Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Gene grimaces. “Boy, that sounded weirder than it did last night—not that I said that, you know, to anyone last night. Or to myself. I don’t.” Her eyes widen. “I don’t talk to myself.”

  He stares.

  She sighs. “Atlas, I don’t do things with other people’s clothes at night.”

  Standing, he steps toward her and takes the material, weighing it, rubbing it between his fingers. It’s soft. Softer than it was. Sturdy. He scans it from hem to hem, not a thread out of place, whiter than he remembers it.

  “It’s just—you liked your clothes and they were all mangled and gross and so—” Gene drops her chin to her chest. “I de-grossed them.”

  Lips parted, Atlas brushes his Sideran tunic with a thumb, forward and back, again and again. His forth stroke notices one of a couple short ridges stitching closed tunic’s tears.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  Gene mumbles, “I should stop kidnapping my traffic accident victims.”

  “These are the only items I possess from Sidera and the only I truly own. I cannot express how grateful I am.”

  “And then doing their laundry.”

  Atlas ducks down, finds Gene’s eyes, and peers into them. He both strengthens and softens tone.

  He says, “Thank you, Genesis.”

  Her face flushes. She looks past Atlas’s arm and smiles, rubbing her neck. Her smile vanishes. She gapes. Atlas spins around and does the same; he finds Samuel resting against the front doorway, his hands in his pockets.

  “You’re.” Atlas balls his fists. “A disease.”

  “Heart disease or COPD?” Samuel asks. “Either way, I’m nasty powerful.”

  Shivering, Gene shakes out her hands. “Stop hovering.”

  “Nnnnn,” Samuel makes circles in the air with his forefinger, aims at Gene, and then points, “no.”

  “That’s a comeback?”

  “Comebacks imply a defense. Who’s defensive, Denim?”

  Gene scoffs. “Get out of my house.”

  He holds a hand to his heart. “But I’m a guest.”

  “Among other things. Shoo.”

  “You think I want to be here?” Samuel narrows his eyes and deepens his voice. “I’ll be back tomorrow to get,” he leans in, “what’s mine.”

  Atlas and Gene stare.

  “Meaning, I’ll get you two. And we’ll go.” He motions to the door. “You know, we’ll leave.”

  They nod and Samuel again exits the apartment.

  Clutching the Sideran material in one hand, Atlas picks at an unraveling thread in his T-shirt, where glass pierced it. A hitch in Gene’s brow quivers tighter as she eyes the scuffs on his arms. She gestures to her bathroom, and he finds it.

  Atlas spreads his citizen clothing out on a counter cluttered with soaps and oils and decorative knickknacks. He shuts the door on a room scented faintly with citrus and, as his thoughts catch up with his body, changes into his freshly cleaned white tunic and pants. He straightens his collar halfway up his neck. He slips on his Sideran identification bands, the thin leather sashes and armbands Gene returned to him, and he smooths down tunic’s wispy, opaque billows of an expertly close weave, his legwear just the same. Lighter than the days’ past vestments. More secure, comfortable, bound. Familiar. He could run a thousand kilometers and not a centimeter of his uniform would shift beyond the hold of his bands.

  He looks in the mirror. A purple streak on his face marks where his hours-old cut used to be. Wrinkles around his eyes and rings under them and the webbing red within them add seven years to his thirty-one he sustained only a few days ago, while in Sidera. His shorter hair too ages him. He fingers through it, plucks at one section around his crown, yanking the strands up and over, until its unrelenting spring-back goads the smother of both his hands, dragging over his head again and again. Each time, the crude, mis-mowed fronds of his hair bounce to no pattern and stick up and down and to the side, each section repelling the next.

  He frowns.

  Atlas tugs on his collar, tight against his skin, and pulls down his tunic. In crystal glass he never knew, he notices what he’s never noticed. He glances at the bathroom door, imagines how far Gene stands from it, and shrivels into himself gawking at himself.

  He bursts a sigh that turns to a yawn and plods from the bathroom. Knees rubber, back leaden, he slumps into the couch across from Gene. She says something; but Atlas’s eyes flutter shut and, thirty seconds later, he’s draped over the backrest, his head tipped toward ceiling, and unconscious.

