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This was the year your neighbors set fire to their lawns. Blocks of suburbs went up simultaneously, everywhere and at
once, pillars of smoke tall as skyscrapers sprawling the horizon. There were cultish chants and rituals. Hotdogs were
cooked in these pyres to a well-done char—steaks, burgers, and s'mores, too. The local kids tried to dance around
them and were sent to bed with a scolding, for the hour was late, and they had school early the following day, and their
homework was not yet finished. It was said that when viewed from space, all these continental burnings together formed a
word whose meaning had been lost to history.
Meanwhile cicadas rose from the earth for the first time in a century and screamed for lovers, each with the force of an orchestra. Locusts descended on crops, and the sound of their eating was a wind of its own. It was all there—plague, death, a man caught inserting razorblades into the supermarket's frozen pizza dough as an act of domestic terrorism. It was too much.
Megyn had just lost her cat. The cat had a pacemaker in his heart and was prone to collapsing, without provocation, in the middle of any day. She had left her porch door open a fraction too long and he had bolted, charged into the tidy vastness of the suburb she lived in, and now she was on the couch sobbing with her shades drawn because her pet, the animal she was supposed to have responsibility over, was gone, escaped, vulnerable and helpless with nothing but a flea collar to protect him from all the world and its various vultures, the great flapping constant ordeal of cars ignoring speed limits and poison left in the spilled garbage of neighbors.
The cat's name was "Robert."
Megyn called animal control. She did not call her husband, Gene, who was away on business. Her husband was one of those people who did not tolerate loss; a man who flossed intricately, scalpel-like. She called her neighbor, who she'd recently had an affair with. The neighbor's name was Pat, and he was the only one in the development who left his barrels out to linger at the end of his driveway past trash day.
He pulled up in his 2009 Honda Civic, a dented thing whose wide windshields and peeling silver exterior gave it that otherworldly look of molting beetles and science fiction spaceships. Pat himself often seemed extraterrestrial, his clothing vivid and strobe-like, his grin sudden as spilled liquid. He covered his missing teeth when he laughed. He wore sunglasses at all hours and could not be seen without an open can of cheap beer.
Megyn, meanwhile, felt that there was a hole in her heart, the leaky balloon of it, a hissing and perpetual escape. She knew there was a hole in the sky, one verifiable by science, sun-lasered and destroying the earth, even if she could not see it, even if it often seemed less real to her than her own hurts. Think of the babies, she would remind herself in those moments of doubt, those children yet unborn but nevertheless anchored with a future unknowable as the crushing bottom of the sea. One always had to think of the babies, those days.
"Doggone it," Pat said. He slapped his knee. He sipped his beer. "Or in this case, should I say cat gone it?"
Megyn bit at a nail. She toothed and gnawed, until she realized half a fist was in her mouth.
"Sorry," Pat said. "Simply trying to lighten the situation. A rhetorical device. We'll find your kitty in a second—in a heartbeat. Another rhetorical device. Cat has a bad heart, right? Kinda weird for an animal, if you ask me. He don't do enough yoga, or something? He exceed the weekly recommended intake of sodium?"
Pat started to laugh, then slapped his hand across his mouth the way you cover a sneeze. Was he drunk? Megyn wondered. She could not tell—those sunglasses of his, reflective as an insect's lensed eyes. This was the thing about Pat. He both allured and repelled her, a back-and-forth so seesawed it might have teetered into the gracefulness of choreography, had he not veered his car toward guardrails a few times too many with her in the passenger seat.
A woman only needed a certain amount of peril, and Megyn had become statistically drenched in it, spending her mornings memorizing her chances of death from every category spanning criminal gangs to garden hoses. Her conclusion: not so good. Things were looking bleak. There was an invisible hole in the sky, and even the sunniest days could be cancer if they hit your skin just right—especially the sunniest days, in fact.
She missed, maybe, her hometown. She had grown up on the northern coasts, where the sky was too gray for melanoma and the rumors of sharp rocks crashing ships and shark attacks killing mothers dissipated in the ocean fog blanketing each day—how nice to be blanketed, Megyn lately thought: to be swaddled and softened against a barbed world.
She had moved to this suburb in the smashed middle of America for her husband's work. The stories went that this development was so affordable, its houses so big, because it had been built atop a Native American burial ground turned nuclear testing site. There were lizards here, unlike the cold coast. They got into the house sometimes and stared back at her, moistening their black eyes with their tongues, before the cat caught and killed them.
Not that she begrudged her husband. He was a man straightforward as a screwdriver, an engineer striving to bend the spikes of a catastrophic future—flooding, plague, the closure of strip malls—into smoother shapes. To build, as his company's motto went,
Better Outcomes. He believed in peace, justice, and solutions for foreign conflicts. He made bombs for a national
defense contractor. Most of them fell strategically, Megyn knew, and the ones in the news that fell the wrong way, at
angles onto children and hospitals overseas, probably belonged to other departments.
