Randal's Seabed

Randall's head was enormous—like several heads merged into one, a swollen mass of flesh and thinning, greasy hair that gleamed under certain lights. A few summers ago, he had driven to a bigger city where surgeons cut out a chunk of his skull. They blamed the cyst on the power lines strung above his house. His son wasn't as lucky. The sickness ate through the boy's brain completely—radiation, scrambled cells, a slow, irreversible decay. The doctors warned people to be careful of such things these days.

But now, with his wife gone and the baby dead, Randall remained in that same decaying house, where the mold in the curtains seemed to breathe with his guilt. He dragged his son's rusted tricycle everywhere, its corroded handlebars shrieking whenever he rolled it—he even took it into the bath with him.

That evening, the streets were wrecked as he wandered through the dimming light. There had been a parade earlier, at 3:00 p.m., celebrating the Governor's latest wedding—a legal union to the woman he'd been caught with in a scandalous tabloid photo. High on camera flashes, the Governor had declared his vows to her: a towering, six-foot-four woman, thickly mustached, inked from head to toe.

But, as usual, Randall had slept through the day. By the time he managed to drag himself out of bed, pull on his pants, and clear the dead birds from his porch—those damn things dropped constantly, another nightmare caused by the cursed power lines—the parade had already passed. The streamers were torn down, the trombones had gone silent, and the champagne bottles lay empty. The town felt deserted. No cars. No street sweepers. Not even the usual degenerates loitering on the club porch, where they gathered most nights, drunk and prowling for trouble.

Randall headed on along the strip where wheel wells from parade floats scarred the dirt. Folks had tricked their cars into makeshift barges, spurting confetti and huge balloons. They'd built a twenty-foot high reproduction of the Governor out of mud and chicken wire, which for days had towered up into the sky outside the trailer known as City Hall—a multicolor monolith, in minor silhouette of god. Seeing such a thing made Randall wonder his own quadrupled replica might look like—zonked out eyes as tunnels, a skull so big it blotted out the sky. In school they'd called him Lump Skull, Fat Face.

They'd smeared his name on bathroom walls with shit. They'd made him stand profiled under the monkey bars so they could swing down from each end and kick his eyes. On and on in that way for years until one day in shop class he'd tried to stick his neck into the band saw. After that he'd been expelled, ripped from the rosters, which at first had seemed a gift—though at home things weren't much different. Randall's parents were good-looking and ashamed. At night they locked their room.

Randall hadn't shuddered when the mold collapsed their bedroom ceiling. He could at last now, he thought, be alone.

Over time Randall had built up so much venom that he hadn't shuddered when the mold collapsed their bedroom ceiling. He wore no expression over their twin coffins. He could at last now, he thought, be alone.

Thereafter, though, among the damp halls, the house hummed with the phantoms of those it'd claimed. In the squished air Randall could hear all three, the folks, the baby, taking turns shaking the ceiling, breaking lamps. He could hear them clawing inside his grubby mattress. However long he lay, there was no rest. Randall prayed soon the mold would pile in on him too, deep enough no one could dig him up.

In the dirt, Randall passed the skin and nail salon where on weekends he liked to watch the girls prance out with their new flesh. He hadn't sniffed a woman since the dead child's mother left to meet a man she'd met on a 1-900 party line. Randall imagined her in wider rooms now, bloated with new chub from further births. She likely had a lot of other people in her life.

There was no one in the P.O. None in the laundromat, the frazzled gravel lot.

When the road ended where the town did, Randall continued walking on. He slogged up the mulch ridge ruptured with ant dirt into the smidge of half-dead sun-damaged trees. The days were lasting longer lately. Instead of fourteen hours, the sun would stay for sixteen, twenty. Some nights night never came.

Randall trudged until his breath stung. He turned to look back from where he'd come. White spurs of lightning stung at certain roofs. Randall's stomach threw itself against his inner meat. He sat down in dirt and stared.

In the light slurring behind him he watched the streets eject a thing that moved. He couldn't tell for sure, at first: a shimmer, conjured cogs of spreading heat. He squinted through the stutter until it made a girl. She followed the hill the same way he had, approaching slow, but locked on course—as if she'd been sent to greet him, or he her, there in this absence.

Soon she stood right there beside, skin from skin by inches. Through clotted locks he saw her eyes slit flat over cheeks somehow newly bruised. He recognized the dress—a smock of several garish colors, picked to bits. He couldn't tell if he smelled himself or her. She sat beside him, knee to knee.

"My father isn't in the kitchen," she said, blinkless. "He's not in the whole house."

