Sky Full of Elephants: A Novel

1

THEY KILLED THEMSELVES.

All of them. All at once.

We unsealed the jails first.

Folks showed up swinging bolt cutters to liberate their lawless relatives into a world different from the society out of which they were exiled. Because no one stood guard any more. No longer could anyone be exiled from anywhere.

All banks closed down. Their silent, towering buildings became mausoleums, having been worshiped long enough.

Time slowed down too. Sauntered like hours did in places like Chattanooga and Charleston and Savannah. A notoriously southern phenomenon now spread like honey over everything. Ask the time and folks just looked up at the sky, mumbling, Quarter’til, because gone was the appraiser of hours into wages. Gone was the gaze evaluating for its resource every minute ticking inside a body.

They killed themselves. All of them. All at once. You could feel their absence in everything. On the subway. In the streets. In all the places the wild reclaimed. Where sunflowers grew through office buildings, over golf greens plagued red with ant mounds, where the earth crawled black up the sides of monuments, where all those Chihuahuas and cocker spaniels scavenged and begged in packs, their dog sweaters ragged, bedazzled collars dulled of sparkle.

They killed themselves. One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.

Even now, on nearly every shore from southern gulf to northern sound, crosses stand like the skeletons of those old beach crowds. Water crushed in waves, lapped and babbled, unwilling to respect in silence what was otherwise a graveyard.

No one expected the event. No one was prepared.

Some people were angry, cursing God for doing the business of gods. Some were quietly contented, seeing the horror as penance. Some longed for the world before, settling into movie theaters to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Titanic, sharing in the awe of misshapen memories.

Howbeit that we remained breathing on this earth at all, after such a thing, terrorized the conscience. Shame. Tortuously complex. Mornings came like a curse to be among those still waking up, even if rising to easy sunshine warm on the skin. Some nights were worse than others, some mornings better. A year later, Charlie couldn’t say which emotion grabbed hold of him the morning he swiftly, and finally, pulled down all their photos.

He’d found himself a nice house out in the suburbs. Two stories tall with fat white columns and a skirt of porches. His front yard sparkled green except under the shadow of an oak where, innocently, a tire swing bolted to its arm whined on every breeze. His home, of course, added to the sum of thousands taken over as we hollowed out city tenements, spilling into the outlying neighborhoods of Germantown, Rockville, and Bethesda. To hear Al Green’s voice drifting over aboveground pools out there wasn’t uncommon anymore. Charlie, and he suspected many others, tried to keep the photos and memorabilia from the families who’d once owned the houses.

For his part, and for months stacked on months, Charlie kept the birthday cards and perfume bottles, jewelry, and golf clubs. He left portraits hung up on the walls and photobooth strips magnetized to refrigerators as a monument to their lives, hoping the solemn act might absolve him somehow. Maybe looking at all those blue and green eyes every day, those easy, easy smiles, might make him feel things he didn’t.

But Charlie still felt what he always felt.

A husband in a suit, a blond wife, two children, and a yellow dog. Charlie did not want to know their names nor what became of their dog. When he finally took their pictures down, he did not cry. Wedged in a box, packed into the garage, Charlie put away every article in the house that made him feel as he did before all the oceans went from waving to wailing. Photos, of course, stuffed animals and unopened mail. He unstuck the souvenir magnets on the fridge making caricatures of Paris, London, and Rome. Even the small library of self-help and sci-fi books, which for him held together a watchful consciousness, he stowed deep in boxes. Anything that hovered and pulsed like memory got set aside. And when, at last, the house sat empty of character, quiet but for the crickets playing symphonies in the yard, Charlie could nearly convince himself he deserved that which he could never quite bring himself to accept.

Charlie had class that morning. The day would result in his third teaching lesson ever. And he wasn’t awful at educating. His students eagerly arrived to his classroom and departed energized. Moreover, he did believe his lessons were deeply important offerings to this new world. The problem was, a year ago, the only books he read came from the prison library. Indeed, in his mind, under his cardigan and argyle socks, down naked as a hound puppy, he still wore prison’s uniform. Couldn’t shake it. The result, one so oddly unexpected, came when he looked around bewildered at his big house and green lawn and forward to all those students desirous to absorb what he had to teach. Him. Of all the good folks still living. One day he withered away in a cell, and the next he waltzed into a world without white people. From prisoner to professor. Bewildered. Bewildered and bewildered.

