The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  In the parking lot, a boy runs in circles, blowing bubbles with a bottle of soap and a pink plastic wand. The bubbles rise, brightening as they catch the film-light. Clouds smudge the sky, but I can make out the constellation Crux, its upper star a clear orange.

  “Mommy, look!” shouts the boy with the bottle of soap, as a cluster of bubbles floats toward Lauren Bacall’s wet lips.

  18.

  Ahead of me as I drive, the sun rises and then appears to rise again—the brightness spreads so fast, cutting through a nearly cloudless sky. Rocks in fields on either side of the road absorb the light and shine like mirrors: flecks of sky, chipped and dropped to Earth.

  I’ve tuned my radio to jazz, a program entitled “Drummers’ Extravaganza”: Cozy Cole, Chick Webb, Big Sid Catlett, Zutty Singleton, Dave Tough, Baby Dodds, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson, Shelly Manne, Panama Francis, Jo Jones, and the great Kenny Clarke.

  I check the map. I can stay on the highway or I can turn here and take a country road. No doubt, the highway is more efficient but not as elegant as the road. I turn. Up ahead, a splintered wooden structure, the base of an old windmill, perhaps. As I approach, I see it’s part of a much larger ruin: an old aviary, according to a faded painted sign. Oak poles cluster together, some leaning badly in an octagonal pattern; wire-mesh screens—sagging now to the ground. Large wooden dowel pins (perches for the birds?) lie scattered like bones in the dirt. A few red and yellow feathers—green and blue ones, too—rustle from nails or splinters on which they snagged long ago.

  I stand and sip water from a bottle. The feathers twist in the wind.

  I check the map once more. The sun is blinding now, the land a lake of light. On the horizon, hills: soft crevices filled with shade or illumination, strong here, weak there—as varied as the thick encaustic surfaces of Susan’s paintings. This morning, I’m feeling a refreshing distance from her, a mild embarrassment about the call I made last night. Or maybe I’m just trying to talk myself into experiencing nothing. A cloud uncurls like a sash around the sun.

  I set out again, brightness cascading over bushes, billboards, rocks. They all appear to move. On the outskirts of a small ghost town, a naked mannequin, missing an arm, lies beside the road. Empty hamburger bags blow against her torso. Up ahead, a tattered sign says, “Re-elect Edwin Low, Sheriff.” Seven or eight sparrows perch on a sagging telephone wire; a new bird arrives, settles among them, and they all begin to preen in pleasure and excitement.

  On my radio, Jo Jones pounds out a drumbeat as steady as a pulse.

  Squinting against the glare, I nearly miss a curve in the road. I’ve entered the desert unprepared for the vigor of the sky. At a gas station–café, I buy a cheap pair of sunglasses and give Marty a call at a pay phone whose cracked glass door won’t close. Just inside the restaurant, a waitress stands behind a cash register slurping lemonade, reading a Screen Secrets magazine. Behind her, a calendar on the wall rustles, open to the wrong month.

  “Hey,” I tell Marty. “Looks like I’ll get there tomorrow afternoon sometime. That okay with you?”

  “Fine, fine,” he says. He sounds harried. “The architects are squabbling about our theater,” he tells me. “Stage measurements. Windows and doors.”

  A tumbleweed blows against the phone booth.

  My brother’s voice rises and I hear a bit of the old hair-trigger Marty, the one who always accused me of stealing his toys. “Anyway, I’ll be glad when you get here, bro. Take my mind off this stuff.” An invitation to disaster, I think: he’ll count on me to make things better, and when I can’t, he’ll turn on me. We’ll fall into our old patterns and this time Mom won’t be around to save us from ourselves.

  No. I’m not being fair. He isn’t all that angry. And his annoyance is justified. Maybe I’m the problem, I think. Little creep.

  I pass a farmer in a field pounding dirt with a shovel to no apparent purpose. Clouds crowd the sky, reeling like silver clock gears. Another nameless town, full of trucks hauling cattle feed. Wind scatters hay from the trucks’ open beds. The streets seem made of straw. At a high school, a marching band rehearses on a practice football field. Farther on, in the middle of a flat, shadowless field, an abandoned fairground sprawls: an off-kilter merry-go-round, rusting in the sun, an old loop-the-loop ride.