Randall stood up and shook his head off. He stretched as if she wasn't there. Above, the sky made bubble, blurred with humid grog. Several dozen black birds circled above the town in halo—no, not a halo—a living crust. In recent weeks he'd watched them swoop down and nip old women on the bonnet, their feathers chock with nit.

When he started back in for the city, the girl fell in behind, keeping close through the wrecked light until again they stood among street windows reflecting the outside on itself. The panes heat-warbled in their framework, the glass again becoming sand.

Every so often, the girl offered interjection, questions with no answers Randall knew—

Where are people?

Will they be back?

Why aren't we also gone?

Who's the trike for?

What has made your head so huge?

Randall walked in silence...' so that the paragraph reads: 'Randall walked in silence, squeezing the puckered plastic of his son's tricycle's handles--worn thin by his own fingers, not the child's. He'd tried several times to ride it: his enormous knees and legs tangled alone among the metal in the night.

Other hours of certain solitary evenings Randall heard his father talking through the house. Most of the speech, to Randall, swam in blather—BUGMERMENNUNMMEM USSIS LUMMMM. Some words he understood—every inch of every inch of every thing you see is fucked. Might as well come ahead and muck it. Put your big head through the wall.

Sometimes the boy joined in—his son who'd yet to use a voice, now stretched heavy, echoed, spooled in ache—mostly just repeating one thing over and over—What else could you have done?

Through the past weeks they'd been louder.

Randall's mother never said a word.

Randall felt the girl's eyes on him now, her stuttered breathing, the film that made windows of her skin.

The birds had redoubled overhead. They circled a small circumference just above the city, black. There must have been hundreds now, suspended—a ceiling waiting to rain shit. The wings' crick and neon cawing filled air the same way their feathers choked the light.

The girl tried to take Randall's hand and their sweat-flushed fingers zapped.

The birds stayed just above as they moved forward. The sky had flushed a ruddy color, more blood than regal, thunder in some long drum roll slow and low all through.

Randall walked a little faster, his fat legs and ass meat rubbing, warm.

He could not stop thinking how if he walked long enough, he'd make fire. Spontaneous human combustion—his whole head set ablaze—his frazzled locks in wicks lighting the no-night firmament alive.

Behind he heard the girl there breathing, trying to keep up.

He stopped and knelt in the dirt to untie and tie his shoe. She tried again to take his hand.

Though he still slipped away, this time he sighed and scratched the moles sunk in his back. He put the tricycle down between them.

"There," he said. "Ride that then. For a minute."

She sat on the cracked seat and adjusted her thin legs. He couldn't see her smile for all the hair.

They went to where the runoff ditches came together, where once the local council each year planted mums. The concrete was cracking open. The veins coagulated into lines, leading along the black, bump-battered surface down the gully to the clump of green most locals called a forest. The trees' limbs had lost their baggage, the cells and skins all wilted, limping down. Even through the mesh of tree crap, Randall could hear the birds above.

The tricycle's bald wheels ground against the gravel behind him, throwing off short showers of spark.

The suffered branches made a hall.

On and on with walking, Randall's stomach queased from so much motion in their air. He named the first things that came to mind, his own series of questions, spoke into his head—

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.

Sometimes the sky would open up. Storms would appear out of nowhere, without thunder or a cloud. The only thing that didn't rain was water. Lather. Crickets. Lesions. Seed. Sand drenched in thin torrential pillars, poured from above by erupted hourglasses. Blades of grass came whipped by wind and sliced the thin skin of Randall's wrecked head. Peapods, pine straw, even plastic—sometimes they had to dig themselves out of what'd come down. Worse were the insects—gnat, mosquito, aphid—wriggling at their eyes. They picked the shit out of one another's hair.

They hid under bridges or in carports that'd been abandoned. They made lean-tos out of rotten saplings, formed pillows from dead leaves. Often within minutes the girl snoozed soundly no matter what surrounded, her small head humming; Randall only ever tossed. He ripped his hair out in fat folds and threw up. He felt birds rutting in his stomach. His brain fizzled, swelling out.

He figured the sooner he did not remember, the sooner he would sleep.

The girl kept singing, making noise. She didn't seem to notice what they'd come through. She announced what she'd be when she grew older. An astronaut, she said. A breadmaker. Randall often could not catch his breath.

They saw ruin and rocks and shit and stinging in long plates of earth congealed.

They saw whole buildings made to dander—where there'd once been people, now burned black and shrunken.

Sometimes Randall convinced himself they'd fallen into a repeating circle—a long whirred loop they'd never leave—every inch around them lurched the same, what with the stagnant sun ruining all bearing and the anthills. He didn't try to understand.

