The Empire of the Dead (20 page)

He raises a hand. “It's all right. I'm not here to scavenge. I used to watch pictures here as a boy. I'm just looking around. Remembering. Sorry to disturb you.”

I start to head for the lobby. The priest looks me over. “You're about my age,” he says. “When we were kids … the Beatles' first movie.
Day for Night? Night and Day?
”

“
A Hard Day's Night.
”

“Of course. How could I forget? I saw it four times, right here!” He grins and for a moment I see the child in his middle-aged face: pudgy cheeks, pale brows. He probably wore a bowl haircut, Beatle-style, as I did. He's wearing a too-sweet aftershave. Tall, stooped. “I remember thinking, No one has ever had as much fun as this fellow, Ringo,” he says. “Pounding out anger, frustration … just whaling away on the drums. Utter joy. I couldn't sit still.” He pats one of the seats. “Watching those guys sing … such a
kick
after months and months of Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy.”

“Funny,” I say. “I was just thinking about that.”

He looks around. “Well. Old theaters. End of an era. I guess a joint like this brings it all back.”

“I guess.”

“‘All you need is love,'” he says. “If only.”

I smile and nod goodbye. He sinks into a seat, for all the world like a lonely kid.

In the lobby, I tell the man in the vest to hold the curtains for me (I'm not sure, yet, how to transport them to the planetarium). We negotiate and I hand him a check.

On the bus to work I hum “A Hard Day's Night.” The bus is nearly empty and I sit in the back, away from the other passengers, so as not to disturb them with my tune.

John Lennon is dead.

The day my mother took me into Oklahoma City to see the movie (we lived in Holdenville, nearby; I had just turned seven), the city never seemed finer, clear and lovely, vibrating to light-hearted melodies.

For weeks afterward, I drew the Beatles on everything: newspapers (crossing out JFK, LBJ—the Scrabble-like headlines following the president's murder), scratch pads, my Golden Books of Science.

I didn't see headlines so bold again until the Murrah bombing. An American revolution.

My father's dead, my mother—

No. Not here. I bite my lip and sit on my hands till they hurt.

At the planetarium, I find in the day's mail a letter from a former patron, a crackpot who writes every week. Two or three others write, too, about their conversations with God or their visits from aliens. Shedding these folks is the one perk of forced retirement. (“We can't afford to maintain a human host, especially with our attendance dropping,” the museum board informed me last month. “Across the country, planetariums are becoming digital sky-theaters, with prepackaged shows narrated by Robert Redford or Tom Hanks. This will be our new direction. We thank you for your service.”)

Sirs [the letter says]:

The Good Book tells us Abraham's father came to Palestine from across the flood—i.e., from west of Egypt, which is obviously a reference to America. The USA, then, is the origin of all life on Earth, which should surprise no one. Uncle Sam was there in the Garden, giving that serpent hell, believe you me, and the Tree of Knowledge was draped in the red, white, and blue. But more important than that, where
scientists
are concerned, is what first scrambled the continents (except for America, which has always been right where it sits today). I know you theory-boys have been chewing on that, but here's my two cents: check out the comets. They're the work-horses of the solar system, roaring past the planet, shifting the land masses, due to gravity
(what you might call the Jigsaw Effect), throwing the world's lesser peoples into confusion, from which they have never recovered.

In a file box in the storage room I save the letter with others like it (a cultural record, for good or ill) and start to prep my show.

This morning, the ten o'clock audience consists of three old men, two of whom are hard of hearing. I press a button on the Star Room console (round and metallic, like the clunky robot in
Lost in Space
) and Glenn Gould's version of the
Goldberg Variations
trills through tiny speakers. First, then second, canon. The repetitions put me at ease. As the sun sets in the room and the brightest stars appear, about the size of nail heads, I see in my mind's eye, written against the planetarium's dome, the music's mathematical equivalent, a string of elegant functions:
if performer
a
produces note
b
at time
c,
then the second canon commences at
c+(a–c)d,
where
d
equals the interval between successive entrances of
—

From the console I dim the cove lights. Dusk is a red button, sunset a silver lever next to the music's volume knobs. The sun sinks fast or slow depending on the show, the crowd's mood, or my whims. These old dodderers will be disoriented after sitting so long in the dark, I think. Keep an eye out.

