You Ever Actually Read Faust?

Ground Control To Major Mom

Just have the audacity to ask yourself who you are to be walking towards ground zero. Who cares when you stopped taking your psych meds? The sky in front of you glows white light white heat, behind you the bruised plum of night falling October fast, and particles passing through you are heavy radiation ghosts going faster than bullets, they travel in a straight line until pap, hit something just as thick as a few sheets of paper and the bad radiaton just stops cold. Not like a dick in a porn flick, heavy radiation has no penetrating power. Walking along the side of the road in the suburbs in a daze, ears bleeding, holding the child's hand, glass shards in hair, lodged little bits in their torsos, pinprick holes and rips in their shirts, cuts on arms, hands, faces. They’re getting a nightfall nuclear farmer’s tan.

She looks down at her child and she doesn't glow. The cars jammed bumper to bumper headed west from the city, totally gridlocked, honking that never ends, they're not glowing either. She'd always imagined there’d be a glow. Her ears ring. Will they live long enough to develop tinnitus? The child asks mommy where are we going and she doesn't know. They're walking in the median on a road with no sidewalks in a western county headed towards a mushroom cloud slowly jellyfishing, swimming like one up into the sky for the last… how long? She says that they're going to the aquarium, see the jellyfish, and she nods at the nuclear cloud hovering above the city center, 25 miles distant. She's measuring kilotons, putting down rings on a map in her head. The middle ring where everyone has evaporated in the light of god's sight, a ring past that of hot winded destruction from god's lungs, every building flattened or burnt, every tree turned into a char skeleton, every shadow become permanent, past that a ring or broken windows and less destruction a flick of god's finger, all the way out to where they are. A blue ring. In her head, this ring is azure blue, and filled with deadly particles. God's thoughts.

Her child coughs.

You can't see radiation. You'll feel its effects, but you can't see it, and that's what scared her from when she was a little kid, right at the end of the cold war. You could see the explosion if it didn't blind you, the cloud, the destruction and the fires, the shockwave if you were lucky enough to be engulfed by it, but in that azure blue ring, so far out from the flash, all you could do was wait for your skin to turn translucent and your insides to go liquid. She wipes blood from her mouth with her sleeve.

Her child coughs again.

She stumbles down a grassy embankment on the median near a shopping center, a beige strip mall, L shaped, parking lot emptying out. She hears people coughing and horns honking. Breathing isn't labored, but she's getting a headache. Her child is too, she knows, but the child is the one who never complains. It's always been her child who plays the stoic. Her knees hit the grass and the child pulls at her arm, get up, get up, you said we were going to see the jellyfish. What if it disappears? And mom says that she's okay, just, give her one second. Shock, delirium, neuroses, previous psych diagnoses, a nuclear strike, the perfect storm. Mommy, the child says, we're close to that place you like with the noodles.

They both cough.

She spits blood onto the grass and trips sideways up to her feet, almost dragging her child to the ground, then leans on the kid's shoulder with one hand and looks up the other side of the embankment. The end cap of the stripmall shopping center, there, her favorite Thai restaurant. Its blue and red sign still flashing that it's open. She asks baby you hungry? Let's get some food, ignores the child answering no, not really, stomach hurts. She’s dancing a tragic dying tango, listing zigzag up the other side of the embankment, pulling the child along, a fifty pound doll with no coordination and no direction of their own. The bottom of the depressed embankment, when it rains hard it turns into a swirling pool of brown storm runoff. Next time it rains the runoff will pollute the ground like the exclusion zone in Chernobyl. Does it rain in the exclusion zone? She'd never thought to wonder. It has to. The weather doesn’t just stop. Feet hit pavement and they stumble like the tail end of a second line that’s run all day across the parking lot. 25 miles out and the pavement is hot enough the bottoms of their shoes are close to melting, they’ve got slapped bright burn pink sunburns from the walking. She's adjusting how many kilotons it might have been that went off over downtown in her head.

Above them, in the east, the jellyfish mushroom cloud is rising to heaven, tendrils wavering below it, the constant of it there pulling under up into itself. The air smells burnt. Under that, just normal atmosphere. A happiness blooms in her chest thankful they were turned away from the flash and are not blind, but they could have gotten away from the windows. Arms, hands, shirts, torsos, sliced open and filled with glass shards. But, she notices the Thai restaurant is the only building in the strip center without the windows blown out. Their noses are bleeding, blood is crusting at the corner of their lips. The day could get weirder.

Mother and child cross the parking lot to the door and walk into the restaurant. Nothing is out of place. The wall of photos of happy customers in the entryway, the Buddha, the candy dish full of mints, the hostess station around the corner, it's all like nothing is going on.

She coughs and doubles over in pain, closes her eyes.

Mom, mom, the tugging at her sleeve, there's someone in here. The mother stands up half straight, one shoulder slumped, maybe broken, she can't feel it if it is, and yeah, in the table in the middle of the room is a lonely little round three top set up with the regular bright red tablecloths that cover the glass tables, three place settings, and a man sitting in front of a plate with a dish on it. There are two other plates and two other dishes.

"Come and have a fuckin' seat, it's only the end of the world," the man says and waves at the empty places at the table. “Not a death in the family.” His hair is short and grey, his face carved from granite, worn by weather, a cigarette unlit hanging from his mouth, a light grey suit jacket and a black shirt with no tie. "I said come have a bite, I've been waiting." The child moves behind her mother to hide. "Don't be scared, I'm a friend. We should just eat. What's the end of the world without a little dessert huh?" That voice is tires on gravel. He's not disheveled. He's not wounded. There isn’t a bit of blood sullying him. The mother blinks.

