The Empire of the Dead (27 page)

“I'm afraid so. My brother—he's all the family I've got left, and we've gone a lot of years without really talking. And you?”

She smiles sadly. “I stay as strong as I can for as long as I can. And make sure Anna and Daniel are fine, going forward. That's it.”

I squeeze her hand. “It's cruel,” I say. “It's cruel for us to meet like this. Now.”

“Oh, Adam, I don't—”

“I know, I know. Would anything have been possible under other circumstances? Who can say? But
this
—”

“Yes. I feel it, too.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I'm being selfish.” I turn to watch Anna sleep. “Poor little girl. Does she know?”

“She knows I've been seeing a doctor. Not the prognosis.”

“She's too smart, Susan. She'll figure it out before you're ready. She deserves to know.”

“Yes. We'll tell her soon.”

“Is your husband a good father?”

“He is.”

“Good. Good.”

She turns my hand over and over against the car seat, touches my fingertips as in a child's repetitive game.

Anna stirs, a low whine like the star ball makes whenever it
moves into position. She slips a thumb into her mouth, falls still. “Should you get her to bed?” I say.

“We haven't resolved this.”

“It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that you take care of yourself now.”

“Three times!” She laughs. “I can't believe that's all it was! I'm going to miss you, Adam.”

“Stay in touch? I'll give you my brother's address.”

“Of course.”

I nod.

We sit silently for several more minutes. Then she asks, “Can I drop you off?”

“You need to get her back. I'll walk. My final show is next week. Will you bring her?”

“I will.”

I kiss her lightly: the left temple, where her hair fans away from her skin. Then I reach behind the seat and squeeze Anna's arm. “Good night,” I say.

I stand and watch Susan's taillights pull away, as red as the scribbles my pointer leaves among the moon's rubbled craters.

Tonight,

Final Show:

A Possible History of Forever

… or, Is That All There Is?

William and Lila are the first to arrive. He's looking dapper, in a red pullover sweater, neatly pressed khakis, and shiny cordovan loafers. A healthy ruddiness colors his cheeks. His eyes are keen. He links fingers with Lila.

“You two look happy,” I say.

“He's a wonderful man,” Lila tells me.

“And she's a delight,” says William. “Thank you, Adam, for introducing us.”

“Glad to be of service.”

Lila hands me an invitation for a potluck to promote local awareness of the Strategic Initiative to Identify the New Paradigm. “I've invited some of the group's national leaders here to meet with a select bunch of forward-thinkers,” William says. “As we know, Dallas is woefully unprepared to encounter new worlds.”

I tell them I hope they'll enjoy the show.

Susan and Anna step through the curtains. I hug them both. Susan looks regal against the velvet folds. Anna's eyes are red. She slouches, and I figure Susan has told her the truth about her illness. She confirms my hunch with a nod. “I've got something for you,” Anna mumbles.

“Oh?” I say.

“A letter to keep with your others.”

She hands me a sheet of notepaper:

It's not fair to take the sky away from people.

Signed,

Anna

“Thank you very much,” I say. “You know, honey, only
I'm
leaving. Not the sky. But I'll be proud to save this.”

“When you make the moon rise tonight, do it real slow,” Anna says.

“I will.” I look around the room. “All my friends,” I whisper. My sweet old crackpots.

A few strangers wander in—maybe twelve in all. No one from the museum board.

I push a button.
Music for Airports.
The lights dim. “The artist Odilon Redon once made a lithograph—a hot air balloon in the shape of a wide-open eye,” I say. With the cove lights I indicate a
brittle balloon, cast by the slide projector. “Redon entitled his piece, ‘The Eye like a Strange Balloon wafts itself towards the Infinite.' So. Tonight, as we travel together through space, may your eyes be strange balloons. I'm your host, Adam Post.”

The sun sets.

“As you know, our little cosmos is calling it quits,” I say. “But before it's done, let's rejoice one last time at its marvels, along with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who once wrote, ‘Look at the stars! Look up at the skies! / O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!'

