Atlas

by Nicholas Gagnier

  There is only one explanation for how I could have gotten here.

  “Tim?”

  My voice echoes down the humming tunnel. Like a thrown boomerang, it comes back to me. No train is travelling down the concrete tube; only the pitch of my nervous voice returns, and not even the distant sound of a vehicle on fixed tracks dares follow it.

  Last I remember, the FBI turned on me after exposing one of their senior agents as complicit in the abduction of children. Long story short, he and a few others used a group of former altar boys to take kids from grocery stores, museums and any public place they could potentially get away with it. Learning of that revelation almost cost my life. In fact, were it not for Tim, I would not have survived the assassination attempt.

  “Tim?”

  Again, the name returns nothing, and my eyes drift to the row of payphones to my left. Behind them, silver railings and concrete steps hug the far wall, with a decommissioned escalator separating them. My memories are more accessible, no longer dimmed by the cloudiness of waking from near-death. But there is no sign of my guardian angel who saved me from the FBI’s dark underbelly, then granted powers I could not explain.

  How long have I been here?

  Exhaling, I take my first steps up the multi-flight staircase. Every heightened surface brings me closer to answers, and farther away from questions— at least, until I reach the top.

  The scene above the tunnel is New York City, but nothing like I have ever seen. The Empire State Building— if that is indeed what it is— curves in its center, forcing the building’s peak to perform a one-hundred-eighty degree angle, making it look like an arch. The point most people would assume to be the top is pointed to the road. Its general shape defies most logic or expectations. Above its bending body, the sky has adopted a dark shade of purple. Black swirls slowly rotate in the violet canopy, reminding me of a Twilight Zone episode.

  What the hell is this place?

  I have only been to New York once, on a graduation trip in high school. Maya encouraged me to go, despite not really being able to afford it. The woman sacrificed so much more than I gave her credit for, and I was able to join my peers on the trip.

  Even given that experience, the unsettling skyline is remarkably different from any version of Manhattan I would recognize. Its roads are virtually abandoned— not a car in sight along the intersections. Building windows are dark, as if everyone shut down their lives and moved out of the city.

  Trying not to panic, my feet shuffle down West 34th, glancing in all directions for a corresponding sign of life. None of the mobility issues that gripped me in the hospital are in play here. The hospital gown is also gone, replaced with a more familiar dress—a black pantsuit and blazer, like those often donned as a rookie FBI agent. Shoulder-length hair sways with turns of my head, but no longer possesses ashen streaks as a rogue strand escapes the ponytail trailing behind me. I pass several stores before reaching Macy’s on the corner of 34th and Broadway but like everywhere else, the iconic department store towering over the intersection is locked tight.

  Turning right at 7th Avenue, my subconscious compass carries me from point to point like connecting-the-dots. Somehow, my feet know where I am headed better than I do. Soon in Times Square, I gawk at a scene that should be instantly familiar, but rings hollow and foreign instead. For miles around, Manhattan is desolate. I don’t know if the plague Wilson inferred to did this, but am certain it would not turn the sky purple as it currently stands.

  This makes no sense.

  And then, a voice behind me confirms everything I suspected to be true. Based on all my previous interactions with the man who called himself Death, who led me into a comatose state while the world fell around me, this is his world, not mine. This is the afterlife he warned about, and there is no escape from it.

  “Hello, Ramona.”

  The words evoke a shudder down my spine. Turning to the source— the bearded man was not there to greet me in the hospital ward where armed men came to kill me, nor upon my entrance into his strange world— I shouldn’t be as spooked as I am, but scramble back from his empathetic frown and cool demeanor.

  Alliance with him has only brought me pain.

  “Get away from me!” My shoes run the other way while my head is still turned to him, almost tripping me. The strange world revolves and trembles as I regain balance, sprinting back the way I came. The man who appeared under a table to me at five-years-old does not give chase that I can see or hear. The weird horizon is lost on me— buildings blur together in my dash for freedom. Pacing breaths lends realization that my chest does not burn and my legs do not tire. Neither revelation does much to comfort me.

  I have to break free of him, once and for all.

  Blocking out logic that dictates I should hear him out— that he has been around all my life, and never harmed me— flight overpowers every remaining intuition, and I care for nothing more than escaping him.

  We have to begin the separation process, Ramona.

  Bolting down West 45th, the purple sky swirls with my pounding heart and unstable vision. Roads ordinarily filled with cabs, limousines and Manhattan’s traffic through the heart of America’s most notorious metropolis are dormant. Skyscraper windows are devoid of light or life, promising no escape between them.

  Will it hurt?

  The memories run together like slapping feet on the pavement beneath. Turning up 5th Avenue, my brain tries to corroborate memories of him as a child with the man whose merging with me left my body in a vegetative state.

  I will run forever if it means escaping him.

  Several blocks pass by— aside from the weird sky and lack of other human beings, it really is New York. Reaching the Rockefeller Center takes the same amount of time as it would in the real version; perhaps slightly faster, since the street carts and sidewalks are empty. Slowing in front of the landmark, whose rink is long untouched and its double door entrance pitch black beyond, I look for any sign of the man who calls himself Death.