Charlie packed the last box into the garage, bit down on his emotions, and held them under his tongue the full commute to Howard’s campus. Held his thoughts back until he stood at the door of his classroom, where they surfaced as a sudden anxiety. Afraid to go inside. Strangely, Charlie liked the fear. So often having to overcome that prick of terror, he’d learned to find nobility in enduring it. A sense of self, even.

From outside the classroom, he heard his students laughing so loud they melded together in the sound of joy. He took a deep breath, fought off the shadows of the world before, and resolved to give this new world as much of himself as he could—as noble an act as he could muster.

Halfway through his lecture, one of Charlie’s students, Gerald, a tightly edged, stylish young man, raised a hand.

Mr. Brunton, Gerald asked. My question, I guess, is more of a philosophical one. Seems like the only difference between conventional electricity and solar is the source. Why can’t we just put panels on every house one by one instead of trying to rebuild the whole grid to have solar foundations? Save ourselves a lot of work.

Yeah, we agree on that. You might save some man-hours in the short term, Charlie answered. But if we’re speaking philosophically, then you’re also selling yourself short. What Charlie aimed to say next weighed his shoulders down. Right now, every city in this country is built on an electrical system created for two agendas: make natural power measurable and make money off those measurements. Priority in reverse order, of course. Yeah, sure, you can fit panels on top of every house in the city, but, philosophically now, you’re just putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. Might stop the bleeding, but damn sure ain’t gonna do anything about why you got shot in the first place, follow me? The class responded in the puzzled language of blinking and squinting, so Charlie went on, careful not to let too much of his past slip out. "We have to strip out what existed before. We have to do it for the function and, I’d say, the freedom of it too. It’s the electrical system and its sustainability, but it’s also how we think about power in general, you follow? Our new power won’t come from some faraway source that feels like magic, but from a source you can see every day right above you. Same power that powers everything. So, it makes sense why it’d be free. And the sun has all kinds of energy: heat, radioactive, vibrations—one day, one of you will figure out the ways to use all of it. And not just one house here, another house there, but the foundation itself. Better to understand why you do it, not just how."

You almost make it sound righteous.

I suppose anything sounds righteous when you pay it enough respect.

Gerald smiled big and looked coolly around to his classmates. That’s why I love this class. I told y’all, Mr. Brunton be preaching!

Laughter popped and sparkled throughout the class like fireworks. Again, the weight in Charlie’s chest sagged, his heart finding the reaction difficult not to conclude they were laughing at him. A moment had to pass, as it always did, for Charlie to recognize that feeling as his conflict. He understood, but could not reconcile, himself as both a man with little to offer and yet their teacher. Gently, nausea rocked him; too many thoughts that always swung back to the same place. Charlie centered himself, cleared his throat, and went on.

All right, everybody, let’s look more closely at these photovoltaic cell systems.

The small class gathered around him and the solar panel splayed before them like a cadaver. There, Charlie went on with the business of teaching his class everything he could.

Systems had always come naturally to Charlie. He understood their composition, necessity, and capacity. Even as a child, he excelled in math and science and kept, without great effort, the best marks among his peers. When his uncles made him do calculations in his head as a party trick, they called him Baby Carver. That always made his mother smile and frown at the same time. By thirteen, everyone in his bitty Michigan town called him for repairs. Fixed their televisions, their sprinkler systems, even their cars’ engines, which he had found easiest to diagnose. A few dollars to fix an air conditioner, a few more to fix a lawn mower, and by high school he thought maybe he’d have enough saved to send himself to college and apply that special mind of his to something more important than people’s radios. But, by and by, he came to understand why his mother smiled and frowned in the manner with which she had, how she could be both proud and terrified of what was possible as a result of his talents.