"Cat with a bad heart," Pat said, stifling another laugh. "I can't get over it. Maybe he should sign up for calisthenics or something. Yoga."
They were driving in his car, the beaten Civic, prowling the streets for Robert. The air conditioning did not work. Megyn felt as if she was in a boxed hearse. Pat kept leaving his foot on the pedal for instants too long, causing the vehicle to jerk forward and back like a wasp's stinging. His hand tumbled onto her thigh. It flopped down there like a pancake fumbled from its frying pan, a ruined breakfast.
Gently, Megyn removed it. Her own hand had started to bleed from her nervous chewing, hangnails ripped. Blood was streaming impressively from several fingertips. Pat did not seem to notice. His brow was contorted, his sunglasses impenetrable.
"Can you imagine a cat doing yoga," he said seriously. "That's all that separates us from the animals. If we can't even claim disease, then we have nothing left but yoga."
The neighborhood idled by in spurts. Everywhere out the window Megyn looked she saw a flatness broken only by the hulking of houses and telephone poles. This was a part of the country that did not have trees or shade. There was a lot of sky in this neighborhood, which the real estate agent had presented as a selling point to her and her husband, but on reflection maybe it was
too much open blue, all of it arid and without a hint of rain. She saw no cat.
"Gene always wanted me to do yoga," she said. "He says it's good for the metabolism. Keeps things from coagulating in your veins. He knows about things—he's an engineer. "
"Listen," Pat said suddenly. He grabbed her hand, the one bleeding. Still he did not seem to notice the rivulets drizzling down it. "I want you to leave your husband."
"Want," Megyn repeated. "People want a lot of things. Dentists want you to floss twice a day, but more than half the country doesn't. Your heart can clog right up if you don't floss."
His hand pumped hers. He was breathing loudly. He had released the steering wheel so that he could hold both her and his beer. For a living he did carpentry, and his skin felt perpetually sawdusted to her, like a thing that could scrape off and catch in you.
Her husband, meanwhile, was smooth to the brink of reflection—as if sunlight bounced off his skin. He understood proper moisturization. His lifestyle was maybe a little too slug-like, protected by mucus and spent in the shadows of rotting things.
"I'd like a baby," she said after a moment. "But Gene says it's morally unconscionable to bring a child into such a cruel world."
Pat nodded gravely. "We'll have all the kids we want, honey. More than a globe can contain."
Megyn felt she understood her husband abstractly, in the way you could an expensive painting in a museum you had paid admission for. You nodded your head at it, and then you tried to find a concession area to buy a vodka. In those hazy pre-dawn moments when she woke to Robert hissing at something unseen beyond the porch door in the stillness of a suburb without trees or wind, she wondered if there was a technology that could nuke the oncoming sun, bomb it into a black hole, suck all the cancer on the planet inwards and up.
Megyn worked at a hair salon that had been built at the bottom of an abandoned mining quarry. The tiny building, with its flickering neon "Open" sign, seemed all the smaller beside that mounded ruin of shale and rubble, fake as a doll's playset. The salon's name was "Curl Up and Dye". Its number was one digit off from the local pharmacy, and often when she picked up the phone expecting customers she got calls from people gasping for medication.
"Help," said the voices from the gloom. "I can't understand the pain."
Think about the children, her husband would always say.
Several times her husband had asked her opinion on threesomes. He had suggested, in his moments most bubbly with wine, some of her coworkers at the salon, wives like her, women cracked by their makeup and marriages. Megyn wondered about Gene and Pat together. By themselves they did not seem to quantify, to create a sum capable of mortaring her life, but together? In the same room? A ceiling fan pirouetting above and late night cable after? Pat did not take off his sunglasses for sex. Gene, on the other hand, did not remove his socks. That went miles beyond addition. That was multiplication.
*
Pat had pulled over. Or rather, the car had stopped, and he had managed, as it stalled into neutral, to guide it halfway onto a curb. Its engine puttered, rasped, went silent. The radio continued playing, soft chatter of a newscaster covering the latest tsunami, cities in ruin, children with pulverized bones gasping for aid. Megyn turned the knob to silence.
"Guess we'll have to go it on foot," Pat grunted. "Baby wants a rest." He gave the steering wheel a fond rub.
"On foot?" Megyn echoed. She could feel her eyes widening, something having opened inside of her like an unexpected fall. Every second wasted was one her Robert got further from her, his little paw-paws tap-tapping into the throated conjecture of a future she could not follow—a void worse than death, for at least dying could provide some finality, closure of a closet door slamming and the rattle of the hangers within.
Pat was already lurching out of the car.
