The Empire of the Dead (24 page)

“I don't get it,” Anna says. “Adam, I don't
get
it!”

“Me, neither,” I admit. Carelessly, I'd left one of our crackpot letters out in the open, sitting on the console, and Anna discovered it following today's show. Her mother stands smiling, embarrassed, in the portal.

“To be honest, I think this person is pretty disturbed,” I explain.

“So then … it's probably not true?”

“Well, what's she
talking
about? But, you know, it's interesting, the responses the sky prompts from people.”

Anna shakes her head, disgusted. “You're supposed to tell the truth, Adam.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's an
obligation
. I've told you that.”

“Yes, you have.”

Susan apologizes for her daughter, nudges Anna's shoulder, and says they have to go now. “Thank you for the show.” Asteroid formation: always a winner. “It was lovely. We'll be back.” She's wearing a cream-colored blouse, black jeans. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders.

“No need to rush off,” I say. “The next show's not for another hour. If you like, I can demonstrate for Anna how the star ball works …”

Susan shakes her head. “My opening's scheduled next week and I need to check the place. It's worrisome. They're not quite done refurbishing the gallery, and it's hard to imagine the carpenters and electricians will be ready in time.”

“I'd love to see your paintings.”

“That's sweet.”

“No, really.”

“Well …” She bows her head; her hair hides her face. “I'm supposed to hang the first few tomorrow in the finished rooms,” she says. “Eight a.m. If you're truly interested, I could give you a sneak preview. In exchange for your space tours.”

“Great.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I'd like that.”

“Don't be sure.” She laughs. “It's selfish of me. I could use some help. Some of them are quite big, with large—I mean really humungous—frames.”

“
Humungous
,” Anna repeats, nodding, as if her mother is either a genius or a loon.

So I find myself, before Wednesday morning's show, on the steps of the small art gallery. One step is purple, one white, one red. On a mat inside the doorway I wipe the dust from my shoes. As Susan talks, she keeps her head down—still trying to hide behind her hair. She
leans
into her sentences, chasing definitions. “As a child,” she tells me, “I stared at my father's architectural drawings and wondered what kind of magical maps I was seeing. Were these skeleton-sketches, animal anatomies? Were they shellfish?” She laughs. “When I realized I was looking at representations of buildings, I remained intrigued by the designs. But—I'm not sure how to put this—what they
were
was not as mesmerizing as
what they could have been
. When I was free to imagine the diagrams as many things at once, it was like I was holding in my hands … I don't know … the blueprints of the universe.” She laughs and shakes her head. “Anyway, when I knew these sketches were only of rooms, spaces filled with simple objects—flowers in a pot, a china cabinet, a couch—they lost much of their spell for me.”

Talking takes a toll on her. She's willing herself—driven by need to share her work?—to overcome deep reticence as we speak.

“One of the things I want people to feel, when they look at my paintings, is the magic I experienced when I saw those architectural
drawings for the first time,” she tells me now. “But of course, for the magic to happen, you have to
not know
what you're looking at. There has to be confusion.”

“What I see is an affliction to me. What I cannot see a reproach,” I say.

Susan cocks her head.

“Lévi-Strauss. My first week on the job, I thought of engraving that line on a plaque and hanging it above the planetarium doorway,” I say. “I don't think my bosses would have liked it.”

For forty minutes or so, I help Susan unpack paintings from crates and lean them against the walls. They're huge and heavy, and Susan struggles with them. Many of the paintings are on hollow-core doors linked to form panels, and they're as tall as she is. She's incredibly thin; perhaps not entirely healthy, I think. An aspect of grief (or am I projecting?).

“I believe I was probably dyslexic as a child,” she says, standing back to study a particular image. “I couldn't understand two-dimensional plans of elevations. Also, our household was pretty hectic.”

I listen closely, enchanted by glimpses of her face.

“My parents didn't care if I made a mess, if I built, say, a volcano on the dining room table out of whatever materials I found around the house. I could leave it there for weeks.”

