The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  Frizzy blonde hair beneath a dark blue cap. “Karen!” I call. I wave wildly, surprised at my eagerness. The woman turns—a stranger—and dismisses me with a scowl. I stand beside a security gate, at a loss for what to do with myself. A man empties coins from his pockets into a liver-colored bowl. He steps through the portal and sets off the alarm. Uniformed men converge on him, flapping metal wands. Hocus pocus! Danger, vanish! Somewhere down the line, another alarm brays.

  I’m about to make my way to the Ground Transportation exit when an elderly gentleman collapses in front of me. He falls against a candy rack in a gift shop doorway—chocolate mints shower his chest and head. Immediately, three security officers surround his body, alerting paramedics through their sleek walkie-talkies. Within minutes, two young men arrive with an oxygen tank. They strap a plastic see-through mask on the fellow’s face and he begins to revive, his eyes drifting, his hands flitting nervously in the air. He looks like my father. The same thin chin. My chest tightens and I’m tempted to ask for a mask-suck. A boy in a Star Wars T-shirt tries to pluck a mint off the floor, but his mother, swift, determined, tugs his hand and whispers, “No! Make me proud!”

  Take me with you. Wherever you’re going. Boise? Bristol? Birmingham? Don’t leave me here with nothing! I’ll make you proud. I promise.

  The old man sits up, shaking and pale. “Tell my children I love them,” he says. “Tell my children I’m sorry.” The paramedics assure him everything will be okay.

  4.

  “You’re crazy,” Marty says. He laughs, a bark, and I jerk the phone away from my ear. “We’re talking literature. Not real life.” I had told him Dad’s spirit seemed to be haunting me lately—in dreams, in the airport just now. Immediately, Marty assumed I was thinking of his work: his assertion that the ghost in Hamlet was Shakespeare’s nod to Purgatory. When the Protestants banned Purgatory in the mid-1540s, the deceased were stranded searching for purification between Heaven and Earth, Marty says. “I am dead,” moans Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and he means dead.

  As usual, Marty had missed my point. The point was, Dad was suddenly a presence in my life again.

  “You’re stressing, Adam,” he says now. “McVeigh’s back in the news. That’s all it is. The bastard’s finally about to get what he deserves.”

  “How will that help anyone?” I ask. I’m sitting in the dark in my sparse apartment.

  “It’ll help me, the minute they stick that needle in his arm.”

  “Will it?”

  “Sure.”

  Marty and I have never been close, but he worries if I don’t check in once a week. He’s a good big brother, that way.

  “Well, anyhow,” I say. I don’t want to argue with him. Not tonight. “What about your theater?” Marty teaches at Sul Ross State, several miles south of here near the Mexican border. For the past year he’s been spearheading the university’s construction of a replica of the Globe Theater in the West Texas desert.

  “Sucker’s really going to happen. Can you imagine?” Marty says. “Thank God for donors with holes in their pockets.”

  “How’d you sway them?”

  “Sold our fucking souls. It’s TV money. Couple of our drama grads went to Hollywood, made it big in the sitcom world. Writing, producing. I’m in the wrong damn profession.”

  “You and me both,” I say, thinking of Tom Hanks’s prerecorded lessons on stars.

  We’ve agreed that as soon as I’ve finished my tenure at the planetarium, I’ll drive down to stay with Marty. We haven’t spent much time together since our parents died. I’ll use the occasion to clear out of my apartment and ponder new starts. I ask him again if he’s sure it’s no trouble. “You’re not, uh … sharing your house with anyone now?” I know of at least four exes over a five-year span.

  “Nope. What about you? Any moon maidens?”

  “No, sorry to say.” What’s wrong with us, I think. Two grown men.

  “Well, damn it, bro, get out and grab some ass!”

  Underperformers, Dad used to say, patting our chests. Don’t let those lungs of yours hold you back. Embrace the world, he said. Just like me in the oil fields. We’d roll our eyes at him. I’m telling you: Breathe it all in, boys, better or worse!

