“Thanks,” says Todd.
Dawn plunges her fists into the pockets of her fleece vest, lowers her head, and hurries past the teenagers, trailing the faint odor of liver and marmalade.
“This is crazy!” she says when Todd emerges from the dining hall.
They are standing on a concrete deck, looking out over a swollen creek that winds toward and then past them, its surface gently roiling, gelatinous and silver green in the failing light. Overhead, tiny points of yellow and pink appear in a sky that modulates from iridescent teal to indigo purple.
“What are we even doing here?!” she says.
Todd shrugs.
“This is a catastrophe!” she says.
“We just have to wait and see.”
“Wait and see what?”
“It’ll be different when the others get here.”
She has been gazing at the creek, but now she reels around to look at him, her face in the dimness an agglutination of powdery grays and blacks. “Do you really think anybody is coming?”
“How could they not?” he says. “I mean, look at this place. They wouldn’t hire all these people if they didn’t expect a crowd.”
“Why not?” she says. “The world is full of fuckups.”
Todd shrugs. Then he sighs.
“I don’t have time for this bullshit!” says Dawn. “I’ve got work to do.”
Her hands plunge back into her fleece pockets and she lowers her head as if she is walking into a fierce wind. Her sandals make cha-cha sounds as she diminishes across the broad deck. She descends the three steps to the path back to the Fellows’ Residence, and grows less and less distinct as she strides off into the gloaming.
A familiar loneliness gently settles in Todd’s heart. He looks up at the sky, which has expanded and grown raven blue. Smaller points of yellow and pink—and also green—appear between the first ones, which grow brighter and brighter. Gradually the sky shifts from a light-speckled dome to an ever-receding loftiness in which stars hang like radiant dust motes. This is exactly the sort of night Todd loves most, and he decides to stretch out on one of the benches along the deck’s creek side and spend an hour just looking up and feeling that gentle suction of the universe’s vastness pulling along the length of his body.
But then the dining-hall doors open and the teenagers spill out into the night, chattering happily, lighting up cigarettes and joints. In an instant, Todd too has descended the steps and is walking along the path, which is illuminated as it traverses an acre of lawn by a double row of elfin streetlamps.
“Help yourself,” says the handwritten sign taped to the brushedsteel serving table. To the left of the sign are three open boxes of cereal, some bowls, plates, cups, a carton of milk, and a coffeemaker the size of a small trash can. To the right, under the table’s heat lamps, is a basin of oatmeal, the surface of which has gone pigeon brown, and a basin of scrambled eggs that have gone school-bus orange. Both heat lamps are off.
Todd pours himself a bowl of Sugar Pops and fills a cup with black coffee.
Dawn is sitting in the exact seat where he sat last night. She is holding a cup to her mouth with both hands and contemplating the cow-dotted hills. Todd carries his tray in her direction, suffers a crisis of confidence, turns a pirouette, and then blushes and places his tray at the nearest setting, which happens to be three seats down from Dawn. As he pulls back his chair, he hears her speak, but he can’t make out her words.
“Excuse me?” he says.
“Do I look like I have bad breath?” Her voice is angry, but she is smiling.
“Uh …” He blushes again, this time so forcefully he hears a thumping in his ears. “I just didn’t … you know … disturb you.”
“Suit yourself.” She turns toward the window and, once again, covers the lower half of her face with the cup.
Feeling that he has offended her, Todd walks around the table to the seat she occupied the night before. No sooner does he sit down than he thinks that she might not have actually wanted him to join her. But it’s too late to move again, so he just contemplates his milk-slick yellow cereal, unable to eat. When, at last, he dares to look in Dawn’s direction, he finds that she is staring right at him.
“Did you hear all that noise last night?” she says.
“Noise?”
“Yeah. Engines. People shouting. Sometime in the middle of the night. Two a.m., three a.m.”
He searches his memory and then, just to be sure, he searches it again. “No.”
“It went on for like an hour, first out in the parking lot. Then there were all these thumps in the corridor. And whispers. I figured it was the other fellows moving in, but …” She holds out an upturned hand to either side, looks around the empty room, shrugs.
“Maybe they’re still sleeping,” says Todd.
“Hunh.”
“I mean if they got in so late.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“I bet we’ll see them at the convocation.”
“I guess,” she says.
“Some of them, at least.”