“A kid's paradise,” I say.

“It was. My grandfather was an architect, too. My babysitters were drafting supplies. I could take things apart—like clocks—and no one would even notice. I didn't put them back together successfully. I tried. But I found it was interesting to dismantle something, try to reassemble it, and come up with a completely different object.”

“What about Anna?” I ask. “
Her
environment?”

“Oh, my husband's a neat-freak. Anna's parameters are
very
strict.” She laughs.

We work a while longer. She doesn't do small talk. To break the silence I tell her I'll be leaving the planetarium soon. “Really? Oh. Anna will be so disappointed,” she says.

Sheetrock clutters the floors. Susan breathes heavily. I ask if she's okay.

“I need to rest for a moment,” she says.

“Can I get you some water? You look a little—”

“I should tell you, Adam. I'm sick.”

“I wondered. Here, sit down. Let me get you—”

“No, I mean
really
sick.”

I look at her.

“Leukemia.”

“Susan …”

“I'm doing chemo, you know, but frankly …” She trails off.

I realize she's wearing a wig.

“So this show is very important to me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I appreciate your help, Adam. And your interest. Really.”

I nod. Silently, we work another thirty minutes. Then I gather from her body language she wants to stop and survey the paintings.

Layerings and erasures. Thick surfaces. Grids (echoes of her father's architectural designs?), nonsense (childlike scribbles in crayon). “I think I lost faith, at some point, that anything can ever really be finished,” she says quietly, pacing the room. “No, that's not it. It's what I said before. I want to try to tell everything about an object. What it was, what it might be. I guess I lost interest in things that
could
be finished.”

Pale yellows, blues, and greens. Ziggurats and spirals, like Dan­te's Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell. She's not after the beauty of shapes, I think; she's probing their deep structures, taking them apart with little hope of putting them together again.

We make a right turn, into a larger room.

“How do you get this texture?” I ask her.

“It's an encaustic process, pigment mixed with hot wax.” She moves in beside me. She smells lemony. “I didn't know how to do it at first, and I learned different ways to make really dangerous fumes.
I almost blew myself up a couple of times.” She shrugs. “It's not a good idea to heat turpentine on a hot plate.”

“I love what you do,” I tell her. “You've found a way to paint ideas, and to paint everything at once. But the uncertainty … it's as if your hands were trembling as you worked.” I amaze us both by lifting her fingers to my lips. “Congratulations on really fine work.”

I've embarrassed us.

“Thank you,” she mumbles.

“Susan—”

“Y'all are gonna have to leave pretty soon,” a workman interrupts us. He's hauling a dusty Skilsaw. “We got some ceiling work to do. We'll cover your paintings, ma'am, and take good care of them, but it might get rough in here if you don't have a breathing mask.”

“Yes, all right,” Susan says. “We're on our way.” To me she adds, “Anna had a sleepover at a friend's last night.” She checks her watch. “I need to pick her up.”

“Susan, can I ask: what are your doctors telling you?”

She bites her lower lip. “I don't …” Her eyes moisten. “I just need to do this show.”

“All right,” I say, a near whisper.

“Thank you, Adam.”

“I feel privileged.”

The Skilsaw starts to whine. As we move toward the door, I glance at the titles of the paintings. They're written on paper wall-tags we've placed beside each image.
The Angel of Forgetfulness, Vacillating Measures, Expectations of Distance, Notes for a Talking Cage, A Chronology of Skin, Language Mechanics.
They read like entries in a fevered encyclopedia, lost among dusky labyrinths in a library. Tales of astronomers madly dreaming, spirit becoming flesh, a lover's body breaking into bloom.

The radio wakes me as sunlight hits my bed. Behind my eyelids, an after-streak of birds.

“After several delays, appeals, and a flurry of legal motions, Timothy McVeigh died today with his eyes open,” a female reporter announces solemnly. “He was declared dead at 7:14 a.m., Central Time, Monday, June 11, 2001. Witnesses on site said he looked stoic, calm, resolute. Many of the bombing survivors and victims watching the closed-circuit feed in Oklahoma City swore he looked defiant. Hate-filled. Arrogant.”

