The Empire of the Dead (21 page)

I've heard him speak this way many times but the words never fail to startle me.

“Here's the short of it. Earth is doomed. Humanity is doomed. The sun will eventually fatten and engulf us. You know all this, Adam. I'm just totting up.”

I nod. I pull a small ladder out of the storage room and dust the base of the dome.

“But here's what we can do. Mechanized space vehicles equipped with antimatter engines can travel to nearby star systems at approximately nine-tenths the speed of light,” William says. “There, we can colonize the planets, or failing habitable worlds, build orbiting space stations.”

I sweep around the console.

“I calculate it will take about six hundred thousand years to populate the Milky Way, a drop in the bucket, then it's off to Andromeda—three
million years. By the time ten billion billion years have passed, we will have seized control of the universe. With a series of strategically placed explosions, we can force the cosmos to contract in certain places and build up vast energy reservoirs in others.”

Explosions and revolutions. “What does this have to do with an afterlife?”

He smiles. “At the Big Crunch, enough energy will have been amassed in the universe—under
our
control—to perfectly emulate every creature that ever existed. Because, you see, all information generated in time will exist in that energy. The universe will shrink to a final singularity of infinite density and infinite temperature, the End-Point, in which all creatures, great and small, with their memories intact, all their
potential
selves, will be brought back to life.”

I tap my chin with the tip of the broom. I have no idea what he's saying. “What about Hitler? Timothy McVeigh? We'll have to mess with
those
assholes again?”

“Yes, well. An annoying side-effect. Can't be helped.” He wads up his food sack.

“Excuse me, William. I think I see a problem,” I say. “For your theory to work, wouldn't
all
information, from the beginning of time, have to be available at the end? What about black holes? Information is lost forever inside an event horizon. Isn't it?”

“Hm.” He folds his hands in his lap. “Hm. Well. Good point, Adam. I think—yes. Yes. I'll have to get back to you on that.”

“I'm sorry, William. I don't mean to—”

“No no. I'm certain I'm correct. I just have to work out the bugs.”

He's confessed to me that the death of his wife, Lily, from a heart attack three years ago had sent him into a downward spiral (“We were in love until her very last breath, Adam, our very last
kiss
!”). His immortality work, an amusing sidelight to his more serious projects in plasma physics, became all-consuming.

“In any case,” he says. “You'll be reunited with your parents. Didn't you tell me you'd lost your folks? In the bombing?”

“Yes. Of course, I hope you're right, William.”

“Trust me. Well. I suppose I should mosey on and leave you to your work,” William says, tossing his lunch sack into the trash.

I straighten his collar. “Take care of yourself, okay? Don't work too hard on your theories.”

“Adam, could we … some night …” He stops in the portal. His thin lips tremble. “Would you like to have dinner somewhere? I don't get out much, now, and since Lily died I can't speak to many people about things that interest me.”

I realize I've never seen him outside the planetarium.

“Certainly, William. I'd like that,” I say.

“Fine. I'll call you?”

“Sure.”

“And I'll work out the, uh … the, uh … what was it? … oh yes, the black hole problem. I'll have an answer for you, I promise.”

“Good.”

He gives me a shaky wave and walks to the bus stop. In the wind, tufts of white hair swell on his head like toy parachutes, right above each ear.

Alone again beneath the dome, I run my fingers across Susan's name on the mailing list. Then I set the star ball spinning. “You had an
obligation
,” I whisper. Virgo, Pisces, Sagittarius. Careening, colliding. Chicken Little, that little shit … he had it right, didn't he?

“You had an obligation,” I say louder, watching planets fly among dark matter, “not to be
blown to fucking bits
.”

The sky falls.

Bird dreams.

In one, beneath a swift black flock I pace beside the chain-link fence blocking the hole where the Murrah building stood. The fence is adorned with teddy bears left to memorialize the children. With me is Timothy McVeigh. “Why did you do it?” I ask him. He won't answer. I reach to touch a bear. “Leave my stuff alone!” McVeigh screams. He slaps my arm. “Little creep!”

