The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  “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.”

  8.

  “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.

  9.

  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.

  “I don’t get it,” Anna says. “Adam, I don’t get it!”

  “Me, neither,” I admit. Carelessly, I’d left one of our crackpot letters out in the open, sitting on the console, and Anna discovered it following today’s show. Her mother stands smiling, embarrassed, in the portal.

  “To be honest, I think this person is pretty disturbed,” I explain.

  “So then … it’s probably not true?”

  “Well, what’s she talking about? But, you know, it’s interesting, the responses the sky prompts from people.”

  Anna shakes her head, disgusted. “You’re supposed to tell the truth, Adam.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s an obligation. I’ve told you that.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  Susan apologizes for her daughter, nudges Anna’s shoulder, and says they have to go now. “Thank you for the show.” Asteroid formation: always a winner. “It was lovely. We’ll be back.” She’s wearing a cream-colored blouse, black jeans. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders.

  “No need to rush off,” I say. “The next show’s not for another hour. If you like, I can demonstrate for Anna how the star ball works …”

  Susan shakes her head. “My opening’s scheduled next week and I need to check the place. It’s worrisome. They’re not quite done refurbishing the gallery, and it’s hard to imagine the carpenters and electricians will be ready in time.”

  “I’d love to see your paintings.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “No, really.”

  “Well …” She bows her head; her hair hides her face. “I’m supposed to hang the first few tomorrow in the finished rooms,” she says. “Eight a.m. If you’re truly interested, I could give you a sneak preview. In exchange for your space tours.”

  “Great.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I’d like that.”

  “Don’t be sure.” She laughs. “It’s selfish of me. I could use some help. Some of them are quite big, with large—I mean really humungous—frames.”

  “Humungous,” Anna repeats, nodding, as if her mother is either a genius or a loon.

  So I find myself, before Wednesday morning’s show, on the steps of the small art gallery. One step is purple, one white, one red. On a mat inside the doorway I wipe the dust from my shoes. As Susan talks, she keeps her head down—still trying to hide behind her hair. She leans into her sentences, chasing definitions. “As a child,” she tells me, “I stared at my father’s architectural drawings and wondered what kind of magical maps I was seeing. Were these skeleton-sketches, animal anatomies? Were they shellfish?” She laughs. “When I realized I was looking at representations of buildings, I remained intrigued by the designs. But—I’m not sure how to put this—what they were was not as mesmerizing as what they could have been. When I was free to imagine the diagrams as many things at once, it was like I was holding in my hands … I don’t know … the blueprints of the universe.” She laughs and shakes her head. “Anyway, when I knew these sketches were only of rooms, spaces filled with simple objects—flowers in a pot, a china cabinet, a couch—they lost much of their spell for me.”

  Talking takes a toll on her. She’s willing herself—driven by need to share her work?—to overcome deep reticence as we speak.

  “One of the things I want people to feel, when they look at my paintings, is the magic I experienced when I saw those architectural drawings for the first time,” she tells me now. “But of course, for the magic to happen, you have to not know what you’re looking at. There has to be confusion.”

  “What I see is an affliction to me. What I cannot see a reproach,” I say.

  Susan cocks her head.

  “Lévi-Strauss. My first week on the job, I thought of engraving that line on a plaque and hanging it above the planetarium doorway,” I say. “I don’t think my bosses would have liked it.”

  For forty minutes or so, I help Susan unpack paintings from crates and lean them against the walls. They’re huge and heavy, and Susan struggles with them. Many of the paintings are on hollow-core doors linked to form panels, and they’re as tall as she is. She’s incredibly thin; perhaps not entirely healthy, I think. An aspect of grief (or am I projecting?).

  “I believe I was probably dyslexic as a child,” she says, standing back to study a particular image. “I couldn’t understand two-dimensional plans of elevations. Also, our household was pretty hectic.”

  I listen closely, enchanted by glimpses of her face.

  “My parents didn’t care if I made a mess, if I built, say, a volcano on the dining room table out of whatever materials I found around the house. I could leave it there for weeks.”

  “A kid’s paradise,” I say.