  “And you,” I say. “Good luck with the Globe.”

  “All right, Star Man. Keep it spinning.”

  The moment Marty clicks off, the telephone chirps again, startling me. “They’re back,” says Lila—like William, a Star Room fixture. I’m fond of her but wary in her presence. She often calls me late at night. I’m never prepared for her.

  “Who’s back?”

  “Adam, don’t you ever surf the net?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you must have read about the new crop circles?”

  “Lila …”

  “Two formations appeared overnight in wheat fields near the radio telescope at Chilbolton, England.” Her voice is high and thin. Her manic voice. “A man’s face looking up, and an abstract pattern similar to the binary message sent into space by the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974.”

  I groan.

  “The difference is, in this returned message, Arecibo’s double helix DNA pattern is partly a double helix and partly a triple helix,” Lila says. “Like nothing we’ve ever seen. Quite significant, don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  “Adam, Chilbolton has a bank of security cameras. They failed to detect any nighttime activity in those fields. If human beings had been out there making those patterns, the cameras would have caught them. Plus, this work couldn’t have been completed in just one night. It’s too elaborate. And the patterns are only discernible from the air. How do you explain all that?”

  “I don’t know, Lila. I can’t.” She breaks my heart. She swears she was snatched one night, raped and impregnated by Andromedans. Or Arcturans. I don’t remember. She claims they continue to follow her, dressed as nuns: “They don these harmless masks. Benign, you see. Smarmy little smiles.” Before she walked into the Star Room, I’d never encountered a true believer—of anything. In time, I persuaded her to see a therapist, who convinced her that she’d watched too many X-Files episodes. Her problem wasn’t space travel. It was Hollywood. Gullibility. Unresolved issues with the Church. She improved for a while. Now her painful delusions, including her conviction that she miscarried late one evening, come and go. She used to piss off Karen. Lila is attractive when she isn’t paranoid. I’ve never flirted with her. I don’t want to shock or encourage her, nor do I want to romance a will-o’-the-wisp. But Karen was jealous of her, anyway.

  “I think these things are hoaxes, Lila. I’ve told you that. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Adam, can we get a beer next week? I really need to debrief with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t mind telling you I’m scared. I mean, you know. All I’ve got’s a dead bolt. Inferior technology. I’m afraid they’re going to come for me again.”

  “No one’s going to come for you, Lila. Stay off the Internet, okay? It’s crazy stuff. I’ll see you next week.”

  “Okay.” Timid, unsure. But basically solid, I think. No danger to herself. “Goodbye, Adam.” Her voice says, Don’t let me go. Please don’t let me go.

  I set the phone down. A jet rumbles out of DFW, a mile or so away, shivering my windows. Lights flicker, high in the sky.

  Birds.

  I wake remembering the Murrah site, an early morning shortly after the bombing. I met a medical examiner there, by chance. Hawks circled above us. After high heat, he explained, what’s left of the human body is the canine maxilla, facial and palatal bones, occipitals, the calcaneum, the talus, fragments of the parietals, vertebral drums and spine, perhaps the tibial and humeral shafts.

  5.

  “Have you been crying?” Karen asks.

  Her blue cap, perfectly square, perches on her upswept yellow hair. She sits across a round table from me, on a slender chair in the middle of the fas
t-food court. Coffee steams in front of us.

  It’s late Sunday night.

  “No. Why?” I say. I’d seen her the minute I arrived at the airport. When I asked if she could chat, she told me she had only thirty minutes to spare: “I’m working the Seattle flight.” Breeziness. Distance.

  I admit, “I have been pretty down lately.”

  “What’s going on?” she asks.

  The coffee tastes of its Styrofoam cup. My lips burn. I surprise myself: “I miss you,” I say.

  She glances away from me at a flickering Delta monitor. “Well.”

  I imagine a crisp new bra beneath her blouse. “I don’t know … weird dreams. I’m having trouble concentrating,” I say. “My shows have not been good. I seem to have lost the feel for the audiences, lost patience.” I brush my eyes. “To be honest, I don’t know what’s going on beyond, of course, the fact that they’re forcing me out …”

  Behind her, a chubby boy drops a slice of pizza. Smoking cheese grips the floor.

