Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  “Oh, no,” she eyes the Mustang, “I’m not going in that cramped, run-down thing. We’re taking my car and I’m driving.”

  Face flushing red, Samuel springs upright and grinds his teeth and waves his fists and claws at his jacket lapels. His words catch on his chewed tongue. He looks for something to shoot.

  Atlas walks with Gene to her silver sedan, a smile in his eyes. Samuel folds his arms and stays put.

  “Two against one, Samuel. We could,” Gene shrugs, “leave you behind.”

  “And I could kill you both,” Samuel says.

  “You need Atlas.”

  Samuel inches toward Gene’s vehicle. Atlas reaches it and, over his bobbing shoulder, hears a faint:

  “I am so peeved.”

  Gene slides into the driver’s side and Atlas into the passenger’s. Samuel plops a hard sit in the center-back.

  “I’m serious.” He yanks his jacket collar up his neck. “Name me Seraphina and stick me in a shoujo anime because this sissy Japanese sedan is gonna turn me in thirty hours’ driving time.”

  Mouthing “okay, racist” at the windshield, Gene starts the engine. Atlas glances at Samuel’s scowl in the back, at Gene, and his smile shows. They dip out of the apartments’ parking lot, roll patiently onto the street, and accelerate for the main highway. The sun arcs over buildings, between hills. Sky reflects in the side window and Atlas watches the newly acquainted suburban sprawl pass away as he once saw it come.

  XIV

  Day I: Transit and Transition

  “Say it, Atlas. Say it.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, say it.”

  “I will not say it.”

  “Please?” Taking her eyes off the road, Gene glances right and juts out her bottom lip. “Just once?”

  Atlas sighs, looks down, and whispers, “Pineapple.”

  Her mouth falls open. “You have the biggest accent.” Gene looks over her shoulder, at Samuel in the back seat. “He has an accent.”

  “I don’t have any such—”

  “Why do you say that so weird?” Gene squints at him. “Peen-ahpple?”

  “I did not say it like that.”

  She ducks her head and lowers her voice. “Say ‘vigorous.’ ”

  “No.” Atlas narrows his eyes. “I am not saying anything else.”

  “Say,” Gene searches the air, “narcolepsy.”

  “No.”

  “Yamaha.”

  “Gene.”

  She frowns, stares out the windshield, and quiets.

  Rubbing his arm, Atlas looks to his left. He mirrors her. They stare at the road for twenty seconds before he breaks the silence.

  “Vigorous, narcolepsy, Yamaha,” he mutters.

  “See?” Gene lights up and pokes him in the arm. “Why do you say things so weird?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. You have a Sideran accent.”

  “Which of us truly possesses the communicational abnormality? You are the being with an accent.”

  “Oh my gosh you just admitted it.”

  “Yes, the undergrown, affected toddler has an accent.” Samuel bursts open his arms. “Both of you please drink wet cement.”

  Gene bends down, tugs on Atlas’s sleeve with the tips of her right fingers, and whispers, “You have an accent.”

  He grimaces.

  “I like it,” she says.

  The corners of Atlas’s mouth lift. Warmth fills his chest.

  “I’m bored.” Stretching out, Samuel pushes the front seats and kicks the center console and groans. “I’m borreeed.”

  “Not again.” Gene exhales. “I will strand you on the roadside.”

  “At least it won’t be borinnggg.”

  They drive along trees, under blue sky, over sallow tracks striping highway’s darker gray. It’s enough to dance Atlas’s eye for the hours they’ve traveled. Nearer vehicles turn his head as he watches them approach Gene’s sedan, spin their blur of spoked wheel plates, spit pebbles from their tire grooves, slice over backdrop’s antagonistic current whooshing leaves toward the traveled horizon, and he watches as each whirs past. He squints at each driver. They make faces back.

  Gene glances at her phone, at its grids and lines and street names within miraculous moving images. She sets it on the dashboard.

  “Looks like, Samuel,” she steps on the gas, “I can throw you into Lake Erie, and you can swim around for a few years when we make it past Cleveland.”

  Samuel laughs. “Ha, Cleveland. Drew Carey. He’s a funny man.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “I need sustenance, woman.”