The dream shifts. Now I'm standing in a field very much like the one behind the planetarium. Hawks circle overhead. My father, wearing overalls and a green Mobil Oil cap, is lying in the charred ruins of a granite building. He gets up, dusts himself off, and walks to me over broken tinted glass. He's grinning. I take his hands. They're chalky and cold.

“Father—” I say.

“All I wanted—”

“Father—”

“It was a beautiful morning in the city, remember?”

I whisper, “You didn't make it, Father. I'm sorry.”

“Oh.” He looks at his body then back up at me. “I see. Are you in touch with your brother?

“Yes.”

“How is he?”

I shrug.

“The two of you … what was it, son? Was it your breathing? All those inhalers and pills … I always worried about you.”

“I know.”

He kisses my forehead. Then he turns, walks back to the ruins, and lies down among the blackened stones.

A nuthatch, I think now. It was lying like an old potato skin on the asphalt.

One night, when I was about Anna's age, maybe a little older, my father took me out to eat, just the two of us. Some special occasion I can't remember. Maybe I'd done something worthy in school. Baked potatoes, macaroni and cheese. Dad offered me a sip of his wine. Afterward, beneath moth-hazed lights in the restaurant parking lot, I noticed a tiny bird the color of a sewing spool. It blinked rapidly, stretching its legs. One of its wings was bent. My father tried to talk me into leaving it alone. There was nothing we could do for it, he
said, best let Nature take its course. I was inconsolable. “Moral obligation,” I muttered. From the time we were small, Dad had lectured my brother and me: moral this, moral that, boys, understand?

Finally, he gave in, rummaged in the car trunk until he found a box with his golf shoes in it. He removed the shoes. We placed the bird in the box and drove it home. For the next week, we hydrated the bird with water from an eye dropper, fed it seeds from Pets Aplenty. It didn't eat much. One morning, when I woke struggling with asthma I got up and found the box empty. My father told me the bird had been so eager to join its friends, he took it into the back yard and let it go. It swooped over our peach tree, waving its gratitude with two firm wings. He laughed and I did too—or tried to, between wheezes.

Now, with Dad no longer here to tell me stories, I'm certain the poor thing died overnight and he threw it into the trash.

Fanning out from the planetarium: feeder roads, cargo routes, latticed grids. Birds wheeling overhead. The first glimpse of distant runways. None of it—the comforting, open flatness, the strobe lights bordering landing strips—is meant for us ground-dwellers. It's supposed to be seen from the sky.

It's Friday evening, my third-to-last as the planetarium director. I've just concluded the day's final show.

On the bus, my breathing shallows out. I pull my inhaler from my shirt pocket, take a hit. A cool Albuterol rush. Over there the gallery, nearly finished, where Susan Hayes will show her paintings. I take a deep breath.

The bus exits the International Parkway and bumps over an unpaved road reserved for service vehicles. The airport is expanding. No new runways have been built, but each year fresh shopping outlets appear near the ticket counters and airline gates (a testament to greater volumes of delayed flights, more time to kill?). In the waiting areas, on boxy white televisions attached to the ceilings, a
regular ad between CNN newscasts promotes DFW's “goal to provide exemplary customer service and innovative new concessions to increase passenger satisfaction with their airport experience.”

I'm never a passenger, but I've come to depend on the “airport experience.” It gets me through evenings when I know I can't sleep and so I often stop here to pass the time before heading home from the Star Room.

The bus pulls up to Terminal B. My fellow riders fold their
USA Today
s and grab their bags, all of which look more or less alike. I squeeze past them, slip unencumbered through the automatic sliding doors (an almost erotic
hiss
!) and into the concourse, past the gleaming silver counters—the ill-fitting coats and strained, may-I-help-you smiles—of Continental, British Airways, Frontier, Korea Vanguard, Lufthansa, and Mesa. I head for the TRAAIN stop, past out-of-order ATM machines, telephones, Internet kiosks, travel insurance booths, a copy shop (“Second Looks”), and the warmth of rust-colored heat lamps nurturing rows of melted cheese sandwiches wrapped in gold tinfoil, French fries, pizza.

