Buildings could do this too, when they chose.
* * *
Martha collapsed the first day of the war, smashed in her knees by the missile that sent her weighted majesty crashing down into white dust, all her residents buried inside. The other skyscrapers fell, too: old Ty Markum and Joy Delgado, the soaring spires of Caroline Watts and the flat-topped garden of Delbert Hunt, giants who sheltered us, gone forever.
I was home with Cleo and Chachi, staking tomatoes in the garden while morning shaded me from the worst of the sun. I swear the world shifted deep in my bones before I heard anything. Sudden thunder shook my knees, though the sky was bright and cloudless. Black smoke rose in dark, thick braids, cutting off the skyline. Asphalt odor blew on the wind. Whenever I breathed, I gagged.
My phone rang, and I answered automatically.
“She’s gone,” said Cat, before I even got in hello.
“Oh, Cat. I’m sorry.” Conversational, like we were discussing groceries. When your world goes to dust in a moment, your brain doesn’t always believe it. “Where are you?”
“At work. Everyone else left. They all went home. I was supposed to go see Mom this afternoon. Meet a client in her rooftop restaurant.”
“Come to my house. It’s safe here. So far.”
On the westside, those who survived the initial volley rooted themselves on the spot, throwing up wall after rigid wall, wrapping themselves around Aurora as far as their strength permitted. They made a half-nautilus maze just beyond the gleaming steel war machines of Apsides digging down, angling their guns up, preparing the next volley.
On the eastside, we waited and watched.
* * *
We took shelter inside Grandfather’s walls, my children and Cat and Jake and me. The former mayor Ami Nguyen had fallen. She loved Aurora so much that when her time to take root came, she stretched her arms wider and wider until they became a wooden roller coaster, our outermost border. Which meant she was the first to go when the invasion began.
“What do they want?” Jake peeled red potatoes over a wooden mixing bowl. He cooked when he got nervous. The sour smell of bread yeast suffused the whole room. He came from a family of restaurants, and intended to become one himself when the time came, part of our plan from the days when we dated. I would be a skyscraper, like Martha, and he would be the restaurant crowning my summit. I would house the city, and he would feed it.
“It’s finally happened. They’re moving in.” I pitched my voice low, so I wouldn’t scare Cleo, who at four was old enough to detect fear. “They think we’ll make their lives more convenient.” Living buildings repaired themselves, lived for decades and centuries longer than the ones other cities built by hand. Our buildings responded to our needs. No collapsed roofs, or broken stairs, or subway cars stalled on overworn tracks. Rooted structures died eventually, but there was always someone to take their place, to serve in turn.
“It won’t work, you know,” said Jake. “They think it’ll be easy, but we won’t be used.”
I didn’t like that sharp edge in his eyes. I didn’t want guns or war. I just wanted our home back. I wanted to sink my toes deep into bedrock and stand beside Aunt Martha, proud and strong, showing just how far the horizon reached by cracking it like a blue-shelled robin’s egg against my peak.
I excused myself to the kitchen. Bread dough rose in a pan next to a bowl of mixed berries. I picked a couple of blackberries off the top and crushed them against the roof of my mouth. The sweet-tart taste didn’t quite wash away the acrid asphalt smell clinging to my hair.
I leaned against the antique oak pantry door. “Grandfather,” I whispered, “I don’t know what to do.” I never knew I’d miss him so much until he was gone. I even missed his anger.
He didn’t reply. Grandfather had been rooted for nine years now, and didn’t speak much. But that night I woke to creaking and groaning deep in the walls. Grandfather trembled, knocking pictures and mirrors askew. It began to rain outside, drumming down so hard it drowned out the distant sounds of war. The roof sprung a leak, right over our bed in the master bedroom. Suitcases clattered down out of the attic and skittered down the newly warped hallway floor until they hit our bedroom door.
We had our answer. We got up and began to pack. Chachi cried at being woken so early, but Cat rocked and hushed him asleep again. I gave Cleo a backpack to fill with her favorite things: a stuffed beaver, a plastic sword, some boardbooks pressed from the last beams of her great-grandmother.