  “Eat something then. I said there’s a bag in the back. I’m sick of you weirdos always sitting there, watching me eat like I’m a dog on YouTube—”

  “She’s hilarious.” Samuel bumps Atlas’s seat. “Eating. The hoomy hasn’t even noticed. So kooky, right, Teen Titan? Nobody eats anymore. Breatharianism is the only real way to combat resource depletion.”

  Gene’s eyebrows cinch. “Hold on,” she turns to them, “neither one of you eats? Or drinks? Like, at all?”

  Atlas shakes his head and Samuel smirks.

  “ ’Course not.” She scoffs. “No one but weird Gene who weirdly eats like a human with two legs and one liver.”

  Samuel lies down and crosses his ankles on Atlas’s headrest, staring at the vehicle’s roof. “I don’t know about Glorified Flatulence here but, at my best, I don’t need to sleep either. It’s great. Never have to look long to find some late-night wandering drunk in São Paulo. Elisium’s portal system—goes all over the world, you know. Close to instant transportation, as long as you know where you’re going.”

  “What are you ever saying?” Gene asks.

  Atlas brightens his posture and, eyes wide, looks between her and Samuel. “You don’t understand either?”

  “Atlas, calm down.” Gene glimpses Samuel’s shoes. “Samuel, get your feet off the chair and stop talking about flatulence.”

  She turns the nob on the “radio” and, after a loud complaint from Samuel, switches it to a different station. A couple more hours of sighing, fidgeting from the back seat, steering-wheel-strangling from the front, and they pass a sign that reads “Welcome to Indiana, Crossroads of America.” Nothing but trees, plains, open skies, and, every couple song changes, the aluminum roof of a farm or another building’s cross-topped steeple accompany the vehicles’ sparse trail. Atlas favors his seat’s right mound as he looks off a horizon of golden wheat fields. It’s familiar. It warms his skin and surfaces memories of Sideran terrain: distantly near images that don’t cross paths with ones of black fences or laborhouse smokestacks. He stares across the land, through its receding prairie, to the motionless copper mass farther off, and longs for Sidera’s. If only for a second or two.

  Samuel pokes Atlas in the shoulder. “You’re always so quiet. Why are you always so quiet?”

  Atlas doesn’t turn. “Te odi.”

  “What’s that, Attie?” He rests his chin on the shoulder of Atlas’s chair. “You’re too quiet. I can’t hear you.”

  “Si nihil dicendum est, non loquor. Item, quia te odi.”

  Samuel sighs at the roof. “He’s broken. Someone hit him.”

  “No hitting,” Gene says. “We’re going to stop up here. I’m starving.”

  “Don’t emphasize like you’re the only one, Denim Walker.”

  Forehead crumpling, Atlas speaks one notch above a whisper. “When was the last time, Samuel?”

  “How many kids do you want?” Samuel asks. “What’s your blood type? Do you sleep naked?”

  Gene’s eyes widen.

  “Some things are personal and, no, creepy admirer,” Samuel shoves Atlas’s chair, “I won’t flirt with you.”

  Atlas twists around. “When was the last instance of assimilation?”

  “You saw it,” Samuel says.

  Facing the windshield, Atlas sinks the fog of his vision into road’s vanishin
g point until his mind wanders to Minkar’s hired guardswoman a day and a half ago. He counts the hours.

  “Should be a town somewhere,” Gene touches her phone’s screen, “up the road. I need a minute’s break.”

  Samuel lets his head fall over the back seat’s headrest and gazes out the rear windshield. “Well, you can eat and break, Denim, and I can drive.”

  “No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re you.”

  “Then let the angry, Latin-speaking Greek with a Sideran accent drive.”

  “Atlas can’t drive!” Gene turns to him. “You can’t, can you?”

  Atlas stares.

  “He can’t tie his own shoelaces,” Samuel says. “I just want to see him wreck this manga mobile.”

  Atlas looks at his shoes; they buckle shut.

  Samuel lifts his hands. “All I want is control of the wheel for a couple hours, tops.”

  “After you said you want to see my car crash?”

  “My intentions are my own. Why do you fascists keep asking me such personal questions? I don’t want to get intimate.”

  “Please,” Atlas bends over and grasps his hair, “cease speaking.”

