[Many thanks to Sam and Conrad Rice with help on this chapter]
When I look at the stars, I see a face where other people see eternity.
It could be the face of God – or Allah, or Fate – his skin scarred by luminescent measles and a smile that reminds me a lot of the expression on the faces of little boys with magnifying glasses cremating ants on the sidewalk. Or skinning live mice that wriggle and squirm and squeak as they are undressed of their skin and fur.
I can't help but feel like wriggling a little as I stare up at that face.
I can't help but feel focused pinpoints of sunlight dancing on the back of my head like sniper laser sights.
Up there, that twisted, deformed face smiles down at me.
He smiles with all the humor and cheerfulness of a clown wielding a chainsaw.
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-August 30th-
The sky was splitting in half, right down the middle, and lit up as if someone had strung Christmas tree lights up on the horizon. And as the sky cracked its smile, the earth trembled a little with laughter too, like a giant with goose feathers tickling the insides of its ear.
Laughing as if Meth-induced insects were crawling underneath its rugs of skin.
The reason for all this mirth, Charlie knew, was a bomb smudging out Chicago.
He knew it because for weeks his mother and father had been talking about the possibility. They had been talking about evil men in foreign countries and death and war in hushed tones on the living room couch in front of the television while Charlie sat on the stairs and listened. They talked about Japan and cancer and nuclear winter.
Winter.
When nature stuffed the world in a white body bag with bread lines and soup kitchen queues running down it like iron-gray zippers would.
It seemed strange to Charlie that anyone but God could change the weather.
But as Charlie's mother crouched cradling him in front of a locked and barricaded bomb shelter with nothing but her coat to protect her from all that cancer, war, and winter as the earth laughed and the sky smiled, Charlie was sure that he felt God breathing on his face a little – like a homeless man blowing on his chapped and frost-bitten hands for warmth. It was hot breath, and it smelled faintly of battery acid and burning hair and roadkill rotting on the side of the road on a blistering summer day.
Charlie wrinkled his nose and his mother held him tighter.
She was shaking.
Crying.
And then the fires started.
His mother's coat and hair and shoes combusted into flames that jitterbugged and twirled and for a moment, Charlie was fascinated. Then he realized that the side of his face open to God's breath was burning too.
Pain licked at his nerves sloppily. Big, wet, excruciating kisses goodnight.
Charlie was screaming, his mother was screaming, and they were dancing and rolling on the ground as the trees and the buildings around them were crowned with princely coronets of fire. Charlie thrashed at his face with his hands, with clods of dirt, with whatever he could get his hands on.
It didn't even cross Charlie's mind that a couple miles away people were dancing to the same tune.
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-August 23rd-
Charlie's mother always smoked when she worked in the garden, so he came to associate poppies and tulips with the smell of tobacco smoke itching the inside of his lungs like teenage punks scratching phone numbers into bathroom stalls. Her face was worn and wilted, just like the flowers when fall came along and she liked to hum when her hands were wrist deep in gardening soil.
The rest of the yard was gristle-colored and weeds loitered around in the grass with bowed heads, but Charlie's mother could coax stems out of the ground like a snake charmer seducing cobras with bobbing heads out of straw baskets, and had managed to devote at least one portion of the tired yard to new life and washed-out colors. Generally, Charlie didn't pay attention to the gardening or his mother, and instead would root around the soil for grubs and potato bugs.
Still, he liked the smell of poppies with cigarettes dangling from their lips.
Today, his mother had her hands in the dirt, but nothing was coming out of her throat. She plucked at weeds and exhaled smoke and stained her knees, but her voice box shut up tight.
Charlie had a potato bug in his hand.
It was curled up into a little ball and rolled around in his palm like a liberated pinball.
Glancing at him, Charlie's mother wiped sweat off of her forehead with the back of her hand. Stretched her back and crouched on the balls of her feet with the cigarette pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She looked up at the sky, which was pale and watery and stared at it.
The potato bug was refusing to come out and parade for Charlie.
“He's not going to open up for you, hon,” Mother said. “He's terrified of you.”
“I'm not gonna hurt him.”
“Sure, but he doesn't know that.”
“Well, maybe he's not so scared of you. You try and open him up.”
Mother smiled and took a drag on her cigarette. “If you're real still and you whisper 'please' to him, maybe he'll decide come out of his shell.”
Kneeling, Charlie cupped his hand – trying to stay as still as possible – and stage-whispered, “Please open up, mister. I'm not gonna hurt you.”
A moment passed.
Charlie glanced up at Mother and frowned.
She just smiled and nodded at his hand where the potato bug was unfolding like a set of spike strips across a highway. Charlie caught his breath and watched with a half-smile as the insect shuffled around the lines on his hand.
It was a tank crawling through Chinese city squares.
Charlie laughed a little and his hand twitched, sending the potato bug tumbling off of his hand and into the dirt. Its body immediately folded over itself and Mother took to staring at the sky again.
Charlie, still smiling, picked a weed out of the garden and tossed it into the pile his mother was building and then looked up at the sky with her. The sun pulsed and had a sad, drooping expression.
“Is the world really gonna die?” he whispered.
Mother glanced down at him and said, “Maybe.”
“Does that mean we're gonna die?”
“Maybe.”
Charlie bit his lip and could've sworn that cancer and war and evil men in foreign countries were staring at him over the fence. He felt an early winter refrigerating his skin. Charlie's mother tapped her cigarette and ashes freckled tulip petals. She sat on the ground and beckoned for Charlie to sit on her lap.
“But listen. Death isn't all that bad,” she said into Charlie's ear. “It's just a matter of making changes is all. It's warm and dark and sweet and God is sitting there with you holding your hand as you watch the sun set over the planets in the sky.”
“I want you holding my hand, not God.”
Mother's breath was oxygen swirling in hot air balloons in his ear and her arms were wrapped around him like those of hippies clinging to tree trunks with steam shovels on the horizon.
She whispered, “I'll be there, hon. It'll be you, me, and the Lord.”
Taking a final drag on her cigarette, she flicked it into the weeds and kissed him on the top of his head.
In the distance, a bombing raid drill alarm woke up like a baby sleeping in an earthquake and droned into the garden with the volume of a locust cloud of bees.
Mother got to her feet slowly, dusted her knees off, and took Charlie by the hand.
“C'mon, kiddo. Let's head over to the shelter.”
