The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  I dress and catch a bus to the airport. For forty-five minutes I ride the TRAAIN, trying not to think—or to think vividly, I’m not sure which. This is the announcement I’ve been waiting for. The balm of justice. Permission to move ahead.

  The train’s doors slide open. People come and go. The motion soothes me. I remember riding in the backseat of my father’s car one day as we cruised toward Oklahoma City. The car’s purposeful movement. Its smoothness. My mother poured chicken soup from a thermos, and handed a steaming plastic cup to me over the top of the seat. “Don’t spill it, honey,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself. Steady, now. Okay?”

  “It’s impossible,” a man says now to a little girl sitting next to him across the aisle from me.

  “But why?” the girl screams.

  The train stops and I step off near the copy shop. In the concourses, I find I can’t watch flight attendants without a catch in my throat. Head down (I’ve let Karen go; really, I have), I hurry toward the Ground Transportation Exit. Outside, on the sidewalks, people jostle one another, glancing at their watches.

  I stop at a pay phone next to the sliding-glass doors.

  “The bastard got what was coming,” Marty tells me. His voice is faint on the line.

  I reposition the receiver so it doesn’t hurt my ear. “It’s just another death, piled on other deaths. How does that resolve anything?”

  “Don’t think about him anymore. Move on.”

  Move on. Yes, that’s what they say. But moving on is precisely what Marty would never do—“Don’t touch my stuff!”

  A limousine driver signals to a business traveler. Two pilots hustle past me, laughing.

  In seventh grade, when I came home from chemistry class with straight As on my projects, Marty took it personally (he’d gotten all Bs). He turned his attention to English. In high school, he’d never introduce me to his dates—what few he had—fearing I’d steal his girls (an irrational fear, to be sure; I was as painfully shy as he was).

  And now I’m going to stay with him? Are we crazy? If we’ve managed to be civil as adults, I think it’s because we’ve kept hundreds of miles between us.

  “Anyway, bro, forget the planetarium, forget that asshole,” Marty tells me now. “Get your butt down here. Unwind.”

  “Right,” I say. “I appreciate it.” I watch a young couple with twin infants flag a taxi outside.

  “We’ll have a ball together,” Marty says.

  What were our flare-ups about? I mean, really? Proximity? Private space? Competition for Mom and Dad? Well. Not a problem now.

  “You’re not worried? Even a little? You really think we’ll be okay?” I ask Marty.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the fights we used to have.”

  “What fights?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  It can’t be that he remembers a different past than I do. “Ah, you know, the usual stuff,” I say.

  “We’ll be fine,” Marty says somberly: a signal, perhaps, that he does know what I’m talking about. “Let me know your schedule. And get here soon.”

  After I hang up the phone, I work with a Hertz representative to rent a car at the end of the month and drop it off at a dealership in south Texas (I haven’t driven a car in years, though I’ve dutifully renewed my license). I pay an advance, sign a contract.

  Upstairs, I get a bagel and stroll past “Second Looks.” Inside the copy shop, a teenaged employee tugs pink and purple sheets from a Xerox machine. He’s wearing a blue apron, a baker pulling pies from an oven: a word-maker, a confectioner of reproductive delicacies. Photostats and duplicates. Posters, bills. Notes and invitations. I pause to watch the process. The shop’s copiers clack with a steady, soothing rhythm; pages emerge with a reassuring sameness from the printers. The boy feeds job résumés, birthday greetings, swap-meet fliers, alumni newsletters through the copiers’ plastic slots: a frenzied information-quilt recording the city’s buzz. No—more like splitting cells, I think: the culture’s basic units proliferating and replicating, spreading throughout the community like strains of a virus. What was it in Timothy McVeigh that wished to deny, that thought he could deny, all this energy? Behind me in the Terminal A concourse, travelers rush toward the ends of the earth in a colorful blur, some toward destinations listed on the fliers. This boy, it seems, is casting destinies.

  For an hour I ride the TRAAIN. Loop after loop, the riders look exhausted. An old woman coughs uncontrollably into a Kleenex. The train’s automated voice says something inaudible and therefore faintly threatening.

