Blake Butler - Scorch Atlas

Other hours of certain solitary evenings Randall heard his father talking through the house. Most of the speech, to Randall, swam in blather — BUGMERMENNUNMMEM USSIS LUMMMM. Some words he understood— every inch of every inch of every thing you see is fucked. Might as well come ahead and muck it. Put your big head through the wall .

Sometimes the boy joined in — his son who’d yet to use a voice, now stretched heavy, echoed, spooled in ache — mostly just repeating one thing over and over— What else could you have done?

Through the past weeks they’d been louder.

Randall’s mother never said a word.

Randall felt the girl’s eyes on him now, her stuttered breathing, the film that made windows of her skin.

The birds had redoubled overhead. They circled a small circumference just above the city, black. There must have been hundreds now, suspended — a ceiling waiting to rain shit. The wings’ crick and neon cawing filled air the same way their feathers choked the light.

The girl tried to take Randall’s hand and their sweat-flushed fingers zapped.

The birds stayed just above as they moved forward. The sky had flushed a ruddy color, more blood than regal, thunder in some long drum roll slow and low all through.

Randall walked a little faster, his fat legs and ass meat rubbing, warm.

He could not stop thinking how if he walked long enough, he’d make fire. Spontaneous human combustion — his whole head set ablaze — his frazzled locks in wicks lighting the no-night firmament alive.

Behind he heard the girl there breathing, trying to keep up.

He stopped and knelt in the dirt to untie and tie his shoe. She tried again to take his hand.

Though he still slipped away, this time he sighed and scratched the moles sunk in his back. He put the tricycle down between them.

“There,” he said. “Ride that then. For a minute.”

She sat on the cracked seat and adjusted her thin legs. He couldn’t see her smile for all the hair.

They went to where the runoff ditches came together, where once the local council each year planted mums. The concrete was cracking open. The veins coagulated into lines, leading along the black, bump-battered surface down the gully to the clump of green most locals called a forest. The trees’ limbs had lost their baggage, the cells and skins all wilted, limping down. Even through the mesh of tree crap, Randall could hear the birds above.

The tricycle’s bald wheels ground against the gravel behind him, throwing off short showers of spark.

The suffered branches made a hall.

On and on with walking, Randall’s stomach queased from so much motion in their air. He named the first things that came to mind, his own series of questions, spoke into his head—

What was new now?

When was ugly?

How had the meat aligned our eyes?

Who had been here?

Who was coming?

What could anybody want?

After each he ground his teeth and tried to keep his tongue still, but the words slid on his gums and worked his lungs open, filled him with some color heavy even on the light enclosed.

On the far side of the forest, Randall realized they were headed for the dump — a half-mile-deep gorge just outside the town where people went to ditch their junk. For years it’d all been building up there, squat in the middle of what more fervent regions might have made a landmark. They could have sequestered it off, got government funding and a proclamation, brought fat tourists from all over to buy tickets to a sight to see. Instead they fed it their condom wrappers, their plastic linings, their lint-trap crap and old foil. Randall could smell the sum there from his bedroom when the wind blew the right way.

In the sky above, slow cycling color, the birds skronked at their approach. Randall could feel each of the thousands of tiny eyes glared down upon him, wanting him forward. He heard the innard questions cannoned, cawing, making lesions on his throat.

What is who doing ever?

What’s the best thing?

Blassmix buntum veep?

They called him on along the hill, still up the half-paved path that ended not just in sanitation, but in voltage — the machines birthing all the wires hung in nest over his house. Even before they’d reached the lip of the drop-off Randall could see the steel-gray multi-paneled mongoloid of boxy mass, the unknown smog and slither burping up to join the broth of skying clog above. The air all stunk of fire, shit and oil and liquidated hair. He’d grown accustomed after years of inhale, but this, much closer, made him choke.

At his side, hunched on the tricycle, the girl pulled the neckline of her dress over her mouth, her eyes already bloodshot, the veins blistering to knots.

From the top ridge of the chasm lip, they saw together down into the gorge.

At the bottom, piled among the trash, sat the grand finale of the Governor’s parade. The crepe left crashed and punctured. Bloating bodies squashed around old coupes, their metal crumpled, battered, caved. Whole truckbeds full of people toppled — people other people’d loved. Women Randall had ogled with gross wanting. The men he’d spent endless nights with pounding shots with, fly-licked blood now flooding from their mouths. Even the mammoth Governor replica whipped to pieces, its neck snapped and elbows bent. Not far, the Governor himself lay ripped, his new woman jackknifed at his side. Randall could not quit his brain from seeing each body somersaulting one after another. Their last air coming out or stuck inside them, hung.

Overhead the birds still hovered, half a billion screeching, shitting, hiding light.

The girl stood beside him mouth half open. He couldn’t even find the nerve to turn her head.

In his mind: The birds. The birds.

A funny feeling came over him then — a tingle ripping through his fat. Looking down onto the wreckage, Randall felt the sudden impulse to go on and jump off, to throw himself into the chasm with the wind of the birds’ wings riffling his hair. He kicked a rock and watched it topple, pocking some ex-neighbor’s exposed skull between the eyes. It was only by some scummy nod of knowing that he didn’t just go on.

Above, the legions watched, clocked in his ears. The black abrasion of the sky behind them now, made of all color, was on the verge of waking, breach.

Randall put a hand against his heavy skull and lard-rung forehead, the last door against the noise — the same fat fucking head he’d almost scratched off a hundred times. He could feel those goddamn questions for which again he had no answer, his brain into a lock they had the key to, so much scrape—

WHO WAS COMING

WHAT COULD ANYBODY WANT

Muffled as they were, he could not quit it. Scrims of new night flushed his numb. His son’s head in the heavens, begging. His father behind, eyes brightened, wide. Randall covered at his holes. He turned toward the girl. Her eyes were wetter now, her skin pulled taut, showing their veins. The birds weren’t inside her, Randall could see that, though he could not name what it was that kept them out.

The girl pointed past him in the gorge rip, somehow aimed at one man bloated on top of several others, his black hair thick the way the girl’s was, his lips stretched and pleased, wide beyond their size. She nodded, blinking, forced her eyes closed, pulled her arms into her dress. She got off the trike, the cushion sticking. She wheeled the wheels to Randall and fixed his hand around the metal. So much rust. The once white grips now gray. He nudged the frame once with his right foot, again, again, until it tottered off the gorge edge. Below, it made no sound.

He turned back toward the girl, his whipped eyes brimming in the treble. He couldn’t move yet. He tried to see her. She nodded once and stepped toward. The birds lurched with her movement. Screeching. She didn’t blink. She reached.