The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  “It’s okay. Let’s not talk about it.”

  Move on, I think. Everyone’s always moving on. Except they aren’t. Not really. “Yes. All right. But if I decide to come back to Dallas after spending a little time here, can we, I mean, do you think—”

  “I don’t know. For me, right now, it’s one minute to the next.”

  “Yes, but promise me—”

  “I can’t promise anything, Adam! I have to be here for Anna.”

  “The feeling you get in your belly.”

  “What?”

  “It’s how my mom described a ‘moral obligation.’”

  “That’s beautiful. Adam?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I need to lie down now.”

  “Is someone there with you?”

  “Daniel’s just a phone call away.”

  “Okay.”

  “Really. I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?

  “Call me later,” she says. “I love to hear your voice.”

  Howl, howl, howl!

  In downtown Marfa, I turn in my rental car and buy a batch of postcards: garish red sunsets. I stand at the counter next to the cash register and write to Lila, William, and Anna. Near the postcard rack, a stack of pamphlets: The Birds of the Davis Mountains. Cassin’s Kingbird, Clark’s Nutcracker, White-throated Swift.

  I scrawl Marty’s return address on the cards, buy stamps, and drop the cards into a mail slot. Outside, the sun is straight overhead. I cool myself off by imagining night on the other side of the planet. A plane passes and I think of Karen, floating around somewhere … or maybe not. Maybe now she’s firmly grounded. Does she think of me? The plane crosses the sun. The wings become shadows; on land, their outlines sparkle with light reflected off the body of the jet.

  Marfa, sixty miles north of Mexico, was named for the family servant in The Brothers Karamazov, the novel the railway overseer’s wife was reading when her train paused here in 1881. Marty tells me Marfa is famous for three things: its World War II prisoner of war barracks; its use as a backdrop in the Elizabeth Taylor movie Giant; and its transformation into an arts mecca.

  Oh yes: and the Marfa Lights, unexplained flashes in the evening sky whose source has never been discovered. Theories suggest everything from luminous methane gas to UFOs.

  I dodge tumbleweeds in the streets as I stroll past the Paisano Hotel where, apparently, Liz Taylor romped during the filming of Giant (she is said to have swum naked in the pool), coffee shops (only two—Mike’s and Carmen’s), a bookstore, and a gallery featuring smashed automobile sculptures. They look like wadded-up paper, as tall as a man. The colorful textures are lovely, but there’s no denying the violence of a twisted automobile.

  A U.S. Border Patrol truck, massive, olive-green, parks by a curb. Two men in camo clothes, wearing steel helmets and gripping rifles, leap from the cab of the truck and run down an alley. Somewhere, a dog barks.

  Two men pass me on the sidewalk wearing combat boots and sweaty felt cowboy hats. The thing to do, one tells the other, is to form an armed militia in the hills. Then we attack government installations—“McVeigh style”—until the governor resigns and Texas secedes from the country. Then this place would be a fucking paradise.

  Before I stop and think: “McVeigh was a punk,” I mutter.

  The old warriors pause, turn, stare at me. “What the hell?” says one, but nothing’s going to happen. These guys are made of straw. I walk away. A young mother hurries her child past me and into the safety of a dime store. That’s right, ma’am. Just another stranger in town. Who knows who I might be?

  At lunchtime Marty picks me up in his Camry and drives me to the construction site. Clouds like ocean waves. The desert is gold-going-pink in gauzy light, with patches of green where grasslands rise from the sand. In the distance, the Dead Horse Mountains and the cone of an ancient volcano. “Pavement Ends, 32 Miles,” says a big yellow sign.

  Marty’s car smells of fast food. Fries. Overdone beef. “It’s true. Most of those fellows are harmless. Sunday soldiers,” he says when I mention my run-in. “Crackpots. The hills are full of them. But one in ten turns out to be a psychopath. Be careful.” He swings us down a side road. “Maybe it’s because there’s so much space out here, and the air is clear, but this place draws a lot of dreamers,” Marty says.