  Evening. Thunderheads. A faint water-smell in the air. Flash-lightning shoots through the sky; the electrical charges appear to overflow the clouds’ limits and burst toward Earth. Then, just as quickly as the storms gathered, they’re gone. The sky begins to clear. At dusk, a single cloud changes color with the sunset; one by one, cirrus wisps, like mirrors, take up the hue—a faint orange-pink—and sink with the sun.

  The night is warm. I find a rest stop and kill my engine. Crickets skreek in the weeds—here, there, then a whole chorus. If you prove that there cannot be motion without cause, you’ve proved the existence of God, said Thomas Aquinas. I open my door. One cricket hushes. Soon, others follow suit.

  Bootes, Aquila, the Little Dipper (like the tiller of a ship). Saturn and Mars. A star cluster, low in the west, too faint to have been etched on the planetarium’s star ball.

  Though the air is warm, I figure a fire would be nice. An aesthetic pleasure. One should never forego an aesthetic pleasure. I gather twigs and sticks and, using the car’s cigarette lighter, start a little flame. Sparks flit here and there, mingling with lightning bugs. A meteor spikes through Cassiopeia. Antares, in the heart of the scorpion, shines like a candle flame through a little patch of alabaster.

  I must have slept, stretched across the hood of my car. The ground is moist with dew and the air is chilly. I’ve got a crick in my neck. I wander into a field and take a piss. Meteors zizzle. In the south, a few stars rarely visible in this hemisphere poke above the horizon, their light as faint as a far-off lament.

  On my radio, a newsman says New York’s World Trade Center will host an important economic summit tomorrow: “There’ll be much excitement around the Twin Towers. Following the ’93 bombing incident, security, naturally, will be tight.”

  More jazz. The Bill Evans Trio, from the Village Vanguard sessions—recorded, says an announcer, just days before Scott Lafaro, the bass player, was killed in an automobile accident.

  Castor and Pollux gleam above the road: a pair of quarreling brothers. The moon begins to rise. The sky is many colors: black, silver, yellow, deep blue. A faint eggplant tint, over in the east.

  I turn off the radio and crawl into the back seat, wrapped in the Yucca curtain. At dawn I wake. Sunlight streaks across the remaining stars until even the most gorgeous are gone.

  19.

  “The prodigal brother,” Marty says. “In the bosom of his family at last!”

  “Don’t start with the literary allusions,” I say.

  “Deal—as long as you promise to keep the cosmos out of our conversations.”

  I laugh. “Neither of us will be able to play by these rules.”

  “Come in, come in. Let me look at you. You’re thin. Don’t you eat?”

  “It’s been stressful.”

  “You always were a-quiver, as the poets say.”

  “There you go again.”

  “How ‘bout I whip us up some spaghetti? We’ll unload your car later. Scotch, vodka, beer?”

  “Red wine?”

  “You got it.”

  Since I saw him last, Marty’s brown hair has thinned at the temples and he’s gained six or seven pounds. Otherwise, he’s the same: slightly bowlegged, long-faced and prematurely jowly, like Dad. He’s wearing khaki pants, a white shirt, and black cowboy boots. His house is austere. A hound’s-tooth couch, a couple of wooden rocking chairs. A plain deal table in the center of the dining room. On it, The Riverside Shakespeare, open to a page of Hamlet, and the rough drafts of a pair of Marty’s articles.

  As a sign of his hospitality he’s displayed on an otherwise empty shelf a book I sent him one Christmas on the work of Joseph Cornell. I thought it might be a point
of connection between us, science and art, though as I recall he never said a word about it. The book offers photographs of Cornell’s shadowboxes: Toward the “Blue Peninsula,” a simple white container filled with wire mesh. Behind the wire, a tiny window opens onto startling blue sky—a glimpse of infinity in a claustrophobic space. Cassiopeia #1, only fourteen inches wide, its inner walls plastered with star charts: heaven folded into the equivalent of a cigar box. Solar Set, a box featuring sketches of the sun and of Earth’s orbit around it, behind five fluted glasses, each holding clear yellow or shadowy blue marbles—phases of the moon. Staring at the book, I’m struck with a fierce and piercing homesickness for the planetarium.