They moved across the state, its borders pummeled, the land flattened out, awaiting flood.

They uncovered liquid cupped in gutters and strained it through his shirt and drank.

The girl's skin turned soft and pasty. It snowed off her back in flakes. Randall stayed thankful they didn't have a mirror.

They came upon the coast.

Even there standing on the bleached sand, Randall stood and sucked his tongue. He couldn't imagine they'd made it that far. He hadn't seen the beach since he went once as a child, afraid to step on the sand for fear of the clam holes, that they'd come up and rip into his feet.

Now they found the water missing. Where once there'd been multitudes half-naked, bathing, sunbathing, the shore was swarmed with dragonflies. Their blue bodies hovered, buzzing, looking for further things that'd died: they'd already stripped the meat off of the beached trout, the scales of salmon husked off, glinting light.

The sand cracked beneath their feet. The shore sat scummed over and pile-driven down, pale combs of foam dried at the farthest point where water'd lapped. Cracked shells of land-stuck jellies and uncased conch flesh sat overcooking, dried out, picked apart. Whole gulls with their skulls pecked in and post-ravaged by sand mites and worms.

The sun had drunk the ocean.

The sun more rapt than ever overhead.

Randall's eyes could not keep their focus as the girl picked ahead among the wreckage. She fished sand dollars out of murk pools. She giggled, gaffed, hummed la-la-la. Tucked in the half-smashed ruins of some sand palace, she found a transistor buried up to its antennae. She dug it out and cleaned the speaker. She wiped the corroded batteries and licked the dials white, straightened the wires with her teeth. Soon she had the half-ruined thing alive, burping static broken by occasional squeals of incoming sound.

She skittered between the stations, searching to match the song set in her head. Randall didn't have the heart to tell her it was useless, that nothing clear would come through now—how all those cryptic wavelengths once transmitting now were just more radiation. It made her happy just the same.

With nowhere else to go and under such stench, they continued on along the seabed. They walked out where before the water had been, the stretch of crunching sand endless for miles. Randall shuddered as they passed close to where once the tides would have lapped over their heads—for years in sleep he'd found himself stranded in such black; the miles and miles of unknown depth culling him under, full of grime.

They saw the dead all fuzzed and sunning. Whole fish schools. A swollen porpoise. Schools of jellyfish beat to vaseline. The seaweed knotted in fat brown scalps and punched with rash.

In small landlocked pockets they found tiny lidless fish clustered in barnacles and eaten through by mites.

Further out, there came another kind of wreckage: moored boats and ocean liners, rotting and picked apart by weather. Men's skins lifted from their bodies. The whitewashed limbs of enormous swimming things held encrusted in the matted sand.

They continued in a short trench out into the heart of where the wet had been.

The phantom waves seemed to lap at Randall's head. He breathed air that once would have been liquid. He kept looking back behind him, waiting to see the sea come back, enfolding. The brine filling his nostrils. The water wrapped around his face.

The girl messed with the transmitter's signals near him, squelching. Certain frequencies ached his teeth, CHPCHRRAKRAK. The bulbs and wires screamed. Randall imagined those same signals invisible in the air around him, licking up against his skin, the same way they'd ruined his son: the errored flood of digits soldered to nothing, wormed into the flesh of the baby's head; how the head's molecules had formed clusters in reaction, spreading out, a blooming fist.

As they got further from the shore ground, the sand began to level out. The refuse became more sparse or deeper buried. The ground made one long blur in all directions, its one bland color stretched. The sun stayed put, enchanting. Randall stared into it, forcing his eyes against the blink. He let the light wash his vision hazy. In seconds he couldn't see where he was going; he let his stumbling lead them further, the heat washing in boggled machination behind his face. He chewed just slightly on his ached tongue, imagined steak. He could hear the girl veering around him, lit by the cracked transistor's bleep. She was to his left, then right; behind then way on; then somehow overhead. He felt overheated. He felt multi-pronged and run through. He continued on regardless, warbling. He blew a saliva bubble and it popped softly on his lips.

When he could see, he saw a house—ranch-style, dull orange, three-bed two-and-a-half-bath, there in the stomach of the land.

Randall looked, and looked again. It was not apparent from the condition of the house that it had been underwater. The flat sheen of the old paint shone in the new light. He and the girl stood there before it, blinking. The large-paned windows glared and gleamed.

The speaker between them went ABEEEEEEZE.