  At the planetarium, I place the mailing list on its wooden stand just outside the Star Room. With the tips of my fingers I caress Susan’s name.

  The latest missive:

  Gentlemen:

  There are holes in the sky, if you know where to look. Sometimes you can stare through them and glimpse the nations of Heaven. Heaven is industrious and efficient, and its citizens are busy plugging the holes so we can’t see in. This is not a malicious effort—they know we would be utterly bereft if we saw too clearly what is beyond our grasp. Still, it is your duty as scientists to expand our knowledge, even into the areas God deems forbidden. You must hurry. I suggest you train your cameras and ‘scopes on Lyra, now, tonight, before the angels spackle all the gaps.

  I toss the letter in the trash.

  Turn up the cove-lights. Time for the afternoon show. No one has arrived. For my own pleasure, I whisper into the microphone:

  In this world

  we walk on the roof of Hell

  gazing at flowers

  The poet Issa. I quoted him often in the old days.

  The energy, the excitement!—before blockbuster movies, laser light-shows, video games, and computer simulations primed people to expect extravaganzas we can’t afford. (On the south side of the dome, I notice now, a small aluminum panel has peeled away from the surface: a jagged edge pricking Scorpio’s heart. Our universe looks a little ragged.)

  Once, early in my tenure here, I invited a guest lecturer, a NASA man who’d done some artificial intelligence work, to address an afternoon group. Human beings are “finite state machines,” he said. Genetically, we are capable of generating only a fixed number of responses to any stimulus: at most, a person can experience no more than 4 × 1053 changes of state per second.

  That day, a woman in the audience wore a T-shirt proclaiming SO MANY MEN, SO LITTLE TIME. When our speaker saw it, he did a brisk little skip in the aisle. “Yes, yes!” he said. “That illustrates precisely what I’m saying!”

  No one’s coming. I shut out the lights and lock the doors.

  11.

  A sweet note from Karen, postmarked Oregon: “I read the news. May that awful man’s passing bring you peace, Adam. With warmest wishes—”

  * * *

  The plan this evening was to meet William at Terza Rima, his favorite Italian restaurant, as soon as I finished up at the planetarium, but just as I’m putting away my broom, Lila phones: “Adam, I know we were going to meet later this week but I’ve got to see you tonight!”

  “Lila! I’m sorry,” I say. “I have a commitment.”

  “Cancel it! I’m desperate. I’m scared. Please, Adam.”

  She’ll be angry, but I don’t have the pep to see her alone. I call William and ask if he’d mind delaying our dinner for an hour. “Meet me first for a drink at Call Me Later?” I ask. I tell him about Lila. Graciously, William accepts the change of plan. “Sounds like an adventure,” he says.

  Call Me Later is a sports bar at the edge of an industrial park west of the airport, catering to computer geeks, electrical engineers, and telemarketers like Lila. It’s close to where she works, so this is where we always choose to meet.

  A big man bumps me, sloshing a pitcher of beer. His T-shirt reads, “My Alcohol Team Has a Soccer Problem.”

  I grab three chairs by a large-screen TV: dirt bikes, flying black mud.
On the wall, behind glass frames, there’s an Emmit Smith jersey, a Troy Aikman jersey, and an autographed photo of Jerry Jones. Seventies disco blares through hidden speakers. A smell of stale peanuts in the air.

  “… outsourcing our solid-state production … Indonesia …” a businessman says to his partner behind me.

  “Layoffs?”

  “A few. You know. Minor collateral effect.”

  William appears in the doorway. He stumbles. I grasp his elbow and help him sit. “Thank you, Adam,” he says. In the video light, his skin is the color of morning snow.

  I apologize to him. “This woman, Lila, is extremely needy,” I say. “But maybe, whatever’s troubling her, we can dispense with it quickly. Then you and I can get to the restaurant.”

  “It’s all right, Adam,” William says. “I understand. You’re surrounded by needy people.”