On a thin, pesto-colored carpet, restless travelers reset their watches. A dozen or so of us crowd against a wall of sliding glass doors. “Stand back, please,” says a robotic female voice. Boredom perfected. “The train will arrive in two minutes.”

I like the double A in the TRAAIN sign above the doors—as if this were no ordinary train, but a supertrain, a train to end all trains.

And it
is
remarkable: completely mechanized, running in a constant loop from Terminal A to Terminal B to Terminal C. Sometimes I ride it for hours, circling, circling, lulled into a temperate daze. The pale green light inside the compartments (what is its source?) softens our flesh tones, turning us all the color of vanilla yogurt. The computerized voice, warning us every few minutes to keep clear of the doors, soothes like the ticking of an antique clock once you key into its rhythms.

Everything about the airport is designed to be as automatic as breathing. Glitches, failures, weather, unpredictable situations agitate
the plan, but for a nontraveler like me, with no destination, no time pressures, no agenda, it's easy to shut down and be carried along, easy just to
function
, which is what I seek on evenings like this.

At the same time, I desire a heightened awareness of sights, smells, sounds, emotional dynamics (none of which involve me directly, so I can observe them disinterestedly and take abstract pleasure in their unfolding). Like a chemical reagent, the airport's tedium works with my own exhaustion to produce sharper than usual perceptions. No analysis. No expectations. For a few hours—on my best nights here—life occurs solely on the surface, and when the surface is all there is, its contours emerge in a stunning display.

The doors open—a torpid exhalation—and we step onto the train. The plastic seats are cold and hard, made for short journeys only, but I've accustomed myself to sitting without moving, and without comfort, for extended periods.

I shake my inhaler and swallow another gust. Across the aisle from me a pig-tailed girl—three or four years old—plays with a brown and white Beanie Baby. A puppy or a gopher, I can't tell. I think of Anna. Perhaps
any
female child, right now, will make me think of Anna: a little Force of Nature. On the other hand, the girl's mother, in black slacks and pumps, reading a
Business Week
—her rich blonde hair and bemused mouth remind me of my ex.

The bus slides through blue-lit underground tunnels, climbs until it parallels a highway. Jets idle in the dithery glare of sodium vapor lights.

“Aeromexico, Air Canada, Air France,” the train says. The voice is too flat to be seductive, but it's as persistent as memory. This quality gives it a haunting, sexy power.

Business Week
and her daughter get off. I decide to follow them. Not
follow
: take their cue. I hang around an American gate, a 9 p.m. to Houston, wondering if I'll glimpse Karen. She's a flight attendant. We met here three years ago. Sometimes she scurries through this concourse dragging her bag-on-wheels, preparing for her next leg:
Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. Occasionally, she has time for a cup of coffee and we'll sit on wobbly metal stools at waist-high tables in a fast-food court, catching up with each other. Naturally, when I spot her, or recognize anyone I've seen before (I'm familiar now with a few steady travelers), the safety of my “airport experience” is broken; I'm forced to marshal my energy and be social again, which is precisely what I'm hoping to avoid after a busy week. Still, her pretty face remains a pleasure and a comfort. The hem of her jacket rides the tops of her hips, just so …

In the waiting area, ticketed passengers skim paperbacks as thick as house bricks. Legal thrillers. True Crime. Every third man barks into a cell phone. One particularly noisy fellow in a high-sheen suit says twice, into his mouthpiece, “Dude, did you check today's digits? The high techs crashed!”

Headlines in the newspaper bins: “Attorney General Okays McVeigh's Execution.” “Credibility of the Nation's Law Enforcement at Stake.”

A sweating young mother in a blue halter top yells at her little boy to stop popping her bra straps, which keep sliding down her shoulders. She's got a wad of sticky napkins in one hand and a crumbling ice-cream cone in the other. A baby watches an escaped yellow helium balloon bob against pale ceiling lights. Another man with a cell phone says, “I don't
do
lunch in Tacoma anymore. Worst lunch town in the West. I mean, Christ,
goat
-kabob?”