“What was it?”
“Well. Khufu was grand. Khufu was a monument, writ large. The greatest wonder of the ancient world. Tut’s tomb, however, was either built over, or flooded over, or used as a dumping ground—it disappeared. It was hidden. No one thought to loot it because it wasn’t there. Are you following?”
“Vaguely,” Elwin admitted.
“Yeah, well, that’s where human nature comes in.” Here Carrollton leaned in, lowering his voice. Out of politeness, Elwin leaned in too. “Let’s say it’s the year 5510. Civilization has collapsed, then reemerged. Viral catastrophe, resource depletion, whatever the cause. But humanity has inched its way back, okay? You’re exploring the New Mexico salt flats though the name New Mexico means as much to you as, I don’t know, the Tumulus culture does today. What are you looking for? Doesn’t matter. But you come upon this massive, super-forbidding, intensely permanent monolith in the middle of all this nowhere. There’s writing all over it, courtesy of this crackerjack linguist four thousand years earlier (that’s you), but you can’t make sense of it. So what do you do?”
“Curse the linguist, who clearly wasn’t so crackerjack.”
“Bwah! Maybe,” Carrollton said, which Elwin didn’t quite appreciate. “No, look, for starters, here’s what you don’t do: You don’t get the heck outta there. Uh-uh. You set up camp and you dig and you pick and pry and poke to try to figure out what’s so damn important here. Because clearly, like the pyramids, this site meant something to someone. This site had value. And because you’re human, you want to know why.”
“Fair enough,” said Elwin.
“Well, there’s my argument.” Here Carrollton paused. Elwin blinked. “You see? We’re talking about building a modern-day Khufu when we might be better off building Tut’s tomb. Building something that isn’t there. Put another way, maybe the best marker for all this waste material would be no marker at all. Throw some standard-issue government concrete on it for the short term, let erosion do the rest. Be gone in a century.”
“Out of sight, out of mind,” Elwin murmured.
“Exactly.”
Elwin weighed this for a while as the plane rose, watching through the window as Newark dropped farther and farther beneath him. The multicolored shipping containers, stacked at Port Elizabeth, looked like a giant circuit board, a teeming matrix of stuff parked beside the long charcoal smudge that was Newark Bay. Then the intestinal snarl of roadways south of the Ironbound, as the plane banked westward, and the quilted neighborhoods out toward Scotch Plains and Watchung—then clouds, gray and linty-looking, devouring the view. Elwin turned back to Carrollton.
“Several issues with that,” he said, more brusquely than he’d intended but then something about Carrollton was itching him. “First off, Tut’s tomb was opened. Whether it was safe for, what’d you say, a thousand years or three thousand years—that’s a fractional difference.”
Carrollton blew the air from his cheeks. Obviously he’d been hoping to find an ally, seeking to line up support for his do-nothing proposal. “It might be worth noting,” he said, “that it was opened by archaeologists, rather than looters.”
“To some people those would be synonyms,” Elwin said. “Motives aside, the result was fundamentally the same. The tomb was opened, explored, emptied.”
“You have to keep in mind, it’s a theoretical construct—”
“But secondly,” Elwin countered, “there’s a moral component.”
Carrollton frowned.
“The warning, the marker system itself, would seem a moral obligation. Something like the warning label on a pack of cigarettes.”
“Ah huh,” Carrollton said. “But is there anyone who’d argue, realistically, that those warnings are in any way effective?”
“Maybe not. They weren’t to me, thirty years ago. But there’s a strong argument to be made that they’re morally incumbent.”
“Morally incumbent,” Carrollton repeated, as if he’d never heard the words conjoined. “Well. I’m not sure the analogy works, but it’s a valid point.” He pursed his lips, lifted his eyebrows, sank a little into his seat. “Like I said, you know, I expected resistance.”
With a smidge of pity, Elwin said, “I wouldn’t say resistance . . . ,” though he did think Carrollton’s idea was only half an inch from crazy. Then again, he thought the whole undertaking was only half an inch from crazy, too: budgeting $120 million for a monument to waste in the New Mexico salt flats. “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “I’ve been talking about this with my father a good bit . . .”
