Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

Squinting at the bottle, he plops into a chair by the window. He nods to Atlas and Gene.

  “You want any?”

  They glower.

  After much struggle, Samuel pops the top off the bottle and takes a swig. “Do you two always poop out at parties?”

  “I thought you don’t eat or drink,” Gene says.

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t. I jus’ don’t like shoving bitter junk down my pipes and then feeling like I’m gonna vomit an organ. Also, peeing’s such a chore.” Samuel swigs. “But this tastes better by the second. Weird.”

  Atlas stands, grabs the recliner by the closet, and drags it toward the window until its front looms less than a meter from Samuel’s chair, its sides squeezed between bed and wall. He sits. He leans back and stares forward, stares at Samuel, who makes a face. Gene exhales and switches off the lamp.

  Darkness falls. Samuel’s outline budges the faintest highlights: the whites of his eyes, the bottle reflecting a red light somewhere near the microwave. Atlas locks his vision on every motion. The glass in Samuel’s hand quivers. Samuel drinks, clears his throat, shifts his weight, and Gene lies down on the bed’s covers. As their pupils adjust, their eyesight blurs. They glean murk with vapid gazes, listen to Samuel’s twitches until they soften, lessen, die.

  Atlas watches the bottle lower and the whites of Samuel’s eyes vanish. Atlas too closes his eyes. His unconsciousness eases reality under and sews the seamless path to deeper darkness stitch by stitch by stitch by—

  XVI

  For Godly Sorrow Worketh Repentance

  Atlas marches across asphalt, staring down alley’s outlet like its sunbeams don’t near. He steps over the concavity his body left when he fell, a series of cracks and fissures that stoop into a bowl, that connect other networks of cracks zagging from wall to wall, entrance to exit of a back road too aged. He passes the garbage bin, the shards of broken glass, the sheet of cardboard. He passes the hair he sawed off his head.

  He reaches the alley’s end, stepping into sun, but in eyes’ first overexposed blink, reappears at the alley’s beginning. He walks for its end. He reaches it and repeats at the start. Always walking, always moving, never passing the threshold, never progressing. Clouds gather and rain taps his head, his face, trickles down his collar a demoralizing heaviness that exhausted its glisten several thousand meters overhead, where Sideran sun pales before an earthly anvil cloud. Pitters increase in frequency until a downpour overflows concrete gaps. The wind that drove him blasts him backward. It funnels through the alleyway and collides with his shoulders, fights against his stride, tackles his stance.

  Atlas never left the Pittsburgh alley. He freely walks within the prison he chose.

  His feet slow and knees creak and arms lose momentum. He thrusts forward, his hands outstretched, and releases his power; but the charged wind only flows around his arms and joins the wind thrusting him back. He grinds his teeth. They crack.

  A voice swims upstream his nape’s river, whispers in his ear.

  “Where are you looking?”

  Atlas gasps and his teeth spill out of his mouth. A woman screams.

  His eyelids burst open.

  Heart pounding, Atlas grips the motel recliner’s armrests and sits up straight. He glares into familiar darkness, catches his breath, runs his tongue over his teeth, very intact. Room 312’s temperature remains cool, bristling, but the air feels different than when he fell asleep. It feels moved. He squints: no body fills the chair a meter from his own. He speaks involuntarily.

  “Samuel.”

  Atlas looks to the flicker, one glimmer of orange, out his eye’s corner. It grows into a flame, whose licks twirl between raised fingers, bending shadow behind bed posts and lightless lampshades. Samuel kneels on the bed; he’s over Gene, his hand on her mouth, his knees bordering her hips. His left hand spouts fire.

  The flames morph to blue that glazes all spectral and Gene screams into Samuel’s palm, claws at his arms, kicks for loosening. His cobalt rose fans its petals as his hand presses her chest.

  Atlas jumps onto his recliner with his right foot, onto the bed with his left, and leaps off its corner. He slams Samuel midair and launches him at the wall, into a picture frame with a thunderous crack. Its glass shatters on Samuel’s head and his blue flames die as his grunt springs, room again drinking black.

  Samuel and Atlas hit floor. Atlas throws Samuel onto his back, plunges his sprawled fingers into his throat and jaw, and knees on either side of Samuel, pins him as he pinned Gene. He wrenches his jaw to point toward his own. And releases it, grabs Samuel’s hands, jerks them up and in. With one hand, Atlas wrings Samuel’s fingers against his hair, knotting black clumps and veined contortions into the hotel carpet.