  “I saw the border patrol. Dressed like paratroopers.”

  “Oh yeah. Mexico is tanking. They’ve got a drug war on their hands. We’ve had a huge influx of illegals. Everyone’s nervous. About a month ago, a couple of feds stumbled on a boy who’d crossed the river. In the dark, they thought he’d raised a rifle—it was just an old stick—and they blew him away. Big stink, as you can imagine. Investigations, court cases. It’s just added to the tensions.” He spreads his arms. “Welcome to my world, little brother.”

  “The Republic of Texas.”

  He laughs. We pass an old Hispanic woman leading a burro with a rope. Strapped to the burro’s back, a portable television set and a microwave oven. “We’re here,” Marty says.

  We park next to a group of men gathered around a concrete slab in a clearing surrounded by mesquite bushes. The men are wearing white shirts and dark ties, sleeves rolled to their elbows. Young professionals. Bright futures. I wilt in the heat. A makeshift drafting table straddles two sawhorses.

  Marty introduces me to the team: architects and contractors, all from Houston. Together, they ponder a set of blueprints on the drafting table. A mild breeze curls the edges of the paper. A scent of lilacs in the air. “Here’s what we’re dealing with,” Marty tells me. From underneath the blueprints, he pulls a copy of a drawing made in 1647 by a man named Wenceslaus Hollar. A view of London. I’m reminded of Susan’s circles, grids, and swirls. “This is one of the historical documents we have, showing the theater’s location, relative shape, and size. Not much to go on. What’s depicted in this other drawing, here, is the second Globe, built after the first one burned. They moved it across the river—see the building with the flag?—and constructed the new theater out of the surviving timbers of the old. We have written accounts, performance contracts and the like, to supplement our knowledge. But overall, the theaters’ layouts remain a mystery.”

  Over his shoulder I glance at the drawings.

  “Shakespeare viewed his stage as the earth,” Marty says. “The balconies, sky.”

  “A magic space.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not sure …” I say.

  “What?”

  “Well, I was just thinking … a year or so ago, for one of my planetarium shows, I did a little impromptu research. The Elizabethans invested a lot of power in the zodiac. In triangulations based on the zodiac. If the theater was open to the sky …”

  Marty removes his shades.

  “Triangulations,” says one of the men. “The zodiac. Interesting.” He tugs a calculator out of his pocket. Below us, a rustling rises from a narrow ravine, the crackling of dry, brittle brush. A crunch of gravel. I peer down a rocky slope to see a Mexican family, a man and a woman probably in their midtwenties with two small children, all dressed in long pants and heavy shirts, trundling through dust. They startle when they spot us. We stand silently. The wind is a razor of heat. The blueprints ripple. Eventually, the family walks away.

  “Broad daylight,” Marty says, shaking his head. “They’re getting bolder. More desperate, I guess.”

  “Where do they go?” I ask.

  “Who knows? Lots of shoe factories on the border, auto manufacturing. And there’s always the East Texas fruit fields, if they can get that far.”

  In the car later, on our way back to town, Big Brother says, “The zodiac?”

  “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  “No,” he says. “But that’ll be all, right? No more pearls of wisdom?”

  “I was just trying to help, Marty.”

  He smiles at me. “You are who you are,” he says.

  “I’m meddling,
you mean. Like Dad.”

  He drops me at the bookstore. A little tense, we agree to meet for supper at the house.

  “So I talked to the chair of our math department,” Marty tells me. He’s reheating spaghetti on the stove. “There may be some adjunct positions opening up in the spring.”

  “I don’t think I can go back to teaching. But thanks,” I say.

  “What’ll you do?”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t get stuck with me.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Maybe I’ll go back to Dallas. You know. After I’ve licked my wounds.”

  “If you need any money …”

  “I’m okay for a while. I live pretty frugally.”

  We laugh. He turns off the burner.

