On the surface of the moon, just before he meets Piccarda Donati, Dante does not know what substance he inhabits or how his body can mix with Heaven’s insubstantiality. How can “one dimension contain another?” he asks. The moon “took me into itself / as water does a ray of light / and yet remains unsundered and serene.”
These days, the elements I once moved through so effortlessly have evaporated. My world has shrunk. Lori and I divorced a decade ago. My mother died last year in Amarillo in an assisted-living facility. In truth, she had diminished for me, little by little, as my father’s memory erased her. I buried her next to him: my final link to the past.
I’m comfortable now teaching high school art classes, eating takeout in the evenings, still dreaming of getting to Italy. I’m fond of my American Originals: Rauschenberg, the intriguing shadows cast by homeless men huddled in the parking lot of the empty Astrodome, an occasional high school freshman who scrawls an arresting sentence on an exam. You never know what you’ll come across in the great state of Texas.
I do a little painting, culling images from my sketchbooks, and sometimes exhibit in a local gallery. Solitude contents me, and most of the time I don’t wrestle with loneliness. I would not claim to be living a saintly life, but at least I am living lightly on—in?—the world, and doing no harm that I can see. And so I go about my days. As with Janis: Nothing left to lose.
Except for this. One last cherished memory. The danger lies in forgetting.
That day on the river. After we’d drifted a while.
Mildred said, “I keep thinking, where did everything turn? When did I realize I couldn’t get back to before? That night … you know the one I mean … I’ve always wished I hadn’t been so high. I’ve wondered if I could have helped Dad more.”
“I wish … well, I wish a lot of things about that night,” I said. “And you did okay. Really.”
Mildred nodded. “Our lives didn’t end then, did they?”
“No. Of course not.”
She nodded again. Mosquitoes troubled her face. She brushed them away. Old wooden pilings, abandoned since the Civil War, poked up out of the river. The water had a variegated sheen, thick and pale. People had tossed hubcaps, busted microwave ovens, and U joints into the stream. Mildred and I held hands and floated past the remains of a Weed Eater. A heron rose fluttering from the water.
“Bless Janis,” Mildred said.
The Magnitudes
A dream of birds.
And then I wake recalling my father.
Later, just before my morning show at the planetarium, I catch a crosstown bus to Oak Cliff. After a few short blocks, the bus pulls up to a dusty intersection separating a residential neighborhood from a small business district. A tennis-shoe army gets on: half a dozen Mexican women, on their way to housecleaning jobs in south Dallas neighborhoods. They’ve come from a 7-Eleven parking lot, where they kissed their husbands or boyfriends goodbye. As the women board the bus, pickups come for the men, taking them (I imagine) to construction sites or distant fields for a day of strawberry- or apple-picking. The men remind me of my father, an oil man when he was younger: stringy arms, the permanent squint characteristic of field workers and drillers exposed to the sun. Some of the women are accompanied by children. They nestle crusty noses between the ladies’ breasts, loose inside faded print dresses, and fall asleep. A dark-eyed boy in a stained T-shirt, sitting across the aisle from me, gives me a beautiful smile then closes his eyes. Two stops later, the women gather kids, rags, spritzers, and toilet-bowl brushes. They get off the bus and march toward unpainted, ramshackle houses, places whose owners, from all indications, can’t afford housekeepers. The homes are old, ornate in their decay. Possibly the occupants are clinging to some lost glory, a proud history, refusing to accept changes of fortune.
My stop is surrounded by hobby shops, pawnbrokers, hardware stores, and bail bondsmen. The Yucca Theater sits in the middle of the block. An old-fashioned place, like the Oklahoma City theaters my mother took me to when I was a child. On the dirty, cracked marquee above the entrance, a set of plastic letters: O A T. Patton? On the Waterfront? I can’t remember recent titles. I haven’t seen a memorable movie in years, though my ex used to drag me to matinees every Sunday. Nothing stuck with me. I have no idea what Karen and I saw. Am I the problem or is the film industry not what it used to be?