It was much the same with our neighbors. Boards warped, door knobs rusted, stairs bowed downward. The structures of Aurora had taken counsel overnight, and we had their verdict. Our rooted families nudged us out the only way they could.
In the distance, bombs exploded against tall walls that hadn’t been there the night before, human bodies holding back the invaders so we might escape. The nautilus maze had thickened inside. There wasn’t much time left.
We only had so many bodies, after all.
* * *
We fled weeping. We fled into the eastern wilderness, an undeveloped, empty country of steep hills and evergreens and thick, prickly bramble. Jake and I packed the children into our car, and Cat squeezed into the backseat. We joined the slow-moving traffic wending from the city’s wreckage. Eventually the jam got so bad, we parked and shut off the engine. Jake and I left Cat with the kids and approached a knot of refugees having words with a tired police officer by the roadside.
“What’s the problem?”
The police officer cocked her chin eastward. “Roads aren’t wide enough to handle this much traffic. It gets even worse ahead. This highway narrows to a single lane, cutting into hills and forests. People don’t take that road often, unless they’re visiting the ocean. It isn’t very tidy out there. All granite boulders and switchbacks around rivers and lakes. Wild country.”
“So what are you saying?” said Jake. He fanned himself with a baseball cap, the hot asphalt intensifying the growing heat.
The police officer sketched a phantom map in the gravel with her boot. “I don’t know. But we can’t get out of the city to the west, not with Apsides coming in that way. We should consolidate into fewer vehicles. Leave behind as much as we can. Save our bodies, at least.”
The whole group turned as one to watch the black smoke rise in the west, a nonstop line since the first attack. It struck us all as a bad idea, but nobody had a better one.
We were halfway through the disordered and chaotic consolidation when I realized I couldn’t find Jake.
“Have you seen my husband?” I asked the police officer, the other travelers, sprinted from car to car along the shoulder as the traffic began to creep along. I checked with Cat, but he wasn’t in the car, either.
Then I spotted him far up the road, unlacing his shoes, stripping off his socks, and stepping barefoot onto the asphalt at the road’s shoulder.
“Jake. Wait!”
I was too late. He’d already buried his toes and reached eastward. For a moment he bowed to the sun. Then he lengthened, broadened, his white t-shirt running pebbly black as he flowed down the road, faster than my eye could follow.
He transformed. He disappeared forever.
Numb, I climbed behind the wheel and began to drive. I caught Cat’s eye and cut off her comment with a tiny head shake. Now wasn’t the time. I gripped the steering wheel hard, dodging Cleo’s questions as I nosed us into traffic. “He’s in another car,” I told her. It was a horrible fate for a man destined to play restaurant to my skyscraper when we took root.
Jake ran smooth and true for mile upon mile, without bump or fault. I did not change lanes.
That night, when we stopped to sleep, I lay down on the sun-warmed tar and whispered, This wasn’t our plan. You changed our plan. True things. Bitter things. Words of blame. What I really meant was, I love you.
I don’t know how many
survived the flight from the city. Our numbers thinned as we went, lost to the necessities of survival. More roads, when the older ones ended. I said goodbye to Jake. I wanted him to speak to me, but he was a road, and roads cannot even creak and sigh like houses can. When another woman lay down and joined ends with Jake, his brand-new asphalt was already pitted and potholed, graying like he had been rooted for many decades, weeds hurrying to bury him. He’d closed the way behind us to slow any pursuit.
That was when I knew for sure our city was dead. Our beloved ghosts had fled their haunts. Without them, we had only dry rot and snapped beams and crumbling cement to return to.
Aurora had fallen.
* * *
We reached no end to sacrifice.
When the snow fell, some of us became cabins, or if we were able, hotels. The oldest and most powerful among us disappeared first. Our structures grew smaller as we traveled. Always behind us we left new walls to block the way. In the west, a black oily plume snaked upwards against the sunset.