  Before sweeping into ambiguous scenery and rapid images, Gene’s voice penetrates his new dream:

  “I’m—I guess I’ll talk to you later then.”

  XIII

  Recrudescence

  He opens his eyes to a horizontal world. He glimpses a slit in cream curtains, its soft shadows and shapes of dusk’s descent skating over the window, and shuts his eyes. He rolls over. Something presses on him, his shoulders, arms, legs. Something soft.

  He opens his eyes. Looking down his body, Atlas touches the quilt’s grooves and stitches and padded squares in between. A comforter encompasses his sideways body and beyond, cascading over couch cushions and tickling the area rug. Gene also placed a pillow by his head on the coffee table.

  A jarring warmth penetrates his gut; and, for reasons undiscernible, his throat constricts and eyes brim. He blinks until the heat sinks under.

  He dreamt of something. But can’t remember the content, only the feeling that lightens his chest.

  The quiet rejuvenation pumping through his limbs stings, for one breath, his mind with instinctual preparation for cyclic Absolute Praises, a recurring event in Sidera. But a gleam in his eye replaces the chants in his memory; and he sits up and instead curses Imperium and grins afterward. He glances around the room. Then curses again. And nearly cringes but doesn’t. He smiles.

  He hops onto his feet and peeks outside, drawing back the curtains with a finger. The setting sun, halfway below horizon, tells him he slept from dawn to dusk. He hasn’t slept that long in thirty full cycles.

  Strolling around the living room, past the couch, by the front door, the kitchen, to the short hallway, Atlas scans the apartment for Gene. She’s not present. Her vehicle’s keys don’t hang from the hook by the door. His brows tense.

  He sits on the edge of the couch again, rubbing quilt’s woven plush between a thumb and forefinger. Significantly heavier than any Sideran fabrics. The heaviest he’s known. His eyes blur the vase in the center of Gene’s coffee table. He lets the quilt slip between his fingers, reaches forward, and takes the vase instead. He feels it. Cool, smooth. And cracked down its hidden side from Samuel’s and Atlas’s scuffle preceding all courteous introductions.

  Atlas turns the vase in hand, narrows his eyes, and then replaces it on the center of the coffee table. He moves some black, bumpy rectangle, two smaller vases, and a drinking vessel to the table’s edge until the large vase stands alone. He breathes. Lifts his palms and stares. He stares into the vase’s most prominent bulge until he’s sure it’s given him a foul look back.

  Sprawling his fingers, he lengthens his next inhale, searches for the charged power in his veins, and eases its answering, prickling emergence to his hands. Atlas drives a current out of them. The vase wobbles and he releases another—

  Gene throws open the front door.

  Eyes widening, Atlas stands and snatches the vase off the coffee table. He faces Gene. “What are you doing?”

  “Entering,” Gene slows her movements, “my home.”

  Atlas nods. He hugs her vase with both arms and leans onto his heels.

  She points at him. “What are—”

  “Inspection.”

  “Of my vase?”

  “It’s only natural for us eccentric Siderans.” Atlas juts his jaw. “We are so inquisitive and abnormal and oppressive and inquisitive. Earth is strange and, oh, curse it,” he pats the vase, “I merely couldn’t stop myself from—”

  �
��Okay.” Gene holds up her hand, the other weighed down by a couple plastic bags. “Hi, Atlas. Sit down.”

  Frowning, he sits on the couch and Gene sits in the recliner, setting the plastic sacks by her feet. Atlas slides the vase across the table until it’s again centered and its crack looks on room’s far side.

  “Sorry,” Gene says. “Just had to run an errand. Didn’t know how long you’d be out.” She presses her lips together and scoots forward. “But I’ve, uh, been meaning—I have a mental list of questions that I’d like to ask you, if that’s all right.”

  Atlas straightens posture. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she rubs her hands on her pants, “to start with, what happened last night?”