  Stepping on the gas, Gene speeds into South Bend, the first substantial civilization in hours, and swerves off the highway’s exit. Buildings mingle with trees and land; they heave their saturated puddles of midday shade across asphalt, the sun’s slight angle stretching mock roofs to graze the curb. Gene leans into the windshield and squints until she spots one “gas-tation.” While Atlas ponders her plausible mispronunciation of “gestation,” Gene turns for the block-wide concrete tangle. She parks her vehicle under a large rectangular shelter and by some moderately frightening contraption with numbers and hoses and buttons.

  Gene swings open her door and says, “I’ll be like five minutes.” She points at Samuel. “Stay put.”

  Two seconds of Gene’s absence and Samuel fiddles with his door handle.

  Atlas faces him. “You’re doing what exactly?”

  Samuel gets out of the vehicle and slams his door shut. He strides in the opposite direction of the gas station. Atlas exhales and pops his door.

  Stretching his legs, Atlas stands on asphalt and yells over the sedan’s roof, “You’re doing what?”

  “Stuff. Go practice your Latin, young man.”

  Atlas runs after Samuel, grabs his shoulder, and spins him around. He stares him in the eye.

  “One cannot ‘do stuff’ because ‘stuff,’ ” Atlas digs his fingers into Samuel’s jacket, “is unspecific material or matter meant for ambiguous referral to an already known subject.”

  “Or it’s stuff. Get your Slim Jim’s off my jacket.”

  “Gene told us to stay.”

  Samuel rolls his eyes. “You can’t stop me.”

  “While I’m here, and I will assuredly be, you’re not touching another walker.”

  Samuel swats Atlas’s hand off his shoulder. “You still think you have some kind of influence over me. That’s cute.”

  Atlas grasps Samuel’s jacket lapel, pivots, and shoves him against one of the station’s thin columns. “And you still believe you’re unmatched.” He tilts his head. “That’s cute.”

  Samuel shakes a finger at him. “Sarcasm. You’re learning fast.”

  Something flashes. Atlas blinks and his arm grows warm, hot, too hot, much too—he releases Samuel. He staggers backward and glares at the flames in Samuel’s hand, at the smirk on his face. Atlas holds his arm: warmer but unburned. Wind electrifying his spine pulses his central blood vessels to dilate.

  Smoke between his fingers, Samuel spins around and vaults over a trash bin as he bounds for the road. Atlas sidesteps the bin and runs after him. He slows when he realizes Samuel’s lead is too wide, his lank stride too long. Atlas breathes in, out, lifts his hands, and aims for Samuel’s shrinking figure a meter from the curb. He throws a current. It explodes a shockwave that skids Atlas backward on his heels, but Samuel receives its bulk; wind crashes against Samuel’s back and slams him face-first into the asphalt in the middle of the street. Squealing, honking, a truck swerves around his body.

  Atlas smiles.

  Samuel pushes himself up with trembling arms and swings around, blood trickling from his nose.

  “Ouch.” He wipes his face. “That hurt.”

  Samuel conjures fire in the backswing of his arms and, reversing thrust, propels two streams. Atlas dives to his right. His side thuds asphalt and the flames collide with the trash bin instead. It catches fire.

  Atlas scrambles onto his feet. He and Samuel stare at the bin’s protruding, burning paper products centimeters from the rectangular contraption with hoses. They let their hands fall.

  Two or three walkers exit the station’s building, see the fire, and pale. Panting, a middle-aged man runs to the bin and whips his head, scans the bin, the nearby contraptions. Atlas walks to his side; he freezes before bin’s fiery snakelets hissing to hypnotize the onlooking.

  Someone yells from inside the building. Gene barges from its doors and spots Atlas, the fire, the man. She runs to another bin, a washing station, yanks on it till a water vessel gives way, and then runs for the fire. Stepping in front of the man, Atlas raises his palms and blows a gust onto the flames. They flee and waver. And die, as a candle to a turbine. Residual wind sweeps through the middle-aged man’s hair, blasting it from his ears. Gene reaches them and dumps the water over the extinguished bin.

  Frothy glops dribble down the bin and splash asphalt, and the bystander’s brows tense. He looks at Atlas, his open hands, and his looking turns to gawking.

  Gene’s eyelids droop.