  “Passengers for Denver should now be aboard Flight 111, departing from Gate Seven,” says a crackling speaker in the ceiling.

  Karen picks at a smudge of lipstick on her cup. “Actually, Adam, you know what? A lack of concentration might be good for you,” she tells me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You use your concentration like a shield.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She sighs. “Tim McVeigh.”

  “What?” I say.

  “Now it’s his turn, right? Of course you can’t concentrate.”

  “I don’t think that’s a—”

  “No? It doesn’t affect you? Jesus, Adam. Just once, can’t you drop your guard?”

  “Honey. Please. All right, it’s true, every night I go online, scrolling through updates on his trial. I figure if I could just understand—”

  “Understanding is not feeling, Adam. That’s your problem, okay? I’ve told you that.”

  “Karen—”

  “And, anyway, the Internet … it gives me the creeps. You and that Lila woman. You’re made for each other.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She shrugs. “Okay. So. How are your friends?”

  “You know.”

  She nods, reaches for my hand. “You’re a lovely man, Adam. I just—”

  “Karen, listen—”

  “And it’s sweet of you to say you miss me, but you don’t. I mean, all right, maybe you do a little. I miss you, too. We’ve had some nice times together. But you’re lonely, that’s all. You and me, we were never …”

  “I know.”

  She squeezes my fingers. “And you’re grieving. Adam, you’ve never really dealt with it. You realize that?”

  “I’d like it if you’d come home with me again some night,” I tell her. “Your next layover?”

  She fusses with the napkin in her lap.

  “What is it?” I say. “I don’t mean to upset you, honey, I’m just hoping—”

  “I’m thinking of relocating to Portland,” she says. “Oregon. Next week, the week after? There’s this guy.”

  “Ah. A pilot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course.”

  She laughs. “Maybe that’s our trouble, Adam. I’ve got you figured out, and you’ve pegged me.”

  I laugh, too. “Well. That’s great, I guess. I’m happy for you.”

  “No you’re not. But thank you.”

  We finish our coffee without saying much more, but the minutes pass agreeably and I start to relax.

  She checks her watch, reaches for her carryall. “Seattle calls,” she says.

  I walk her to her gate. “Portland, eh? I hear it rains a lot there.”

  “Rain can be nice.”

  “I can make it rain for you. I can make the sun shine. Give you the stars.”

  She smiles and nudges my shoulder.

  How will you spend your life? I think. With whom? Will you be happy? Will I know it if you’re happy? How will we remember each other?

  “Goodbye, Adam. Thanks for the coffee.”

  Will we remember each other?

  “Take care.” I peck her cheek.

  “Catch you next time around,” she says.

  May you eat well aboard your lengthy flight. May the in-flight movie be a romance …

  Not here. No tears. Not now.

  Don’t leave me with nothing, damn you.

  A man with a plastic ID badge and a set of keys opens a heavy door for her: “Authorized Personnel Only.” Her jacket hem brushes the tops of her hips. A pair of pilots slips past me. Is one of these fellows her lover? Should I smack him? Smack them both? I turn again for a final wave to Karen but she’s gone.

  I stroll past empty gates, closed gift shops, and rows of newspaper dispensers. Analysts predict the Dow’s joyride is over. Experts declare genetically altered foods “safe as milk.”

  The coffee I drank earlier sits badly in my belly. I realize I haven’t eaten. In front of a vending machine, I pull out my wallet and buy a package of peanut-butter crackers.