“Your father?”
Elwin bristled at the condescending smile Carrollton was giving him, as if he was expecting Elwin to relay some ha-ha idea à la his son’s proposal to insulate highways with radioactive waste, or his daughter’s to blast the stuff into the sun. To credential his dad, Elwin said, “He taught history at Montclair State for almost forty years,” then immediately undermined it by adding, “He’s got Alzheimer’s now, but . . .”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s . . . funny.”
“Funny?” Carrollton must’ve thought he meant the Alzheimer’s.
“No, what he says about it. He says the whole project is the most depressing thing he’s ever heard.”
“The Markers project? Depressing, how?”
“Just the idea that . . . this is the deepest time capsule we’ve ever conceived. Aside from the Voyager mission, this is the longest-range communication attempt we’ve ever undertaken, as a society. And what’s in the time capsule? Spent fuel rods, warhead shavings, Pyrex tubes, rags, junk. Just a big radioactive pile of . . . shit.”
Carrollton was grinning. Elwin felt certain he’d greeted his children’s ideas with the same supercilious grin. “But that’s all any civilization leaves behind,” he said. “Think about it. Not a single library survived antiquity. It’s just tombs and trash heaps. Historically speaking, we are what we bury. Biologically, too. There’s a hundred thousand terabytes of data in a single gram of human feces. Talk about shit.”
Elwin turned to the window and watched the silver wing slice the atmosphere, squinting from the sunlight that was bleaching the cloud layer beneath them and somehow feeling, through the soles of his shoes, all two hundred thousand pounds of turbine thrust that were hurling him westward and detaching him from the earth. Carrollton was vacantly thumbing the SkyMall catalog while monitoring the flight attendant’s progress up the aisle with the beverage cart. Elwin revisited the Haynes manual, but, finding none of the usual comfort in it, pulled the Waste Isolation Project information packet from his bag and for half an hour or more, while drinking half a glass of ginger ale and munching half a bag of peanuts, trained a hard stare upon its pages.
Suddenly, he asked Carrollton, “Whatever happened to the car?”
Absorbed in the in-flight movie, Carrollton had to yank out an earbud. “Say again?”
“Whatever happened to the car?”
“The car?”
“The Pontiac,” Elwin said. “The Tempest.”
“Oh, gosh,” Carrollton said. “I haven’t thought about that car in twenty, thirty years.” He rubbed at his mustache and shut one eye in half concentration. Then he looked at Elwin, with something like amusement and distant melancholy, and said, “I have no earthly idea.”
3
AT THE GLASSED FRONT of a three-story Finnish clothing store on 34th Street, a slim young man with narrow crescent sideburns wearing a charcoal linen blazer and a subtle black headset stood monitoring the entrance. From bag to bag his eyes went zigzagging, as shoppers funneled in and out of the store, but he did not open the door for the shoppers, nor greet them, nor even acknowledge them; he merely watched, with his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his heels, mute and expressionless, as the outflow of white bags went swinging past his kneecaps.
Out back, on 35th Street, another man sat monitoring the store’s rear entrance. This man was older, and though he was Latino
like the man out front, his skin was browner and pocked, his face rounder and more puff-cheeked, his torpid eyes reddened by infection and the incessant rubbing the infection aroused, with no sideburns to mention. Dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up high and neck buttoned low, along with knee-stained navy workpants, he was sitting with his back against a concrete wall and with a fingertip drawing figure eights on the pavement between his legs. Nearby, a crouching three-year-old girl was angling a red crayon over a Dora the Explorer coloring book. At regular intervals the man would look up, glancing first at the girl and then at the bright-orange loading-dock door and then at the big steel dumpster, where two women were sifting through bags of clothing. One of the women was his wife, who’d come north from Guatemala with him four years before. The other woman was Micah.
Together the women untied a black plastic bag and went rooting through its soft contents. After a while Micah held up a loose-fitting floral blouse with a grosgrain bow at the neckline and said, “Hey, mira.”