We finally reached the ocean. Nowhere else to run except into the water, and the black smoke still persisted. No city center for me. No long, languid dance of generations racing down my stairwells. There would never be a city without these children, too young to take root, and we adults too few to hold off our pursuers.
We left the cars behind and let the children on the beach. Cat found me. We buried our feet in the sand together like we were girls again, on a holiday. The sun sank trembling at our backs and turned the ocean into tossing, broken light. It hurt my eyes to look at it.
“I tried to become a bridge,” Cat said. “I tried. I did just what Mom did, but nothing happened.” Her voice strangled with suppressed sobs. “I should be old enough. I’m not much younger than you.”
I took her cold hand and squeezed it. “Shh, it’s okay.” She leaned against my shoulder, and her whole body shook. “It’s too early for you, Cat. You wouldn’t be able to get far, anyway. Not all the way across, not at your age.”
“Do you think there’s another shore at all?” She wiped ocean spray mixed with tears from her cheeks.
“I don’t know. It’s not on the maps.”
I dug my toes a little deeper, squeezing the grit and broken shell fragments between them, and thought bridge.
But if I bridged the sea, I would only lead the enemy to the other side. We would never be safe so long as our own roads betrayed us.
What then? A gun factory? A house of death to wreak some last revenge? I could become a lighthouse, and wait for the enemy. I could gather them up inside me, welcome the soldiers of Apsides with warmth and shelter to drive back the ocean’s storms. When they slept, I could collapse roof to floor, and take them down to the sea. Our bones could mingle and house the fish, and no one would speak the name Aurora ever again.
I skipped shells into the ocean. Children splashed in the shallows, chasing the tide in and out. Cleo had taken a wooden plank (a memento, perhaps, of Grandfather?) and paddled around on her belly in the shallows, her bare toes kicking and digging into the waves. I longed to gather her back into myself, a tiny thing to shelter in my belly from awful things like asphalt and smoke, that same impulse that drove every person to throw up girders and drywall when they reached maturity.
Martha a skyscraper, Graham a parking lot, and Jake an asphalt road. Three generations stepping down and down from dignity and use. We stood at the end of the Age of Cities.
My toes curled into the water, soft and yielding as silk bed sheets, but it had a weight to it, a gravity. Maybe there was more than one way. Maybe the ocean could be a home, too.
Martha, help me, I prayed. I stepped into the water. The waves licked waist-deep, chest-deep, then lapped my chin.
I reached out toward the ocean, my back lengthening, ribs bending out, vertebrae fusing and bowing at both ends. My arms lifted into masts, and my black hair snapped and spread into sails caught between my fingers. Come with me. I spoke as a hundred planks and a hundred iron spikes rocking in the wind. Rope ladders unspooled down my sides. I filled my belly with chocolate and oranges and Sumatran coffee, and my cabins with beds of soft down. At my bow, I shaped a figurehead in the image of Graham the day he hugged me goodbye, a road no more, carved in Martha’s brick-red stone, wrapped in iron scrollwork.
It would be enough. I could carry them. I would carry them far away.
I whispered my love in swishing nets and flapping sails. Their feet trembled against my belly and my decks. Their voices reverberated in my planks. Their hands tangled in my ropes. We sailed on together.
The black smoke receded and disappeared in the night. The water went on and on for days and months. Still I reached for another shore, and longed for the comfort of skyscrapers.
Being Here
Claude Lalumière
The night before, you and I had fought, and it had taken me forever to fall asleep. We didn’t make up then, and I still regret that. We’d argued about nothing and everything – the dishes, the vacuuming, the cat litter. A stupid fight. One in which none of the important things got said, in which all the real reasons for the tension between us were carefully avoided.
Exasperated, you had turned your back to me; a snore interrupted me mid-sentence. Waking you up would only have made a bad situation worse. There was nothing I could have said at that moment that would have brought us closer. I let you sleep and tried to calm myself.