  You can probably stop calling him that. I have seen the extent of his terrible powers. From the looks of it, his realm is not much better.

  We have to begin the separation process, Ramona.

  Will it hurt?

  Immensely.

  None of this would have happened if I had just told him to go away.

  I should be out of breath, have to hold my knees to regain oxygen. Maya was a smoker, and the years trapped inside a cloudy apartment in the seventies, when everyone and their mother smoked inside, should have compromised my respiratory system. It never did, but that should not make me Superwoman. I should not be able to sprint twelve blocks and be fine—

  “Ramona,” Tim says, appearing behind me. I scream at the suddenness with which the suited man appears, scrambling back from him. “We need to talk.”

  But I’ve heard everything Death has to say, and paid for every word. I tell him to leave me alone. Turning up 6th, hoping he has enough respect to listen this time. But I am in his realm now. He can appear and disappear and stalk me until I listen to him.

  He’s going to have to work for it.

  ***

  When I was about six or seven, I loved Where the Wild Things Are. Long after Maya tired of reading it to the little girl who survived her parents’ murder-suicide, I begged her to read it to me before bed. I always thought about being spirited away to a whole other world. Despite not being a reader or terribly interested in television, something about that damn story captured my heart. I went to sleep afterward, happily dreaming of waking up in a strange place. I would be befriended by its monsters and learn to love its darkness, and it would love me in return.

  I am sure this monster has perfectly good explanations. He is the Devil, and knows the words I want to hear. Befriending me as a youngster, manipulating me through every major period of my life to ensure his ulterior motives were satisfied; it was all a game to him.

  I can’t trust anything the man says.

  Cen
tral Park filters into view under the strange sky; its green shrubberies and trees are less lively, more like plastic ornaments sprinkled throughout to give the illusion it’s the real deal. Taking care to check my twelve and six, I advance into it. My hip feels lighter, missing the service weapon I carried with the FBI, and had become accustomed to. Guns won’t save me now — I am at the mercy of Death’s realm, if that is indeed where we are.

  You’re not thinking about this rationally, Ro.

  Maya’s voice surfaces in my memory, forming the only soundtrack to Central Park’s irregular state. The purple sky reflects off green grass, lending the blades’ tip a brownish hue where the perception connects. Condominiums and high-rise towers surrounding the greenspace are uniformly blank; no worker drones or bodies traverse lit halls from a distance— almost as if the buildings themselves are props.

  Of course I’m not thinking rationally, Auntie. Did you see what he did to me?

  He saved your life.

  Only to ruin it. I’m not arguing with personifications of a memory. I have to get out of here, away from the man who masquerades as a caring figure. Breaking into a trot, the park’s massive center offers even fewer answers than its edges. All the best escape routes are unobstructed, and there is no sign of my celestial pursuer—

  “You don’t need to be afraid, Ramona.”

  The particular phrasing of Tim’s words grind my feet to a stop. They pull my flailing heartbeat back to the Earth. So many ways to retort to the first words he spoke to me, hiding under a table at five years old; but turning to face him, unleashing any, I am capable of none.

  You don’t need to be afraid, Ramona.

  Not to say I don’t recognize the snaking pillar of darkness, floating vertically at eye level. It saved me during the FBI’s attempt to stop my rescuing Emily Rickard. It appeared in the sky, flipping vehicles and disabling helicopters to protect me from afar. But to see it up close, moving in parts while stationary in others, is something else to behold. Its head tendril is glossy and shimmers as light bounces off its surface when it lands a certain way. In every other manner, it is a cloud, made out of inexplicable material. It hovers, dancing with the air.

  All of my former comebacks lost, my feet turn the other way, sprinting back the way I came. Uncanny, limitless stamina ensures my legs don’t tire or my arms don’t ache, swinging at my sides as I bolt out of Central Park.

  I could deal with the apparition, appearing at crucial moments of my life. Sometimes, I benefited from his presence, even if I could never really explain it— like his all-knowingness or bringing me back from the dead.

  The whole undead, abandoned Manhattan is kind of a dealbreaker.

  I don’t make it far beyond the stone wall into the empty lanes of Central Park West before I am stopped by another of Tim’s manifestations, this one far more threatening. The being is humungous, towering on giant arms like a gorilla. It is made of the same material as the cloud, but has no eyes or face in general. It must be twenty feet tall, and bows over its front haunches to inspect me.

  Other than my childhood years, I have never been easily scared. But the sight of a giant golem widens my eyes before I dart right. The uncharacteristic scream from my mouth echoes down empty blocks. The monster does not follow me.

  I run forever, thanks to unbridled endurance I suddenly possess; run until I see the Hudson, glistening under a violet canopy. I run until I can’t see smoke or golems or the man who calls himself Death, who I allowed to taunt me for far too long.

  Now he is a monster, and I see what terrible things he is capable of.

  My name is Death. My friends call me Tim.

  I should have told him to go away the first time we met, and Jeremy was trying to beat the door down, and Maya screamed for him to go away.

  Would you like to be friends, Ro?

  Some part of me knows he has a rational explanation, like he always does. Devils and monsters often wear a friendly face, and this Devil has everything to gain from being calm and collected, nothing to gain from presenting as his darker forms.

