Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  “Perhaps,” Atlas whispers and it blares, “I could be there for a child in the future.”

  Gene’s lips curve upward.

  “If I discover the correct non-analyst-selected partner.” Atlas squints through window’s yellow mask.

  Gene’s smile falls.

  The front door bursts open. Atlas and Gene jolt; they look to the knob’s metal slamming wall, the trickle of a rain gutter, the whoosh of cool air, all in a second’s time, and Samuel leaps through the door, turns, and throws it shut.

  Gene spews something along the lines of “uhmya” and Samuel runs to her curtains. He yanks them together. He switches the farther, then the closer lamp off and darkness steals Atlas’s breath. A blur of living black, Samuel steps again to the front door and checks its lock.

  Atlas stands. “What—”

  “Shh.” Samuel waves his arms; they evade Atlas’s sight. “No time. All over. Ravens—”

  The opposite wall explodes. Gene, Atlas, and Samuel jump. The wall rattles but stands, settles—but another bang slams the window. Two more hit the front door. Atlas whips his head through waxy darkness dotted by the red blink on a hallway fire alarm, his palms prickled and heart loud. He freezes at the next loose-wheeled freight train that spans the apartment exterior, and registers it as not one bang, but hundreds, each melding with the last. The floor trembles. A shaded object slips from an end table and shatters. Gene claws the couch.

  Her window’s glass screeches and pops. Staring through the closed curtains, Samuel yells. Booms mute his words; but Gene slides to the floor, knees and hands on the hardwood, and ducks beneath the coffee table. Samuel crouches behind her recliner.

  “Get,” Samuel looks to Atlas and yells, “down.”

  Atlas crouches and meets Gene on the floor. She wraps her arms around her head, grimaces into the hiss of her breath. Another object, a picture frame, falls and clatters on the floor. Atlas scoots toward Gene, stretches his arm around her shoulders, grasping the crinkles in her shirt, and ducks his head with hers. He grabs his ear.

  Samuel yells, “Guess we’re going—”

  Atlas uncovers his ear and hears between tectonic plate collision.

  “—stay put for a bit.”

  Samuel flinches. Gene shrinks into Atlas’s arm and he rocks to a pulse rivaled by wall thuds, both accelerating to mind’s replays of Brian’s last claim.

  Yours. The Presage is—

  Atlas squeezes his eyes shut.

  XXVII

  (Mis)communication

  Light slips through the crack under Gene’s curtains. It streaks the grooves in her floor and, half a meter onward, the shards of some ceramic object and the rug fibers Atlas feels beneath his ankle, his pant leg wrinkled upward. The coffee table’s underworks sever his horizontal view. His forehead tenses.

  He feels more. A hundred-kilogram rigidity under his shoulder and hip, a flat mass pressing upward, and pressure—

  Atlas blinks and draws down his chin, his vision to his right arm: outstretched but unseen.

  Gene lies next to him, facing from him, her head on his upper arm. Her hair drapes his shoulder and her back curves to his front but doesn’t touch. Atlas’s left hand rests over her elbow crease.

  He stares. Gene’s side rises and falls; all else stills. The hardwood floor softens and his mind blanks.

  It jolts. Mind touches last night and Atlas scans the room through his eyes’ corners. Samuel’s absent.

  Gene mumbles. Atlas freezes.

  She licks her lips and rolls onto her back, her neck curved to his arm. She opens her eyes.

  Pressing his arm flat, Atlas lifts himself a centimeter, throws his free hand far from her, and inhales through his teeth. Gene rolls toward him and her eyes widen. He sits up. She follows.

  “Hello, Gene,” Atlas says.

  She pushes her palms into the floor. “Hi.”

  Grimacing, Atlas stands and glances around the room. Gene frowns. She too stands with a wobble, stretching her neck.

  “Are—” Atlas clears his throat. “Are you well?”

  “Um. Yeah. I’m just gonna—” Gene points behind her. “For a—so that—sorry.”

  She spins around, strides into her bedroom, and shuts the door. Atlas’s grimace embeds in his face. He stares at nothing.

  Stepping around the place they lay two minutes past, he wanders to the window. He pulls back the curtains and his gut sinks with the metal rings’ compressing sigh.

