The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  The sun sets.

  “As you know, our little cosmos is calling it quits,” I say. “But before it’s done, let’s rejoice one last time at its marvels, along with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who once wrote, ‘Look at the stars! Look up at the skies! / O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!’

  “Some say the souls of the dead are cast into the skies. There, they live on as stars, lighting the dark woods for those of us struggling on Earth. So perhaps endings aren’t so sad, after all.” Minor chords drift through hidden speakers. “Other myths say falling stars are souls returning to Earth, bathed in a purifying fire, where they walk among us as angels.

  “In any case, for six years now, here at the planetarium, we’ve endeavored to suspend ourselves in a state of possibility. Whatever we can envision, perhaps someday we’ll create it. We are builders. We are dreamers. We are once-and-future fire-folk.”

  This is the last time I’ll stand at the center of my universe. No more control. Move on: Marty’s voice in my head.

  I make the moon rise.

  Let them go, I think. Let them all go.

  A rumble of thunder. Lightning. Anna laughs and claps.

  I press a yellow button and an aurora borealis explodes across the northern arc of the dome. Cascading blue light overflows the dipper’s tipped bowl. “May your lives blaze,” I whisper into the microphone.

  Now, one final time, sunlight pours through my space.

  Music for Airports fades into distance. I bring the house lights up. For a moment, no one moves. Then, one by one, the patrons wish me luck and pass silently through the curtains.

  Standing in the portal, Susan catches my eye. “Call us?” she says. With her fingers, she brushes Anna’s hair.

  “Of course,” I say.

  Anna won’t look at me.

  “Will you be all right, honey?” I ask her.

  “My mama’s sick,” she says.

  Susan closes her eyes.

  “I know,” I say.

  Anna shuffles her feet. “My mama is sick and they’re taking away the sky.”

  “So you’ve got to be really strong now.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “I don’t!”

  “For your mother. You’ll learn. Won’t you?”

  She puffs her lower lip. Susan and I lock gazes, helplessly.

  Finally: “Adam?” Anna says.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Can you make it rain?” She grabs my hand. “One more time, for me?”

  And I do.

  16.

  I snag a bus to the airport, pick up my rental car—a new, white midsize (I don’t know one automobile from another)—and return to the planetarium. I place Glenn Gould, Brian Eno, and other music CDs into a small cardboard box; fill a paper sack with constellation slides and star charts; remove the pen-sized pointer from the console and wire it to a battery from the storage room. Now I can aim a red, lighted arrow anywhere I wish (a pointless activity—pun intended—but one I’ll relish). I unlatch the curtains from the Star Room’s portal and fold them into the car’s backseat.

  A new letter has arrived. Should I leave it for the kid the board has hired—at a paltry wage—to activate Robert Redford for their fancy new shows, the voice of Tom Hanks? I unseal the envelope:

  If you ever get up there, please know that the moon is pure pumice, straight from the earth’s core. I have proof, and I don’t need the Bible for this, that Earth was once much bigger than it is at present, but it busted apart upon collision with some unholy solar debris. The Bible doesn’t say so but I can prove this is accurate, if you would like a demonstration at my home (I’ll be gone next month, but any time after that is fine. Tuesdays, around three, are best).

  I slip the letter into my box, a keepsake.

  At home, I swaddle my computer in a series of blankets and set it in the trunk. I throw my clothes into a suitcase, along with a family scrapbook. The apartment is paid for until the end of the month, but I’ve informed my landlord I’m leaving. One last look around. My radio. I click it on as I dust the countertops. A debate about the death penalty. None of the show’s guests, whose loved ones have been murdered, are in a benevolent mood. “There’s no way that thug can atone for what he did to my family,” says one man, sobbing. “Killing’s too good for him.”

  “I want that mother to fry,” a woman shouts.

  I swallow a gust of Albuterol. Forgive me, I think, staring at a cobweb in a corner of my ceiling. I can’t reach it even with the broom. I picture my parents’ faces. Marty’s face. For everything I did, please forgive me. For things I didn’t know I’d done, please forgive me. Forgive me.