  “Let’s go.” She puts a hand on Atlas’s shoulder and, raising her voice, says over it, “You too.”

  Samuel follows Gene and Atlas, whose shoes sop a watery trail. They climb into her sedan, settle into their places, and she starts the engine.

  “Five minutes.” Gene closes her eyes. “I was gone five minutes.”

  “Nothing extensively lethal occurred,” Atlas says.

  Opening her eyes, she squeezes the steering wheel and backs out of the gas station. “He’s bleeding.” Gene gestures to Samuel. “You’re bruised. And you almost blew South Bend into a crater. Gasoline, you alien—gasoline and fire. And wind! Do you even know?”

  “I concur.” Samuel scoots to edge of his seat. “We should take a vote. All that want Attie, the lawless ragamuffin, to walk back home to his cardboard box say ‘aye.’ Attie, you say ‘aye’ now.”

  Atlas jumps. “I—”

  “Two against one. Get out of the car.”

  Gene makes a noise and flicks her hand at Samuel. She looks to Atlas. “You know, you really shouldn’t do that.”

  His gut constricts. “I merely said it because Samuel ordered me to.”

  “You shouldn’t use your powers in public. You too, Samuel.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—” She sighs. “Because nonhumans draw enough attention as is and you never know—just don’t, please? It’ll make everything a whole lot simpler.”

  Atlas looks at his knee and nods.

  “Now, we’re going to drive to Montana and back without a single trip to the emergency room. Not one. Understand?”

  Samuel and Atlas mmhmm.

  “All right.” Gene veers onto the main highway and accelerates. “In a couple hours we’ll be in Chicago.”

  Samuel doesn’t peep a whine or word for next two hours. Atlas hopes he accidentally died. When they’re past Portage, Gary, and alongside industrial train tracks and countless electricity pylons scraping sky with steel skeletons, halfway into Chicago, he peeks at the back seat. Samuel clenches his fists and glares back. Atlas frowns. He turns forward.

  Under their elevated road, beneath the highway and beyond its concrete barriers, lies a world of monochromatic geometry. A train ticks away at its pebbled path, three identical ones left of it, and the blare of its horn screeches long i
nto the smoke that hangs about the horizon. Kilometers distant, the city hides behind it: a gray veil. Each building stands a different height, towers or crouches over the intersecting alleys and factory silos and bridges of a labyrinth, but each finds unison in the desaturation. The jagged skyline sinks into colorblindness, all except for contradictory multicolored splotches of lettering on warehouse exteriors.

  “I hate this city,” Gene says.

  “Denim,” Samuel grabs her seat, leaning over the center console, and pouts, “we left our negativity in Indiana.”

  Traffic huddles and Gene slows the vehicle. They stop and drive, stop and drive in a symphony of rocking halts and blinking taillights, the trail behind them doing the same. Atlas looks to his left; Samuel’s hand on Gene’s seat glistens with sweat. His arm trembles.

  Gene glances at Samuel. “For goodness’ sake, sit back and put your seatbelt on.”

  “You’re just grumpy because you’re hormonal.”

  Gene grazes highway’s divider with her bumper as she swerves into the left lane. Someone honks.

  “Know what, let’s go.” She clenches her jaw. “You have your fancy revolvey thingy. We’ll get out and have a duel. Let’s do it. Right now.”

  Eyes wide, Atlas grips the dashboard on the vehicle’s next jerk. “Gene—”

  “Because someone who calls my .44 Magnum a ‘revolvey thingy’ can shoot anything?” Samuel says.

  Gene inhales. She shifts weight and eyes Samuel in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I’m sorry I want to shoot you. Atlas, say you’re sorry too.”

  “I am sorry.” Atlas’s forehead crinkles. “Why—”

  “Ha.” Gene points at him and Samuel. “I’m not going to hell now.”

  Atlas stares. “Are you well?”

  Samuel and Gene scoff and say together, “Yes.”

  They quiet. The digital numbers on the dashboard switch to five o’clock and traffic speeds by one mile per hour. The steel oven in which Atlas sits sweats depressions into his hair and dark rings under his identification bands, and the screech of worn brakes, the pounding of some other vehicle’s maximized stereo volume, the yelling from an SUV three vehicles behind theirs drill new holes into his ears.