  Charmingly, a small brick fireplace occupies the northeast corner of Marty’s living room. On the mantel sits a china doll in a glass bubble. I’d forgotten Marty took it when we sold our folks’ house. It used to belong to our grandmother. “Grandma would be pleased,” I call to Marty. He’s uncorking a smoky bottle in the kitchen.

  “What’s that?”

  “Her doll. It would tickle her that you kept it.”

  “Oh, nothing satisfied that old woman.”

  “True.”

  “It comforts me to have it there. You know. The familiarity.”

  “You never struck me as sentimental,” I say. I join him in the kitchen.

  He’s poured himself a whiskey. “Sentimental? No,” he says. “I like order. Continuity. That’s all.”

  On the pantry door, by the stove, he’s taped a newspaper headline: MCVEIGH DEAD. “Like I say,” he says, catching my stare. “Order.”

  “‘Move on.’ Wasn’t that your advice to me?” I ask.

  “Absolutely. But we can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”

  We take our drinks to the table. He shoves aside Shakespeare. “Once the theater’s finished—if we can get the damn architects to agree—we’re thinking Hamlet will be our first production,” he says.

  “Been busy,” I say, nodding at his drafts.

  “Doing okay. If nothing else, I’ve got good work habits. I’ve become a set-in-his-ways old man.”

  “Hardly old.”

  “Dad was like that. Remember?” Marty asks. “He loved us, but he was happiest, I think, on his own, puttering around his tools and that junk in the garage.”

  “No. That’s not how I picture him at all.” I sip my wine. “It seemed to me he was always making an effort to help other people—his ‘moral obligations.’ Remember? Like those roughnecks, those Mexican guys.”

  “Who?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. When was this?”

  “Oh, we were seven or eight. He had them to supper. You really don’t remember?”

  He shakes his head and laughs. “‘Moral obligations’? All I know is, he acted so aggrieved whenever I asked him for something. Extra allowance, the car keys.”

  “Hm. You didn’t keep his core samples, did you? His rock collection?”

  “I think it got tossed when the house sold.”

  “I always loved those pieces.”

  “Yeah, well, that stuff … that was your thing with him. ‘Nother drink?” Marty asks.

  “I’m fine. And you?”

  He pours himself a second whiskey. “Me?”

  “Your thing with Dad?”

  He laughs. “In college, when I told him I was going to major in English, he didn’t say a word. Later, I found out he’d phoned my professors, asking them, ‘What the hell can an English grad do?’”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Sweet? Meddling, is what it was.”

  “He was concerned about you.”

  “More about him than me. I was his obligation, but I don’t think morality had anything to do with it.”

  Down the block, a lawnmower whines. A clock ticks in the kitchen.

  “I appreciate you letting me stay, Marty.”

  He toasts me.

  “Even if the board hadn’t forced me out, I’m not sure I … I mean, I was struggling.”

  “With what?”

  “Women. Work. You know.” Susan’s face floats like a pane of light in the air in front of me. “But mostly …” I glance toward the pantry door, at the killer’s bold, familiar name.

  “Still?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t feel it, too.”

  He shakes his head.

  “It’s funny to hear myself say this.” It would take an 82-inch telescope, shoved down my throat, to locate everything I’m feeling now. “I’ve been trying to ignore it, but … maybe it took seeing you to pull it out of me.”

  Inconsolable?

  “Adam, we’ve talked about this.”

  “You said it yourself. You can’t pretend the past didn’t happen.”

  “Yes. But you put it behind you.”

  “How?”

  “File it away.”

  “Fine. But how?”

  “I don’t know. You work. You fuck. You drink.” He stands. “You cook. I’m going to put the spaghetti on. And you should take a shower. What did you do, sleep in the car last night?”

  “As a matter of fact.”

  He looks at me and sighs.

  “All right,” I say. “I won’t be long.”