"Are you real?" Soon she’ll start to slur.

"I'm as real as this crème brûlée you're not coming over here and eating that I just spent the last thirty minutes whipping up for us," he says. "I'm Nick, by the way, nice to meet you." He waves them over again. They stumble to him, almost knock over another table. The mother leans on every surface with her free hand and when she gets to the table he's sitting at collapses into a chair coughing up blood on her t-shirt. So much for the run for a cure for whatever she was running to cure, now it's just running for the blood splatter. "I'm sort of a recurring character in these sorts of situations you see," Nick says.

"Mommy I'm scared," the child says and coughs. Not hard, no blood spewing from mouth in a fountain or a mist, but coughs.

"You should be, a nuke went off," Nick says.

"Who the fuck are you?" the mother asks. "The cloud, it looked like a jellyfish." This is delirium.

"I'm just trying to get you to eat some crème brûlée before you fuckin' die," Nick says.

"Mom I don't want to die," the child says. Tears would come after if the child wasn't the mother to her mother in their family dynamic.

"Mommy doesn't want to die either," Nick says. He reaches under the table and pulls out a black revolver with a thick short barrel. Thumps it on the table next to his plate, and only then takes a bite of crème brûlée. Cracks the torched crust with a tiny spoon, takes a tiny bite. Closes his eyes to chew and swallow, opens them and stares the kid in her little face, blank. "No one wants to die, trust me, I've been around a minute."

"Wh, the fck are you?" The mother's words garble around all this blood starting to drip out her mouth.

Nick is wearing a red pocket square, and he pulls it out and tosses it to the mother, then sniffs the air. "You smell that? That's dessert."

"Mommy," the child tugs at her mother's sweatshirt sleeve from the chair next to her.

"Eht, th, yum foood," the mother says and slumps onto the table next to the plate with the little boat of creme brulee on it, a cold spoon against her cheek.

"Fine," Nick snaps and music starts to play. "What's life without a little drama, right?" Sympathy for the Devil echoes across the empty dining room, those opening drums unmistakable in their boom boom bap before please allow me to introduce myself, "I'm a man, of wealth, and taste," Nick sings along to just the one line. "What would you do to not die here from that dose of rads you got bout to turn you into something from a cheesy rerun of the X-Files?"

"Mommy-" Nick cuts the child off and points at the crème brûlée. The child picks up a spoon, cracks the glazed surface of the dessert, and starts to eat without another syllable, a perfect little cherub.

"Kid's gonna bite it too ya know," he takes another small spoonful of the dessert and takes a deep breath through flaring nostrils as he chews and swallows. The mother wheezes blood onto the red tablecloth, but it's so crimson oxygenated and hard to tell because it’s the same color as the tablecloth. "So, you have three choices." He finally lights the cigarette that's been hanging from his lips the whole time, takes a drag, exhales too much smoke for any three men’s lungs to hold through his nose. The man is a dragon. "You cough blood, turn into a jelly ghost, and you die on the table in like, the next seven minutes. Your kid dies thirty minutes later trying to wake you up, crying, coughing up their fuckin' insides, right?" Another drag of the cigarette and an impossible plume of smoke. The mother wheezes. The child is oblivious, in a trance. "I mercy kill you, pop pop, just say please, and your suffering is over."

The mother chokes.

Nick leans over the table at the mother. "Can't really talk right now can you? Sorry."

Blood dribbles a start out the child's mouth, down her chin, onto her shirt. Every tiny spoonful of crème brûlée comes back bloodier, every bite leaves more red smeared in the dessert.

"Option three. Faustian bargain." Nick leans back in his chair, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and ashes it in his own dessert. "Now, I'd go for three, because I'm partial to being alive, and no matter what I can tell you this isn't going to be pleasant, but I promise that'll be the least unpleasant option you got going." He takes another drag of the cigarette, flicks it away; finished in three drags and the entire room is smoky and smells sulfurous. "Nod or shake your head." He picks up the revolver.

"Option one," he says, "you star in HBO's Chernobyl." The mother shakes her head against the table.

"Option two," he says, "I cap you and you go… wherever you go. You and child separated forever. Space dust. Ground control to Major fuckin' Mom. Ask David Bowie how it works if you ever see him." And he aims the gun at her daughter. The mother's eyes tear over in a hot glaze and she blinks water out onto the tablecloth when she shakes her head. The thought of never seeing her child again. Her daughter.

"So that's a no. Leaving option three. The Faustian Bargain." Nick sniffs and his nose wrinkles. "You ever actually read Faust?"

The mother, crying, about to die of terror before radiation can liquefy her insides shakes her head no.

"Well fuck, that's a shame isn't it?" Nick says and aims the revolver at her daughter's head, cocks the hammer, pulls the trigger. A flash of firelight, smoke for the smokeless, the mother's ears would ring if they weren't already. Her daughter's brains and eggshell puzzle piece skull volcano out the back of her head, splatter in a messy arc fanned behind her, landing on the tables, the chairs, the floor. The mother sees her daughter's skull flap up like a window shutter in hurricane winds, a dying bird half smashed into pavement’s last wing flaps, a flutter, but only a split second. A perfect round hole in her daughter's forehead. Before a drop of blood can seep out of it, she rolls her head in full collapse face down, away from the scene, into the crème brûlée she was eating.

The mother takes a breath, feels like she could run an ultramarathon, no more pain, no more blood from her lungs, she could breathe the vacuum of space and mom will live forever, and she screams.

"Whoo, whoo, get on down," Nick sings along to the track winding down as she wails in the background of his story. "Tell you baby, what's my name?"