A torn John Wayne poster sags in a glass case—“Now Showing”—next to the ticket booth. I step through the open doorway. Dust, Lysol, stale popcorn. An air conditioner rattles in a corner, but the lobby is hot and close. A man in a red vest slumps beside a flickering Coke machine, which casts the only light in the place. The glow turns his jowly face green. “Come right in,” he says to me. He sounds like Vincent Price. An elegant croak. “Everything goes. If you see something you like—concession equipment, carpets, seats—make an offer.”
I nod my thanks, step past him into the auditorium. Empty. Dingy rectangular screen. A leopard, a lion, and a wolf are painted among stone arches on the walls—the animals are badly faded. Broke-backed seats. Sticky aisles. Someone has swept trash into a pile near a door with a cobwebbed EXIT sign: ripped ticket stubs, business cards, partial phone numbers scribbled on slips of paper. The air conditioner shudders to a stop.
Eggplant-colored curtains line the sides of the screen. I came here hoping I could use the material to replace the fraying drapes in the Star Room’s entryway: my last grand gesture before leaving the planetarium. The curtains are dusty but nice and thick. I finger their folds, listen to a critter—a mouse? a rat?—skitter beneath the seats.
Not Vincent Price. Lyndon Johnson. That’s who the fellow in the lobby reminded me of … and it occurs to me: an old theater in Oak Cliff. What was it called? The Texan? Yes. The Texan Theater. Grassy knoll. Officer Tippett. It all comes back. When Lee Harvey Oswald ducked into the Texan Theater after allegedly shooting Officer Tippett, two old combat movies were playing: War Is Hell and Cry of Battle. Why do I know this? It’s my Lone Star legacy. But also, in graduate school, during study breaks, a group of us traded conspiracy trivia—a mindless relief from the chaos theory we were to be tested on at the end of the term. “Chaos or conspiracy?” someone would say. “Chance or plan? You decide.” JFK ruled these sessions. His assassination offered a depthless pool of conflicting possibilities. Chaos or conspiracy? Burch Burroughs, the manager of the Texan Theater, claims Oswald paid to attend the double feature at 1 p.m. and bought a bag of popcorn at 1:15. What do the Dallas police records say? Oswald snuck in without paying at around 1:30. Chaos or conspiracy? Bernard Haire, a shop owner next to the Texan, claims he saw officers detain Oswald—or someone who looked like him—in the alley behind the theater. He didn’t resist. The Dallas police? Oswald was pulled, kicking and screaming, out of the front entrance before a gathering crowd.
Oswald. Ruby. An American revolution. Right here in Big D, my father used to joke.
Well. Dad’s murderer would have a thing or two to say to those boys.
I step away from the curtains and take a seat in the front row. In bas-relief, in the theater’s cheap stone walls, next to the leopard, lion, and wolf, sketchy figures stand and sit. They appear to have been painted once, a lavish mural, but the colors have worn away. The figures remind me of classical nudes—Titian, maybe—abstract forms melting into one another.
Titian is dead.
John Wayne is dead.
So is Vincent Price.
Behind me, a shuffle, a creak. I turn. A man lingers in the back row. He says hello. In the dim light it takes me a moment to notice he’s wearing a priest’s collar. I rise. “I’m buying the curtains,” I say. My voice echoes in the high-ceilinged room. “I mean, just so you know.”
He raises a hand. “It’s all right. I’m not here to scavenge. I used to watch pictures here as a boy. I’m just looking around. Remembering. Sorry to disturb you.”
I start to head for the lobby. The priest looks me over. “You’re about my age,” he says.
“When we were kids … the Beatles’ first movie. Day for Night? Night and Day?”
“A Hard Day’s Night.”
