The Burning World

  Abram is silent.

  “You have some kind of analog system. I’m guessing that’s the part that got damaged, since the nose is where the nav gear goes. One of Perry’s friends was a pilot; I know how planes work.”

  Abram looks over his shoulder, but not at Julie. “Do you understand this girl?” he asks me. “Can you translate her for me? Because I’m lost.”

  I see Julie’s face darkening.

  “Does she want to fight Axiom and save America? Does she want to run away to Iceland? Or does she just want everything she wants, all at the same time, because she doesn’t know how reality works?”

  Julie stops, perched on the roof of a Chevy Tahoe. Her lips are tight and her eyes are narrow, but it’s not entirely anger. Abram’s questions are valid, and I think she knows it. What does she want? What matters most? How does anyone make choices when so much can depend on so little?

  She seems to be crumpling inward, imploding under her confusion, and I’m searching for something to ease the tension when a sharp scream cuts through it.

  Sprout is staring over her shoulder at the collapsed remains of an antique movie theater, her good eye wide with alarm.

  Abram’s rifle slides over his shoulder and into his hands and he scans the surrounding buildings, darting from opening to opening with a practiced efficiency. “What is it, baby? What’d you see?”

  “That building,” she says. “It changed.”

  “What do you mean it changed?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, frowning in concentration. “It was . . . different.”

  “Different how? Did you see something move? Baby, this is important, if you saw—”

  “It wasn’t broken.” Her frown warms with a hint of wonder. “It was pretty.”

  This seems to put some kind of tag on the moment for Abram and he relaxes. He holsters his rifle. He resumes walking. Sprout glances back over her shoulder a few more times, then falls into step behind her father.

  “Is she okay?” Nora asks with raised eyebrows.

  “She has vision problems,” Abram says. “Sometimes she sees things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things that aren’t there.”

  I watch the girl’s face as she climbs car after car, clinging to her father’s arm like it’s a mountaineering rope. Every few minutes, her eye widens on something in the ruins around us, but she keeps whatever she sees to herself.

  “What happened to her?” I hear myself asking.

  “Nothing,” Abram says, shooting me a dark look. “She was born with it.”

  I stare at the places where Sprout stares, squinting into the ripples of heat rising from the sun-baked concrete. She notices what I’m doing and a look passes between us, eerily nuanced given our gulf of age. She shuts her eye, and at first I think she’s winking at me, but then she scampers over the next car with her eye still shut, not noticeably hindered by her apparent blindness.

  She glances back, taps the daisy on her eye patch, and flashes me a gap-toothed grin. My spine tingles.

  WE

  DO YOU KNOW THE FUTURE? Is there a future? What will you do? Can you even do anything?

  The boy asks us questions, knowing we won’t answer. He skims the spines of our volumes, searching the endless stacks, but we are not sorted and cannot be checked out. We must be read all at once.

  What’s it for? Why remember all this? What can we do with it?

  His anger ebbs and flows as he traverses mile after mile of silent highway, his leathery feet dragging through dead leaves and trash. Momentary spikes of rage sink back into grim contemplation. We understand these feelings. We watch them fill the pages of his books and so many books around them.

  Are you only good people? he asks us in the bleak mumble that often follows his spikes. Or are you everyone?

  Leaves and beer cans swirl around his ankles in a sudden gust of wind.

  Are you Mom and Dad?

  No answer comes for the boy, though we wish we could give one. We would like to help him because he sees us and talks to us and can very nearly read us, and some pages of his books line the highest shelves. But we are many, and it takes many to make us move.

  Another city. The carpet of trash deepens. A broken bottle penetrates his foot’s callus and cuts into live tissue. A few drops of lukewarm blood ooze out, dark but not black. He feels no pain. His mind is far away, occupying other worlds, and it has no time for the needs of his body. He does not hear the van approaching behind him. He does not hear the man calling to him. He does not realize his sphere of solitude has been punctured until the man is kneeling in front of him.

  “Are you okay?” the man asks him. “Where are your parents?”