  “Listen,” Marty says. “I gave some thought to what you said this afternoon. Here’s the problem with your suggestion.” He drains the pasta water in a colander. “If we look at the breadth of the zodiac and make equivalent measurements, scaling it down, we get an elegant and workable set of numbers for the theater’s large spaces.”

  “But not for interior doorways or the stage,” I say.

  “Precisely. You fucking love to mess with my world, don’t you?”

  “What else have I got to do?”

  “The Globe was primarily a summer theater. Most of the performances were given in June, July, and August,” he says. “My guess is, the stage was oriented toward the midsummer sunrise, facing the cosmic center, as it were, along the azimuth of the solstice, as many churches were.”

  “I’m impressed,” I say.

  “So. If Shakespeare wanted his stage aimed at the center of the universe, as he perceived it, it probably reflected the core of his true concern.”

  “Man,” I say.

  “Exactly. The proportions of the human body.”

  I pour a glass of wine and toast my brilliant brother.

  “In Shakespeare’s day, anatomy theaters—you know, those pits where doctors performed surgeries?—were built according to ancient drawings of a man on his back, with his feet and hands extended, describing the circumference of a circle,” Marty tells me.

  “Will your architects know what to do with this?”

  He shrugs. “In their theaters, surgeons explored the body’s ills,” Marty says, drizzling into a yellow dish a little pool of olive oil. Extra Virgin.

  “Virgin, just like me!” I remember we said as kids.

  Once upon a time, making our mother laugh.

  I picture Susan lying in an old anatomy theater; in the office of her doctor; floating in the space of one of her paintings.

  “I imagine Shakespeare, in his theater, saw himself doing something similar. Exposing melancholy. Joy,” Marty says.

  “Beautiful, brother. The birth of the Globe.”

  “Okay,” he says, raising his glass. “Let’s eat.”

  20.

  I tell Marty it’s my turn to make supper (I can’t take another night of his noodles). I’ll get steaks and potatoes at the market and fire up the grill when he comes home. “Deal,” he says. After he leaves for morning classes, I shower. As I’m about to walk into town, the phone chirps.

  “Adam?”

  It’s Anna.

  “Hi sweetie. What’s up? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “You knew my mama was dying.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “You knew. Didn’t you? I only thought she was sick.”

  “Anna, honey, tell me. Has there been a change? What’s—”

  “She throws up a lot. My daddy took her to the doctor this morning.”

  “Does she know you’re at home? Are you home? Does she know you’re calling me?”

  “I skipped class. And no, she doesn’t know I have your number. I found it in her purse. She told you, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should have told me you knew.”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “We were friends, Adam. You had a responsibility to tell me you knew. Something that big—”

  Damn this kid!

  “Okay. I’m sorry. Are you taking good care of her?”

  “She won’t let me. She thinks she should take care of me.”

  “You’re right. She does think that. How about your dad? Is he good with her?”

  “They don’t get along very well. They just pretend they do so I won’t be upset. You knew that, too, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know much. We never really talked about your dad. You get upset anyway, huh?”

  “I think you should come back here.” She says this wearily, as if acknowledging I’m a last resort, not the kind of man who can make it rain when the desert really needs it.

  “What does your mama think?”

  “She’s sick. She doesn’t know what she thinks.”

  How did she get so smart?

  “Your mom and dad have a plan, Anna, for going forward.”

  “It’s not a very good one.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know she’s not happy. I know she misses you. She talks about you. She liked it that you liked her paintings.”

  “I miss you guys, too.”

  “So?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Adults always say that. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Anna, if you go to school, I’ll promise to think about it and to talk to your mom again.”

  “If you talk to her, she’ll tell you not to.”

  “But I have to talk to her, honey. You know that.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Get to school?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m really glad you called me. Phone me again sometime.”

  “Come home, Adam.”

  “We’ll talk,” I say. Home? You’re not the center any more.