  I step outside. “Forgive me,” I say to the wind.

  I drive to the airport, intending to hang around the concourses one last time before hitting the road. By the side of the highway I spot a slender stick and almost stop to pick it up. It might be useful. After all, from a vertical stick in the ground, you can learn the exact time once a day (when the sun is highest in the sky and the stick’s shadow is shortest), you can mark the summer and winter solstices, and you can determine the sun’s altitude. There are quicker, more accurate means of making such calculations, but none simpler or quite as graceful.

  Ingenuity over drudgery—much to be desired.

  In 250 BC, Eratosthenes used a stick, the sun, and the stick’s shadows to measure the size of the earth; hundreds of years later, scientists determined Eratosthenes’ figure—a circumference of 46,250 kilometers—was accurate to within 15 percent. Much harm, much good can come from a man with a stick.

  I decide to keep moving.

  At the airport, I park the car and make my way to Terminal A. The copy shop clatters with motion, the dull fertility of repetition. All day, a stay against Nothing (though the world is ending every minute!): relentlessly, the machines duplicate anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything any—

  I head for the TRAAIN. “Please clear the doorway,” says the train’s robotic voice. A crowd of people rushes in. A crowd of people rushes out. “Standing in the doorway can endanger yourself and others.”

  I ride for half an hour. Then I give Marty I call. “I’m setting out,” I say. “I think I’ll take my time. Look around.”

  “Beautiful West Texas? Rattlesnakes? Tumbleweeds?”

  “What is it Dad used to say? Embrace the world? I don’t know. I’ll be there in a couple of days.”

  “Okay, bro. Hey, we finally poured the foundation for the new theater,” he says. “You’ll get here just in time. You’re going to be impressed.”

  “Look forward to it.”

  I go to find my car.

  17.

  Night-driving. Its great pleasure is the odd radio fare. For a while, I listen to a BBC production of King Lear. The king wanders the heath in exile. “Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!” he shouts. “Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack.”

  Lear at midnight, in the middle of the Lone Star state. Who’d have imagined it? Seek and ye shall find!

  When the performance ends, a broadcaster delivers the latest news: thousands of Iraqi children are reported dead as a result of U.S. food sanctions; the Atomic Energy Commission does not know where the nation’s nuclear waste should be stored; former Beatle George Harrison—the “spiritual” Beatle—has been diagnosed with throat cancer.

  I hum “A Hard Day’s Night”—if not the Music of the Spheres, at least a pleasant little tune.

  Near McDonald Observatory, there used to be a globe factory. Several years ago, I toured it and watched the sure-fingered women on the factory floor paste hemispheres together, as if arranging apple slices on a blue china plate. The women were serious, intense—laboring, it seemed, with a strict moral purpose (and for much less than minimum wage). Not long ago, I read in a newspaper that the factory had moved south, across the Rio
Grande. The production of the planet, outsourced to Mexico.

  I pull my battery-powered pointer from a paper sack and aim it out the window. With my lighted arrow, I touch hummocks of hay, horses, cows, and sheep. Cloud-bottoms. Rotted barns, coffee shops (“We never close!”) crumbling into dirt. Within seconds, I’ve circumscribed the earth.

  Just as I’m thinking I need a nap, or at least a break to stretch my legs, I see a neon sign by the highway up ahead. Flickering pink letters: Paradise Motel.

  How can I pass it by?

  I turn left, off the highway, and park. The motel consists of three single-story brick buildings in a row. A drive-in movie screen, isolated from the motel by a wire-mesh fence, angles toward the rear parking lot. The swimming pool is filled with air. A green lamp blazes in the office window. Above it, an electric sign says, “Cable TV!”

  The moon—marred all night by clouds—shines briefly in the east, its craters dark, like pieces chipped from a pane of thick smoked glass.

  Behind the office desk stands a man who—damn if it isn’t so—looks like my father, with this difference: he smiles easily and broadly.