  The boy looks at the man through the shadowy gloom of his sunglasses. The man’s eyes are round with surprise and concern. His face is thin and brown with a short beard of fuzzy tufts. He is waiting for an answer.

  The boy shrugs.

  “Are you alone, mate?” another man asks, and the boy looks at the van. A rusty old Volkswagen camper, crammed full of bags and boxes, food and guns. The man’s head pokes out of the passenger window. This one’s face is pale, his hair yellow and shaggy, his eyes big and green. The boy wants to take off these smothering sunglasses to get a better view of these eyes, but he leaves them on. Even in his otherworldly state, he is capable of learning. It’s what he’s here to do.

  The green-eyed man steps out of the van and kneels down next to the brown-eyed man. His arms are tattooed with spirals of numbers. He reaches out and touches the boy’s face. The boy feels the instinct surge into his jaw, electrifying his teeth with unnatural hardness, but he forces it back down.

  “You’re so cold,” the green-eyed man says. “Are you sick?”

  “Cold?” the brown-eyed man says warily.

  “Not that cold, Geb.”

  “Can I take these off for a second?” the brown-eyed man says, reaching for the sunglasses.

  The boy steps back and shakes his head violently.

  “Okay, okay,” the man says, holding his hands up. “You need to look cool, I get it.”

  The green-eyed man smiles. His eyes are gentle. “What’s your name, mate?”

  The boy shrugs.

  “Do you want to come with us?”

  The boy thinks. His mind starts to form questions for us, specific and insistent, but he drops them. Instead, he reaches into the Library. He closes his eyes and skims our countless pages, a brief but vast fluttering. He gains something. An obscure insight. A word within an infinite crossword. He nods to the green-eyed man.

  “My name’s Gael,” the man says. The boy notices a lilt in his voice, an echo of distant places. “This is Gebre.”

  “Maybe we’ll talk later,” Gebre says. “When you’re ready.” His accent is exotic too, yet familiar. “For now, would you like a snack? You hungry?”

  The boy shakes his head.

  “Thirsty?” He pulls a water bottle from the back of the truck and offers it to the boy. The boy takes it. He stares at the liquid sloshing inside it, and then at the microorganisms sloshing inside the liquid, billions of little diamonds and helixes living unfathomable lives in an unknowable world. He takes a sip and feels them slide down his dry throat, becoming part of him. He climbs into the van with Gael and Gebre.

  I

  PAUL.

  I am sitting on the roof with my friend Paul Bark, smoking a cigarette that I stole from my father. I don’t enjoy it; I can feel it burning my insides, but that’s the point. When I asked my father why he keeps a habit that will kill him, he took a deep drag and breathed out a scripture:

  “ ‘He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’ ”

  I didn’t understand then, but I do now. I suck in a lungful and resist the urge to cough until it fades to a dull ache. It feels good to hate my life. It feels safe. If death is what I want, then nothing can ever hurt me.

  “
What’s your mom doing?” Paul says.

  In the lawn below, my mother is pruning a rosebush. Its blooms are impossibly red against their dull green stems, like puddles of pure hue leaking in from some other realm. There are flowers all over the yard despite the blistering heat. She hauls in a whole extra water cart every week just for them.

  “Why does she waste all that effort on a stupid garden?” Paul says. “Doesn’t she believe in the Last Sunset?” He sounds angry, like he always does at the thought of unbelief, and I remember a game we once played when we were younger, pretending our bikes were dragons and his house was a castle we had to conquer.

  “Tear down the walls of Jericho!” he had shouted gleefully as we circled the little cabin. “The Lord ordains their destruction!”

  My bike slipped in the gravel and I crashed. “Piece of crap bike,” I said, kicking the tire.

  Paul looked betrayed. “It’s not a bike, it’s a dragon! The Canaanites killed your dragon!”

  “I cut my knee. I’m going inside.”

  “No! You can’t!” There had been anger in his voice but also panic. “You’re ruining it!”