“Of course. How could I forget? I saw it four times, right here!” He grins and for a moment I see the child in his middle-aged face: pudgy cheeks, pale brows. He probably wore a bowl haircut, Beatle-style, as I did. He’s wearing a too-sweet aftershave. Tall, stooped. “I remember thinking, No one has ever had as much fun as this fellow, Ringo,” he says. “Pounding out anger, frustration … just whaling away on the drums. Utter joy. I couldn’t sit still.” He pats one of the seats. “Watching those guys sing … such a kick after months and months of Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy.”
“Funny,” I say. “I was just thinking about that.”
He looks around. “Well. Old theaters. End of an era. I guess a joint like this brings it all back.”
“I guess.”
“‘All you need is love,’” he says. “If only.”
I smile and nod goodbye. He sinks into a seat, for all the world like a lonely kid.
In the lobby, I tell the man in the vest to hold the curtains for me (I’m not sure, yet, how to transport them to the planetarium). We negotiate and I hand him a check.
On the bus to work I hum “A Hard Day’s Night.” The bus is nearly empty and I sit in the back, away from the other passengers, so as not to disturb them with my tune.
John Lennon is dead.
The day my mother took me into Oklahoma City to see the movie (we lived in Holdenville, nearby; I had just turned seven), the city never seemed finer, clear and lovely, vibrating to light-hearted melodies.
For weeks afterward, I drew the Beatles on everything: newspapers (crossing out JFK, LBJ—the Scrabble-like headlines following the president’s murder), scratch pads, my Golden Books of Science.
I didn’t see headlines so bold again until the Murrah bombing. An American revolution.
My father’s dead, my mother—
No. Not here. I bite my lip and sit on my hands till they hurt.
At the planetarium, I find in the day’s mail a letter from a former patron, a crackpot who writes every week. Two or three others write, too, about their conversations with God or their visits from aliens. Shedding these folks is the one perk of forced retirement. (“We can’t afford to maintain a human host, especially with our attendance dropping,” the museum board informed me last month. “Across the country, planetariums are becoming digital sky-theaters, with prepackaged shows narrated by Robert Redford or Tom Hanks. This will be our new direction. We thank you for your service.”)
Sirs [the letter says]:
The Good Book tells us Abraham’s father came to Palestine from across the flood—i.e., from west of Egypt, which is obviously a reference to America. The USA, then, is the origin of all life on Earth, which should surprise no one. Uncle Sam was there in the Garden, giving that serpent hell, believe you me, and the Tree of Knowledge was draped in the red, white, and blue. But more important than that, where scientists are concerned, is what first scrambled the continents (except for America, which has always been right where it sits today). I know you theory-boys have been chewing on that, but here’s my two cents: check out the comets. They’re the work-horses of the solar system, roaring past the planet, shifting the land masses, due to gravity (what you might call the Jigsaw Effect), throwing the world’s lesser peoples into confusion, from which they have never recovered.
In a file box in the storage room I save the letter with others like it (a cultural record, for good or ill) and start to prep my show.
This morning, the ten o’clock audience consists of three old men, two of whom are hard of hearing. I press a button on the Star Room console (round and metallic, like the clunky robot in Lost in Space) and Glenn Gould’s version of the Goldberg Variations trills through tiny speakers. First, then second, canon. The repetitions put me at ease. As the sun sets in the room and the brightest stars appear, about the size of nail heads, I see in my mind’s eye, written against the planetarium’s dome, the music’s mathematical equivalent, a string of elegant functions: if performer a produces note b at time c, then the second canon commences at c+(a–c)d, where d equals the interval between successive entrances of—
From the console I dim the cove lights. Dusk is a red button, sunset a silver lever next to the music’s volume knobs. The sun sinks fast or slow depending on the show, the crowd’s mood, or my whims. These old dodderers will be disoriented after sitting so long in the dark, I think. Keep an eye out.
“In Canto Twenty-eight of Paradiso, Dante describes the Primum Mobile,” I begin. “The abode of God and all the angels. Remarkably, his fourteenth-century conception of the universe is eerily modern. It accords with contemporary physicists’ notions of the three-sphere, a finite object lacking edges—”
A light snore from the front row.