There was a welcome mat and a tall chimney that stretched so far into the sky Randall couldn't tell at all where it ended and where something else began. Several plastic children's toys were left scattered in the sand yard. There was a swing set and a bench. There was a two-door garage inside which two twin black vehicles sat silent.

Randall touched the vinyl siding and found it warm and flat, undisappearing. He crossed the sand yard up the short stoop to the front door. There was a texture to the stair steps, razed in a pattern that crossed his eyes. He climbed the steps and rang the bell. The toning chimed inside the house, one long whole note that resounded, then was over. Nothing moved. No eye appeared inside the spyglass. No footsteps. Randall knocked three times with all his knuckles. He tried the knob and found it locked. The doorframe would not give.

Around the house through a side window, Randall looked into a living room. There was a white leather sofa and a recliner arranged around a large TV. The TV was on and through the screen glass showed a cartoon dog and cartoon cat. The dog hit the cat with a piece of driftwood and the cat laughed.

There was no one in the room.

Randall tried the window but it would not stutter. The pane swayed and shimmied with his fist. Overhead the sun still stung and stared.

Randall stepped back from the house. The roof had the same pattern as the stairwell, a mess of lines of scattered depth. He walked back to where the girl stood. He stood looking on inside the light. Static rattled from the transistor, nuzzled tight against her torso. He gave her a look and she shut it off. She turned around toward the house.

Randall watched as she walked toward it in the same slow path as his, up the strange steps to touch the door with both her hands, though this time the knob turned; the door opened on to the inside.

The girl looked back at Randall and closed her eyes.

The air between them wavered.

Inside, the house was cool and clean and smelled of cedar. The hardwood floors reflected their faces in the grain. They called out up the stairwell and into the adjoining rooms, peering around corners to no response, no motion. The home's air hung around them, parting.

In the short hall Randall's shoulders brushed both sides.

Upstairs they found a child's room, painted pink and draped with lace—a canopy bed piled with pillows and stuffed toys, a loom. The bed was dressed in patchwork in the same way as the girl's clothes. There were no fingerprints, no dust, no locks.

On the nightstand beside the bed there was a small picture in a frame. In it, a young man stood beside a tree with both hands behind his back.

The girl lifted the frame and stroked the glass grain with her thumb.

"My father," she said. "He looks young."

She propped the photo back on the stand to face the bed.

Across the hall they found a larger bedroom with a large oak-framed mattress and a roll-top desk stacked with new paper. The longer wall was made of bookshelves, husky spines packed end to end. Some of the books were filled with blather, math, rune symbols. The clothes inside the walk-in closet fit Randall close enough. He changed out of his sandy jean suit into blue fur pajamas and stood in the mirror trying to recognize his face.

Above the bed was an enormous painting of an ocean, slung with froth, mostly opaque.

Back downstairs, in the kitchen, they found the pantry fully stocked; the fridge overflowing with clean light. They ate peanut butter and corned beef. They ate avocado and pineapple spears, drank cold filtered water from a pitcher. As they ate, their skins began to loosen, the texture of their tanned skin and going smooth. They carried plates into the living room and ate in front of the TV where now the cartoon dog and cat were smiling and on fire. The sofas were large and comfortable and smooth. There was enough room for both of them to sit sprawled out on their own seat and sink their skins into the cushions. They watched the TV, droning. There were no news clips and no commercials.

In sleep, their warm brains drifted, slow pulses still and steady.

Randall slept with his mouth open, drooling, seeing his son was made of light, full and stitched and spotless.

The girl nuzzled a pillow and rolled over upside down and hummed.

While they lay, the house made short clicking sounds around them, slight settlings, shifts of air.

Randall woke later to the touch of something crawling in his hair. He sat up quick, with fists clenched. The girl lay across from him with the transistor. In her sleep she'd turned it on.

The signal came in clearly, broadcasting the same soft-sunned song he could not place—throbbing and monotone and wordless. It sang out from the tiny, salvaged speaker from everywhere at once.

Randall blinked, his body sponging. He tried to think of where he'd been. He muttered something old beneath his breath.

The girl opened her eyes.

She smiled and watched him, her sleep still glazed and changing. She pointed past him to the window, between the thick green curtains parted wide.

Through the glass into the sand yard, Randall saw the rain there coming down—liquid rain. Plain water poured in droves. It sluiced against the paneled glass so thick he couldn't see a foot beyond. He moved to the frame and pressed his face against it, saw where below the lip the runoff had already gathered several feet. It lapped at the bottom panes, compiling upward, beaded droplets cascading down the glass.

Inside, the song continued, drawing upward, its long calm chords vibrating the air, his hair, the house.