  Now he glares at my mother’s rosebushes like they’re ruining a much bigger game. They trouble me too, because my mother does believe. She believes as strongly as anyone. And yet she plants flowers. She feeds refugees. Some deep, instinctive spring bubbles through the bedrock of her beliefs, and she does these senseless things.

  “She’s a woman,” I tell my friend. “She likes flowers. She’s not thinking about what it means.”

  Paul frowns. “ ‘Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.’ ”

  “I know the scriptures, Paul.”

  “But does she?” He jabs a hand at the frail woman in dirty coveralls tending her vibrant pets. “Are any of our parents strong enough to live the hard truth? Or are they trying to make it softer?”

  She prunes the leaves off a particularly bright bloom, and it’s hard not to see love in the smile it brings to her face.

  “You heard the sermon last night,” Paul says. “The world wasn’t made to be loved. It was made to test us. ‘Not a home but a battlefield.’ ”

  I take the last puff of the cigarette and flick it away. The dry grass smolders.

  • • •

  I wake to the roiling red of the sun against my eyelids. I open them and glance around, gripped by a sudden guilty fear, but no one is watching me. No one can see the young man growing inside my head. I have woken from a nap in the sun, my friends are all around me—I have done nothing wrong.

  I straighten, rubbing reality back into my skull. The air is hot. The city is quiet. Abram is clattering around in the nose of an ancient plane. M is sawing something.

  “Marcus,” Nora says. She’s sitting on the runway with her legs crossed in front of her, her back against the plane’s tire, watching Sprout play with a screwdriver.

  M pauses his work, leaving the square of aluminum dangling from the bottom of the plane. He looks down at Nora from his perch on the landing gear. “Yeah?”

  “How much have you filled in?”

  “Filled in?”

  “Do you have a whole life now or is it still just sketches?”

  I hear a raven croak in the distance. I wonder what it eats in this barren urban desert.

  “It’s sketches,” M says. “But a lot of them. Like the ones for movies.”

  “Storyboards?”

  “Storyboards.”

  He resumes sawing. A breeze whistles through holes in the terminal building, harmonizing with his saw.

  “I haven’t watched a movie in ages,” Nora says with a melancholy smile. “Not since I was a teenager.”

  “What was the last one?”

  She thinks for a moment. “Return of the Living Dead?”

  M chuckles.

  “I know. Wasn’t my choice. I lost my taste for zombie flicks when they became real life, but I was in a prison pit and the guards were watching it, so . . .”

  The sun has begun its descent, casting the airport in a surreal red-orange glow. Julie sits just outside the invisible border of the group’s company, beyond the range of conversation, staring into the rippling city. She hasn’t said a word since her last argument with Abram. I wonder what she’s thinking. I wonder if the dreams that trouble her are anything like mine.

  “So tell me about your sketches,” Nora says, watching M cut his way toward her. “I’m curious.”

  He completes the cut and the square drops out. It produces an eerie wobbling noise as he hands it down to Nora.

  “Piano,” M says, staring into the plane’s exposed guts. “Loved playing piano.”

  “Really!” Nora says.

  He starts cutting another square. “Family was surprised too. Said I was too big for it. Said I looked like a circus ape.”

  Nora is quiet.

  “Never liked sports much,” he says over the whine of his saw, adding a gruff stiffness to his voice. “But in my family, big guys were wrestlers. So I wrestled.”

  Fine bits of metal rain down from his saw, piling on the ground next to Nora. He glances down at her. “You should move. Don’t want to get it in your hair.”

  She scoots out of the way. She watches Julie for a moment. “You okay, Jules?” she calls across the awkward distance.

  Julie nods without turning around. It’s not reassuring. Nora raises her eyebrows at me and I realize I’ve been put on boyfriend duty. I approach my girlfriend, unsure of what I might be dealing with, and sit down next to her.

  “Julie?”

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Just thinking.”

  She keeps the side of her face to me; I can’t quite get a look at her eyes.

