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.
This time when her hand hit his, he held it. It felt like his son’s once, during those few months he’d had a chance to feel — the palm pudgy and dampened, the fingers fragile, warm.
With the child, he turned around to face the forest, from the bird sound, from the sun.
They’d been walking for a week then. When the girl felt faint or winded, Randall would hoist her up. He didn’t like to stop for very long for any reason. He didn’t know where they were going, though he knew there had to be somewhere else from where they were — miles from any other city, miles from where they’d come.
In the blanched road they crossed dog carcasses wearing tags engraved with phone numbers, family names. Craters lined with white mud. Burnholes in the earth. The birds that had followed in fat flocks for the first few days had by now fallen from the sky, or disseminated after other things.
Randall let the girl eat leaves and roots and soft paper and anything preserved or clean enough. He had her chew her hair and nails for protein. When she asked what he would eat, he rubbed his gut. “So much saved up I could go forever,” he’d say in smile, though he knew if they didn’t find good food and water soon, they would wither, slump, and die.
They continued on together in a straight line beneath the scratched lid of the sky. The sun stayed stuck ahead unblinking. It did not wax or wane or become obscured by clouds or disappear for night. The surplus glow affected Randall’s vision. The ground and air lightened several shades. Slim spheres of heat moved in his margin — gaudy, blistered blobs of nothing. Inside his head he saw slow color, melted, morphed, and neon-blinked. Sometimes the colors formed his son — two blistered eyes behind his own eyes. His brain burped and gobbled, wriggling.
He could hardly think of what had been. He said his name over and over under horse breath to keep his mouth shape from forgetting, but soon even those familiar syllables went marred. His skin began to feel taut and made of leather. It peeled in layers. Itched his blood.
He tried to make the girl stay wrapped in a tarp torn from a camper, but she kept letting it slide off — she wanted to see where they were going, though she seemed to know he didn’t know.
When they weren’t talking, which was mostly, she hummed in glitches, cuts of hymn he’d never heard. She’d insist he hold her hand.
They crossed expressways with concrete cracking, large gaps woke in the median where the cars had skidded off, their windows sweltered obscure with condensation, airbags deployed and flaccid, popped. Smoke and ash hung on the air in streamered fuzz. They passed long fields where all the grass had died and ruptured black. Where there’d been forests once the trees had fallen over rotten and turned half to mush against the ground, the dirt riddled infertile with threadworms and microbes, small creatures burrowing spored homes. Drainage ditches gathered backed up with yellowed foam that didn’t give when it was kicked, though the stench was almost liquid.