The Empire of the Dead (28 page)

“Breakfast comes with the room: coffee and doughnuts here in the lobby, seven to ten,” he says. He hands me a silver key.

He's assigned me a corner room facing the movie screen. An auto salvage yard sprawls across a barren field to the west of the motel lot. Hundreds of hubcaps hang on a cinder-block fence in front of the main office. I unlock the door to my room, flip a wall switch. Light explodes onto a thick orange carpet, a single bed, a tiny TV, and a lamp with a yellow paper shade.

I remember a statistic from one of my shows: 98 percent of the universe remains invisible to us.

Dear God, that's not nearly enough.
I switch off the light.

It doesn't take long for my eyes to adjust to the dark. With my red, flaring arrow I write my name on the walls.
Adam Post.
The light's afterglow remains in my eyes for several seconds.

On the bed, I wrap myself in part of the Yucca curtain. The velvet is soft and warm, a ghostly heat I imagine radiating from the auras of Hollywood stars, amazing black and white light from the screen penetrating the curtain. Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn. Happily, I hug my pillow.

On the nightstand, I find the TV remote and a Magic Fingers box. I slip two quarters into the box and the bed begins to vibrate. It hums and whines like a flying saucer in an old sci-fi flick. I turn on
the television. The reception is awful. I click through the channels and settle on a Hedy Lamarr movie. Snow obscures the figures on the screen: reflections in a small, tarnished mirror.

Birds all night. All night, birds.

It's three in the afternoon when I wake. I'm soaked beneath the curtain. The TV wheezes: an evangelist with white, poofy hair yelling, “Hell!” I turn him off and stand at the window. Somewhere nearby, children are singing, a song within a song. One voice holds a high note while others chant melodies. I remember Fridays at the planetarium, the noise and excitement of the kids as they gathered outside the Star Room.

The window is dusty. So, it appears, is the sky.

I shower and shave. Outside, on the sidewalk in front of my room, sunlight blinds me. I'm afraid to move. I shield my eyes with my arm. The sky is immense. I realize I'm used to a much smaller version of it.

In the office, the manager—Fred Davis, says a sign on the counter—slaps price tags on cellophane-wrapped packets of postcards. “You missed breakfast,” he tells me. “Lunch, too.”

“And you?” I say. “You don't sleep?”

He laughs. “My shift started last night just before you pulled in. I'm clocking out in an hour. My wife'll take over then.”

“I guess you don't see much of each other.”

“Secret to a long, happy marriage,” he says. “Might be half a sweet roll left on that table over there. Otherwise, if you're hungry, you'll have to walk down the highway a bit, just past the auto salvage. There's a Sure-Mart there.”

“Thanks.”

“You missed your checkout time. I'm afraid we'll have to charge you for tonight.”

“It's okay,” I say. “I could use the extra night, anyway.”

I set off down the road. A short walk to stir the blood. Kids
chase each other across the motel lot. Aside from my car, I see four station wagons parked in the gravel slots. In the auto salvage yard, a man welds something onto a car bumper. He's propped the bumper across two rusty barrels. Sparks jitter from his torch, rise a little, float to the ground. Sunlight blares off the hubcaps attached to the fence.

The Sure-Mart is dim inside, and my eyes are so dazzled by the outside light, I'm helpless for a moment. Slowly, forms appear: outlines of boxes, bags, glass freezer cases. Colors complete the lines now, and textures, as though matter was a paint-by-numbers game, filling the world's given shapes. I stick a frozen hot dog in a microwave oven in a corner of the store, next to a rack of girlie mags:
Angels of the Desert Southwest
!

Back outside, walking by the highway, I tear open a small bag of Fritos with my teeth. I'm light-headed, sweating. Two jet trails cross each other overhead, perfect, half-circular lines, as though the ecliptic and the celestial equator had twisted together like pretzels. A praying mantis leaps from the dirt and brushes my forearm. A flash of green against startling blue sky. A delicate touch on my skin. The air smells of sage.

I breathe, slow and easy.

In the motel office, Davis stands with a pair of binoculars, staring out the window.

“What are you looking at?” I ask.

He scans the flat horizon. “Nothing,” he says. “But you never know when something's going to turn up out there.”