  On the TRAAIN, going in circles, I watch frantic parents prepare their children for wearying trips. Some families are headed for freezing weather. Mothers tug jackets, coats, and sweaters past resistant little arms. “Believe me, when we step off that plane back east, you’ll want to be wrapped up tight,” one woman tells her son. Other families are westward bound. They strip their infants down to diapers. One man smells of beer. Another sips coffee. A woman eats a bean burrito. Another tells her husband she’s craving scrambled eggs. The train makes its endless loop, neither here nor there, early nor late, in the blackness of its tunnels, a fixed sixty-five degrees (I estimate), suffused with a steady bright green. From time to time, when we emerge from under ground, we see highway cloverleafs curling into the distance, rows of parking lot lights marching toward vast invisibility at the horizon.

  6.

  I go through the motions of the morning show but it lacks pizzazz. The small crowd is as restless as I am until, on a whim, recalling Karen’s hair as it curled beneath her cap last night, I point out the star cluster Coma Berenices—according to legend, the hair of an ancient queen. The astronomer Garrett Serviss, describing the constellation in one of his atlases says it has a

  curious twinkling, as if gossamers spangled with dewdrops were entangled there. One might think the old woman of the nursery rhyme who went to sweep the cobwebs out of the sky had skipped this corner, or else that its delicate beauty had preserved it even from her housewifely instinct.

  The audience seems pleased, and afterward, as I’m cleaning the building, I tell myself I’ve recovered my equilibrium.

  Outside, the sun glides behind clouds (sloppy clouds, irregular, thick; in my sky, they would never do).

  7.

  “All right, bro. I’ve cleaned out the back bedroom for you,” Marty says on the phone. He calls more frequently now. Maybe he really is eager for me to come. “Meantime, hang in there. Grab some ass!”

  “Will do.”

  “Little creep!”

  “I didn’t touch your stupid old toys!” I’d shout. This wasn’t always true. As kids, Marty and I would end up fighting, wheezing, both of us. Our room was like an infirmary. Shade drawn. Leaden air. No sun. Mom always came running. She’d whisper and sing, hold Marty then me.

  Tonight I sit in my dark apartment, missing Karen, thinking of Susan Hayes, contemplating last things at work, and wondering if Marty and I can really share space once more.

  Our stuff. It was all over the house.

  One afternoon, Mom forced me to hide my Beatle drawings in a closet. She said we had to straighten up because Dad was bringing guests home for supper. She collected my sketches in a neat little stack and told me to put them away. Dad’s guests—sullen but gracious, dark skinned—spoke little English. Two of them were missing fingers on one or both of their hands. They inhaled my mother’s mashed potato
es, roast beef and gravy, green beans. My father didn’t say much. He smiled and gestured with his fork for his friends to eat, eat, by all means try seconds. Grab thirds.

  Marty and I stared across the table at each other.

  After the meal, Dad showed the men the small collection of core samples, drill bits, and fossils he kept on a shelf in his study. Jealousy seized me. His geologic oddities and oil field souvenirs were our treats, his and mine. Each evening, I’d ask him to tell me about them again, take them down so I could touch the rocks’ porous edges. This was our private, intimate time together. I’m sure it sparked my love of science. Now, he was letting these silent strangers handle our trilobites, our schist, our shale (one man nearly dropped a piece—he had only three fingers on his right hand!). I retreated to my room and furiously scribbled John, Paul, George, and Ringo in every library book Mom had checked out for me that week. Charlotte’s Web, Little House on the Prairie, Have Spacesuit Will Travel.

  At one point, I put down my pencil and raised the stiff yellow shade over Marty’s bed. Through the window screen I heard my father’s laughter from the porch. I plucked an empty jam jar off my desk, ran outside, and chased fireflies through the yard, all the while keeping an eye on my father and the men. They smoked cigars. Marty sat at their feet, listening closely to the visitors’ fractured talk. I could see my mother, through the bright kitchen window, washing dishes. Steam rose around her face, her dark brown hair.

  Later, when she put Marty and me to bed, she said the men worked for the same oil company our father did. Roughnecks, she called them. “They’ve come all the way from Mexico, leaving behind their families. They’re not familiar with our language or our customs. They don’t earn much money and they don’t have good places to live. Your father wanted to offer them some hospitality tonight. They don’t get many home-cooked meals.”

  “What happened to their fingers?” Marty said.