  No. Looking closer, I think I’m making this up. I’m tired. This guy looks nothing like my father. Too swarthy. Too short.

  “Howdy. Pulling an all-nighter?” he says to me.

  “I got a late start.” I sign the register.

  “Breakfast comes with the room: coffee and doughnuts here in the lobby, seven to ten,” he says. He hands me a silver key.

  He’s assigned me a corner room facing the movie screen. An auto salvage yard sprawls across a barren field to the west of the motel lot. Hundreds of hubcaps hang on a cinder-block fence in front of the main office. I unlock the door to my room, flip a wall switch. Light explodes onto a thick orange carpet, a single bed, a tiny TV, and a lamp with a yellow paper shade.

  I remember a statistic from one of my shows: 98 percent of the universe remains invisible to us.

  Dear God, that’s not nearly enough. I switch off the light.

  It doesn’t take long for my eyes to adjust to the dark. With my red, flaring arrow I write my name on the walls. Adam Post. The light’s afterglow remains in my eyes for several seconds.

  On the bed, I wrap myself in part of the Yucca curtain. The velvet is soft and warm, a ghostly heat I imagine radiating from the auras of Hollywood stars, amazing black and white light from the screen penetrating the curtain. Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn. Happily, I hug my pillow.

  On the nightstand, I find the TV remote and a Magic Fingers box. I slip two quarters into the box and the bed begins to vibrate. It hums and whines like a flying saucer in an old sci-fi flick. I turn on the television. The reception is awful. I click through the channels and settle on a Hedy Lamarr movie. Snow obscures the figures on the screen: reflections in a small, tarnished mirror.

  Birds all night. All night, birds.

  It’s three in the afternoon when I wake. I’m soaked beneath the curtain. The TV wheezes: an evangelist with white, poofy hair yelling, “Hell!” I turn him off and stand at the window. Somewhere nearby, children are singing, a song within a song. One voice holds a high note while others chant melodies. I remember Fridays at the planetarium, the noise and excitement of the kids as they gathered outside the Star Room.

  The window is dusty. So, it appears, is the sky.

  I shower and shave. Outside, on the sidewalk in front of my room, sunlight blinds me. I’m afraid to move. I shield my eyes with my arm. The sky is immense. I realize I’m used to a much smaller version of it.

  In the office, the manager—Fred Davis, says a sign on the counter—slaps price tags on cellophane-wrapped packets of postcards. “You missed breakfast,” he tells me. “Lunch, too.”

  “And you?” I say. “You don’t sleep?”

  He laughs. “My shift started last night just before you pulled in. I’m clocking out in an hour. My wife’ll take over then.”

  “I guess you don’t see much of each other.”

  “Secret to a long, happy marriage,” he says. “Might be half a sweet roll left on that table over there. Otherwise, if you’re hungry, you’ll have to walk down the highway a bit, just past the auto salvage. There’s a Sure-Mart there.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You missed your checkout time. I’m afraid we’ll have to charge you for tonight.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I could use the extra night, anyway.”

  I set off down the road. A short walk to stir the blood. Kids chase each other across the motel lot. Aside from my car, I see four station wagons parked in the gravel slots. In the auto salvage yard, a man welds something onto a car bumper. He’s propped the bumper across two rusty barrels. Sparks jitter from his torch, rise a little, float to the ground. Sunlight blares off the hubcaps attached to the fence.

  The Sure-Mart is dim inside, and my eyes are so dazzled by the outside light, I’m helpless for a moment. Slowly, forms appear: outlines of boxes, bags, glass freezer cases. Colors complete the lines now, and textures, as though matter was a paint-by-numbers game, filling the world’s given shapes. I stick a frozen hot dog in a microwave oven in a corner of the store, next to a rack of girlie mags: Angels of the Desert Southwest!