  “It was. My grandfather was an architect, too. My babysitters were drafting supplies. I could take things apart—like clocks—and no one would even notice. I didn’t put them back together successfully. I tried. But I found it was interesting to dismantle something, try to reassemble it, and come up with a completely different object.”

  “What about Anna?” I ask. “Her environment?”

  “Oh, my husband’s a neat-freak. Anna’s parameters are very strict.” She laughs.

  We work a while longer. She doesn’t do small talk. To break the silence I tell her I’ll be leaving the planetarium soon. “Really? Oh. Anna will be so disappointed,” she says.

  Sheetrock clutters the floors. Susan breathes heavily. I ask if she’s okay.

  “I need to rest for a moment,” she says.

  “Can I get you some water? You look a little—”

  “I should tell you, Adam. I’m sick.”

  “I wondered. Here, sit down. Let me get you—”

  “No, I mean really sick.”

  I look at her.

  “Leukemia.”

  “Susan …”

  “I’m doing chemo, you know, but frankly …” She trails off.

  I realize she’s wearing a wig.

  “So this show is very important to me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I appreciate your help, Adam. And your interest. Really.”

  I nod. Silently, we work another thirty minutes. Then I gather from her body language she wants to stop and survey the paintings.

  Layerings and erasures. Thick surfaces. Grids (echoes of her father’s architectural designs?), nonsense (childlike scribbles in crayon). “I think I lost faith, at some point, that anything can ever really be finished,” she says quietly, pacing the room. “No, that’s not it. It’s what I said before. I want to try to tell everything about an object. What it was, what it might be. I guess I lost interest in things that could be finished.”

  Pale yellows, blues, and greens. Ziggurats and spirals, like Dan­te’s Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell. She’s not after the beauty of shapes, I think; she’s probing their deep structures, taking them apart with little hope of putting them together again.

  We make a right turn, into a larger room.

  “How do you get this texture?” I ask her.

  “It’s an encaustic process, pigment mixed with hot wax.” She moves in beside me. She smells lemony. “I didn’t know how to do it at first, and I learned different ways to make really dangerous fumes. I almost blew myself up a couple of times.” She shrug
s. “It’s not a good idea to heat turpentine on a hot plate.”

  “I love what you do,” I tell her. “You’ve found a way to paint ideas, and to paint everything at once. But the uncertainty … it’s as if your hands were trembling as you worked.” I amaze us both by lifting her fingers to my lips. “Congratulations on really fine work.”

  I’ve embarrassed us.

  “Thank you,” she mumbles.

  “Susan—”

  “Y’all are gonna have to leave pretty soon,” a workman interrupts us. He’s hauling a dusty Skilsaw. “We got some ceiling work to do. We’ll cover your paintings, ma’am, and take good care of them, but it might get rough in here if you don’t have a breathing mask.”

  “Yes, all right,” Susan says. “We’re on our way.” To me she adds, “Anna had a sleepover at a friend’s last night.” She checks her watch. “I need to pick her up.”

  “Susan, can I ask: what are your doctors telling you?”

  She bites her lower lip. “I don’t …” Her eyes moisten. “I just need to do this show.”

  “All right,” I say, a near whisper.

  “Thank you, Adam.”

  “I feel privileged.”

  The Skilsaw starts to whine. As we move toward the door, I glance at the titles of the paintings. They’re written on paper wall-tags we’ve placed beside each image. The Angel of Forgetfulness, Vacillating Measures, Expectations of Distance, Notes for a Talking Cage, A Chronology of Skin, Language Mechanics. They read like entries in a fevered encyclopedia, lost among dusky labyrinths in a library. Tales of astronomers madly dreaming, spirit becoming flesh, a lover’s body breaking into bloom.

  10.

  The radio wakes me as sunlight hits my bed. Behind my eyelids, an after-streak of birds.

  “After several delays, appeals, and a flurry of legal motions, Timothy McVeigh died today with his eyes open,” a female reporter announces solemnly. “He was declared dead at 7:14 a.m., Central Time, Monday, June 11, 2001. Witnesses on site said he looked stoic, calm, resolute. Many of the bombing survivors and victims watching the closed-circuit feed in Oklahoma City swore he looked defiant. Hate-filled. Arrogant.”