The Empire of the Dead (23 page)

I stroll past empty gates, closed gift shops, and rows of newspaper dispensers. Analysts predict the Dow's joyride is over. Experts declare genetically altered foods “safe as milk.”

The coffee I drank earlier sits badly in my belly. I realize I haven't eaten. In front of a vending machine, I pull out my wallet and buy a package of peanut-butter crackers.

On the TRAAIN, going in circles, I watch frantic parents prepare their children for wearying trips. Some families are headed for freezing weather. Mothers tug jackets, coats, and sweaters past resistant little arms. “Believe me, when we step off that plane back east, you'll want to be wrapped up tight,” one woman tells her son. Other families are westward bound. They strip their infants down to diapers. One man smells of beer. Another sips coffee. A woman eats a bean burrito. Another tells her husband she's craving scrambled eggs. The train makes its endless loop, neither here nor there, early nor late, in the blackness of its tunnels, a fixed sixty-five degrees (I estimate), suffused with a steady bright green. From time to time, when we emerge from under ground, we see highway cloverleafs curling into the distance, rows of parking lot lights marching toward vast invisibility at the horizon.

I go through the motions of the morning show but it lacks pizzazz. The small crowd is as restless as I am until, on a whim, recalling Karen's hair as it curled beneath her cap last night, I point out the star cluster Coma Berenices—according to legend, the hair of an ancient queen. The astronomer Garrett Serviss, describing the constellation in one of his atlases says it has a

curious twinkling, as if gossamers spangled with dewdrops were entangled there. One might think the old woman of the nursery rhyme who went to sweep the cobwebs out of the sky had skipped this corner, or else that its delicate beauty had preserved it even from her housewifely instinct.

The audience seems pleased, and afterward, as I'm cleaning the building, I tell myself I've recovered my equilibrium.

Outside, the sun glides behind clouds (sloppy clouds, irregular, thick; in
my
sky, they would never do).

“All right, bro. I've cleaned out the back bedroom for you,” Marty says on the phone. He calls more frequently now. Maybe he really
is
eager for me to come. “Meantime, hang in there. Grab some ass!”

“Will do.”

“Little creep!”

“I didn't touch your stupid old toys!” I'd shout. This wasn't always true. As kids, Marty and I would end up fighting, wheezing, both of us. Our room was like an infirmary. Shade drawn. Leaden air. No sun. Mom always came running. She'd whisper and sing, hold Marty then me.

Tonight I sit in my dark apartment, missing Karen, thinking of Susan Hayes, contemplating last things at work, and wondering if Marty and I can really share space once more.

Our stuff. It was all over the house.

One afternoon, Mom forced me to hide my Beatle drawings in a closet. She said we had to straighten up because Dad was bringing guests home for supper. She collected my sketches in a neat little stack and told me to put them away. Dad's guests—sullen but gracious, dark skinned—spoke little English. Two of them were missing fingers on one or both of their hands. They inhaled my mother's mashed potatoes, roast beef and gravy, green beans. My father didn't say much. He smiled and gestured with his fork for his friends to eat, eat, by all means try seconds. Grab thirds.

Marty and I stared across the table at each other.

After the meal, Dad showed the men the small collection of core samples, drill bits, and fossils he kept on a shelf in his study. Jealousy seized me. His geologic oddities and oil field souvenirs were
our
treats, his and mine. Each evening, I'd ask him to tell me about them again, take them down so I could touch the rocks' porous edges. This was our private, intimate time together. I'm sure it sparked my love of science. Now, he was letting these silent strangers handle
our
trilobites,
our
schist,
our
shale (one man nearly dropped a piece—he had only three fingers on his right hand!). I retreated to my room and furiously scribbled John, Paul, George, and Ringo in every library book Mom had checked out for me that week.
Charlotte's Web, Little House on the Prairie, Have Spacesuit Will Travel.