"Gotta respect the Honda," he said. "They say if a Honda makes it past a hundred thousand miles, she'll drive forever. Only other thing I can think of voyaging that far in its lifetime is the sea turtle, riding on abyssal currents, plunging to depths so pressurized they would crush our skulls just trying to comprehend them...Gotta respect these things. If the Civic wants a little break, I'll give it to her. I'm good to the ladies in my life."
Reluctantly, Megyn also got out. She emerged, she thought to herself, like a bug from its shed shell. The suburb was a dry crackle in her lungs. Glancing down the street, its pavement squirming in the hot sun, heat lines wriggling like worms on a corpse, she noticed a hazy figure. Pat was preoccupied, halfway inside his trunk for some reason. It was a woman approaching, old and hobbling, dressed in a medical gown. She had no belongings. She could have materialized from any of the houses bordering the streets, their windows mirrors in all that sunlight.
"They're building a tower," the woman said.
Megyn could not speak. The words stuck in her throat like glass.
"They want to reach god," the woman continued. Her face puckered; she spat. "Oh, certainly people will make pilgrimages to it. The world will marvel, the newspapers will talk, talk, chatter. But you have to ask. You have to wonder."
The woman was close now, standing right in front of Megyn. She reeked of disinfectant. Megyn wondered about that—how could someone reek if they smelled clean?
"Is it a tower or a bridge?" The woman released a cackle. "The purpose of a tower isn't connection, after all—towers are intended not to reach but to distance. Well, all structures are based on the body. What is architecture but veins, capillaries? What is god but an image based in the ribs of man, that chested cathedral?"
Megyn was sweating. This surprised her—that, in all the sun and its blasting, her pores still held liquid. She had forgotten sunscreen, and she could feel cancer creeping, gnats on the edge of her vision. The woman grinned without teeth. Megyn did not know her, she did not know anyone in this development, not really, and it was here, somewhere, that her Robert was lost, alone, whimpering, this blighted place, this scorched asphalt pit.
"Ms. Jenkins!" Pat said. He had appeared behind Megyn. He was carrying a thirty rack of beer like a business briefcase, presumably what he had been searching for in the trunk. "Good to see you. How's your health? Shouldn't you be getting back to the hospital now?"
"The tower!" Ms. Jenkins screeched, raising her gaze to the sky. "May our tongues be cursed and split!"
Pat patted Megyn reassuringly. "Good old Ms. Jenkins. She gets out all the time. Our little community escape artist. Not too much unlike your Robert, eh? Got a thing or two in common, huh? Ms. Jenkins, have you seen a cat about? A stray little kitty?"
"Do you walk the dog, or does the dog walk you?" Ms. Jenkins tried to spit again, but no fluid came out.
Pat chuckled, shook his head. He extracted a beer from the thirty rack. "Good old Ms. Jenkins."
Ms. Jenkins was moving away from them now in staggered motions, every step its own little collapse. In the distance beyond her, a sprinkler system turned on, an automated shift, its spattering like rampant machine guns. She careened toward its rainbow.
Megyn blinked. Inexplicably, she was thinking about an old rhyme—step on a crack, break your mother's back...There
were no cracks in this neighborhood. Every last street had been paved over perfectly as a grave, cemented sealing.
Sweat stung her eyes. She closed them. When she opened them again, the woman was gone as any apparition or pet
escaped.
*
On the news it said there was a once-a-century planetary alignment happening, a sequence of Mars, Jupiter, Venus. There was always, it seemed, a once-a-century planetary alignment happening, turning the sky red as bloodlust and raising ancient pharaohs from their tombs. Everyday things in heaven collided, stars smashed, erased, whole galaxies wiped out, and your neighbor was found dead in their apartment with the TV still on, pale light flickering against a body: they had been located, after all these months, only because the utility company complained about the unpaid bill.
Worldwide, people pulled over on the highway, got out of their cars to gawk at the horizon. The problem was not that there was something looming, a Godzilla-sized monster toppling distant cities, tainting the clouds orange as a premature sunset with its nuclear breath. Rather, it was the opposite: there was nothing there. No planets, no comets, not even a moon in sight, just a blue that curved always into black. For miles turnpikes snaked with idling vehicles while people stared dumbly at the vacated future, children crying in backseats, managers calling furiously, demanding to know why so many were so late for work.
Megyn and Pat kept walking. They kept passing houses. How many thousands of houses had they passed in this one solitary afternoon, Megyn wondered. How could all this emptiness be so simultaneously clustered? Trash compacted yet sprawling as a dump...
One house had an inground pool out front. Despite the season, it had been drained of water, and it trenched its yard like a cavity in a tooth, its blue tiles chipped and sun-scorched, its bottom muddled with darting lizards. A crowd of neighborhood boys had assembled around its edges. They were chanting out of sync, performers in a ritual clumsy as a school play. There was a dog in the pool's center, an old whimpering Labrador, its nails clacking against the enclosed walls.