  “Well.”

  “Like me, for example.”

  “William—”

  “No no, it’s true. I’ve seen it,” he says. “You’re a very kind man, Adam. Patient. A good listener. People sense this and they cling to you for dear life. It’s one of the reasons you’re in trouble with the museum board, isn’t it? They like to keep things ‘professional’—their word for ‘impersonal.’” He reaches across the sticky tabletop and pats the back of my hand. “Well, relax, Adam. Screw the board.”

  I’m startled to hear such language from him.

  “It was the same with me and the university. To be sure, my colleagues looked askance at my research—‘Immortality Studies’ was not proper copy for their recruiting brochures—but mainly it was the time I spent with students, especially after Lily died. My peers said it was unseemly of me to eat and drink and talk with kids outside the classroom. I protested that kids were our jobs; nurturing the young. No, said my colleagues. The institution wanted to be recognized as a major research center—more grant money, that way—so aloofness was the ticket. Head down over a lab table in some darkened corner somewhere. Pooh.”

  I order us a couple of beers and a hard-boiled egg for William.

  He says, “So I ‘followed my bliss,’ as the writer Joseph Campbell used to say.”

  “And the university shunned you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He sips his Rolling Rock. “My studies have sustained me, as will yours.” He lifts his glass to toast me. “I’m sorry you have to leave, Adam. I’ll miss you. Shame on the board for exiling you. But I have faith in your resiliency.”

  “Thank you, William.”

  “Now, before I forget, and before our guest arrives,” he says. “Those pesky black holes? The flaw you pointed out in my theory?”

  I laugh. “Tell me.” I reach over to straighten his shirt collar.

  “Order up!” a bartender yells at a waitress.

  “Centaurus,” William says. “An exception to typical black hole behavior. The Hubble has discovered an intense glow outside its event horizon. Apparently, energy is pouring out of it like pasta flung from a bowl!” William cracks his egg.

  “Congratulations,” I say.

  “Adam!”

  “Lila. Hi.” I reach for her arm. “Here, give me your purse. Please, have a seat.”

  William stands precariously. He offers Lila his hand. “Hello, hello,” he says. “Very nice to meet you, young lady. Sit down. Relax.”

  “Thank you,” Lila says, flustered, straightening her hair. “I’m sorry to call so last-minute, Adam.”

  “Take your time,” I tell her. “Catch your breath.” I order her a beer.

  She leans over and whispers to me, “I wanted to see you alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I had no choice. I told you, I already had plans when you phoned.”

  “Shit. Anyway, anyway, they’re back,” she says, a little louder. She sinks into her chair.

  “Lila—”

  “And please, Adam, don’t ask about my medications, all right? This isn’t me! It’s them!”

  She’s pale and disheveled. She scratches her right ear—her headset at work forms a rash there. Forty hours a week, phoning strangers with offers of revolutionary new kitchen appliances. “I don’t even know what the hell they do,” she’s said. “I mean, how many ways can you dice a carrot, anyway? This is what I went to college for? To expedite soup?”

  Her shapeless blue dress spreads like a tent in her chair. She looks like a child. I urge the beer on her and leap to cheer her up. I say, “By the way, you’ll be happy to know I finally did some investigating on the crop circle thing.”

  “You did?”

  “Absolutely. It’s an old practice,” I say, “dating all the way back to seventeenth-century China. Yes, really. Listen. Historians have found remnants of manmade circles on the Sino-Mongolian border. And these more recent examples in England … at least three different London-based groups, trickster-artists, have hinted they’re responsible for the pranks.”

  “But Adam—”

  “Wait,” I say. “The security cameras at Chilbolton? Turns out, the latest circles weren’t terribly close to the telescope facility. With a little planning and a tractor, these things are surprisingly easy to make. Takes about five or six hours, that’s all. So you see? No mystery. No aliens.” I pat her chilly hand. “Feel better?”

  She frowns, glances at William, starts to talk, sips her beer. Then, meekly: “Okay. Well, then. What about the cow mutilations in Montana?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.” She’s energized now. “Herds of cattle drained of blood, no visible wounds, with their faces lifted off.”