  My name is Death.

  He said it so often, so...nonchalantly over the years. He played to my childhood loss of Daniel shooting Tiffany in a gravel pit. I sat in a car seat, only yards away. So, when the strange man in a suit constantly appeared to a child on the verge of tears or abject terror, I found him a calming presence. Little did I know, he was just looking through my life like hitting rewind on an old VCR. Popping in earlier and earlier, until my memories solidified with his subtle interventions, all leading to my inevitable murder by Stephen Hardwick and Ryan Royce.

  He knew, and did nothing to stop it.

  I run, and would run forever, but my advance is stopped by a descending darkness. It covers my eyes and prevents gasps for air I may not necessarily need, but want to draw anyway. It is sudden, halting my progress toward no particular destination, only away from an apparition who can morph into unexplainable beings.

  The darkness pulls. It welcomes and provides a coaxing effect in contrast to the purple sky above my head. It soothes my pounding chest, and I would think I was dead if my mind wasn’t racing a mile a minute. But it does, and this can’t possibly be what dying entails.

  But it is, and I am in the land of wild things.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The earliest memory in my fledgling consciousness has nothing to do with the man whose sperm fertilized my mother’s egg. That egg hitched a ride to the lining of Tiffany Stewart’s uterine wall, even as she was drinking and smoking nights away in her D.C. apartment. Most of what I know about Tiffany Stewart stems from old photos, and what Maya was willing to tell me about her. It mostly consisted of bitter criticisms while I was a child. Over the years, her bitterness levelled out, and I learned about my birth mother in a more objective light.

  Even pregnant, Tiffany was fucking three guys, telling each she was shacking up with only them. There is no way to know if Daniel Knox was my true biological parent, and I remember nothing of the drug-addled drunk who killed Tiffany as I sat feet away, then himself.

  Most memories are of her sister Maya, who raised me on her own accord and goodwill. Maya grew up in poverty and never made much of herself, but worked at the soup kitchen on weekends, down the street from a lavish Capitol lifestyle of politicians and dignitaries. She collected food stamps and somehow, by the grace of God, afforded the ground-level Stanton Park apartment we lived in until she died.

  The darkness which enveloped me in Tim’s realm lifts to a completely different environment. Gone is the violet sky with weird black swirls, and the same pantsuit worn as I came down on Emily Rickard’s abductors.

  The room in front of me seems to be a long hall, both travelling forever and immediately closed off from outside influences. Everything from its oblong panels to the inmate-style crewneck and pants I’ve adopted is white. The walls themselves turn as autonomous, translucent cubes. Glimmers of gray-like lead shade the cubes’ edges— there are both several and none, reminiscent of three-dimensional pictures I used to study in grade school, trying to find their layered secrets.

  Where am I?

  And then, a voice responds. It is female, but hollow like a robot. Its inflections echo through the strange chamber— willing to reveal the answers to all my questions, or none of them.

  “Hello, Ramona Knox.”

  Her arrival is sudden but non-threatening, despite not belonging to any being I can see. No idea whether this has anything to do with the place I just left— and hopefully never return to—but maybe I can get some damn answers.

  “Who are you?”

  The voice falls silent, having made itself known while seemingly incapable of answering basic questions. The glare its presence returns is blinding and other than my own pink hues, it would be uniform.

  “Hello?”

  “Who I am is a human construct. What we are is paramount to understanding principles of the Light.”

  “The Light?”

  “Yes.
Think of chemistry, if you will. The Light is nitrogen in a hydrogenous basin, which makes oxygen needed to sustain most life in the universe. It was born from Darkness, and only comprises a small concentration of celestial power. Those whose duties facilitate its use, or through possession of certain artifacts, can wield the Light’s true power, but it always comes at a steep cost. For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  “The majority of the Light’s power is protected by the four-member Council of Atlas. Another percentage is used to power Atlas itself, and another yet for Earth. The aforementioned artifacts that are imbued with it allow its bearers a range of powers surpassing their physiological limitations.”

  Might as well start with the obvious questions.

  “Where am I?” I ask the voice with no body, speaking in an echo chamber of strange shapes and hollow imitations at making conversation.

  This time, she is quick to respond.

  “Do not consider where you are, but how you are. To exist within Atlas is a state of being, not a location.”

  “A...state of being?”

  “Yes,” the disembodied being says, echoing through the chamber my entire existence has been relegated to. “Are you aware of the concept of Heaven?”

  “Heaven?” I ask. “As in...God’s heaven? Adam and Eve’s God, who kicked them out of Eden over an apple?”

  “The apple is symbolic. It represents obedience. This is a metaphor your human leaders have used to explain the concept to the lesser-minded to maintain order— something you have seemingly failed to grasp in your time observing such protocols.”

  Did it just...insult me?

  “The Atlas,” it continues, “also desires control, although for reasons not of ego, but order. It governs the state of all things, from quantum physics to morality for complex life in the universe. This is achieved through a network of proxies and individual agents carrying out its commands. If there is an anomaly, these failsafes ensure the continuity of survival by eliminating the threat within a margin of 0.0001% failure.”