  Atlas retracts a fist and then throws it into Samuel’s nose. Samuel groans.

  They repeat. Atlas lifts his fist and propels it forward. It lands with a rippling thwack. Atlas tenses his knuckles, pops back his elbow, and again snaps straight his arm, hurls a tunnel of energy from every condensing muscle into Samuel’s face. He resets his piston and punches Samuel’s cheek, then each eye socket. And again. The glass beneath Samuel digs into his head and blood streams out his nose toward the blood already pooling under his hair.

  Samuel’s moans sink under gargled gags. Then those too suffocate.

  Gene yells something but Atlas doesn’t hear it.

  He thrusts his knuckles into Samuel’s lip until they bruise, until the adrenaline that dilates his pupils steals his peripheral vision and charges his power. His spine bathes in electricity. Atlas bashes Samuel and wind courses through his veins.

  Bound under one of Atlas’s, Samuel’s hands catch fire. Flames whirl out the bars of Atlas’s fleshy cage. Cringing, he releases Samuel and recoils.

  He blinks in the new light, new heat; Samuel’s legs bend, slip out from under their snare, and when Atlas stops blinking and blisters start emerging, Samuel’s gone. The hotel door swings open. Atlas scrambles onto his feet and, catching it before it clicks closed, runs out the door after Samuel.

  The hall’s fluorescents burn his eyes. Atlas beats his heels into hollow resonance that rivals his heart’s and finds Samuel at the hall’s end and heading the stairs two paces ahead. Atlas lunges. He crashes into Samuel, and they plummet.

  Samuel’s shoulder hits the railing; Atlas’s head slams the fourth step. Vision sparking, feet flying overhead, they tumble down a couple dozen protruding wooden slabs, into the walls, into railing again. They flip backward, sideways, forward over their next dozen steps and skid to a stop at the bottom of the second staircase. Atlas rolls onto his back, Samuel onto his side. They wait for numbness to depart, groans to lift from their throats, and white flashes to dissipate.

  When his eyes clear, Atlas stares at the lobby’s ceiling. He hears tenor hysterics by the front desk, through tinnitus clashing. Palms against floorboards, Atlas pushes upward, sees Samuel do the same, wobbles on his planted right foot, his supporting left knee. Samuel staggers as he stands and, gaze fixed on the front doors, shoves Atlas’s head. Atlas collapses onto his face. Samuel stumbles out the motel’s exit.

  Atlas scrapes the floorboards until his fingers hook a crevice and his biceps scream in raising his shoulders, his body. He limps out the doors and into cool, dark air.

  He narrows his eyes. Samuel teeters through a line of vehicles two—three parking spaces away. Atlas shakes out his legs jogging spurred his sluggish acceleration. He stretches his arm for Samuel’s back. He reaches, grabs it, curls his fingers around thick, ebony wool and reels it around and thrusts Samuel into the nearest SUV. The air in Samuel’s lungs bursts out his mouth. Atlas clutches Samuel’s lapel and lifts his free hand; he spreads his fingers.

  Wind sweeps the motel parking lot. It blasts Samuel’s hair back, Atlas’s hair forward, and glides through the twitch of his fingers, raw volts pulsing under skin. Atlas glares into Samuel. He budges his forefinger—

  “Please.” Samuel coughs.

  Atlas clen
ches his jaw and angles an ear.

  “Don’t—I don’t want to die.”

  “Speak that again.”

  “I don’t—” Samuel winces and holds up his hands. “I don’t want to die.”

  “No?” Atlas crinkles his brow. “Do you believe Gene wishes to?”

  Samuel shakes his head.

  Grip tensing, Atlas shakes him. “No?”

  “No.” Samuel’s voice breaks. “No.”

  Atlas doesn’t breathe for fifteen seconds but Samuel pants. The wind changes direction: left, right, forward. Samuel stares at the cement.

  “I lied to myself. For you. I gave way to fruitless, exciting notions. I am standing here,” Atlas leans forward, “because of you.”

  Samuel exhales. “I wasn’t—”

  “Gene likes you. She likes every being without hesitation. She believed in you.”

  “This,” Samuel raises his voice beyond his inflaming lip and budding lisp and gestures to himself, “is who I am. You know it. She knows it.”

  “Shedding blood, spilling it all over, smearing it on your cherished vehicle, on your jacket, your face—” Atlas meets his tone. “That is how you slaughter every assimilation. You don’t perceive the gushing red but it’s present. It saturates you like a sickness, boiling under all your unfeeling.”

