Want Not (31 page)

These newest dreams, to his great and bewildered surprise, were very much like those. The first one arrived the night after the panel’s second meeting, at the Attero Laboratories Waste Isolation Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. There he’d been outfitted with a headlamp-equipped hardhat, goggles, and emergency oxygen pack, and dropped two thousand feet down in a wire-cage elevator for a firsthand look at where eight hundred thousand steel drums of radioactive waste would eventually be stored. With him in the elevator were a blue-suited safety officer; Byron Torrance, the Pollyanna-ish genome biologist; and the artist on the panel, Sharon Keim, a Nevada sculptor whose most notable work was a thirty-ton granite polyhedron on the outskirts of El Paso that several Hollywood actresses had commissioned as a monument to battered women. Elwin liked Sharon; she was thorny, subversive, eager to lance the more swollen egos on the panel, as in:

“I feel I should admit something,” Torrance announced in the elevator, about a thousand feet down. This he said floridly, with that same grandiloquence he applied to everything he said—one sensed the cameras were always rolling in his mind—but since Elwin had yet to become accustomed to this he awaited the admission with suspense. Torrance sighed. “I’m somewhat—claustrophobic.”

The others must have been similarly disappointed, because no one responded—not even the safety officer, whose job it was to respond. Obligingly, Elwin broke the silence by soothing, “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Sharon leaned into Elwin. “You’re stealing his lines.”

Elwin didn’t notice any reaction from Torrance, or any sign that Torrance had even overheard; he was too distracted by the playful pinch Sharon gave his arm as they went sinking downward. The pinch felt lingering—if only by second fragments—and he chose not to acknowledge it lest he give her cause to stop or, worse, curdle the moment with some embarrassing overacknowledgment. Only after she’d released her soft pincers did it occur to him that his lack of notice could’ve suggested he hadn’t actually
felt
it—that his insulating layers of arm-fat were thick enough to buffer tactile sensation. And only after that did it occur to him that he was thinking like a seventh-grade girl. He cleared his throat, trying to be a linguist again, an expert in soberminded descent.

They’d emerged into a floodlit gray salt corridor, thirty feet wide and fifteen feet tall, that branched into a series of smaller subcorridors appearing to stretch infinitely outward. The walls, chilly to the touch and stippled with violet crystals, had been carved with angles that struck Elwin as impossibly sharp, the corners crisp and level as if steel girders were positioned behind giant sawn slabs of salt, or as if ten thousand men with ten thousand chisels had been chinking away since antiquity. Elwin saw his seatmate Carrollton, the materials scientist, ogling them with openmouthed admiration; Carrollton even rubbed the walls and tasted his fingers, to verify their saltiness. Forklifts went clattering by, trailed by squawks of static from the walkie talkies hitched to the drivers’ belts. Down one subcorridor workers on scaffolding were fireproofing a ventilation shaft. The workers were all wearing identical blue suits, and were as indistinguishable, at first glance, as the ants in an ant farm: a sub rosa colony of subterranean laborers. In the main corridor one shouted,
“Watch to your right!”
as he floored some sort of deep-earth golf cart past the doddering clutch of panelists. This one was wearing sunglasses, Elwin noticed, and with a doubletake he confirmed the set of Mardi Gras beads strung around the driver’s neck: subterranean homesick blues.

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 lumpy 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.