty engaging article online—just search for ‘Greek origin—”

  Atlas kicks off his shoes and wades into the water. His toe catches on a rock; he trips and falls under liquid sky, submerging in the same coolness wind swept across his neck. Gene makes a noise. It’s muffled. He flails his arms, snaps his legs in and out, and swims away from shore.

  “No, Atlas. He was joking. That one was a joke,” Gene yells. “Come back!”

  The breeze returns. Atlas’s body chases his arms and his ears bob on the line between wind and water. He inhales on the wrong side. He coughs.

  “Do you even know how to swim? Atlas! The coin’s, like, coin-size. Please—you won’t find—Samuel, tell him. Come—”

  Her voice penetrates his hearing in segments. Samuel’s laughing does the same.

  Atlas gropes through a plane tugging back his pant legs, tempting him under, pulsing the temperature of stratosphere that cools his scalp and rocks the cyclic twist of his body. He kicks his feet and grasps, a draft streaming through his fingers, in the directionless world between land and air, solid and gas, a limbo slithered into ears till gurgling. His feet pick up speed. His arms find rhythm. He widens his stroke, deepens his breaths, and stretches his neck toward the current that ripples eight square kilometers of painted sun he’s seen only on Sideran plains. The sheen waves with water. Atlas flies with wind.

  The currents explode; they launch across the lake and ram Atlas’s head, his face plunging under. His skin bristles, mouth gapes as he surfaces. He bats the blur from his eyes and, throwing his left shoulder, pivots with wind’s unsubtle petition, following it right. It fills his lungs when they empty and charges his muscles when they tire. He swims until the abyss beneath his feet lists subconscious anxieties that excite his consciousness and drive him, heart pounding, three, four—twenty meters onward.

  Then the wind dies. It scatters into a murmur over a thousand fleeing ridges. Atlas stops forward momentum and thrashes to float in place. He turns and turns, blinking, coughing, squinting over the waterline. He looks toward shore.

  Something roars.

  From behind, a burst blows his wet hair from his crown and snatches his legs out from under him. Atlas lurches forward as he rides a wave leaps above water level, his feet flying after his head. He soars. And plummets. He crashes into the lake’s bulk face-first and flips and tosses within midnight flurries, waving his arms for the surface. He swims for light. He finds it, finds his breath, his sight, when he twists around and finds the crater in the water. He gawks.

  A tunnel of air drills into the lake, sucks four hundred thousand liters into its orbit, and then booms. Cracks as a coughing volcano and exhales what it inhaled. Depths displaced gush upward, and the whirlpool ejects a hollow, swirling pillar of water thirty persons high, screw-threaded anima climbing for sun, concentric waves heaving shoreward. Atlas lifts his chin and scans the liquid tower formed in a perfect circle, one perfect cylindrical vortex that delves and spouts and sprouts a translucent stem. A slippery hunk of a fish, the first Atlas’s ever seen, escapes the pillar and wriggles an arcing fall over him, slicing homeward into surface water. Loose drops tap Atlas’s head. Whirling currents drag his feet.

  Gold flashes in the corner of his eye.

  A wave’s crest rolls him high; some gilt flicker springs out of water’s spout; and hand outstretched, Atlas lunges for the fragment of a glimmer he thought he saw. Solid metal answers his palm. He wraps his fingers around it—the circular, weathered smoothness of an ancient coin—and the vortex collapses. Water falls from sun, unshades Atlas’s eyes, fills the lake’s gap, flourishes on impact. A wave hurls Atlas back and clawing for air through motion’s foam.

  Rubbing his ear, he buoys himself. He wedges the coin under the armband closest to his elbow and tugs the leather end once, before resuming limbs’ automatic flail. The lake returns to its even flow, the wind to its breeze. Atlas swims for shore.

  Samuel calls out. “Not too hard to find then.”

  Atlas spots him and Gene. He gasps for air, settles his feet into mud, and stands. He trudges onto land, his tunic sagging, feet sopping. Smelling of fish and fungus, he slicks back his hair and jerks on his shoes.

  “What.” Gene points past his shoulder. “Was that.”

  Atlas straightens. “It w-was why we came.”

  “Water and,” she upturns her hands, fingers curled, and then shoots them overhead, “shhwhoosh, things and stuff.”

  Slipping a finger under his armband, Atlas pulls
out the coin. He holds it to the light and turns it, brushing a thumb over its familiar face: an engraved bird mid-flight. It’s columba—a dove, he believes, that monopolizes one side. It glistens gold.

  Samuel reaches for it. “Think it works as an arcade token?”

  Atlas flicks the coin into his palm and squeezes it. He narrows his eyes.

  “Is someone going to act normal,” Gene raises her voice, “and tell me what’s happening? How’d you get that?”

  Atlas shakes a few drops out of his sleeve. “The coin is bound to me, Gene.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay.”

  He meets her eyes and speaks slowly. “It is mine. The wind,” he ducks his head, waving a hand toward the lake, “knew such. Do you understand?”

  Gene grimaces.

  “How soon are you portaling it to Sidera?” Samuel asks.

  Atlas mouths “portaling” and, after three seconds, mouths “oh.” He glances around. “Now, I suppose.”

  “Aw, geez.” Gene frowns at the mud on Atlas’s pant hems. “Can you at least try to not stain everything next time?”

  Samuel flicks his hand at Atlas. “Go. Do the portal. Go now.”

  “I, um—” Atlas looks to Gene. “I am. Patience.”

  Samuel clears his throat and shifts weight and shivers. He trembles on a quickened inhale. Clenching his jaw, he steps toward Atlas and holds out his hand.

  “Changed my mind.” Samuel bends his fingers in and out. “Give me the stupid thing. I’m going instead of you—you’d never find The Presage up there.”

  “Sidera is my world and this is my,” Atlas raises his free palm, “relic.”

  “Or you both could go,” Gene says.

  “Nothing is yours, Sideran. Should’ve learned that in fascist school.”

  Atlas’s coin-hand throbs sunfire, a shrinking behind his ribs. Thanks to Imperium and glory to Absolute! Collect what you gave and bestow—

  “Can’t you share it?”

  —again equal.

  “We agreed,” Atlas whispers, “upon my Sideran travel—”

  “Share, fleshsack? Where’ve you been?”

  Atlas’s breathing accelerates. Despite swimming fatigue, his feet twitch to run, his windpulse rising, and Samuel’s expectant palm rouses memory of Sideran rumor, of those who, when discovery threatened, swallowed whole each’s contraband, only to vomit it up later.