The woman looked up. She was broad-faced, with a flat Mayan nose and thick chapped lips, the buttons of her purple blouse straining at her middle.
“Para tí,” Micah said.
The woman asked, “¿Qué tamaño?”
Micah checked the size. “Diez y ocho,” she said, and the woman cocked her head, reaching across the bag to caress the shiny fabric between her thumb and forefinger.
“Raso?” she said, and Micah nodded. It was satin. Frowning, the woman asked, “¿Dónde se corta?”
“Here,” Micah said, and rotating the blouse she showed where the cut was: a twelve-inch gap down the back that a store employee—possibly the young man out front—had sliced with an X-Acto knife before disposing of the blouse and sending it out to the dumpster. Everything in the bags had been similarly cut—some beyond repair, some salvageably. They did this to prevent scavengers from returning the clothes for cash, or so went the story Micah’d gotten several weeks earlier when she’d buttonholed the store manager. Why couldn’t they stain the clothes instead, she’d asked, so they’d still be functional? Or donate them? The response was something along the lines of: “Corporate policy.” Swiftly followed by: “I’m sorry, I’ve got customers.”
Shrugging, the woman took the blouse from Micah and smiled. “Gracias,” she said, then shouting to her husband—“Hector! Hector! ¿Te gusta?”—she held up the blouse for him to judge. Her husband raised his head, squinting, and then shielding his eyes from the low orange sun he gave her an uninterested thumbs-up. She sighed, and then he croaked, “¿Para mí?” and when the little girl giggled the woman giggled too, and with a glance toward Micah rolled her eyes, endearingly embarrassed. “Para mí,” she whispered, wagging her head, and with a newfound lightness she set the blouse aside and continued rifling through the bag. Micah paused and stood up, staring at the man then the child then the woman with a sudden tenderness, as if her mental lens had just been smeared with a film of sentiment. She couldn’t help feeling as though she’d just glimpsed something lovely and intimate, however small: something that disinterred a memory from her own childhood she couldn’t quite pin, perhaps less a memory of a scene or event than the memory of an emotion, a remembrance of unlikely happiness. “Micah,” she said to the woman, extending her hand, and after a moment of confusion the woman took Micah’s hand and said, “Marcella.” They exchanged smiles, then went back to work, tugging clothes from the bags, analyzing cuts, sifting and sifting.
Micah’s haul was slight but not insignificant: a t-shirt for Talmadge, sliced down the side but easily mendable; a batik-patterned sweatshirt for herself, equally mendable; and a crocheted dress that was probably irredeemable but worth a try anyway. There remained one more bag to open, but when Micah tore it open she found baby clothes spilling out. She dug deeper into the bag, hoping for more, but her hands found only more of the same: tiny fist-wads of fabric. She thought of the girl, now scribbling heatedly in her Dora the Explorer coloring book, lying on her stomach on the pavement and kicking her legs, and probed the bag for larger sizes. Spying a blink of pink fabric from near the bag’s bottom, she pulled it up.
It was an infant’s onesie, she saw—useless. Yet something about it gave her pause and when she spread it out atop the bag she realized what: The onesie had been sliced straight down the middle, from neck to gusset. Micah glowered at it, feeling a harsh stab of anger in her chest, an upsurge of bile bubbling in the rear of her throat, as she imagined the employee cutting it—what could he have been thinking (because it was surely a he), performing a gratuitous vivisection on this almost-infant, this cotton baby shell, poking the blade into its belly and then ripping it downward—at best he’d been thinking it was mere fabric, a $12.95 commodity, a casualty of corporate policy, but still—how could he have reconciled it in his mind, that blithe and unwarranted destruction, how had he divorced the act of slicing open a onesie from the thought and image of the baby it might have clothed? Micah flattened it onto the bag, kneading the sheared flaps together as if to close the wound, but then shaking her head and breathing hard through her nose she held it up to show Marcella and said, “Jesus, mira esto . . .”
Marcella looked up from a pair of men’s jeans, a warm gentle expression overtaking her face. She put down the jeans and clasped her hands together. “¿Está embarazada?” she asked.