I dress and catch a bus to the airport. For forty-five minutes I ride the TRAAIN, trying not to think—or to think vividly, I'm not sure which. This is the announcement I've been waiting for. The balm of justice. Permission to move ahead.

The train's doors slide open. People come and go. The motion soothes me. I remember riding in the backseat of my father's car one day as we cruised toward Oklahoma City. The car's purposeful movement. Its smoothness. My mother poured chicken soup from a thermos, and handed a steaming plastic cup to me over the top of the seat. “Don't spill it, honey,” she said. “Don't hurt yourself. Steady, now. Okay?”

“It's impossible,” a man says now to a little girl sitting next to him across the aisle from me.

“But
why
?” the girl screams.

The train stops and I step off near the copy shop. In the concourses, I find I can't watch flight attendants without a catch in my throat. Head down (I've let Karen go; really, I have), I hurry toward the Ground Transportation Exit. Outside, on the sidewalks, people jostle one another, glancing at their watches.

I stop at a pay phone next to the sliding-glass doors.

“The bastard got what was coming,” Marty tells me. His voice is faint on the line.

I reposition the receiver so it doesn't hurt my ear. “It's just another death, piled on other deaths. How does that resolve anything?”

“Don't think about him anymore. Move on.”

Move on.
Yes, that's what they say. But
moving on
is precisely what Marty would never do—“Don't touch my stuff!”

A limousine driver signals to a business traveler. Two pilots hustle past me, laughing.

In seventh grade, when I came home from chemistry class with straight As on my projects, Marty took it personally (he'd gotten all Bs). He turned his attention to English. In high school, he'd never introduce me to his dates—what few he had—fearing I'd steal his girls (an irrational fear, to be sure; I was as painfully shy as he was).

And now I'm going to stay with him? Are we crazy? If we've managed to be civil as adults, I think it's because we've kept hundreds of miles between us.

“Anyway, bro, forget the planetarium, forget that asshole,” Marty tells me now. “Get your butt down here. Unwind.”

“Right,” I say. “I appreciate it.” I watch a young couple with twin infants flag a taxi outside.

“We'll have a ball together,” Marty says.

What
were
our flare-ups about? I mean, really? Proximity? Private space? Competition for Mom and Dad? Well. Not a problem
now
.

“You're not worried? Even a little? You really think we'll be okay?” I ask Marty.

“What do you mean?”

“All the fights we used to have.”

“What fights?”

“You're kidding, right?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

It can't be that he remembers a different past than I do. “Ah, you know, the usual stuff,” I say.

“We'll be fine,” Marty says somberly: a signal, perhaps, that he
does
know what I'm talking about. “Let me know your schedule. And get here soon.”

After I hang up the phone, I work with a Hertz representative to rent a car at the end of the month and drop it off at a dealership in south Texas (I haven't driven a car in years, though I've dutifully renewed my license). I pay an advance, sign a contract.

Upstairs, I get a bagel and stroll past “Second Looks.” Inside the copy shop, a teenaged employee tugs pink and purple sheets from a Xerox machine. He's wearing a blue apron, a baker pulling pies from an oven: a word-maker, a confectioner of reproductive delicacies. Photostats and duplicates. Posters, bills. Notes and invitations. I pause to watch the process. The shop's copiers clack with a steady, soothing rhythm; pages emerge with a reassuring sameness from the printers. The boy feeds job résumés, birthday greetings, swap-meet fliers, alumni newsletters through the copiers' plastic slots: a frenzied information-quilt recording the city's buzz. No—more like splitting cells, I think: the culture's basic units proliferating and replicating, spreading throughout the community like strains of a virus. What was it in Timothy McVeigh that wished to deny, that
thought
he could deny, all this energy? Behind me in the Terminal A concourse, travelers rush toward the ends of the earth in a colorful blur, some toward destinations listed on the fliers. This boy, it seems, is casting destinies.