  I lock the house and walk into town. Small clouds move swiftly together, like animals in a herd. On a telephone pole, a flier announces a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame to be performed at the Chinati Foundation. Posters for a coffeehouse appearance of a local folk duo: Scapegoat & Martyr. One Way signs. Here, there. In these narrow alleys, I imagine, picturing men in boots, people could die in an instant.

  21.

  I stick to the center of the streets. A faint buzzing overhead. Electrical wires. A smell of dust, of overheated car engines, barbecued beef.

  We met, I imagine whispering to Susan on the phone. We had some time together. For a while, we made each other feel more alive. That’s something—maybe more than most people get. Would she believe me? Give me her trust? Would it be enough to overcome sickness and a life of grief afterward? Could I handle a life of grief? Like Dante and his beloved Beatrice? I haven’t done well so far.

  Does grief explain Susan’s pull for me? Hell, since OK City, perhaps grief is all I’m capable of feeling.

  There’s a smell of old tires in the air. Far off, toward the mountains, the whish of cars on a road. Mesquite twigs scrape the cuffs of my pants.

  Late afternoon. I cut through a field of brittle weeds. Crickets leap. The architects have lengthened the theater’s foundation. They’ve pieced together a partial prototype of the stage: a wooden box with a trap door at the top and an entrance and exit to the Underworld.

  I sit on the edge of the Globe and peer down a limestone slope filled with fissures. Mud, pinyon powder, some kind of white and red mineral deposits in the faces of rocks. A faint humming in the earth. Do unseen caverns stretch beneath my feet? Underground streams? Hidden fires, hidden lives? Many old stories, legends, must have sprung from this land. Mexicans, Native Americans, European missionaries. The ghosts of the dead, passing from one world to the next.

  Come home.

  Our home is death.

  Is death our home? Mother, Father, Susan.

  For a moment, I’m dizzy at the edge of the
stage. A hawk circles overhead, its gyre a steadying pattern. My eyes focus.

  A grainy scraping below me, in a little ravine. A rain of pebbles. I turn. Huffing up a weedy incline, a young woman hikes, carrying a baby. She’s wearing black cotton pants, cut midcalf, a dark blouse. Purple yarn ties her long black hair. Skin the color of wet clay. She’s wrapped the baby in a brown cotton blanket. The baby squirms. The woman stops when she spots me.

  I start to say something—I’m not sure what—but she shakes her head. Her eyes dart. “Town,” I tell her. “If you’re looking for town—something to eat?” I point. My movement makes her flinch.

  Men’s voices. Nearby. The barking of dogs. Metallic clinking—belts, keys? The voices rise and fall, coming closer. The woman whimpers.

  I don’t think. I open the trap door in the floor of the stage. “Hurry,” I say. It’s too obvious, the first place they’ll look if they see it. I crawl in after the woman, pull the door shut, and sit beside her in the dark. I should have stayed outside, talked to, distracted the men. What am I doing?

  Too late now.

  An odor of loam and sweat. The baby gurgles, a low moan. I urge the woman to silence her child. From underneath the blanket she pulls a mesh bag. Inside it, a plastic bottle, a little book filled with pictures of angels. The woman turns the pages of the book and the baby settles, watching.

  Boots. Crunching gravel. Men laugh casually, some moving past us. Maybe they’re not pursuing this lady. Maybe they haven’t spotted her. Routine patrol? The baby makes a guttural sound. Above us, on the stage, a radio crackles. “North perimeter,” someone says. “A whole damn family.” The men march away—or so it sounds. Is it the woman’s family they’re after? Has she been separated from her lover, father, mother? What terrible thing has erupted in the center of her life? Where will her pilgrimage lead?

  In light through small cracks in the wooden floor above us, I see her face now that my vision has adjusted to the dark. She’s very young. A teenager. She starts to stand. “No,” I whisper. “Wait a while longer. To be safe.” I can tell she doesn’t understand me, but she grasps my gestures. She sits back down and rocks her baby in her arms. “My name is Adam,” I say, placing my hand on my chest. “You?” I point at her.