  Sunlight casts splotched red on Gene’s rug, table, far wall; the same drenches Atlas’s front, his eyes. Blood glazes the glass. From top frame to bottom, side to side, dark red made luminescent in morning seeps into molecules’ gaps and fuses to the window, distorting trees and sky and hills. Black shapes spot the blood. One, a feather glued to window’s corner, quivers in the breeze.

  Eyes forward, Atlas sees the mound of dead ravens at vision’s outskirts, centimeters from his shoes’ toes, through the window’s floor-length glass, on the balcony he acknowledges for the first time. Wings snapped backward, this way, that, stick from the mound.

  “It’s a message.”

  Atlas flips around. Samuel leans against the entryway. Exhaling, Atlas yanks the curtains shut again and faces Samuel.

  He gestures to the window. “Eden’s message. She knows we’re here playing games. Pretty birds can’t fly no more. Did just what they were told and she expects you to be the same.”

  The wood beneath foot swirls and blurs. Atlas blinks.

  “Harassment’s not gonna stop until we come looking for her. And we will. That cocky goddess—I mean, person. Bad person.” Samuel lifts a finger. “She’s got you down to a T. You’re itchin’ to run toward danger and she knows.”

  “I’m not like that,” Atlas says.

  “You sure?” Samuel juts out his bottom lip. “Not always a bad thing, Attie. You crave going where other people won’t. Someone’s gotta be like that if they wanna chart land.”

  Atlas tugs the leather sashes and bands strapped in a bundle over his walker attire and sits on the edge of Gene’s recliner. Samuel sits across from him.

  “Time’s ticking to witching hour. Something nasty’s gonna give birth.” Samuel leans into his seat, sighing. His tone levels and stare calcifies on the rug. “Cops came when you two were asleep. They asked a neighbor stuff about the ravens, blamed it on some freak weather phenomenon, and left all confused. We really should clean that crap up if we want to stay, devil willing, inconspicuous.”

  Looking to the front door, Atlas grows nauseous.

  “Where’s Denim? You two have a fight?”

  “No.” Atlas snaps his head up. “You would believe such why?”

  Samuel squints at him and Atlas diverts his eyes.

  “Ah-ha.” Samuel smirks. “You did have a fight.”

  Atlas lifts his hands to nothing and contorts his face. “I don’t know. She,” he jabs a finger at Gene’s bedroom door, “hardly lends clarification. Absolute help us all.”

  “That’s because you’re Attie, the blissfully ignorant kawaii Pikachu onesie.”

  “How do I understand walkers?”

  “By first changing that sentence to ‘How do I understand Gene?’ ”

  “It’s possible?”

  “A nice lady once told me you can do anything—” Samuel snorts. “I talk so much. Lesson one, Gene thinks about you a lot more than you think about her. Your gnarly isn’t easy tolerating but she bathes in it. I can’t believe I just said that.”

  Atlas stares.

  “She’s totally in love with you, man,” Samuel says.

  He stares.

  “You’re really giving me constipated look?” Samuel rolls his eyes. “Seriously? You haven’t noticed?”

  “I don’t know,” Atlas squints, “what you’re . . .”

  Samuel’s jaw drops. “Oh-ho. No way. You literally don’t know. Attie, do you not know what love is?”

  He scoffs. “Of course I know what it is.” Atlas lowers h
is voice and shrinks into himself. “It’s the exchange of undying loyalty to your superiors, symbolizing one’s dominance and the other’s submission, in return for executive support and,” he peeks at Samuel; “guidance, peace,” he inhales, “and pro—”

  Samuel smirks.

  “—tection.” Atlas looks at his feet. “Is it something bad?”

  “No, no, no.” Samuel drags his hands down his cheeks. “Not gonna happen. Not in this house. Not in my lifetime.”

  “Samuel, Eden uses the term frequently. I suddenly feel ill.”

  “I’d rather shove a family of scorpions up my butt than sit here and explain to a cake pop what love is.”

  “Perhaps I should lie down.”

  “Shut up. I’m not doing it.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “NO.”

  “It’s merely a word.”

  Rubbing his temples, Samuel breathes audibly and kicks left his foot onto his other leg. “You already know what it is, you wet sack.”