“Some say the souls of the dead are cast into the skies. There, they live on as stars, lighting the dark woods for those of us struggling on Earth. So perhaps endings aren't so sad, after all.” Minor chords drift through hidden speakers. “Other myths say falling stars are souls returning to Earth, bathed in a purifying fire, where they walk among us as angels.

“In any case, for six years now, here at the planetarium, we've endeavored to suspend ourselves in a state of possibility. Whatever we can envision, perhaps someday we'll create it. We are builders. We are dreamers. We are once-and-future fire-folk.”

This is the last time I'll stand at the center of my universe. No more control.
Move on
: Marty's voice in my head.

I make the moon rise.

Let them go, I think. Let them all go.

A rumble of thunder. Lightning. Anna laughs and claps.

I press a yellow button and an aurora borealis explodes across the northern arc of the dome. Cascading blue light overflows the dipper's tipped bowl. “May your lives blaze,” I whisper into the microphone.

Now, one final time, sunlight pours through my space.

Music for Airports
fades into distance. I bring the house lights up. For a moment, no one moves. Then, one by one, the patrons wish me luck and pass silently through the curtains.

Standing in the portal, Susan catches my eye. “Call us?” she says. With her fingers, she brushes Anna's hair.

“Of course,” I say.

Anna won't look at me.

“Will you be all right, honey?” I ask her.

“My mama's sick,” she says.

Susan closes her eyes.

“I know,” I say.

Anna shuffles her feet. “My mama is sick and they're taking away the sky.”

“So you've got to be really strong now.”

“I don't know how.”

“Sure you do.”

“I don't!”

“For your mother. You'll learn. Won't you?”

She puffs her lower lip. Susan and I lock gazes, helplessly.

Finally: “Adam?” Anna says.

“Yes, honey?”

“Can you make it rain?” She grabs my hand. “One more time, for me?”

And I do.

I snag a bus to the airport, pick up my rental car—a new, white midsize (I don't know one automobile from another)—and return to the planetarium. I place Glenn Gould, Brian Eno, and other music CDs into a small cardboard box; fill a paper sack with constellation slides and star charts; remove the pen-sized pointer from the console and wire it to a battery from the storage room. Now I can aim a red, lighted arrow anywhere I wish (a pointless activity—pun intended—but one I'll relish). I unlatch the curtains from the Star Room's portal and fold them into the car's backseat.

A new letter has arrived. Should I leave it for the kid the board has hired—at a paltry wage—to activate Robert Redford for their fancy new shows, the voice of Tom Hanks? I unseal the envelope:

If you ever get up there, please know that the moon is pure pumice, straight from the earth's core. I have proof, and I don't need the Bible for this, that Earth was once much bigger than it is at present, but it busted apart upon collision with some unholy solar debris. The Bible doesn't say so but I can prove this is accurate, if you would like a demonstration at my home (I'll be gone next month, but any time after that is fine. Tuesdays, around three, are best).

I slip the letter into my box, a keepsake.

At home, I swaddle my computer in a series of blankets and set it in the trunk. I throw my clothes into a suitcase, along with a family scrapbook. The apartment is paid for until the end of the month, but I've informed my landlord I'm leaving. One last look around. My radio. I click it on as I dust the countertops. A debate about the death penalty. None of the show's guests, whose loved ones have been murdered, are in a benevolent mood. “There's no way that thug can atone for what he did to my family,” says one man, sobbing. “Killing's
too good
for him.”

“I want that mother to
fry
,” a woman shouts.

I swallow a gust of Albuterol.
Forgive me
, I think, staring at a cobweb in a corner of my ceiling. I can't reach it even with the broom. I picture my parents' faces. Marty's face.
For everything I did, please forgive me. For things I didn't know I'd done, please forgive me
.
Forgive me.

I step outside. “Forgive me,” I say to the wind.

