Remy stands, her legs momentarily tangled inside of Mom, and stomps her feet. She marches. Mom pushes herself backward trying to avoid getting crushed. Remy’s face is all knots, and her cheek, where she placed the black crystal flint, is swollen. She gives one more monster stomp and the sunlight triangle shakes.
A fire truck’s siren can be heard in the distance and they both look at the window. More city buildings are burning, flames mending seamlessly with sunlight.
Mom looks up at Remy, a shifting adult-to-child perspective that saddens Mom. “This is what happens.”
Remy asks, “How many?”
“It’s something you don’t need to know.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“I’ll feel better knowing what’s inside you.”
“Remy, please.”
“But how many? If I have to accept it, I should know it. Mom? Please?”
“Two.”
16
He sits on the roof in the midnight dark. New lights shine from the city. Buildings built in hours. One building shoots up so fast that Dad closes one eye and with his opposite hand finger-walks the sky with each level completed. Windows with workers’ flashlights open to his touch. The sound of hammers fold inside the sound of saws.
City inspectors are told to sleep outside and report back to Sanders if the city is growing. The inspectors wear white helmets with flashlights and one-piece jumpers the color of pearl. At night they patrol the fence with their lights crisscrossing as they examine the ground. They measure the dirt between the fence and the nearest buildings, and each time the measurement shrinks a quarter-inch.
“What’s going on?” says one inspector to another, in a concrete stairwell that rises with each word spoken. “We losing our minds from the heat?”
“Beats me.”
“We have to report something, Jim.”
“I told you, it beats me.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means I don’t know.”
“How can we not know?”
“Just don’t.”
Later: “Well,” says Sanders, who is aging quickly, not the young buck who once gave a speech at the opening of the prison. He’s balding. In his closet in his office, worn under a suit jacket and pressed between two suits, is a blue dress. Only his wife knows about this fetish, and one day soon, his son.
The ten dirt-encrusted inspectors stand in the room and their jumpsuits crinkle with movement. Sanders stares. One inspector has his flashlight on. Another inspector pulls the helmet off his head and with the heel of his palm knocks the batteries out and onto the floor. They do their best to stand silent.
“We don’t know why, or how,” says an inspector. “Also, the sun might be getting closer, but our reports say it’s an optical illusion.”
“And how, exactly, is that supposed to make sense?” says Sanders.
“What? The sun, or the city? Or both?”
“Let’s start with the city.”
“It doesn’t,” says the same inspector. His black mustache is saturated with sweat. “It doesn’t make any sense at all, that’s what we’re trying to tell you. Not sure if the land is retracting or these buildings are new buildings. I know what that sounds like. We orange-tag them and the tags disappear. Is someone, maybe a villager, taking the tags off? I doubt it. Could be the guy who keeps lighting our buildings on fire. What I’m saying is that one of us sleeps in a building only to wake up with a building in front of that building.”
“Ghosts are working the night shift?” asks Sanders.
The inspector without a helmet says, “I touched the sky where the sun is and burned my fingers.”
“No, well, not exactly,” says the sweaty black mustache. “We can’t prove that. We can’t prove that because we have no physical proof of seeing the buildings going up. Yes, we see, we understand, there is less land between the village and here. Yes, there seems to be more random buildings, but, I, we, just don’t know.”
“Did you ever think,” says Sanders, rubbing his face with both hands, “to have one, maybe two people, stay up for a few days and just watch, or, I don’t know, take a few pictures? We have so much technology, use it.”
“But we did,” says the sweaty black mustache. “And we didn’t see anything. There’s no proof of construction, only what our eyes see, which is new buildings, fully constructed.”
“That sounds,” says Sanders, “insane.”
“We know.”
“Last question,” says Sanders, sighing and looking frustrated at a maroon-draped window. He wants to take over the village, he wants it more than anything, but he also wants to control it, to understand it. He has speeches to give. He has an election to win. “In your inspectors’ opinions, is the city, however impossible that it can grow on its own accord, actually growing?”
The sweaty black mustache takes a deep breath and his protective suit crinkles. “Yes,” he exhales.
Half of Dad’s body hangs over the edge of the roof. He asks a group of nightwalkers below dressed in dark robes with droopy hoods if they’ve noticed the city changing shape. Dad wonders if they’re Black Mask, the ones burning the buildings.
With faces turned up they whisper-yell, “OF COURSE WE HAVE YOU FOOL FACE. THEY WILL MOVE RIGHT IN. HA! HA! HA! DID YOU HEAR US? WE SAID, HA! HA! HA!”
“Are you Black Mask?”
“NO!”
“Are you sure?”
“POSITIVE!”
The air is so hot he doesn’t want to breath. He lies back on the roof, studies the sky, and sees a woman in a constellation whose elbows are stars. Circling his finger he spins a crystal balanced on her lips. He whispers her name. He wants to cry, the idea is there, but he doesn’t because his emotions kept inside have cemented him, have hurt him over the years, and to let it out now would be impossible. He imagines his count attacked with sun-red knives. But whatever he’s at is nothing compared to Mom because she could be at one. She could be an ant. She could be a flower. He didn’t help her. Dad doesn’t have relationships, he has obligations, like making dinner and keeping the generator going. He spins the crystal until it burns a hole through her mouth.
When he stops spinning she vanishes and white lines that connected stars, created legs, arms, her face, become birds, rats, deer. He thinks he sees a rabbit, her favorite animal, fall from the sky and land on the roof of a building being set on fire by a man without a shirt.
I need sleep, I’m losing it, help me.
Below him his family is trying to sleep. He imagines the house is transparent, a dollhouse, and he’s a hand crawling the floors, pulling a blanket to Remy’s chin, moving the hair from his wife’s eyes. He moves into the city, glides over the prison where his son sits on the roof… just… like… him… and Dad’s hand pats him on the back then tugs his ponytail.
Standing on the roof, Dad admires the homes that are falling apart. Through a home’s window, he sees water pouring from the ceiling. An old woman holds a bucket in her right hand and with her other hand she shakes her fist at the water. Skip Callahan runs into the room waving his arms, telling the woman to get away, he’s here, he can help. He stands under the water with arms raised and the water gets stronger. He keeps screaming that he wants to help, he’s a born helper, until the old woman pushes him out of the way with surprising force, nearly knocking Skip to the floor. She fills the bucket and signals him to get another. Dad looks back up at the buildings then back down and over the shacks.
As a child what you see is creation. As an adult what you see is destruction.
Dad leaves the roof by jumping into a pile of hay built in the backyard for such a stunt. One of the nightwalkers jerks his head around and whisper-yells, “BIRD MAN, CAREFUL, YOU’RE GOING TO HURT YOURSELF.”