Some sprawl later, still alone above ground, I got up and went to walk. I moved with nowhere settled in me. It was mostly cold out, despite the burning. My exposed skin gushed bright from the sick sun.
I thought about the week my family camped at the shore during the red tide with dead fish slushing up in piles. My father stood among the flipless bodies and picked the ones that had yet to go soft. We ate with our fingers and our mother sung and the ocean gurgled at the sky — like there was something living in it. Afterwards, with Mom still singing, we buried papa neck-deep in the sand. His gobby cheeks puckered and sand-dusted, as were his lashes, his thinning hair. He claimed to feel things moving near his knees. “They’re biting,” he said in smile. Years later, we buried him on that same shore, wreathed in crimped seaweed—as I thought this thought for the last time, I felt it leave me and a new void birthed in my mind—
I soon came to other places. The face of the earth sat spread like rotting mayonnaise. Such cities sunk under the surface. Ones I’d never see again:
LOST: our middle school.
LOST: the bowling alley.
LOST: the shopping mall where I’d been born.
In some places the shit was stacked so high you could not see where it stopped. Elsewhere, the divots broiled for miles. The mud had many colors. Mounds of blue; green slicks of lichens; gray gobs and puddled ruin in brown and pink and tan. In orange and gray and yellow. It stretched forever. Certain places spread translucent. Underneath you could see kids enfolded, their faces hopeful, their bodies swollen and distended.
I’d never been in love.
Over the hills then, my sore feet rumbling, not sure when or how or what — what was wanted with all this terror, this slippage, gunk and froth. What these people in these buried buildings had done — or not quite done. I thought of my brothers, each forever under, though now the more I thought the harder it was to remember. Suddenly I couldn’t image even Richard, with whom for years I’d shared a bed. Our backs kinked on the mattress. His night-breath in my face. I squeezed my forehead to form some shape beneath it. My little brothers, all of us in father’s likeness, a set of dolls, each slightly smaller.
Soon my stomach’s grinding took over all. I followed the sound in lure — my hum suspended in the sky, an atlas. My knees were hung with strings of leeches. Suck, I thought, suck me empty. Draw me out and lay me down. I couldn’t think of what good my blood had done me. They should have it, they should see.
See me coming through the black fold with my hair all fat in knots.
See my skin striped several colors like the mud.
Colors. I knew such colors. That was mostly all I knew. They ate through my vision in clustered patches. All around, as in my memory, the plots of color grew and flew in glittered flakes.
In the colors, I held no yearning.
In the colors, I met a child.
I met a child who told me to keep walking. She had a faultless face and straight dark hair. She had eyes that spread all through me. She seemed like someone I had known. Or would know. Or could need nearer. She reached in color and touched me on the neck. She said if I kept walking there would be a reason. There would be windows. Some kind of something. I had to trust, she said, to get anywhere. Not all of her language I could understand.
I said for her I would go on.
I would go on, at least, until I found a way to join my brothers.
My brothers, there’d been eight of them. Eight or seventeen or eighty. Some multiple of three.
My brothers, they were good boys. They’d been…
I knew…
I couldn’t feel my face.
See the drowned field where once I’d thrown a wild pitch and knocked a kid between the eyes. He was never quite the same. He roamed the neighborhood undressed and eyes closed. He knew everyone by feel. He could feel your face and name you and then he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
That boy, his name was…
We… I’d…
See the rind of trees all crumpled. Combed to one side like the white hair of my father in his last days. Out in front of our house in shorts and dress shirt, a huge crucifix around his neck. Shouting in my mother’s crippled language: what was coming, what would be.
My father’s name’s…Troy. No, Tony. Robert.
Robert’s my name. I think.
Shit.
See my veins vibrating in their choked skin.
See my brow meshed in lines of unknown light.
See the caved-in parking deck where for several weeks the newly homeless flocked. Once in this deck, people left their cars and shopped for Christmas. The sound of its collapse that Sunday evening shook us even far away. Now that was over. All that was gone. I felt that sound, though, curled in my stomach, crudding over, washing out. I felt it replicate all through me. It brought cohesion in the color.
The cohesion formed a lantern.
The lantern lit a path.
I walked the path with brain wide open, thinking through each thing I thought I knew one final time.
Up the yards then. Through the bogged lots. The fronts of houses stunned or smushed. The cob of old mud dried to figures, streams of dead beds in the earth. And the lost lamps. And the smeared hills. The sewers overflowed. Here and there, perhaps, a flower, its sad head puckered through the muck. The blacktop parking lots and cul-de-sac’d streets where once we’d thrown dice or chucked a ball — all so cracked now, rumbled wrong. There was something in the air in gloaming, a blistered chill even in the heat.
I walked across the roofs of many houses. The sun unblinking, on and overhead through evening into night. I knew night now by the stutter of warped insect critters crowing. They sung together, awaiting nowhere.
OK now, I thought. OK. I thought: I am going somewhere. Somehow I will summer. I will find food and return. I will pluck sausage sandwiches from some strange tree and carry them back to feed my loved. My how? My who? My brothers. I kept saying it aloud: Brothers—those guys with eyes the same as mine. I felt them watching me from somewhere. They were waiting. All was fine.
Through the pasture bright with blue mud, cracked so sharp in turrets, dry with tremor. Spores shorn endless in the raw light, spreading out in webs of gray, green, gold. I felt a small pop in my sock and started bleeding. The veins inside me screaming blue, red, brown.
Colors, colors. I thought to call the girl. She had not given me her name. I tried old names I’d once used for others: Freda, Franny, Fawn, and Farrah. I could not remember who they were now, though the words enlivened, short wires in my brain, leading nowhere, sparking out. I wanted to touch them. I wanted something.
Instead, ahead, I saw a cow. It stood blinking under an overpass, its enormous head cocked to watch me come. In its mottled side skin, I saw a face splotched. I saw someone opening their mouth. Inside the mouth, I heard my brothers screaming. I felt their tendons sizzle in me. I felt the nights we’d all slept knee to knee in the same room in that slow-sinking house — our mother on the floor beneath us, her body quaking, waiting for something to click or come undone. We were old boys in those small bodies. We’d come into the world each already stung. I felt their buzzing in me rupture, bubble.