Bells no longer rang in schools. Lessons started at a general feeling of time and continued until they found a good place to stop. By those measures, Charlie taught for another hour or so before letting his class out into the beloved Yard.

The Yard hummed of people and music. A thin fog of smoke from someone grilling something thickened the grassy square with the smell of barbecue. Speakers roared reggaeton as good as thunder. People laughed loud and broke out into little dances. They’d see a friend and shout them over all the way from one side of the Yard to the other. Greetings, here and there, collided in hand slaps and embraces that thudded chests and patted backs. Students flirted and smiled at each other as effortless as sunlight on a breeze. So much life and so much energy. Easy to forget that half the world died. But then again, Charlie noted, neither grief nor calamity had ever stopped the joy of black people. We smiled through the worst the world had to offer, he thought. Smiled even when our lips bled.

Charlie moved quickly through the Yard, nodding to all those who respectfully tilted their heads at him. He walked far out from the noisy crowds, out to the farthest tree still offering a bench under its shadow. He sat there and marveled.

After the event, all historically black colleges drew what remained of America’s crowds, looking for doctors, dentists, scientists, therapists, and other qualified individuals. D.C. and Howard University’s surrounding neighborhoods now bustled with colorful energy filling restaurants, parks, and museums, and on campus, one would hardly think the world changed at all. When Charlie looked back at all those young people, he did so thinking of Harvard, Yale, and Penn State, schools whose halls, no doubt, sat haunted with vacancy.

He folded his arms and swallowed the conflict surging up in him, careful not to mistake Howard’s smiling energy for indifference. Howard University, and especially its youth, cared about what happened to America a lot more than he did. Probably cared too much.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the event, some thought it had been the Rapture and prayed that God would come back and take them too. Some went wild in retaliation against feelings they could not name and went on boarding up police stations, burning down country clubs—one fella even ran naked into the old White House and pissed himself empty in the Oval Office on the oval rug. Sorrow to rage to resolution, everyone felt something every moment of every day and would for the rest of their lives. All because they cared so much. Cared beyond what they knew how to express.

Charlie, for his part, knew how he should feel and was made worse for not feeling it. So he focused his mind on the systems failing all around him. And fail they did. Too sudden did America fall into hands unprepared to hold its bounty. Too few knew how to fish. Too few could skin a buck. Too few understood how to run a farm, or the mechanics of a clock, or the variable shapes of government. Only a fragile structure remained, consequently, without the reinforcement of porcelain beams, ultimately punctuating precisely who’d made that system and kept charge of its maintenance.

Many of the large-scale infrastructural pillars of medicine, agriculture, economy, and technology sought new ways to function. Gas stations, big chain grocery stores, and even online shopping defected, all of it as a result of us having too little a say in the running of the before world. We were stabilized by our familiarity; as much as we could keep things as they were, the better we felt. Televisions still offered a version of the news; doctors, though from local clinics, still saw patients; and information still flowed through the sparsely available internet and libraries. People still got paychecks, although many of them in cash, and went duck-lipped when, slowly, small things disappeared, when stores stopped carrying their favorite snack cakes and potato chips, or in realizing that HBO series would never have a resolution. Different, but as much the same as we could manage. Brightly, though, amid the struggle for footing, black colleges offered a varied system, imperfect but assiduous. So when Charlie marveled at all those bright smiles, he understood that those smiles didn’t directly amount to happiness. Those smiles, with all their luster and irony, were the same ones that carried their forefathers through centuries of horrors, teetering on a nearness to both jubilation and madness in equal measure. The only thing keeping Charlie from smiling along with them, pursing his lips just to stop himself, was the conflict—more specifically, what he’d come to know as the conflict of his own darkness.

Charlie stood up and wandered the edges of campus, watching without engaging. In this new world, he could figure neither where nor how he fit. Charlie had conflict in his heart long before the event. Before prison. All the way back to when he first learned to define himself by the language in the eyes of others, quick to articulate their bias. Ubiquitous enough for him to question the rationality of his very existence, the conflict of Charlie’s darkness could only be resolved in the way any black man sees himself, that insoluble calculus. Does he see himself from within, as a divine composite of the joys, fears, hopes, and passions that make up any human being? Or does he see himself through the eyes of the world and how it reacted to him? His darkness was as elementary a question as it was existential: Who was he?

