In a cathedral-hushed voice, Sharon said, “It’s like a—giant underground Costco.”
“Or a Bond villain’s cave,” Elwin said.
Together they looked back at Torrance, to include him in their dumbstruck analogizing. Torrance glanced up from studying the instructions on his oxygen pack, his face drawn and greenish, and snapped, “What?” Elwin just smiled and shrugged while Torrance, grunting, resumed his studying. Maybe here (Elwin thought), in these bizarro catacombs, the secret self broke loose, in something like the way cicadas shed their exoskeletons after their thirteen-year slumber below ground: the phobic worrywart emerging from inside the famously blithe optimist, the unheartbroken pinchable linguist shedding his Snuggie of despair. Nice to imagine, anyway. The panelists bumbled about the tunnels in a meek herd. Men with clipboards gave presentations. Everything and everyone was sleek, orderly, deft, buttoned: Here was the sort of covert government competence Elwin had assumed extinct for decades, that virile federal prowess of Cold War–era movies and paranoiac spy thrillers.
Afterwards they’d ascended back to earth to tour the surface site where their markers would be built: “their canvas,” as Sharon put it. Aside from the buildings and trailers and parking lots and various other human alterations, some of which would be dismantled when the encasement was completed in 2055 (leaving only a security post, which would remain for another seventy-five years), the landscape was 360 degrees of khaki flatness, a petrified alien nothingness that Elwin found himself unable to contextualize. This was not the mythic desert West of cowboys and cattle; this was not even like the baked powder of the Sahara. This was a scorched void, stasis translated into geology, the earth stripped of nearly all he considered earthly: a few scrubby gray plants here and there, looking like miserable tinder, and in the great hazy distance a serrated line of violet-gray mountains, but that was all. The panel members gathered in a semicircle, holding their caps tight to their heads to prevent the warm hard wind from hurling them after the few tumbleweeds skittering toward the horizon, while their guide from Attero Laboratories ran through the project’s timeline. “After active control is abandoned, in 2110, this is what will remain,” he said, pointing away from the compound to the flatness beyond. Everyone looked, nodding, seeing nothing. “So the only indicator of what’s buried below,” he said, “will be up to you.”
Elwin frowned, feeling the mental itch of some distant associative memory, an evocation scratching at the door of his consciousness: that tip-of-the-tongue sensation he imagined his poor father had to contend with every few minutes or so. Some line, some fragment, some something, what was it—he’d grown to loathe these senile interregnums, however common, darkened as they were by his father’s demise—but then wait (he thought), that was it, his dad, his dad and the phrase lone and level sands which appeared to him suddenly like an aerial banner over the landscape: it was the melancholy closing lines of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which his father used to read to him at bedtime: “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Elwin looked at the desert anew, filtering the view through the veil of this allusion—
But only for a moment. As if on cue, his cellphone chanced to snare a signal from the wind and bleeped to denote accumulated voicemails: six from his father already, Elwin saw, and all of these before 9 A.M. Eastern time. Even here, even nowhere, he could not shed his life, not even temporarily. It was like all the excess flesh that swaddled him: inert, inescapable, Elwinized. His secret self was just his self.
On the bus ride back to the hotel, rowdy with excited expert chatter, everyone leaning over their seatbacks yattering with interdisciplinary abandon, Elwin called his father back. He had to stick a finger inside one ear to mute the noise.
“Oh El, thank God. I can’t find your mother’s number,” said his father. “Does she have a new one?”
This clearly wasn’t the time to remind him she was dead. Sometimes Elwin’s father would respond “Oh, right,” as if he’d forgotten an appointment; at other times, he’d go silent, choke up, demand the details of her death and, with clenched wrath, the reason no one had thought to tell him. “I don’t—have it,” Elwin said, which wasn’t quite the lie it felt like, since, technically, he couldn’t have what didn’t exist. (Janie, on the other hand, had already graduated to unrepentant make-believe: “Mom’s with me,” she’d tell him, “but she’s asleep.”)
“Why not?” his father asked.