“In Canto Twenty-eight of
Paradiso
, Dante describes the Primum Mobile,” I begin. “The abode of God and all the angels. Remarkably, his fourteenth-century conception of the universe is eerily modern. It accords with contemporary physicists' notions of the three-sphere, a finite object lacking edges—”

A light snore from the front row.

“—in other words, a sphere with fixed volume and immense magnitude, but one in which every point is interior—”

Now, a
chorus
of snores.

“Mathematically, this can be depicted as …” With the slide projector I throw the equation onto the dome, bright yellow numbers fluttering across the ecliptic:

x
²
+
y
²
+
z
²
+
w
²
=
R
²

“Dante put it like this: ‘From this point hang the heavens and all Nature.'”

The old men slump in their seats. There's no point going on. I stop talking and let the music play.

The two o'clock show has been advertised as an “Introduction to Space.” I have options. The Catastrophe of Creation. The Copernican System. Journey to the Arctic and the Mysteries of the Northern Lights. Time Travel (in only half an hour).

I drop a slide marked “Kodiak bear” into the projector: a bright, bad painting of the sort nailed to walls in roadside motels. The bear stands by a stream, slapping at fish. My supervisor swears images like this are audience pleasers—“Every state-of-the-art installation does this sort of thing. It helps viewers picture Ursa Major when you superimpose the bear on the stars”—but it's discombobulating to hurl an animal into the void.

The projector's bulb is weak. I replace it. Boxes, bulbs, armatures. Tracks, rods, gears. Our astral engine needs a tune-up.

“Excuse me?” someone says behind me.

I turn to see a tall, auburn-haired woman standing in the entrance portal, surrounded by the ratty old curtains. Beside her is a little girl.

“Are we early?” the woman asks. She combs the girl's hair with her fingers. Her hands are flecked with dried yellow paint.

“Not to worry,” I say.

“You're the man who makes the moon rise,” says the girl.

“That's right.”

“Hey! There aren't any
bears
in the sky,” she says, glancing at the dome. I think I've seen her here before. She's ten, maybe. Eleven.

“No.”

“Then I don't understand why he's there.”

“Me, neither,” I admit.

“You know, you're supposed to show the truth.”

“What's your name?” I ask.

“Anna. It's an
obligation
.”

“You're right, Anna.”

She bounces on her toes. “
I
know something true,” she says.

“What's that?”

“The earth is younger than the rest of the universe.”

“That's right!” I tell her. “Earth was born not long ago, as long agos go.”

Anna laughs. Her mother smiles. “She loves it here, ever since her class came to visit. Told me I just
had
to come see it,” she says. “I'm sorry we got the time wrong. We'll take our seats and wait.”

“Are you a painter?” I ask her.

“Why, yes.”

“I noticed your hands.”

An embarrassed grin.

“Is your work on display?”

“I'll be showing soon in a little gallery down the road.”

“The new one? Out by the airport?”

“Yes, that's the one.”

“I pass it each day. On the bus home.”

She lingers by the curtains. She's self-conscious about her height, frail, slouching a little, folding her arms.

“Well,” I say, “it's wonderful. Good luck with the show. Are you on our mailing list?” I hand her a pen.

By 2:05, the auditorium is only a third full, but no one else appears to be coming. William, one of my regulars, has arrived carrying a hard-boiled egg and a tub of cottage cheese. “The stars always make me hungry. I don't know why,” he says. He's a sweet man, but the sight of him deflates me. Not a crackpot, but he takes a lot of work. I had hoped to get through this day with no awkwardness or strain.

Anna and her mother—Susan Hayes, she's written next to her e-mail address—sit in the back row. I peek at them as I draw the
curtains and cue the music: an instrumental version of “Norwegian Wood”— “Good afternoon, I'm Adam Post,” I say—followed by Brian Eno: sparse, extended tones, highlighting silence.