“—in other words, a sphere with fixed volume and immense magnitude, but one in which every point is interior—”
Now, a chorus of snores.
“Mathematically, this can be depicted as …” With the slide projector I throw the equation onto the dome, bright yellow numbers fluttering across the ecliptic:
x2 + y2 + z2 + w2 = R2
“Dante put it like this: ‘From this point hang the heavens and all Nature.’”
The old men slump in their seats. There’s no point going on. I stop talking and let the music play.
The two o’clock show has been advertised as an “Introduction to Space.” I have options. The Catastrophe of Creation. The Copernican System. Journey to the Arctic and the Mysteries of the Northern Lights. Time Travel (in only half an hour).
I drop a slide marked “Kodiak bear” into the projector: a bright, bad painting of the sort nailed to walls in roadside motels. The bear stands by a stream, slapping at fish. My supervisor swears images like this are audience pleasers—“Every state-of-the-art installation does this sort of thing. It helps viewers picture Ursa Major when you superimpose the bear on the stars”—but it’s discombobulating to hurl an animal into the void.
The projector’s bulb is weak. I replace it. Boxes, bulbs, armatures. Tracks, rods, gears. Our astral engine needs a tune-up.
“Excuse me?” someone says behind me.
I turn to see a tall, auburn-haired woman standing in the entrance portal, surrounded by the ratty old curtains. Beside her is a little girl.
“Are we early?” the woman asks. She combs the girl’s hair with her fingers. Her hands are flecked with dried yellow paint.
“Not to worry,” I say.
“You’re the man who makes the moon rise,” says the girl.
“That’s right.”
“Hey! There aren’t any bears in the sky,” she says, glancing at the dome. I think I’ve seen her here before. She’s ten, maybe. Eleven.
“No.”
“Then I don’t understand why he’s there.”
“Me, neither,” I admit.
“You know, you’re supposed to show the truth.”
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Anna. It’s an obligation.”
“You’re right, Anna.”
She bounces on her toes. “I know something true,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“The earth is younger than the rest of the universe.”
“That’s right!” I tell her. “Earth was born not long ago, as long agos go.”
Anna laughs. Her mother smiles. “She loves it here, ever since her class came to visit. Told me I just had to come see it,” she says. “I’m sorry we got the time wrong. We’ll take our seats and wait.”
“Are you a painter?” I ask her.
“Why, yes.”
“I noticed your hands.”
An embarrassed grin.
“Is your work on display?”
“I’ll be showing soon in a little gallery down the road.”
“The new one? Out by the airport?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
She lingers by the curtains. She’s self-conscious about her height, frail, slouching a little, folding her arms.
“Well,” I say, “it’s wonderful. Good luck with the show. Are you on our mailing list?” I hand her a pen.
By 2:05, the auditorium is only a third full, but no one else appears to be coming. William, one of my regulars, has arrived carrying a hard-boiled egg and a tub of cottage cheese. “The stars always make me hungry. I don’t know why,” he says. He’s a sweet man, but the sight of him deflates me. Not a crackpot, but he takes a lot of work. I had hoped to get through this day with no awkwardness or strain.
Anna and her mother—Susan Hayes, she’s written next to her e-mail address—sit in the back row. I peek at them as I draw the curtains and cue the music: an instrumental version of “Norwegian Wood”— “Good afternoon, I’m Adam Post,” I say—followed by Brian Eno: sparse, extended tones, highlighting silence.
In addition to William, Susan, and Anna, middle-aged couples round out the audience: vacationers, early retirees. None of them looks happy together. A few gruff, solitary men. No other kids.
I tug the sun from the sky and simulate the stars’ brightness over Dallas fifty years ago, twenty, ten, five. As we approach the present, the heavens become progressively harder to see. “An endangered night sky,” I say. “As cities grow, and artificial lighting spreads across the globe, we’re increasingly cut off from the magnificent sights our ancestors used to yearn toward and dream on. Does this make us fundamentally different from ancient peoples?”
The Empire of the Dead Page 15