  “Hardly the time, Atlas.”

  “You revel in stolen life, in the pleasure of lighting your abysmal concavity if for a momen—”

  “But don’t we all?” Samuel yells. “Everybody on this planet kills to live—plants, animals, humans. As energy, they’re no different.”

  “You don’t consume a walker’s flesh. You consume her intelligence, progression, choice. Her humanity.”

  Samuel spits a ruddy glob over Atlas’s arm and, nostrils flared, licks the residue outlining his teeth. “You—” He spits a laugh this time. “You think you can tell me what humanity means, Sideran?”

  Clutching his lapel with scarlet fingers, Atlas eyes the blood seeping from a crack on Samuel’s cheek and then half swallows, half blurts, “It’s something gentler than us.”

  Samuel’s head swivels toward his shoulder, breeze tangling obscured his expression behind inky tendrils. The whooshes that scatter lamplit insects, that funnel between cars and ridicule thinning voices overpowers all replies thought.

  Until Atlas shifts his hold and Samuel pries his jaw. He scoffs.

  “I was born to it. I need it.”

  Atlas matches his scoff. “An Accend confined by the predisposition of uncontrollable hunger? No, never. You’re much too liberated.”

  Samuel shakes his head, wipes the blood from his mouth and nose. “I never had a chance.”

  “You admit the fault then?”

  “I didn’t—” He swats Atlas’s hand off his jacket. “Shut that hole and get your DISGUSTING GOB OUT—”

  “Do you feel this?” Atlas grasps Samuel’s shoulder and jolts it, a gust flourishing his shove farther than intended, goading their shouts. “You’re not the only existence in this universe. Look up once in your life and feel the joining force that’s greater than you.”

  “And if you’re all just images in my head?”

  “Look,” he cocks his jaw and locks his wide eyes on Samuel’s, “and dare to repeat such insincerity.”

  “Survival of the fittest is the only force in this universe—”

  “—and the only justification you can muster with tears in your eyes and a tremor in your voice.”

  Samuel waves Atlas off and a step back. He crinkles his eyes closed. Dropping his chin, Samuel sniffs on blood, clutches his hair, and drags it into his face. He mumbles something.

  Atlas curls his fingers into fists; his wind loses course, roaring in flighty fits around lot’s light poles. “Speak with clarity.”

  “Why do I,” Samuel’s back quivers, “feel like this?”

  Atlas unclenches his fists. The wind stops.

  Samuel bites the inside of his lip and bends into himself. He slides down the side of the SUV. Elbows on his knees, back against the vehicle’s tire, he claws his hairline and chokes and gasps for air. Tears stream from his swollen eyes, drip long and diluted the red down his cheeks, spatter the pavement. He cries. His shadow swallowing Samuel’s outline, Atlas watches.

  Samuel’s convulsions shake his whole body, steal his breath and mute his sobs. He cries larger the splotches riddling his sleeves. It builds too quickly to release with sound; his lungs brim with an earthquake that purples his corded grimace.

  Atlas crouches to Samuel’s level.

  “I’m sorry.” Samuel bares his bloodstained teeth beneath his arms’ shelter and sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I feel everything and can’t—” He inhales. “I—I’m sorry.”

  Atlas frowns.

  Samuel chokes. “Help me.”

  His eyes darting over the shade between Samuel’s wrists and eyes, Atlas nods.

  Footsteps pound the sidewalk behind the SUV, and Gene turns the vehicle’s corner. Panting, she stops in front of them. She clasps her hands together and squeezes her eyes shut.

  “Dear Lord, thank you.” She opens her eyes. “I was looking for you two all over and thought you killed him or he killed you or if you both were straight up killed and people were dopening their oars—opening their doors and looking at me like a rabid rat—me, not them—and the manager—oh, great goodness. Let’s go. We need to go.”

  She grabs Atlas’s arm, Samuel’s too, and pulls them upward.

  “Go.” Gene yanks them toward her sedan. “Go, go, go.”

  They hop into her vehicle, Atlas in the front, Samuel in the back, Gene at the wheel. She starts the engine and peels out of the parking lot, over two side streets, and onto the highway. Engine rumbles, tires screeching. They roil a dust cloud at the town’s welcome sign as they pass it and accelerate toward a pink skyline, sun touching distant plains. The echo of a siren blares from where they came. Gene grips the steering wheel with white, glistening knuckles.