In addition to William, Susan, and Anna, middle-aged couples round out the audience: vacationers, early retirees. None of them looks happy together. A few gruff, solitary men. No other kids.

I tug the sun from the sky and simulate the stars' brightness over Dallas fifty years ago, twenty, ten, five. As we approach the present, the heavens become progressively harder to see. “An endangered night sky,” I say. “As cities grow, and artificial lighting spreads across the globe, we're increasingly cut off from the magnificent sights our ancestors used to yearn toward and dream on. Does this make us fundamentally different from ancient peoples?”

Coughing. Creaking seats. Tough crowd.

They want more drama? Okay, here we go, then. “Recently, the Hubble telescope, orbiting Earth, has glimpsed the last spasms of matter before it's sucked into a black hole.” Button-press: a vortex spreads from the dome's center, like motor oil leaking from a car. Raspy gasps. “Black holes are dying suns, collapsing in on themselves. Their gravitational fields are so powerful, they cannibalize all surrounding space, gulping nearby objects—other stars, say—into their maelstrom.”

I click on my pointer. A bright red dart speeds across the dome, a little pilgrim among the galaxies. It touches a star in the neck of the Swan.

“Astronomers have long speculated about what they call an ‘event horizon'—that is, the boundary of no return around a black hole, where
what is
cannot escape oblivion. The Hubble has now provided hard evidence of this, photographing ultraviolet light from gas clumps as they were breathed into a compact sun known as Cygnus X-1, right here.”

I conclude by indicating 47 Ursa Majoris, a star fifty-one light years from Earth reportedly orbited by at least two planets larger
than Jupiter. Pleasurable coos as I cast the Kodiak bear into the bowl of the Dipper.

Sunrise. A partly cloudy new day.

“Any questions?” I say.

A buzz-cut guy raises a tattooed arm. His T-shirt reads “I Lost It in Memphis.” “Yeah, what about them crop circles I keep readin' about, over in England? Aliens messin' with our wheat?”

I sigh. “So far, all other planets we've seen outside our solar system appear to be gaseous, and in orbits either perilously close to their stellar hosts or outside what we believe to be habitable zones,” I say.

“So no, in other words?” His smirky arrogance reminds me of my brother when we were kids.

“So no.”

He looks skeptical.

As the crowd shuffles out, a man says to his lady companion, “I would've liked to have seen more bears.”

“Yes,” the woman agrees. “Bears are really cute.”

I catch Susan in the portal, next to the dusty curtains. “I hope you and Anna will come back.”

“Can you make it rain?” Anna says.

“Sure. And I do a pretty good job with the sun and the moon, right?”

She looks me over: a frank assessment of my uses and limits. “I guess,” she says.

Susan smiles, waving long, painted fingers, and thanks me for the show.

William stays to eat his egg and cottage cheese and to watch me clean the Star Room. His face is a desert of wrinkles. In his late sixties, he's still a handsome man. Leafy eyebrows. Thick white hair. He sits on the edge of his seat.

“What's up, William?”

“Well, Adam, it's very exciting. I've refined my afterlife theories.”

“Wonderful. You don't mind if I straighten the place while we talk, do you?”

“Not at all.” He spoons some cottage cheese into his mouth.

“I'm listening,” I say. In fact, I'm picturing Susan naked. I haven't slept with a woman since Karen left me six months ago.

William's hand shakes. He's told me he comes here because the planetarium provides a hushed, contemplative atmosphere. He's no longer allowed to keep an office on the college campus where he used to teach. He hasn't said so, but I suspect his unconventional work drove him from academe.

“The key to the whole thing is simply this,” he begins. “Almost all of space-time lies in the future.” He runs a napkin across his mouth. “The universe will last for at least 100 billion more years—probably longer than that. Plenty of time for all the elements to fall into place.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, to prepare for the resurrection of the dead.”