Across the aisle from him, Sharon was debating marker aesthetics with the panel’s physicist, who was kneeling backwards in his seat with his arms folded atop the headrest. Elwin didn’t much like the physicist, if only because Sharon seemed equally as drawn to him as she was to Elwin. Back in San Francisco, during the first meeting, he’d gotten himself inadvertently drunk at the hotel bar with Sharon and the physicist—Randolph was his name, from U of Washington—while trying to wait him out in order to secure Sharon’s exclusive attention. He wasn’t sure why: she wasn’t particularly beautiful, if that mattered (lined leathery skin, prone to Mother Hubbard–type dresses, a cross between an aging hippie and a Dorothea Lange subject), and had something of the wistful, smudgy air of a retired party girl about her. The question wasn’t about attraction so much as alignment; they seemed like pieces from different puzzles, he and she. So it was all irrational, the drinking and adolescent jockeying, and one of many things he’d cursed himself for the next morning though well down the cringe-list from his having given Sharon an abridged but unavoidably pathetic account of his marriage’s collapse. Despite the finger plugging his ear, Elwin heard her ask, “But how do we ensure it won’t be mistaken for art?”
“I’m traveling, Dad,” he said. “New Mexico, remember?”
“Sure. The nuke dump.”
He heard Sharon say, “Ugliness alone isn’t enough. Think about Munch. The Scream is ugly. But The Scream is art.”
“That’s it,” Elwin said to his father. Outside the window, he saw a guard waving the big bus through a fenced checkpoint. The bus turned onto a paved roadway, churning up a billow of colorless dust that left the windows coated with a bleak film: the lone and level sands smearing his view of the lone and level sands.
“Hey, odd question for you,” he said to his father.
“Say again?”
“Odd question.” He caught Sharon’s eye; she looked annoyed, in need of support with whatever argument she was failing to advance. “Do you remember ‘Ozymandias’?” he asked his father. “The poem?”
“Shelley. What about it?”
Elwin could hear a nurse in the background, probably come to dispense his father’s pills. He said, “You used to read it to me as a kid.”
“Yeah, of course,” his father said. Then he said, “Wait a second,” which Elwin gathered was to the nurse standing bedside, as a nurse did three times daily, with a paper cup of water and a palmful of pills. Elwin’s father cleared his throat, and then recited, with deep verve and without a single pause for recollection, all fourteen of the poem’s lines.
“That’s the one,” Elwin said quietly, listening to his father gulping the pills while the nurse said, “Okay, Mr. King of Kings, one more,” and several thousand miles closer Sharon was saying something about the pitfalls of beauty and singularity to a physicist shaking his head no.
“What else you need?” his father said, with a bouncy new lilt to his voice that sounded, to Elwin, like pride. However inadvertently, Elwin realized, he’d just given his father a test, and the old man hadn’t just passed it, he’d aced it. The flush of that achievement might cheer him for hours. This was good, Elwin thought. This made the sunlight softer, the bus seat less cramped and sticky. He said, “Nothing, Dad, I’ll check in again later, okay?” and his father said okay and thanked him for calling.
For a few moments longer Elwin kept the phone to his ear, staring vacantly out the window at the vacant scenes beyond the glass while inside his mind a question was taking lum
py shape: Was memory a choice? In one ear, albeit muted, there’d been Sharon arguing that even accidental beauty could jeopardize the Markers project, since, cross-culturally, beauty is preserved while ugliness is discarded, and therefore any beauty—even the fearsomely ugly beauty of The Scream—could undermine the mission by drawing rather than deflecting attention, enabling rather than disabling memory, while in the other ear there’d been his father, denying the death of his wife of fifty-eight years yet still clinging to fourteen lines of Shelley that he couldn’t have had cause to recite or recall in four decades. There were dire clinical implications for the latter, of course, yet still Elwin wondered: Could these clashing conversations have been like opposite shores of the same raw and unmapped landmass? Could memories be like works of art, the great ones hung beneath metal halide lighting on stark museum walls, for daily straightening and dusting, while the shoddy ones were abandoned to attics, yard sales, to that unheeded space above the headboards in off-ramp motel rooms?