  Back outside, walking by the highway, I tear open a small bag of Fritos with my teeth. I’m light-headed, sweating. Two jet trails cross each other overhead, perfect, half-circular lines, as though the ecliptic and the celestial equator had twisted together like pretzels. A praying mantis leaps from the dirt and brushes my forearm. A flash of green against startling blue sky. A delicate touch on my skin. The air smells of sage.

  I breathe, slow and easy.

  In the motel office, Davis stands with a pair of binoculars, staring out the window.

  “What are you looking at?” I ask.

  He scans the flat horizon. “Nothing,” he says. “But you never know when something’s going to turn up out there.”

  Back in my room, I hear children shout, “Ha ha, you’re it!” from the parking lot. A beautiful little girl, as tall and dark as Susan, flies past my window, followed by three or four other girls, laughing and singing. They form a ring on the sidewalk and do a fast, frenetic dance.

  For supper I finish the Fritos and munch a Power Bar. On television, a man eats a bowl of worms in order to win a prize.

  Shadows in the evening light reveal the textures of my room’s rough walls: moonlike in the unevenness of their surfaces. It’s hot. I stare at the telephone. Finally, I pick it up and call Susan. “I’m glad I caught you at home,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

  “A little tired today. Anna’s been a problem.” Her voice awakens me like sudden heat or ice. “Daniel thinks we need to take her to a therapist. He doesn’t think she’s handling my news very well.”

  “Listen,” I say. “Listen.” Wrong. Wrong. What’s wrong with me? “I hadn’t planned to say this, but it’s so nice to hear your voice, and I … I think I made a mistake, Susan.”

  “Adam, what are you talking about?”

  “I think I want to come back for you,” I tell her. “I want you with me.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “For all the reasons you already know. Adam, please.”

  “Is your husband there? Can you talk freely?”

  “Yes, I can talk, but don’t do this.”

  “I knew I’d miss you. I didn’t know how much,” I say. The words make it all true, whether or not it was true before. Who knows what comes when and why? The dome spins this way and that. “I haven’t felt anything, not a thing, since—”

  “Me, neither,” she admits. A shallow, raspy breath.

  “So?”

  “Nothing. So nothing. You know that.”

  “Susan, can I call you again? Tomorrow?”

  “Of course. Yes. I want you to stay in touch. But please don’t say these crazy things … or pity yourself … or whatever’s going on, Adam. All right? Where are you, by the
way? Some terrible old motel room?”

  “Exactly. Susan, do you at least think about it? About us?”

  “I won’t answer that. How can you ask? I’m tired. I need to lie down.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Please respect me on this. You know the situation. For God’s sake, Adam.”

  “I know.”

  “And I don’t want to hear the word obligation. I’m not one of your crackpots. I’m a dying woman.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s the truth. Anna has to accept it. You have to accept it. And none of this is fair to my husband.”

  “But as long as—” Wrong wrong wrong.

  “Let me hear you say it. I want to hear you acknowledge the truth.”

  The truth? For some reason, I flash on the bird my father and I found years ago in the restaurant parking lot. Fleeing on two firm wings? “Yes,” I whisper.

  “Yes what?”

  “You’re dying.”

  “Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So no more nonsense, all right?”

  “Susan?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m—”

  “You’re lonely, Adam. That’s all it is. Stay out of crappy motels. You hear me?”

  I rub my eyes. “Sleep well, then. My love to Anna.”

  “You too. Good night. Adam?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for calling,” she says.

  The receiver burns my palm.

  Numb, I sit on the curb outside my room, fanning my face with a sheaf of stationery. Fireflies twinkle in the night. The hubcaps on the fence at the salvage yard shimmer in blue moonlight. The color reminds me of Susan’s palette, of our day together in the gallery when she told me she was sick. I’ve lost interest in things that could be finished …

  Apparently, the drive-in behind the motel specializes in classics and second-run movies. Lauren Bacall flickers across the screen. She was one of my mother’s favorites. I remember, in that clean new theater in Oklahoma City … no. Imagine instead Robert Hipkiss as a boy, sitting dreamily in the Yucca. Don’t feel. Don’t try to understand.