  Atlas explains the night, from when he stepped into the forest surrounding Minkar’s fortress to when he exited it. Between sentence breaks, Gene gives a nod, mmhmm, question, or jaw-drop for the next thirty-five minutes he tells the account. Omitting the details about the guardswoman and communication with Samuel, he describes the barrier, the sentries, the weapons, Minkar, and every vague word exchanged, including the not-yet-commenced—

  “War?” Gene says. “So the supposed rebel Siderans are completely fine with letting their war come here too?”

  “Not ‘fine,’ Gene. They wish it to come here.”

  “I got that. They want war to come here through some big portal—this Pylon?”

  Atlas nods. “Minkar believes it’s the only way for the Imperium to be overthrown.”

  “Is that what you think too?”

  “I—” He drags a hand down his neck. “I can’t make such presumptions.”

  “Do you want Pylon opened?”

  “No.” He scratches his arm. “Possibly. I don’t know.”

  Gene puts her chin in her hands. “You want to read The Presage and find out more.”

  “I feel a draw to it,” Atlas says. “It’s inexplicable.”

  “A big, mysterious prophecy’s gotta have everyone a little interested.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s more than that.”

  “Okay, well—” Gene crinkles her bright-eyed gaze past Atlas’s shoulder. “Second question: how do you speak English?”

  “Um.”

  “I mean, you’re a Sideran and—I don’t know—do they speak Sideran up there or what?”

  Atlas laughs. “Sideran language? Do you speak Earthen?”

  “No.”

  “Sideran language.” He grins and slaps his knee. “That is very humorous. I speak English, Latin, Greek, and some Arabic, poorly, but Sidera’s primary language is English, followed closely by Latin.”

  She gawks. “What.”

  “Yes, and some full cycles past, Imperium instituted Zhōng-wén courses for Sidera’s youngest.” Atlas tips his head from her, the cracked vase an hourglass blob in his unseeing. “Though they don’t speak of Earth much, I believe the Imperium knows of the power of its language. I believe,” he meets her eyes and whets his tone, “that Imperium searches the farthest reaches of the universe for the most powerful concepts and takes them for their own. They wish to possess that power. They wish to become it.”

  “Huh. I never thought of English as being such a,” she upturns her palms and stares into them, “force.”

  Lowering his voice, Atlas says to a new stitch in his citizen pants, “Knowing the languages of the land is a significant advantage in empire expansion.”

  Gene frowns. She twists and turns her hands until the air falls still and the night outside her window grows black.

  “Third question,” she lifts her head, “you know you always have a place here, right?”

  Atlas glances around and then looks to the amber in her eyes. His chest warms.

  “Yes.”

  She smiles. “Good.”

  His lips twitch toward his diverted eyes, and their breaths take the melody and smiles decay. Too quiet. Atlas goes rigid and Gene clears her throat. She inhales and opens her mouth but shuts it again.

  “Do you wish to rest for the night?” Atlas asks.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  Gene scrunches her shoulders toward her neck. “I mean—” She drops them. “What do Siderans do for fun?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Like, enjoyment, recreation—”

  “At times, certain citizens of Taurus would, after intent estimation, reckon quantities of steel bolts to discover if their estimations were correct, or they might reword their Absolute Praises, the latter resulting in severe correction unless Imperium-sanctioned.”

  She makes a face. “What do you do for fun?”

  “I,” Atlas stares at the vase on the table, “don’t know.”

  Gene’s eyes light up. “Have you seen the stars? Like really seen them since you’ve been here?”

  “Seen them?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Walker, stars are fictitious sky lights visionaries describe as metaphor for Sidera and her greatness and superiority.” Atlas hears his words; his eyes widen at the floor.

  “Atlas,” Gene rests her elbows on her knees, “stars are real.”

  He crinkles his forehead. “What?”

  “Stars are real.”

  “No.” He leans back. “No?”

  She beams and nods. “Yeah.”

  Standing, Gene steps to the couch, bends down, and grabs his hand. Hers is softer than the quilt. Atlas follows her gentle pull onto his feet and out her front door, down the lamplit stairwell. He forgets he stomps around winding stair landings and along building’s brickwork he glimpses a dozen meters out of body. Her fingers pulse his too close. The night brushes day onto his skin, a common, mild Sideran day, consistently warm, the aftereffect of old rain sinking into earth and buoying its heat, and yet his neck hair rises. He tics a grimace and doesn’t know why.