Back in my room, I hear children shout, “Ha ha, you're it!” from the parking lot. A beautiful little girl, as tall and dark as Susan, flies past my window, followed by three or four other girls, laughing and singing. They form a ring on the sidewalk and do a fast, frenetic dance.

For supper I finish the Fritos and munch a Power Bar. On television, a man eats a bowl of worms in order to win a prize.

Shadows in the evening light reveal the textures of my room's rough walls: moonlike in the unevenness of their surfaces. It's hot. I stare at the telephone. Finally, I pick it up and call Susan. “I'm glad I caught you at home,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

“A little tired today. Anna's been a problem.” Her voice awakens me like sudden heat or ice. “Daniel thinks we need to take her to a therapist. He doesn't think she's handling my news very well.”

“Listen,” I say. “Listen.” Wrong. Wrong. What's wrong with me? “I hadn't planned to say this, but it's so nice to hear your voice, and I … I think I made a mistake, Susan.”

“Adam, what are you talking about?”

“I think I want to come back for you,” I tell her. “I want you with me.”

“That's impossible.”

“Why?”

“For all the reasons you already know. Adam, please.”

“Is your husband there? Can you talk freely?”

“Yes, I can talk, but don't do this.”

“I knew I'd miss you. I didn't know how much,” I say. The words make it all true, whether or not it
was
true before. Who knows
what
comes
when
and
why
? The dome spins this way and that. “I haven't felt anything, not a thing, since—”

“Me, neither,” she admits. A shallow, raspy breath.

“So?”

“Nothing. So nothing. You know that.”

“Susan, can I call you again? Tomorrow?”

“Of course. Yes. I want you to stay in touch. But please don't say these crazy things … or pity yourself … or whatever's going on, Adam. All right? Where are you, by the way? Some terrible old motel room?”

“Exactly. Susan, do you at least think about it? About
us
?”

“I won't answer that. How can you ask? I'm tired. I need to lie down.”

“I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Please respect me on this. You know the situation. For God's sake, Adam.”

“I know.”

“And I don't want to hear the word
obligation
. I'm not one of your crackpots. I'm a dying woman.”

“Don't say that.”

“It's the truth. Anna has to accept it.
You
have to accept it. And none of this is fair to my husband.”

“But as long as—” Wrong wrong wrong.

“Let me hear you say it. I want to hear you acknowledge the truth.”

The truth? For some reason, I flash on the bird my father and I found years ago in the restaurant parking lot. Fleeing on two firm wings? “Yes,” I whisper.

“Yes what?”

“You're dying.”

“Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So no more nonsense, all right?”

“Susan?”

“What is it?”

“I'm—”

“You're lonely, Adam. That's all it is. Stay out of crappy motels. You hear me?”

I rub my eyes. “Sleep well, then. My love to Anna.”

“You too. Good night. Adam?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for calling,” she says.

The receiver burns my palm.

Numb, I sit on the curb outside my room, fanning my face with a sheaf of stationery. Fireflies twinkle in the night. The hubcaps on the fence at the salvage yard shimmer in blue moonlight. The color reminds me of Susan's palette, of our day together in the gallery when she told me she was sick.
I've lost interest in things that could be finished
…

Apparently, the drive-in behind the motel specializes in classics
and second-run movies. Lauren Bacall flickers across the screen. She was one of my mother's favorites. I remember, in that clean new theater in Oklahoma City … no. Imagine instead Robert Hipkiss as a boy, sitting dreamily in the Yucca. Don't feel. Don't try to understand.

In the parking lot, a boy runs in circles, blowing bubbles with a bottle of soap and a pink plastic wand. The bubbles rise, brightening as they catch the film-light. Clouds smudge the sky, but I can make out the constellation Crux, its upper star a clear orange.

“Mommy, look!” shouts the boy with the bottle of soap, as a cluster of bubbles floats toward Lauren Bacall's wet lips.

Ahead of me as I drive, the sun rises and then appears to rise again—the brightness spreads so fast, cutting through a nearly cloudless sky. Rocks in fields on either side of the road absorb the light and shine like mirrors: flecks of sky, chipped and dropped to Earth.