  Samuel stretches his hands and shifts his jaw and looks into distance. Atlas leans forward.

  “Don’t do that,” Samuel says.

  Frowning, Atlas leans back and rests his left foot on his right leg. He angles one shoulder, narrows his eyes at Samuel’s arm, and then shifts so his own mirrors it. Samuel looks at him. A searing gleam in his eye, he scowls.

  “Don’t do that either.”

  Atlas drops his foot.

  “Love’s,” Samuel grimaces, “less what you think and more what you feel. It’s a noun and verb. It’s personal. Can’t go tossing it around willy-nilly unless you’re born-again Christian. It’s yours, hers, no one else’s. It shows you own each other in a way—belong to each other. It’s trust and support and the aching in your gut when she’s scared or hurt or the happiest anyone could be and you can’t squeeze her enough because there’s never enough to give. It’s when you want—need, more than air, to throw her a whole new level of happiness and then shatter your own record a million times over again ’cause her smile makes you feel like you’re gonna throw up in a good way. It’s torture and unfair and tricky and stinks like Sideran but feels like sunshine. It’s not complete freedom, not independence, but it’s,” Samuel bites the inside of his cheek and turns red, “maybe better. Maybe. Love’s sacrifice.”

  Atlas’s lungs collapse. “That—”

  “Please don’t. If you say anything a little womanly I’ll have to keelhaul you.”

  “That was beautiful.”

  Samuel stands. “I don’t care how many ravens fly into my skull. Bye.” He yanks his jacket collar up his neck and strides for the front door. “Be back in a couple hours. We’ll talk strategy then.”

  “Do you love Eden?” Atlas says.

  He stops. Samuel raises the back of his hand above his shoulder, to Atlas. He drops it and speaks to the door.

  “Don’t ask that.”

  “I—are you—” Atlas’s eyebrows come together. “Have they ceased?”

  Samuel spins around and grinds his teeth. “What? I’m gonna shoot you so hard.”

  “Have your nightmares ceased? The variety that spans the day.”

  The green in Samuel’s eyes glints. “They’ll never stop.”

  He exits Gene’s apartment. Once again. Atlas exhales ten seconds late into mind’s images of Samuel’s footsteps under surely black-clumped branches.

  He looks to his hand. Atlas smiles and forgets and brushes the textured lines on his palm. Warmth takes his gut and seizes his muscles into velvet confinement as stillness unfurls a charge through his heartspace, one soothing and delicate, of Sideran sun upon open plains only in reverie.

  Gene’s bedroom door creaks open.

  Atlas hops onto his feet. “Gene!”

  Halfway around her doorway, Gene slows her steps and makes a face. “Hi. Was Samuel just here?”

  “Yes. Yes he was.”

  “Okay, where’d he go?”

  “Away.”

  “Good gracious, Samuel.” Gene walks into the living room. “That’s not safe at all.”

  Atlas steps around the couch and rests his hand on the backrest. Then tucks one hand inside the other, then lets both fall. “Gene.” He rubs his hands together. “How—how are you?”

  She stops before him. “Uh—”

  “As in cordial walker communication—as in, how do you feel this moment?”

  “Absolutely fantastic.” Gene motions to her window. “With all the creepy birds, as in, The Birds movie, as in, definitely not getting my deposit back when I’m kicked out of my apartment in a few days.”

  Atlas nods seven times. “Mmhmm.”

  Gene eyes him up and down. “You feeling okay?”

  “Mmm. Yes. Wonderful.”

  “Well, um,” she walks to her front door and glares past it, “I guess I’m going out too.”

  Atlas’s smile weakens. “But you said—”

  “Yeah, not safe. Very stupid. Much needed.” Gene grabs the doorknob. “Air—away-ness—something. ’S what I need right now.”

  “I will accompany you then.”

  “Atlas,” she frowns, “no.”

  He steps and puts his arm in her way. “Genesis, you label me incompetent if you believe I’d allow you to exit into Eden’s scrutiny alone.”

  Gene bites her lip. “All right. Whatever.”