Megyn's attention was drawn to the ladder on the pool's side, the hot metal of it, how, without water beneath, it seemed to stop precariously short of the bottom. A leg would break if you fell from that distance—a neck would snap.
"Shouldn't we do something?" she said. There was a chattering in her. For all the light and heat, she trembled.
"Reminds me of my youth," Pat said. "Boys will very much be boys." He chuckled. "Hey, you scouts behave yourselves now," he called out to the gaggle. A few turned and squinted against the afternoon, the rest ignored him. He tossed a beer in their direction. It fell soundlessly on dead grass to gleam. "Don't drink it all at once!" he said.
So Megyn and Pat continued onwards. They reached another house, another dog. This was a small puppy, tail whipping, frenetic, focused on a ball that had rolled into the street. The puppy was at the border of its lawn and the road, as if unable to cross, yelping wildly.
A kid sat in the yard watching. He nodded and grinned at Megyn. "I'm training him," he said.
The boy was—eight? Nine or ten? He could've been ninety, hunched as he was, Megyn thought, his hair so wispy it could be balding.
"We got one of those invisible fences," the boy explained, the puppy fluctuating with his voice, hanging on every word. "He can't leave. Else he'll get hurt. Shocked and electrocuted. His organs will sear from the charge and explode. I'm training him, see."
He stood and retrieved the ball from the road. The puppy watched hungrily. Megyn also watched. Pat stood nearby, too close. His hand kept trying to brush hers. It felt like screws, she thought: it felt like things trying to get inside her skin and dig.
The boy flung the ball over the electric fence. It fell somewhere into some neighbor's distance. The dog jumped but did not cross its bordered periphery. It barked.
The boy stared at Megyn. "I'm teaching him how to choose," he said. He picked his nose. He looked, without warning, a bit bored. He seemed tired and languished and shrugged his shoulders, starting back toward his house, the puppy following The ball remained unretrieved.
Pat clasped her hand. She let her hand go limp, like a failed fish. She thought about her Robert, oh her dear Robert. There was a hole in the sky and a hole in her heart. There were a million, billion pets in this world, she was thinking, but what did it matter if they were not yours...? Everything in this life was punctured, like a poorly delivered postal package. She politely shimmied her hand out of Pat's.
"I think I'm dehydrated," she said.
"We have been going awhile," Pat nodded. His forehead did not so much as shimmer with sweat. His sunglasses beamed with such brightness Megyn could not look at him directly, but had to eye him edgewise, as if in a game of strategy—poker? He handed her a beer. Chess.
The aluminum of the can was warm in her hands. It sweated. She stared at it, at her reflection glossed within. "I don't," she began. "I mean, I appreciate the gesture. But alcohol is not hydration. No liquid is, really. There is no substitute for water, not even blood. Gene says—"
Pat dropped the thirty rack he had been carrying. At this point it was more like a nine or eight rack, and as many beers rolled out of the split cardboard, careening along the pavement like a child's marbles loosed.
"God fucking damn Gene," he hissed. He bent down and began scrambling to collect the wayward cans, cradling them
like infants in his arms. "My bad," he said. His voice was sheepish. Bent as low as he was, his sunglasses no longer
caught the light and became dark as a plunge.
"Maybe we should call it off, huh?" he said, rising. "Maybe just call the whole thing off."
"But we haven't found Robert yet," Megyn said. She realized she was clutching the unopened beer against her heart.
"I," Pat said. He laughed a little, nervously. He scratched the back of his neck. He let the cans fall a second time in a dull cascade, no longer caring in which direction they scattered. He removed his sunglasses, wiped them against his shirt. "I don't know. Let's run away together, Megyn. Let's get married."
"My poor little Robert," she said.
Pat frowned. What was he thinking about, she wondered. There was a horizon everywhere she turned. The first time she and Pat had made love was in a motel off the highway leading out of town. The curtains had swelled gold with sunlight: they had fluttered like translucent cicada wings. The air conditioner had clunked. Earlier that same day Gene had hit her, for the first time, but it had only been once, precise, deft, almost surgical in its implication. No mark had been left.
They left in separate directions, Pat attending to his discarded car, Megyn navigating the miles of lanes and avenues and thoroughfares of her crisscrossed suburb alone. Dogs snarled at her, neighborhood punks crusted the edge of their lawns and flipped her off. Somehow it did not concern her; something within her had closed and locked tightly as a cellar. The sun set, the boiled egg of it. A little light lingered, enough to return home by.
Robert was waiting on her porch, scratching at the door. She had a missed call from her husband. She collapsed on the living room couch and cried.
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