He’d wrestled with this idea before, professionally at least, when he’d conducted linguistic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea back in the 1980s. In the remote village of Gapun, where about two hundred villagers still spoke a dying language isolate called Taiap, he’d interviewed a brother and sister in their sixties—twins, in fact: that perfect scientific model. Both had left Gapun in their late teens—migrating to the provincial capital of Wewak, the sister to marry a policeman and the brother to work in a hotel which he eventually came to own—and both had given up Taiap for Tok Pisin, the pidgin English that’s Papua New Guinea’s official language. Yet forty-odd years later the brother could still speak fluent Taiap while the sister had retained only a few dozen nouns. Rudimentary psychology offered one hypothesis—the brother, now a cosmopolitan hotelier, delighted in the rags-to-riches arc of his biography, flattering himself with the humbleness of his beginnings, while the sister, who blamed a wide and wicked conspiracy for her husband’s lack of promotion over the years and the low economic gear this had stalled them in, went to great lengths to conceal her upbringing in Gapun. Yet this hypothesis, that motivation alone could induce first-language attrition, seemed too coarse to Elwin, and unsatisfying from a neurolinguistic point of view. Could the brain be so easily unwired, by mere emotion? Was there, indeed, an aesthetics of memory? Surely that’s what Sharon was arguing—he looked at her now, and by her expression realized that he’d lowered the phone from his ear and must now appear to be stewing forlornly in his seat, like the neglected fat kid on the schoolbus that he’d never been—and maybe what Carrollton had been reaching for when he suggested burying the waste with no markers at all, the obverse of Nabokov’s contention that by loving a memory you make it stronger and stranger. “Elwin,” Sharon said, trying to draw him in from across the aisle, “do you not agree?” He stammered, clueless about what she meant and furthermore distracted because latching onto the syntax he realized she was a Southerner, long enough ago to lose the accent but not the syntactic imprint, and for some odd reason this seemed like an important detail for him to know—for him to remember—if he was going to fall in love with her, a possibility he hadn’t considered until that moment.
“Yes,” he answered, “absolutely I agree,” earning himself a sneer from the physicist which in some small way felt like a reward in itself.
That was the night the dreams started. In the first one, he appeared as a kind of pharaoh, though not in pharaoh dress. (Just his same old 48x32 Dockers “Big and Tall” khakis and a Kenneth Cole shirt: a mallwear pharaoh.) Inside a giant sandstone cavern, a group of blue-suited slaves—how Elwin knew they were slaves wasn’t clear, but they were—carted wooden boxes in on dollies while others pried open the boxes and still others stacked the boxes’ contents in an exquisitely patterned way. In the shape of an arrow, it seemed; possibly a flower. For whatever dream-logic reason, Elwin didn’t recognize the contents at first. But then he did. There was his old tackle box, here was his wedding suit, there was the wristwatch his father’d given him upon his high-school graduation, here was his medicine cabinet with gypsum-dusted screws jutting from its back as if yanked straight from the wall. These were his goods, he realized: his stockpile for the afterlife. He shouted for the slaves to stop, because surely he wasn’t dying, not to mention that he needed this stuff—the medicine cabinet more than the tackle box, but still. The slaves ignored him. Panicking, he fled the cavern by clambering into a convenient elevator. For a long bizarro time the elevator rose and kept rising, despite Elwin jamming all the buttons. When its doors slid open, Elwin found himself stepping out into a desolate sand-swept landscape littered with the broken ruins of a sculpture. Awe flooded through him, and with it a sense of tranquility. The wind was warm against his face, like the nuzzling breath of a mother or perhaps a lover. He saw two stone legs, tall as houses, sticking out of the sand, and nearby a half-buried head. Something about the legs—cartoonishly plump, with sneakers on the feet—struck him as familiar, but when he walked to the head and brushed the sand from its face he toppled backwards in—
In what? That’s when he woke up, his eyelids springing open despite their heavy crust and his entire body feeling energized at once, as if by electrical switch, a hot and instantaneous current he could discern in his fingers, toes, penis, even his hair: a sudden and all-encompassing shock of corporeal awareness. The sensation was so extraordinary, in fact, that his first conscious thought, as he scanned the alien darkness of the hotel room, was that he’d died. Like that, boom. Like the deer on Route 202, without ever having seen it coming.