“No,” Micah stammered, then repeated it, no I’m not pregnant, the hot red flush of anger on her cheeks replaced by blushing the same color as the onesie. Once more she said no, while Marcella blinked at her in bewilderment. Micah started to explain, gathering the Spanish phrases in her head, but then stopped—unsure of her anger, unsure of herself, unsure why she was holding the onesie so tight and tremblingly. Marcella shrugged and resumed her scavenging while Micah brought the onesie to her chest. It wasn’t that the store had sliced any baby down the middle (symbolically or otherwise), she realized. No. What had enraged her was that the store had sliced her baby down the middle, the baby that (she further realized, the thought so dizzying that the dumpster felt waterborne) until that very moment had been a mere embryonic pulse in her imagination, an unformed craving that like the memory the Guatemalan family had evoked was vague and featureless, a buried emotion, a half-heard signal. Yet here it was, clear now, unburied, laid out before her as a pink swath of fabric floating atop a black sea of polypropylene.
She wanted a baby. There: that was it, she’d said it, and the ridiculousness of it—the reversal—almost caused her to laugh aloud. For years she’d sneered at “breeders,” lambasting them for their egomaniacal, acquisitive desire to slather more of themselves upon the earth, overpopulation be damned. More privately, she’d long ago vowed to never have children because of the compromises they forced in one’s principles—more precisely, because of the compromises she herself had forced her father to make, because of the snake she’d turned out to be, however inadvertently, in her father’s doomed Eden.
The story of that Eden, as she’d absorbed it over the years, went something like this: John Rye had been a clean-shaven industrial engineer in Knoxville, Tennessee—a Vietnam vet, bass fisherman, small-scale collector of vintage Indian motorcycles, lackadaisical member of the First Pentecostal Church, and (people whispered) something of an odd genius—before God had commanded him to flee to the hills with his pregnant wife. This message had not been conveyed by a burning bush but instead by a burning Ford Fairlane station wagon John Rye had come upon late one night in 1981. He’d been out low-riding in his truck, a pint of peppermint schnapps tucked between his thighs, when, rounding a wooded bend, he’d come upon the Fairlane—upside down, with its top halfway crushed, lying crosswise in the road. Already the car was in flames; by the time John Rye was out of his truck, sprinting forward, the blue-yellow flames had swallowed the car whole. Flailing arms or legs appeared as silhouetted squiggles in the front and rear windows. He tried moving in, scampering low toward the car the way he’d scurried toward Huey helicopters at Bien Hoa, but th
e heat was like a shimmering, impervious wall, bouncing him backwards. He looked behind him, and then to the left, the right, but there was nothing and no one there: a galvanized guardrail coruscated by the fire’s reflection, and beyond it a blackness of pines. The flames had screams inside them, two kinds—the low, moany, guttural pain-screams you heard after mortar attacks, and the higher-pitched squeals you heard from wounded rabbits and children. He doubted there were rabbits in the car. Helpless, John Rye dropped to his knees in weepy prayer.
That’s when God spoke to him. Not in words, as he’d later tell his daughter. No, God speaks in images. (This was why John Rye came to see film and television as especially poisonous: They approximate the voice of God.) The visions came in spastic flashes; the sensation, he said, was like trying to read a newspaper thrown into the wind, as the pages went flapping by. He saw a lush green mountainside, a narrow pewter stream. A woman’s pale ankles in the stream, surrounded by an armada of floating yellow oak leaves. A smooth gray boulder, tall as three men, wider than a semi. An Appalachian bristle fern, unfurling from a rock crevice. These were not images from some internal album, flitting through his mind; that is, they weren’t memories. Kneeling on the roasting asphalt, he never once closed his eyelids, yet the visions were distinct from what his wet eyes were seeing—not superimposed atop his view of the burning car and its charring occupants, and not peripheral either. Separate: as if he was trading visual frequencies with someone else, the way radio signals sometimes overlap, or eavesdropping on another consciousness. As an engineer, he was rational enough to recognize the impossibility of this. Clearly, the only reasonable diagnosis was spiritual: the slideshow voice of God.
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