  “Lila. Lila. What do you get from this?” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem to need something to fear. Isn’t that what your therapist suggested? I confess, I don’t quite—”

  “Adam, damn you, don’t you condescend to me.” She throws William a mighty chilly look.

  “I’m not,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “If you won’t believe me, you should at least try to grasp what I’m going through. Always, you throw up this … this … screen of fucking reason.”

  “Understanding is not feeling?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay. But I have to ask you. Are you taking your Zoloft?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m telling you, Adam—I’ve told my doctor—my depression isn’t chemical. It’s the memories of the anal probe.”

  I nod. My eyes hurt. What do I get from this? The flattery of being trusted? Pleasant, I admit. The easing of the constant fluttering in my belly … a distraction from my own vague fears? I don’t know, don’t know.

  All I know is, I’m sitting here tonight in a bland, noisy bar listening to a reasonably intelligent woman talk faceless cows and anal probes.

  Well. It’s easy, and little enough, to listen.

  “The memories get clearer every day,” Lila says.

  “Tell me.”

  “The lights. Remember the lights I told you about?”

  “Of course.” When she first showed up at the planetarium, a year or so ago, she lingered after my performance, asking about the possibility of life beyond Earth. By her third or fourth visit, she was telling me her UFO traumas. Standard tales, popularized in the media: late night, lonely road, strange lights behind the pines … “I saw the lights more than once,” she says now. “I’m certain of that. The first time, it was after work … a triangular pattern, no color I’d ever seen. I can’t describe it, even now. I opened my car door and stepped out. Next thing I know, I’m back behind my steering wheel, but three hours have passed. My ears hurt. I reach for them.” She touches her right lobe. “And there’s dried blood, like someone has ripped out my earrings, then replaced them.”

  I’ve heard this before, more or less the same details. William seems entranced.

  “The second time. After work again. But now, when I come to myself in my car, I’m on a completely different road, about sixty miles away, and
I’m wearing someone else’s clothes. I mean, they don’t even fit me.”

  I order us another round of drinks. She’s looking better. Talking helps.

  “I try to recall what I can, but all I remember is a birthday celebration in the office, right before I left the building. One of my colleagues had turned forty and we’d bought a cake for her. I remembered her holding a gift in her hands, a box about the size of a book, gold wrapping paper, pretty blue bow … it’s only recently, when I look back … when I think of her lifting that present, what I see … suddenly, what I remember… is a pair of charcoal-brown hands, paws really, or fins, webbed and with three fingers, gripping a mechanical box, blinking lights, shiny buttons, and I feel a pain …” She pats her rear. “… right here.”

  I lean across the table and take her hands. “Lila. Whatever you’ve experienced or—forgive me—imagined, I know it’s real to you, and that it torments you, and for that, I’m so very, very sorry.”

  “Thank you, Adam.” She smiles, scratches her ear, and looks at me warmly. Then, bashful, she glances away at an autographed football on the bar. “I only wish sometimes … I wish I had someone to stay with, you know, someone to keep me company.”

  I nod. The truth is—how can I ignore it?—Karen was right about Lila. Karen was always right. If I gave this girl an opening, she’d fly into my bed. I don’t flatter myself that Lila is in love with me or that she even finds me particularly attractive.

  Her smile widens. I squeeze her hands and let them go.

  “So anyway. Now they’re back,” she says. Across the room, a bow-tied fellow thrusts his pelvis against an old-fashioned pinball machine. “Get in there, baby! Yeah!” he shouts. Squeaks and blips blast from hidden speakers.

  “Excuse me. May I ask? Who are ‘they,’ exactly?” William says.

  “Andromedans!” Lila blurts. “And it’s none of your fucking business, old man, all right?”

  “Ah.” William nods. “No one believes you, right?”

  Lila glances at me, blushing. “Right.”

  “William, maybe I made a mistake here,” I say. “Perhaps, if you don’t mind, Lila and I should—”