I drive to the airport, intending to hang around the concourses one last time before hitting the road. By the side of the highway I spot a slender stick and almost stop to pick it up. It might be useful. After all, from a vertical stick in the ground, you can learn the exact time once a day (when the sun is highest in the sky and the stick's shadow is shortest), you can mark the summer and winter solstices, and you can determine the sun's altitude. There are quicker, more accurate means of making such calculations, but none simpler or quite as graceful.

Ingenuity over drudgery—much to be desired.

In 250 BC, Eratosthenes used a stick, the sun, and the stick's shadows to measure the size of the earth; hundreds of years later, scientists determined Eratosthenes' figure—a circumference of 46,250 kilometers—was accurate to within 15 percent. Much harm, much good can come from a man with a stick.

I decide to keep moving.

At the airport, I park the car and make my way to Terminal A. The copy shop clatters with motion, the dull fertility of repetition. All day, a stay against Nothing (though the world is ending every minute!): relentlessly, the machines duplicate anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything anything any—

I head for the TRAAIN. “Please clear the doorway,” says the train's robotic voice. A crowd of people rushes in. A crowd of people rushes out. “Standing in the doorway can endanger yourself and others.”

I ride for half an hour. Then I give Marty I call. “I'm setting out,” I say. “I think I'll take my time. Look around.”

“Beautiful West Texas? Rattlesnakes? Tumbleweeds?”

“What is it Dad used to say?
Embrace the world?
I don't know. I'll be there in a couple of days.”

“Okay, bro. Hey, we finally poured the foundation for the new theater,” he says. “You'll get here just in time. You're going to be impressed.”

“Look forward to it.”

I go to find my car.

Night-driving. Its great pleasure is the odd radio fare. For a while, I listen to a BBC production of
King Lear
. The king wanders the heath in exile. “Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!” he shouts. “Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so that heaven's vault should crack.”

Lear
at midnight, in the middle of the Lone Star state. Who'd have imagined it? Seek and ye shall find!

When the performance ends, a broadcaster delivers the latest news: thousands of Iraqi children are reported dead as a result of U.S. food sanctions; the Atomic Energy Commission
does not know
where the nation's nuclear waste should be stored; former Beatle George Harrison—the “spiritual” Beatle—has been diagnosed with throat cancer.

I hum “A Hard Day's Night”—if not the Music of the Spheres, at least a pleasant little tune.

Near McDonald Observatory, there used to be a globe factory. Several years ago, I toured it and watched the sure-fingered women on the factory floor paste hemispheres together, as if arranging apple slices on a blue china plate. The women were serious, intense—laboring, it seemed, with a strict moral purpose (and for much less than minimum wage). Not long ago, I read in a newspaper that the factory had moved south, across the Rio Grande. The production of the planet, outsourced to Mexico.

I pull my battery-powered pointer from a paper sack and aim it out the window. With my lighted arrow, I touch hummocks of hay, horses, cows, and sheep. Cloud-bottoms. Rotted barns, coffee shops (“We never close!”) crumbling into dirt. Within seconds, I've circumscribed the earth.

Just as I'm thinking I need a nap, or at least a break to stretch my legs, I see a neon sign by the highway up ahead. Flickering pink letters: Paradise Motel.

How can I pass it by?

I turn left, off the highway, and park. The motel consists of three single-story brick buildings in a row. A drive-in movie screen, isolated from the motel by a wire-mesh fence, angles toward the rear parking lot. The swimming pool is filled with air. A green lamp
blazes in the office window. Above it, an electric sign says, “Cable TV!”

The moon—marred all night by clouds—shines briefly in the east, its craters dark, like pieces chipped from a pane of thick smoked glass.

Behind the office desk stands a man who—damn if it isn't so—looks like my father, with this difference: he smiles easily and broadly.

No. Looking closer, I think I'm making this up. I'm tired. This guy looks nothing like my father. Too swarthy. Too short.

“Howdy. Pulling an all-nighter?” he says to me.

“I got a late start.” I sign the register.