Charlie first read the dictionary definition of black in prison: The absence of light. To be soiled. Hostile. Wicked. Devoid of the moral quality of goodness. Evil. He didn’t believe these things about himself, yet the results of his life said otherwise. Indeed, he loved to laugh. Joy rumbled through him when he offered kindness to others. He relished the smells of his mother’s stew and cut grass and the ocean. And on those nights when he stayed up late fixing people’s broken things, he felt as bright as any star in the sky. Still, he had no answer for whether his darkness made him evil. Cruel? Wretched? Was he those things before he was even born? Or was it after he made the mistake of believing himself otherwise? The very question mutated his darkness into a deeply embedded self-hatred, a bitterness that too often steeped into fury. And he believed bitterness would have remained in him forever.

But then all those people killed themselves. And all Charlie felt was relief. Only a dark man could see such a horrible thing and feel what he felt. Too dark to be good. Too dark to be redeemed.

Charlie wandered until the sun cascaded from orange to pink to lilac. When evening arrived violet all around him, he felt that longing for tight walls of which his big house could not provide. Instead, Charlie ambled back across the campus to his office, a place small enough to confine the hum of his thoughts. He kept spare clothes and a cot under his desk. Wood paneling lined the walls, making any light at all flush gold. The office did have a large window looking out over the Yard, but he rarely disturbed the blinds from their dusty, shut lashes. Inside, he had a landline phone, shelves and shelves of books, a record player with a couple of LPs, and a few bottles of whiskey. He’d been trying to drink more scotch, if only to feel a bit more refined in his drunkenness, but kept a cheap Kentucky bourbon within reach. He shut the door behind him, locked it, and drank Wild Turkey straight from the bottle until the laughter and music died outside and all he could hear was the wind talk through the trees.

He lay on the floor of his office, silence as warm as a blanket, and drank, yawning and slipping in and out of sleep, in and out of the past, in and out of who he was and was becoming, in and out of rising to the potential of this new world and putting a bullet in his head. And he might’ve gone searching for a gun, but the phone rang.

Hello, he answered as a matter of course. Charlie Brunton’s office.

Still adrift, the living silence on the other end sat Charlie up. A moment passed, giving him space to realize his own formality, the late hour, and the question as to who would even think to call him at all. He heard breathing on the other end, the fright of the old world tightening his etiquette.

Hello. This is Charles Brunton. How can I help you?

Yeah. The voice paused. How can you? A woman’s voice—young, cautious—seeming to reveal itself out of that dark silence as a mouse.

Sorry? Who is this?

Silence swelled into a weight Charlie couldn’t see.

Hello? Who is this? he repeated.

I’m… The voice, he sensed, paused again not just for emphasis but to gather strength to speak at all. I’m Elizabeth’s daughter.

Elizabeth.

The name was a ghost against his skin. In his nose, inexplicably, he smelled lavender. And how his heart pounded when he realized what the voice had said.

Daughter. He echoed the word absently, though purposely not as a question.

Only the breathing silence responded. Then: I guess I could hang up right now, and maybe we’d be even.

He listened to her voice, the music of it. So familiar. So impossible. Well, shit. I didn’t believe this world had any surprises left to give.

Again, the breathing silence. I think this was a mistake, she said, finally. I don’t know why I called you.

Just wait. The darkness inside him appealed to keeping the voice on the line. Charlie had let go of so many things since before the event, so much of himself. In his office, shoved deep in the back of a filing cabinet, were the items he carried out of prison, specifically a letter written in Elizabeth’s hand, still in its plastic bag, that told the story of her daughter. Their daughter. And he’d let that go too. You called for a reason. To say something or to ask something. Whatever it is, ain’t no sense in holding on to it.

They all left. Just like you. They left me. Anger flared in her voice. More than anger. Sadness. Exhaustion. I don’t know why I called you. I guess… everyone’s gone now. And I keep thinking I might as well go too.

He realized she’d lived through the event in a very different way.