It was useless. I lay awake for hours, unable even to keep my eyes closed, until I fell from sheer exhaustion into an unrestful sleep.
I woke up at dawn, as I always did. The clock on my bedside dresser told me it was not quite six yet. I usually took advantage of the time before I woke you up at eight to go running in the park. That morning, thinking I had a choice, I decided to be lazy and stay in bed. I knew the exercise would help snap me out of my funk, but I just couldn’t gather the energy to get up and start my day.
After a few minutes, it occurred to me that in the morning I always needed to pee urgently. And yet there I was, feeling absolutely no pressure on my bladder.
I wanted to enjoy a drowsy morning in bed, just rest and relax. But I couldn’t get comfortable. The blankets were so heavy.
* * *
The clock read 7:12. The feeling of being trapped by the blankets was unbearable. I was getting tenser and angrier by the second. I couldn’t muster the strength to get up. I liked mornings, but already I was hating this one.
The digital readout on the clock became my lifeline to sanity. That every minute a numeral changed filled me with a strange and pathetic reassurance.
Still irritated from the previous night, I wanted to shout at you to stop snoring, but, with our fight still so fresh, I knew waking you up this early would only make things worse.
Lying there, I was hypersensitive to noises I usually blanked out. The morning traffic, the creaking building, the shrill wind outside. I could make out what the neighbours were saying through the walls; they were calmly reading each other snippets from the morning paper. Everything was so loud.
And the smell! The cat litter stank like we hadn’t changed it in months. Were we really that bad? The whole apartment reeked: the unwashed laundry, the sinkful of dirty dishes, the garbage. How could we have let things slide so much, I thought.
* * *
Finally, it was eight o’clock; time to wake you.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t push the blankets off me, I couldn’t reach over and touch you. I wasn’t paralyzed, though. I could move my neck, my face, and the top of my right shoulder – everything that wasn’t caught under the blankets. I tried to say your name over and over again, but no sound came out of my mouth. I thought: you’ll be late for work; you’ll be furious with me.
And then the fact that I couldn’t speak hit me, hit me much harder than being trapped in bed. I panicked, losing track of time, unable even
to think, until I heard you roar my name.
But that was no roar, not really, only a mumble amplified by my hypersensitive hearing. You were finally waking up. The clock told me it was 10:34. You always mumbled my name when you were in that dozy state, rising from sleep to wakefulness. I loved that.
You turned toward me – I’d never noticed before how pungent your morning breath was – and your eyes popped open. You were looking past me at the clock. You flung out of bed, screaming my name without looking at me, shouting abuse and insults because I hadn’t woken you up in time. The noise and stress combined to give me the god of all headaches.
When you got out of bed, the blankets moved enough so that my other shoulder was freed. But no more than that. I could move that shoulder again. Such frustrating relief.
Ten minutes later, you stomped back into the bedroom – your skin moist from the shower – and, still angry, shouted, “Where the fuck are you?” You turned on the light, and it was too much for my eyes. I squeezed them shut to block out the searing brightness. I mean, I tried to. My face wasn’t paralyzed. I could feel my facial muscles react when I moved them – even my eyelids. But closing them didn’t stop the light. While putting your clothes on, you kept shouting at me like I wasn’t there.
Before slamming the front door on your way out, you had let George in from the backyard. He jumped on the bed and walked all over me. His paws were like steel girders; the bed under me gave with his every step. After a minute or so of this, he zeroed in on my crotch and kneaded it mercilessly. Purring. My life was pain. At least you had turned off the lights.
* * *
George stayed nestled on my crotch until you came back home after work. How much did he weigh? Eight pounds? Ten? Something like that. It felt like a bowling ball was crushing my pelvis.
As soon as he heard you unlock the front door, he leapt off me. He meowed to be let out. You cooed at him and opened the back door. These noises were still too loud, but by this time, having had to cope with it for a whole day, I’d become somewhat used to my newfound sensitivity. Even the light and smells, while still harsh, didn’t bother me as much. In general, the pain was getting duller – an irritation instead of an assault.
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