  In the back bedroom, I slip out of my clothes. A bed, a night table, a chair, a set of dresser drawers. No curtains on the window, overlooking a small backyard. No pictures on the walls. I shower quickly, comb my hair in the dresser mirror, pull on a pair of jeans and a blue cotton shirt. Gingerly, I open a dresser drawer. Empty. Another one, the same. In a bottom drawer I find a handful of faded snapshots: Marty and me as kids. We’re dressed in dark shorts and black and white Oxfords. Quintessential 1950s geeks. All that’s missing are the Davy Crockett coonskin caps. The grin on Marty’s face—wide, slightly crooked—I saw only minutes ago, in the kitchen.

  The spaghetti is clumpy and thick. Marty apologizes. “Actually, I don’t often cook,” he says. “On my own, you know, it doesn’t seem worth the trouble.” My poor, fucked-up brother. Something is wrong with us. Dad knew it. Something has always been wrong. Maybe Marty’s inconsolable too. Perhaps he just hides it better. “I usually grab a burger on my way home from school.”

  He tops off my glass.

  “I used to eat at the airport,” I tell him. “I liked the bland atmosphere.”

  “You’re a weird duck, bro, you know that?”

  “I could relax there. No demands.”

  We laugh awkwardly.

  “So,” I say. “We’re going to be okay?”

  “You and me? Sure. Why not?”

  “Do you remember how angry you’d get at me for messing with your toys? How Mom had to run to our room and make peace?” I ask. “Tell me you remember that.”

  “I remember.”

  “I’m relieved.”

  “I don’t have toys any more. We’ll be fine.” He chuckles. “Though I’ll tell you … as a kid, I remember thinking life was great till you showed up, bawling, pissing, and shitting.” The truth at last! “For a while there, I thought you were going to take away everything I had.”

  “Great. And here I am again,” I say.

  “At my invitation.” The whiskey has loosened him up. “The thing with you was, you had such a rage to know everything. To put your hands on it, like a blind person.” He reaches for the bottle. “Honestly, Adam, it wasn’t the stuff, the toys and such … I worried you saw things—the truth of them—in ways I never could. I was in awe of you, bro.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s true. And of course I hated the hell out of you for it.”

  “I couldn’t see anything, Marty. I was too busy anticipating your next meltdown.”

  He gives me an oh-so-innocent look.

  “Honestly. Every move I made, I knew it upset you. Cards on the table? I remember our childhood as a series of little explosions.”

  “Well. Two little geniuses together, what do you expect?” Marty grins.

  “But you
did make the sun rise,” I say.

  “Come again?”

  “When you pulled back the bedroom shade, real dramatic. Told me to sit up, get ready. Remember?”

  He drains his whiskey. “You were a pain in the ass, little bro.”

  “So were you,” I say.

  We stand and clap each other’s backs.

  As we unload the car, he doesn’t say a word about the theater curtains or my pointer. Once we’ve arranged my stuff in the guest room, he yawns loudly, a bit theatrically. “I’m bushed,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  “Got everything you need?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Thanks.”

  In the dark, I see the first edge of moonlight slide across the floor from the bedroom window. I set my things around the room; fill the dresser drawers with my underclothes and socks. Yesterday, the sky expanded above me. Tonight I’m safe and snug.

  I won’t sleep.

  I sit on the edge of the bed, thinking of Susan.

  Through the walls I think I hear—yes, exactly, as in the old days—Marty’s light snores.

  In the morning, Marty goes to teach his classes. He lives on the east side of Marfa and commutes a few miles to his college in a little town called Alpine. I tell him I’ll poke around Marfa for a while, and we agree to meet at lunchtime. He’ll take me to the desert to see the theater.

  Before I leave the house I phone Susan. She’s not doing well today. “Nausea and headaches,” she says. “It happens.”

  “Can Anna help you?”

  “She tries. She’s doing more of the grocery shopping for me. Daniel’s very kind, but he wasn’t prepared for this, of course. We were pretty distant already and under these circumstances … well, everything’s a little forced. Hard to find our balance together. Especially knowing what’s coming.”

  “I’m so sorry, Susan.”

  “And you? You made it to your brother’s?”

  “We’re fine. It’s very comfortable here. He couldn’t be more accommodating. Susan, I apologize for my call the other night. The last thing I want to do is add to your pressures.”