  “About what?” I ask, and cringe at how trite it sounds. Hey Julie, whatcha thinkin’ about?

  She shakes her head as if to warn me off this ill-advised reconnaissance mission. I shut my mouth.

  “What was your family like?” Nora is asking M. Their conversation seems safe enough, so I return to it, keeping Julie in my periphery.

  “Mom left early. Grew up with Dad and two brothers. Don’t remember their names yet.”

  “And I’m guessing they all died?”

  She says it absently, twirling a bolt between her fingers. M stops sawing and looks at her, a small smile on his big lips. “Um . . . yeah. Probably.”

  Nora nods. The typical modern family: deceased.

  M finishes the cut and climbs down from the landing gear, drops the second square on top of the first: new windows for our battered aircraft.

  “What about you?” he says, settling against the tire next to Nora.

  “My family?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her gaze drifts out into the city to join Julie’s. Broken buildings. Buried streets. Ruins rippling in the queasy orange haze like a fever dream of loss.

  “Never had one,” she says. “I grew out of the ground.”

  Julie stands up. Her back is to me; I can’t see her face. Just her hair whipping in the wind.

  She starts walking.

  “Julie?” I call after her.

  She keeps walking.

  “Jules!” Nora shouts. “Where are you going?”

  “Need to piss,” Julie replies, but the flatness of her voice sets off my alarms. I catch up to her as she enters a narrow alley, hidden from the sun and piled high with sand drifts like a pyramid burial shaft.

  “Julie.”

  She keeps walking.

  “Julie, talk to me.”

  I touch her back and she flinches, wrapping her arms around herself while continuing to walk. “I’m seeing things, R,” she says in a plaintive whimper, and I realize with a jolt that she’s crying. I try to put my hand on her shoulder but she pushes it away and keeps walking.

  “What are you seeing?”

  She shakes her head and clutches her elbows, looking disturbingly unwell. “Something’s wrong with t
his place.” Her voice trembles. “I can see through it. Like it’s watery soup. And my . . . my dreams are in there.” She raises her head, looking toward—or through—the distant buildings. “The monsters, the men. And my—”

  She stops. She finally looks at me. “Am I awake?”

  “Yes, Julie, you’re awake. Please, just . . .”

  I make one more attempt to touch her. She turns around and runs.

  • • •

  Her muscles are young and alive, but my legs are twice as long. I follow at a light jog as she scrambles through the tangled streets, as she glances left and right like a lost hiker trying to find the trail. I let her run until I hear her breath starting to whistle, then I put a hand on her shoulder and squeeze firmly.

  She slows to a fast walk, taking long breaths until her lungs stabilize just shy of an attack. Her tears have dried. Her fear seems to be cooling into a hard edge of purpose. I scan the city, looking for a glimpse of whatever signs she’s following, but every block looks the same to me: centuries of artistry and architecture ground down to shapeless lumps and dunes of monochrome dust. The red evening sun creeps around twisted masses of metal. Shapes dance in the corners of my eyes and vanish when I look. I remember what I saw on the plane, that blurring and twisting of streets, like the city was forgetting its own form. When Julie says something’s wrong with this place, I don’t doubt her.

  I’m able to make her pause just long enough to grab a bag of toy army men from a corner store, which I drop at each fork in our path, imagining the horror of getting lost in this vast urban labyrinth. Julie is in no state to consider such precautions. She walks in a trance, her face pale and stiff, eyes damp but fierce. If I hadn’t followed her . . . if I hadn’t known the tune of her voice well enough to catch that dissonant note . . .

  Lost in grim speculation, I almost crash into her when she comes to a sudden stop. We have entered a sort of courtyard, an empty space between four buildings that appears to have been recently colonized. It’s overrun with bristly weeds and malnourished vines, but it bears less resemblance to ancient Egypt than the rest of the city does. Lawn chairs sit in loose circles throughout the space, surrounded by beer and wine bottles, marijuana pipes, and stacks of books that rain has reduced to pulp, however rigorously highbrow they once were.