There’s one place left that’s a world for people like me. I’m calling you because I don’t have anyone living that I mean something to. But you… you owe me. So I called to ask you to take me there.

Charlie hung in the vacancy after the ask, stuck on what exactly she meant by people like me. His darkness, to his astonishment, reminded him that he was not cruel, or cold, or incapable of feeling something profound. Where… where are you?

Wisconsin. Outside of Oshkosh. On Lake Winneconne.

I’m in D.C. I can get to you in two days. Might take a little longer. Roads aren’t as dependable as they used to be.

Nothing is. But I need to get to the south.

You want me to take you south?

Yeah.

To what?

Are you gonna take me or not?

South ain’t a place anyone should go these days. I hear it’s dangerous.

Then you’re exactly what I thought you’d be: no help at all.

Just wait a second. I’ll help you. I will. Tell me your address.

2580 Sunset Lane.

What’s your name?

It doesn’t matter.

It does to me.

I know right now you probably think I’m your daughter. But I’m not. Your blood might be in me, but that doesn’t make you my father.

The phone died.

Charlie lingered in the darkness of that silence, feeling shame like a fever.

He had forgotten so much of who he was he never once considered that the only child he had a hand in bringing half black into this world might still be alive and not at the bottom of the ocean. He had not even once thought to look back, but he could never forget the questions, now surrounding him like a storm. He didn’t want to sleep. Not anymore. Not with so many things unanswered. He drank until the alcohol pulled him down, down. Into himself.

Down. Where the conflict was all there was.

Down into the yawning fathoms of deep, deep darkness.

2

THE EGGS BURNED.

From the upstairs bathroom Sidney smelled the smoke. The tang mingled with the singeing of her own curls tamed between the blades of a flattening iron.

Wrestling and laughing in the next room, her twin brothers thudded against the walls. And that distracted her too. Sidney imagined Adam, always the bully and only three minutes older than John, using those minutes to prove his superior strength and viciousness over his twin. Adam always liked to play the villain in their wrestling games, which empowered his finishing moves to be backbreakers, and neckbreakers, and facebreakers, when they fake-smashed chairs against each other. Indeed, the best way to tell the brothers apart was to look for bruises, and the one reddened or purpled was always John. Sidney used to listen to their wild roughhousing before flying in as last-minute hero, to save her youngest brother from defeat. But not today.

Summer was over, and soon she’d be filing into a dorm at U of W. First time away from home. First time away from her mother. She’d barely scored high enough on her SAT, her GPA had absolutely no twinkle, and she still didn’t have a license to drive. She’d gotten into the school not by the weight of her own merits but by her stepfather’s ability to move mountains. And, perhaps, by the relentless desire of all those around her to see her succeed. But Sidney wasn’t ready for any of it, and for more reasons than just grades.

In the bathroom mirror, Sidney observed herself. How scarcely she resembled her mother. Even when she straightened out the curls in her hair, the effect, as she saw it, actually further articulated their differences, seeming to widen her nose and pronounce the plump in her lips. Her stepfather said straight hair made her look elegant. And though Sidney didn’t accept herself as elegant, she liked the way the notion of elegant made her feel—deserving, maybe, of something she couldn’t quite resolve. She accepted what he said as having something to do with an abiding sense of unreadiness, experiencing her life from a sort of waiting room—waiting to achieve the transcendence of becoming, suddenly, something more. More of what, exactly, she couldn’t fully imagine. Nevertheless, she felt the gravity of everyone’s patience. She saw patience in their eyes when, with a glimmer of pity, they regarded her, or heard patience in the lilt in their voices, subtly altruistic, as kind words came down to her from some higher, if not inaccessible, place. So she remained in her waiting room.

She sighed as she gripped the straightener to burn the last bit of vigor out of her hair.

But her hair wasn’t the only thing burning.

Her brothers had stopped thrashing. A quiet bloomed in the house.

John? Adam? Even as she called out to them, the quiet seemed to absorb her voice. She set the iron down on the edge of the sink and stepped out into the hallway. The burning smell sharpened in her nose as heat crisped closer to fire.