At one point, I put down my pencil and raised the stiff yellow shade over Marty's bed. Through the window screen I heard my father's laughter from the porch. I plucked an empty jam jar off my desk, ran outside, and chased fireflies through the yard, all the while keeping an eye on my father and the men. They smoked cigars. Marty sat at their feet, listening closely to the visitors' fractured talk. I could see my mother, through the bright kitchen window, washing dishes. Steam rose around her face, her dark brown hair.

Later, when she put Marty and me to bed, she said the men worked for the same oil company our father did. Roughnecks, she called them. “They've come all the way from Mexico, leaving behind
their families. They're not familiar with our language or our customs. They don't earn much money and they don't have good places to live. Your father wanted to offer them some hospitality tonight. They don't get many home-cooked meals.”

“What happened to their fingers?” Marty said.

“I don't know, honey. Oil field work is dangerous.”

“Did you
like
having them for supper?” I wanted to know.

“To be honest, I was a little uncomfortable. But your father feels a moral obligation to lend them a hand, and I respect that.”

“What's a moral obligation?” I asked. “He's always talking about it.”

She rubbed my belly. “It's the feeling you get in here when you see something that isn't right and you want to change it.”

“Their
fingers
weren't right!”

“Well,” she said. “Life makes lots of demands on people.”

Dad walked into the room. He thanked Marty and me for our politeness at dinner.

“You showed those guys our rocks,” I said accusingly.

“It's okay, kiddo. It's good to share, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

Patiently, and without a word, Mom erased my rock ‘n' roll scribbles from the library books.

Dad tousled Marty's hair. “Goodnight, mop-tops,” he said.

Mom. She didn't like rock ‘n' roll but the Beatles, she said, seemed “wholesome.” I remember sitting with her in the plush movie house in Oklahoma City—bright lobby chandeliers, silver spigots on the soft-drink machines, crushed velvet curtains by the screen. It was nicer than anything I'd ever seen. It smelled like a new car, leathery and polished. I held my mother's hand. When the songs played, every hair on my body (not many back then) leaped to attention.

I'd never witnessed four young men happier than the Beatles.

Lord. I'd forgotten all this until the empty old theater. The priest. My mother … my mom … such a lively young woman …

In the middle of the film, when the band broke free of its cramped rehearsal hall and scampered like puppies through an open field—when the boys ran, as Marty and I never could—I thought I'd faint from pleasure. My breath caught in my chest. Mother looked at me, worried. I reached into my pocket and gripped my inhaler, but I managed to settle down and didn't have to use it.

After the show, in the car, I hugged my mother hard: her belly's soft heat through her pink cotton dress, the fluff of her breasts against my cheek. She took me to an ice-cream parlor for a chocolate sundae with candy sprinkles and nuts. Sunlight shattered off my spoon onto her pretty, lipsticked smile.

Late at night, online (like, right about now), Murrah survivors share their raw edges. But for the most part, the bombing belongs to the conspiracy nuts now. They play it over and over in their chat rooms—a wild and familiar cartoon.

Timothy McVeigh kicked ass!

You scum-sucking maggots, you got exactly what you deserved!

I have proof that Princess Diana masterminded the bombing so British agents could swoop in and be heroes, solving the crime. (She's still alive, by the way, living with Dodi Fayed in Costa Rica.)

The One World Government needed a new patsy—so they created Tim McVeigh.

Sodom. Gomorrah. Oklahoma City. When will we ever learn?

Words flicker, not quite
on
the computer screen but floating in electronic space at an indeterminate distance from my eyes. Messages dance. I remember the first time I ever logged on to find out what happened.

Here's what happened.

At around 8:45 a.m., on April 19, 1995, my mother and father walked into the Social Security Office of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. My father had retired from Mobil Oil the previous summer and wasn't receiving his government checks. He'd written Social Security many times, trying to solve the problem. Finally, he decided to confront an official. He made an appointment. He and Mother drove to the city from their home in Holdenville.

I had just started working at the planetarium. That morning, I roughed out a script for my first show, to be performed the following night. At lunchtime, I turned on the console radio and sat beneath the dome with a ham and cheese sandwich I'd made in my kitchen at home. Initially, I thought the news was a hoax. OKC? Nothing ever happened there.