  But the siren fades into the rapping of dragged gravel. Their highway stretches empty, solitary, Dickinson’s outskirts shrinking into the road traveled. Squinting at the rearview mirror, Gene exhales.

  “Sloppy law enforcement.” She drags a hand over her head and the hair from her eyes. “Shameful. Someone should start a petition.”

  Though it reflects the blushing horizon only, she holds her grimace on the rearview mirror. Atlas follows her gaze.

  “Gene, I know not a being has virtue in suggesting so but,” he presses together his lips, “perhaps you should consider allowing us all to continue—”

  “I’m fine.” Gene leans toward Atlas. “He’s coming with and we’re getting that coin in Helena.”

  Samuel closes his eyes, the rings under them violet, eyelids crimson, and slumps against the door. His head hangs. Atlas rubs his temple with his hand farthest from Gene, knuckles’ scabbing rips to the window, and lays his back into his seat centimeter by centimeter. His spine aches and shoulders throb to the beat within his skull.

  Gene sways to the left; her exhale trembles.

  Atlas sits up straight. “Are you well?”

  She blinks. “Um. I don’t know.”

  “The assimilation.” Samuel budges his cut lip, speaks over dried blood. “Does things. Big jet-lag-type feel probably. You’ll be peachy in a day.”

  Gene takes five seconds to nod once. She slouches and her hands slide down the steering wheel. Her car swerves and she overcorrects grazing the dashed line in the road’s center.

  “Samuel,” Atlas twists to face him, “would you like to—”

  “Yes.”

  “—drive the vehicle,” Atlas’s forehead crumples and speech slows, “for an hour or so.”

  Gene scoffs. “No way. I’m jus’ a little tired and he should be being in a hospital.” She shakes a limp finger at Atlas. “Tha’s what he should be being doing.”

  Samuel straightens his back. “No. I’m fine. I’m good.”

&nbs
p; She eyes Atlas, Samuel, their bruises, and then rolls her head back to the windshield. “Boy, we’re some bunch.”

  “Let me drive.” Samuel grabs her seat’s shoulder. “Lemme. Lemme drive.”

  “What? What are you saying? You’re cutting out.”

  “Gene, allow him privilege.”

  “Ew, don’t say it like that.”

  “I’m the driving one—no ones else. ’Kay?”

  “I promise I won’t get blood on the wheel.”

  “And Atlas’ the ‘ew’ one?”

  “Pull over. Pull over.”

  “You tried to kill me,” Gene says.

  Atlas, Gene, and Samuel quiet. Cringing, Samuel leans into his seat again. Atlas looks out his window.

  Gene frowns. She decelerates, pulls to the side of the highway, her right tires scraping pebbles from asphalt, and parks. She opens her door; she gets out and steps to the back door. She swings it open. Samuel stares at her.

  “What—seriously?” he says.

  She jabs a thumb over her shoulder. “Go do driving things.”

  Samuel pushes off his seat, groans, and plants his feet on pavement. Gene switches places with him. She lies down across the back seat and Samuel climbs into the driver’s side and bites down, muffles a grunt; but his eyes glisten. He pulls back the knob at the dashboard’s base. Then glances at Gene.

  “I—” Samuel runs the back of his hand across his nose.

  Gene hugs her knees into her chest, nestling her head into the seat’s mound.

  Samuel looks at the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry.”

  She closes her eyes. Her tone releases seconds late and two notches too low:

  “No worries.”

  Pressing on the gas, Samuel returns the sedan to the right lane and drives for mesas staggering horizon. Atlas looks at him, at his inflamed jaw, his matted hair, and looks away. Gene mumbles.

  “Guys are weird. Hitting and breaking stuff, like your bodies, and now you’re,” she yawns, “all good.”

  Samuel makes a face and Atlas shifts weight. Gene snorts into the upholstery, and then falls silent.

  In the jostle of an increasingly sand-swept strip cleaving through bulges and prairie, bulges and prairie that eat the hours, Samuel speeds. He gazes into the next vehicle in line, a dot on the horizon, catches up to it, and then passes it. He repeats a dozen times. They reach Montana’s border and drive past Glendive, past Miles City and beyond in under two hours. Golden grasslands play with mounds that play with hills that undulate the backward-bounding terrain. Hills grow to small mountains. The land divides and gathers until dried riverbeds and their petrified bones kilometers beneath traffic sculpt three, four, five levels of stacked universes: the tops of buttes, the bottoms of creek-wound woodland patches, the road cutting in between.