  “Hopefully the city’s pollution stayed in the city tonight.” Gene looks over her shoulder. “Just need a good, clear—”

  Atlas hears a caw. He jolts taller. He squints into distant branches and spots one large, black lump of ebony perched atop a maple tree’s silhouette. His already skipping pulse skips a beat. It’s a bird.

  “—but that’s just my opinion.”

  “Gene,” Atlas turns and walks up the stairs, “we should return to your living area.”

  She whips her head around. “Is everything okay?”

  He releases her hand. “Come.”

  Biting her lip, Gene too turns and stumbles upstairs after Atlas. They enter her apartment with quickened breathing and sharp-legged millipedes scurrying races down their backs, latch meeting jamb with a click.

  “What—” She slumps against her front door and rubs her hand. “What’s going on?”

  “There was a raven.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t.”

  Gene drops her hands and exhales. “It was probably nothing.”

  But the sting of earlier strikes anew, volleying pieces of Praises of Imperium superiors standing upon a high stage and gazing down on the many. He thinks he doesn’t think of their staining words. Atlas peeks out her curtains and then yanks them as far shut as they go, though he fusses about escaping light, head turned from Gene and her empty hand, for more than one reason. “I prefer not being under scrutiny.”

  “All right,” she whispers.

  He faces her, with effort. “I’m perfectly comfortable remaining inside as I was. I can verify the existence of these stars later, on my own if needs be.”

  Gene frowns.

  “Is there some other activity you wished for me to participate in?”

  “No.” She looks down the hall. “I think I should go to bed, actually.”

  Gene walks to her room and shuts the door on her way in.

  Brow furrowing, Atlas lowers into the recliner. He scratches the smoothness on his temple where healed his scab. He sits and waits. A breeze sweeps the window, shadows swaying across the curtains, and he switches seats, pulls Gene’
s quilt around his shoulders, hugs it into his chest. He leans back and waits out the night.

  * * *

  He opens his eyes to a horizontal world and glimpses a slit in cream curtains, its soft shadows and shapes. He slept maybe an hour. Atlas blinks, rubs his eyes, and stretches his legs. A strip of blazing marigold wraps his foot. Rolling a shoulder, he stands and follows the light to the window, where the rising sun sets the curtains aflame and floor aglow. He draws the fabric across its metal bar; in the sigh of its rings compressing, he squints upon a flood of brilliance cresting his silhouette and drenching living room’s margins. His pupils adjust.

  Robins chirp in their nests and finches take flight across a dome of white bursts crisp against their silken sea. As morning ages, east’s solar-skimmed periwinkle flushes toward cobalt and the sage of distant hills glistens into dew-topped emerald. Sun, sky, earth: all’s one organism, one beating, swelling soul.

  Atlas breathes fogged his view. His vision retracts and rests on his reflection. Morning sky settles in his irises. His arms carry a charge and palms surge new power.

  The front door clicks open.

  “Attie! You’re up.”

  Atlas squeezes his eyes shut. He sighs.

  “Today’s the big day. Aren’t you absolutely, positively thrilled?”

  He turns around. “You are here why? You can’t simply walk into Gene’s home.”

  “You’re thinking of Mordor,” Samuel crouches and points at him, “you odd, little cutie pie, you.”

  Yawning, Gene opens her bedroom door and strolls into the living room. She wears loose, flannel sleepwear that brushes the floor, its pant hems torn and discolored. Two-dimensional, simplified pigs dot the clothing. Some of them have wings. Some wear roller skates.

  “I thought,” she stares at Samuel, “I locked the door.”

  “Oh, you did.” He clicks his tongue. “So, are we ready to go or what?”

  Gene looks around the room, eyes wide, and then mumbles, “Let me get my stuff.”

  She returns to the other room.

  Hair swinging, Samuel jerks his head at the door and he and Atlas exit the apartment. They descend the stairway, to Eden 2.0 at the parking lot’s other end, and Samuel slouches against its fender. Changed into new clothing, carrying a couple medium bags, Gene meets them a few minutes later.