The rest of the afternoon (Oklahoma phone lines were jammed), I played with the meteor projector, crashing fireballs on the empty horizon.

Ma Bell got me nowhere. Oklahoma seemed to be quarantined. Marty called. He didn't know anything either. He hadn't heard from our folks. Television and radio offered sketchy, conflicting reports. So I turned to the Internet. Its updates were puzzling, too, hard to verify, but they appeared more detailed than the usual news sources. Accurate or not, the web's chaos made its information feel strangely more honest—closer to actual experience—than Tom Brokow's practiced schtick.

10:20 p.m. CST: Rescuers confirm fifteen dead; hundreds injured. Red Cross has responded. The search is on for survivors in the rubble. Witnesses report several infants trapped in debris.

Word is, cops at Will Rogers Airport have stopped two Arab men who may have been responsible for the bombing.

Those killed were mostly civilians. No FBI agents. No members of the BATF. This suggests that government employees may have been
tipped about the bombing, and stayed away from the building. Dare we ask: did the U.S. destroy its own facility so it could blame local militias and confiscate our guns?

Twenty-four hours later, Marty and I still didn't know if Mom and Dad had survived the inferno. I decided to push ahead and go to work. My mother had been proud of me for getting the planetarium job after more than a decade of adjunct teaching in community colleges. (In 1979, I'd earned a master's degree in astrophysics from UT Dallas but, post-Reagan, most of the nation's space funding went to SDI-related projects. Soft money was hard to come by, and I saw no point in pursuing another advanced degree.)

The morning after the bombing, weak with worry, clumsy and dazed, I went about my business. Mom would have expected me to carry on. I prepared the slides and the star ball, and at 8 p.m., while the crowd whispered in buzzy anticipation, I leaned into the mike. “The universe,” I said, fighting to steady my voice, “is full of unsolvable mysteries.”

“Such a puzzle,” Karen used to say, touching my face. Poor girl. I suppose I was always a mystery to her.

One night, I remember, shortly before she left, she told me, “Did you know the Chinese believe we store grief in our lungs? A businessman told me that once, in a karaoke bar on a layover in Sacramento. He said we ingest the world and hold it in our chests: a box of sloshing tears.”

The night she mentioned this was one of many evenings I'd risen from bed and sat and stared at my computer screen, puffing on my inhaler. She couldn't get me to talk. I see now how hard she tried. “It must be awful, the way people go about their routines while everything's changed for you,” she said.

“It is.”

“What's it like?”

“I don't know how to describe it.”

“Can you try?”

“I don't think so.”

“Adam, please don't shut me out,” Karen said.

“I'm not.”

She looked at me and sighed. “You won't even admit to yourself what you feel.”

It's like snow falling all the time. Snow on snow.

Would that have satisfied her? Was it true?

Now I sit in the dark, on the bed we used to share, staring out my window at refinery lights just beyond the airport: eight thousand, five hundred thirty-two light bulbs on sixteen smokestacks, twelve storage tanks, two cokers, two distillation towers, one hydrocracker, and eight security gates. Over and over I count the lights, imagine my father among the hard-hatted men.

On the eastern horizon, the healthy gleam of finance: more than two hundred thousand mercury vapor lamps burning in downtown Dallas.

It's a clear night above. Stars as round as buttons. I pour myself a glass of wine and imagine unhooking the buttons. One by one by one …

Nebulae, as delicate as a woman's aureoles.

A star falls.

Gracefully. Across the sky. Nestling in a pocket of the land.

We said this as kids.

Our mother taught us. We chanted it back to her.

Make a wish, boys. Boys?
Once upon a time.

One night, between midnight and after midnight, I looked up and there was a white path in the sky, soft as lamplight, wide enough for three people to walk on, side by side by side. A troubled congregation. Oh death and trouble have spilled their icy laughter on our town. The
path pointed north, and I asked my children, Children, is this a path we should take, and they said, Mother, what does it mean, should we ask the aldermen, ask the selectmen? And I said, Who knows, children, maybe at path's-end, pain is just a plaything.