I've tuned my radio to jazz, a program entitled “Drummers' Extravaganza”: Cozy Cole, Chick Webb, Big Sid Catlett, Zutty Singleton, Dave Tough, Baby Dodds, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson, Shelly Manne, Panama Francis, Jo Jones, and the great Kenny Clarke.

I check the map. I can stay on the highway or I can turn here and take a country road. No doubt, the highway is more efficient but not as elegant as the road. I turn. Up ahead, a splintered wooden structure, the base of an old windmill, perhaps. As I approach, I see it's part of a much larger ruin: an old aviary, according to a faded painted sign. Oak poles cluster together, some leaning badly in an octagonal pattern; wire-mesh screens—sagging now to the ground. Large wooden dowel pins (perches for the birds?) lie scattered like bones in the dirt. A few red and yellow feathers—green and blue ones, too—rustle from nails or splinters on which they snagged long ago.

I stand and sip water from a bottle. The feathers twist in the wind.

I check the map once more. The sun is blinding now, the land a lake of light. On the horizon, hills: soft crevices filled with shade or illumination, strong here, weak there—as varied as the thick encaustic surfaces of Susan's paintings. This morning, I'm feeling a refreshing distance from her, a mild embarrassment about the call I made last night. Or maybe I'm just trying to talk myself into experiencing nothing. A cloud uncurls like a sash around the sun.

I set out again, brightness cascading over bushes, billboards, rocks. They all appear to move. On the outskirts of a small ghost town, a naked mannequin, missing an arm, lies beside the road. Empty hamburger bags blow against her torso. Up ahead, a tattered sign says, “Re-elect Edwin Low, Sheriff.” Seven or eight sparrows perch on a sagging telephone wire; a new bird arrives, settles among them, and they all begin to preen in pleasure and excitement.

On my radio, Jo Jones pounds out a drumbeat as steady as a pulse.

Squinting against the glare, I nearly miss a curve in the road. I've entered the desert unprepared for the vigor of the sky. At a gas station–café, I buy a cheap pair of sunglasses and give Marty a call at a pay phone whose cracked glass door won't close. Just inside the restaurant, a waitress stands behind a cash register slurping lemonade, reading a
Screen Secrets
magazine. Behind her, a calendar on the wall rustles, open to the wrong month.

“Hey,” I tell Marty. “Looks like I'll get there tomorrow afternoon sometime. That okay with you?”

“Fine, fine,” he says. He sounds harried. “The architects are squabbling about our theater,” he tells me. “Stage measurements. Windows and doors.”

A tumbleweed blows against the phone booth.

My brother's voice rises and I hear a bit of the old hair-trigger Marty, the one who always accused me of stealing his toys. “Anyway, I'll be glad when you get here, bro. Take my mind off this stuff.”
An invitation to disaster, I think: he'll count on me to make things better, and when I can't, he'll turn on me. We'll fall into our old patterns and this time Mom won't be around to save us from ourselves.

No. I'm not being fair. He isn't all
that
angry. And his annoyance is justified. Maybe
I'm
the problem, I think. Little creep.

I pass a farmer in a field pounding dirt with a shovel to no apparent purpose. Clouds crowd the sky, reeling like silver clock gears. Another nameless town, full of trucks hauling cattle feed. Wind scatters hay from the trucks' open beds. The streets seem made of straw. At a high school, a marching band rehearses on a practice football field. Farther on, in the middle of a flat, shadowless field, an abandoned fairground sprawls: an off-kilter merry-go-round, rusting in the sun, an old loop-the-loop ride.

Evening. Thunderheads. A faint water-smell in the air. Flash-lightning shoots through the sky; the electrical charges appear to overflow the clouds' limits and burst toward Earth. Then, just as quickly as the storms gathered, they're gone. The sky begins to clear. At dusk, a single cloud changes color with the sunset; one by one, cirrus wisps, like mirrors, take up the hue—a faint orange-pink—and sink with the sun.

The night is warm. I find a rest stop and kill my engine. Crickets
skreek
in the weeds—here, there, then a whole chorus.
If you prove that there cannot be motion without cause, you've proved the existence of God
, said Thomas Aquinas. I open my door. One cricket hushes. Soon, others follow suit.