  Atlas swings open the door and morning light drenches them. Gene glances down; she covers her mouth and leaps over her doorstep and runs down the stairway. Atlas looks: ravens lie at his feet. He follows Gene down the stairs and shakes Eden, blood, and feathers from his ears. Cool air sweeps his knuckles, slips under his sleeves a brisk newness.

  Atlas jogs to catch up with Gene. She strides through the parking lot, to its corner, turns, and then walks for the far corner. Bordering gutters flow tired streams that reflect sun. Gene scowls at asphalt between dark gray still drying. Breathing quickened, Atlas reaches her and bends to meet her eye level.

  “We are traveling where?”

  Gene shrugs.

  “And you’re unhappy about what,” Atlas scans her furrowed brow, “exactly?”

  She shrugs.

  “Perhaps you should—” Atlas bares his teeth, scrunches his eyes, and shakes a fist. He raises his voice to the sky. “I very much contain feelings of animosity. Curse the Absolute, that wretched cretin who most probably does not have suns for eyes. Where is some object, that I may kick it?” He blanks his face. “Do it like such. Then your anger wouldn’t appear as adorable.”

  Gene stops; he does too. She faces him and gestures to his front. “What’s this?”

  “Imperium,” Atlas thrusts his finger at the ground, “I dislike you. Now you try.”

  She looks off the tip of his finger. “This—a walker and a Sideran?”

  “Accurate.” Atlas closes his mouth and crinkles his forehead. “You are the walker and I—”

  “Are we friends?” Gene says.

  “Of course we are.”

  “What else?” She squeezes her arm, inhales another shrug, and spills words. “Because I just sacrificed my home, family, my life for—so help me—I have no clue. And I’m confused and alone and repeating a bad dream because you’re probably gonna go off chasing Eden or the coin or some non-analyst-selected partner while I’m left trying to figure your mood swings. All this wasn’t for Sidera or Earth or some higher purpose to bring about sugar-coated peace and you’ll never understand that.”

  His eyes narrow. “Never understand? Have you considered that you don’t convey properly?”

  “Samuel would know what I’m talking about.”

  “Oh, Samuel? Perhaps you should go birth his children.”

  Gene’s mouth falls open.

  “I have grown tired of beings declaring me ignorant.”

  “Why do you do,” Gene swirls a finger at Atlas’s face, “that?”

  He recoils. “ ‘That’ being?”

  “Push and pull. You can’t make up your min
d about anything.”

  “Because it is,” Atlas flourishes his hands, “strange. All things. Earth. You. That.” He gestures to Gene. “It’s uncommonly, infuriatingly strange.”

  Jaw dropped, Gene looks down at herself.

  “My knowing you—the words exchanged, time together, unnatural touches—what, by the Imperium, am I supposed to do with that, Gene?”

  She grimaces at the asphalt. “Unnatural?”

  “You cause my organs to hurt and my judgement to deteriorate and the irrationality of it all draws me toward destruction, toward fire like—”

  “A dummy.”

  “Beings don’t know—join—they don’t—it’s all unquenchable groveling for unperceived confinement—they do not exist this close and you are everything wrong.”

  Gene makes three faces, strangles her fingers with her thumbs, and then bursts them open at Atlas. “You stupid dummy.”

  “Imperium warned of attachment and I believe I’m beginning to understand, if the Absolute proclaimed one truth. Perhaps Absolute does not live at star’s head in a colossal tower or wear the past as a necklace and future as a crown but the fact of forewarned private relations that impair one’s coherency—”

  “Atlas,” Gene shoots a pocket of air from her mouth, “the Absolute is fake. F-A-E-K. There’s no one guy who sits in the sky and controls the universe.”

  Atlas glares and Gene’s eyes widen at the ground, the ruby in her cheeks paling. They shift weight and scuff pebbles underfoot and calm their breathing.

  Turning to the apartment complex, Atlas says, “We should return. Come.”

  Gene grabs his arm. He twists back.

  She flushes again and drops her hand. “I haven’t said what I wanted to.”

  “That’s apparent.”

  Scowling, Gene steps toward him. “I—”

  Atlas watches her hand.

  “Honestly, I’m frustrated. I’m scared.” Gene’s eyes glisten. “I’m scared I won’t tell you and you’ll poof! ’cause of Eden or ’cause you want to.”

  “Tell me what?”