But then: No. Of course he hadn’t died. These were not the stiff sheets and scratchy bedspread of the afterlife. With scenes of the dream still swirling through his mind, he pulled himself up, noting the red digits of the hotel alarm clock spelling out 2:57 A.M. For several minutes his mind seemed to operate on two separate frequencies, one mind replaying episodes from the dream, even as they faded, while the other was engaged in mundane physiological analysis of the dream’s causes. Had he eaten anything unusual? Half a Cobb salad, he remembered, dismissing any gastrointestinal basis. No one had salad dreams. Was it alcohol? No. He’d had just two glasses of chardonnay at dinner, and hadn’t even finished the second glass because frankly the wine was awful. Some Australian mega-brand that’d tasted like kangaroo pee. He tried recollecting the dream’s ending, the maybe-climax that had jolted him from sleep, but couldn’t—that’s where the film had broken.
But then something else occurred to him. The silence. Not the exterior silence: the air conditioning unit was thrumming beneath the window, the whoosh of passing cars sounded with arrhythmic regularity, somewhere a toilet was flushing. No, the interior silence: the yearlong conversations he’d been having with Maura in his head had stopped. That aggrieved chatter that spooled constantly, like background music, had disappeared, and in his mind now was a strange and blessed sonic emptiness. He rolled out of the bed and went to the window, and drawing open the heavy Marriott curtains he stood there, breathing in the view: the hotel roof, the parking lot, an empty intersection. The feeling was one of loss, but, weirdly, without the ache of loss. Loss without loss. He watched a car slow for a red light, pause at the intersection, and then glide on through, and for some reason this brought to his face a faint smile of rapport. He felt as though he, too, were gliding through something, though just what he didn’t know.
The dreams persisted throughout the trip. At first they seemed unrelated, save for their vividness and volume. Sharon made a cameo in one, wheeling by on a bicycle. Long-lost friends showed up, resurrected after decades of disregard. More than once his father appeared, one time swimming with Elwin in an antifreeze-colored river that cut through a decimated, abandoned cityscape, the two of them nevertheless splashing and laughing the way they’d done at the shore almost half a century ago. After the third dream Elwin took to hastily transcribing his wake-up memories on a bedside notepad, which was how he came to note the connective dream-tissue binding them together. I
n each of the dreams, he discovered, was a monument. Of a sort, anyway: his own pharaoh’s tomb; a discordantly gleaming edifice in the midst of that blighted riverside cityscape; a skyscraper-tall stack of junked cars in one odd episode (made odder still by the stack’s curator, the television actor Gabe Kaplan of Welcome Back, Kotter fame); a stone cairn that in another dream some children were building and pleading for his help to finish it. He mulled this thematic tie, but not too much. Dreams were just dreams, he figured, the byproducts of the brain’s digestive tract, the off-gasses of cognitive fermentation. Still, the dreaming was pleasant, and, even back home in New Jersey, where the dreams dipped in frequency, he soon found himself looking forward to sleep, nestling himself in early for some REM-sleep entertainment.
He was in the midst of one such dream when a hard metallic banging roused him from sleep. Someone was knocking on the screen door. Bologna sounded a dim bark, less a warning against intrusion than a drowsy corrective for the disturbance. Elwin rolled out of bed and sat up. It was 3:31 A.M. Out of fresh habit, he immediately tried to seize the remnants of his dream, but this one went leaking out fast—all he could catch was the somewhat alarming image of infants swaddled in Saran Wrap. He sat listening, but there was only silence now. Minor house creaks, the patter of rain outside. Had the knocking been a dream too? A dream layered atop another dream?
But then the knocking resumed. Elwin struggled into some pants and went puffing down the stairs. His first theory, conceived halfway down, was that Maura had finally come back. It was the symmetry of it all that sold him on the idea: She’d dumped him at 3:30 A.M., and now here she was returning to him. This was her decisive hour. What would he say to her, he wondered, as though he hadn’t rehearsed the scene a thousand times in his head. Yes, of course. He’d say yes. To whatever she asked. She was the sword he was fated to fall upon. Yet he felt an odd lack of excitement for this potential, evidenced by his slackening pace as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Here was his Christmas, and he wasn’t sure he wanted his gifts. Stricken with apprehension, rather than joy, he cracked the door open for a peek.
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