The schedule in their cell phones reads: “Convocation, Dan Wendall Auditorium, 9:00 a.m.” Todd and Dawn are standing in front of a row of aluminum doors, surmounted by a row of foot-high aluminum letters: DAN WENDALL AUDITORIUM. Their cell phones both say: 8:58. They try every door, but each is locked so firmly it seems welded to its frame. Now their phones say: 9:04. From the concrete plaza in front of the auditorium they can survey the entire W.I.I.I. campus. A dozen mule deer tread hesitantly to the creek edge and then, independently, randomly, they lower their heads, raise them, then lower them again, like a cervine version of Whack-a-Mole. A small white dog tied to the empty bike rack behind the administrative offices keeps running off, only to be yanked so forcefully by its extended leash that it flips backward into the air and crumples to the grass. A dusk-colored sandhill crane flies just over the gleaming silver observatory on slowly wafting wings.
Nature everywhere; no people.
Todd and Dawn can look out for miles to that point where the blue-gray clouds touch the gray-green earth: not a single human being, not even a car—moving or parked. Their cell phones say: 9:13. They turn in circles with their hands on their heads. Their fists against the doors make no more sound than if they were pounding on stone. The edges of their keys make tiny clicks.
Jen, the blue-haired receptionist, is leaning against the front of her desk. She has very big teeth and is smiling. She gives Dawn’s upper arm a quick rub as if she is polishing it. She winks at Todd. “Postponed,” she says. “Didn’t anybody tell you?” Her cheeks bunch like tiny peaches. Slivers of light beam off her eyeballs. She seems exceedingly happy. “You’ve got a free day!” she says. “We’re waiting for the others to arrive,” she says. “Have fun! We’ll let you know ASAP.” She gives Dawn’s shoulder another polish. Todd gets another wink. “Bye-bye,” Jen says.
They are two miles down a dirt road. On one side, six black Angus bulls behind three strands of barbed wire flick their dusty tails and make noises like small-scale geological catastrophes. The bulls stare at Dawn and Todd with eyes the size and color of eight balls. On the other side of the road, at a distance of a quarter mile, a single pronghorn stands motionlessly on an ultragreen hillside, also staring.
Dawn puffs out her cheeks, shakes her head, and turns a laughing expression toward the sky. “That’s so impossibly naive!” she says.
“It’s just simple mathematics,” says Todd. “How can mathematics be naive?”
They are discussing Fermi’s paradox—to wit: there are seventy sextillion stars in the visible universe, and thus several billion planets upon which life could form, and millions upon which, during the nearly fourteen billion years since the Big Bang, life must have achieved such technological sophistication that the electromagnetic noise of its machinery ought to be blaring out into the ether, and, lastly, there must be hundreds of thousands of civilizations capable of sending vehicles into space and colonizin
g other planets, thousands of which might, in turn, colonize others, which would mean that by this point every habitable planet in the universe, including the Earth, ought to have been at least visited—so where is everybody? Why is there zero evidence that we have company in the cosmos? Or at least no evidence capable of convincing anyone other than blubber-hipped eleven-year-olds and gray-haired hippies with copper pyramids on their heads?
“It’s not the mathematics,” says Dawn. “It’s the assumption that all these other planets are populated by angels. It’s the staggering disregard for the fact that life forms only develop intelligence so that they can dominate and destroy their evolutionary rivals. And, what is more, any civilization capable of sending vehicles into space will also have the ability to destroy its own planet several times over, just as we do. What is the statistical probability that the human race will survive this century? And don’t even think about the next millennium! So why should we assume that the inhabitants of other planets are any less greedy, aggressive, incompetent, and perverse than we are? It’s not the mathematics. On the contrary: the mathematics is exactly right. Millions of planets must have given rise to life capable of developing concentration camps and neutron bombs, and simple math tells us that most of those planets must long since have been reduced to smoking cinders.”
There are things about sex that Dawn doesn’t understand. Why is it that the men who start out acting as if their brains are entirely in their dicks are always the ones who end up weeping in the bathroom because you don’t love them? How come stepfathers universally believe their marriage vows give them the right to pull down their stepdaughters’ panties? Why is breakup sex always the best sex? Why is it that seven and a half years after she threw out her lying, cheating, certifiably insane German professor boyfriend, blocked all his e-mail addresses and phones, unfriended him on Facebook, bad-mouthed him to everyone she knew, including his ex-wife, and spent thirteen thousand unreimbursable dollars talking about him in therapy—why is it that she still can’t walk past the bench where they first kissed without groaning and covering her face with her hands? Why, so many years later, can she still hear his love whispers inside her head? Why does she get drunk almost every night and go to his website to scroll through photographs of him standing in front of blackboards or behind podiums the world over, his eyes sparked with enthusiasm, his mouth in that lopsided warp that always makes her think of a baby’s first laugh?
As Dawn and Todd come back down the dirt road and cross the highway onto Dan Wendall Drive, a fire engine–red pickup truck vrooms toward them trailing a corona of golden dust. At first it seems a luna moth is fluttering wildly behind the windshield, but then they see that it’s a woman’s hand—Jen’s, in fact—waving at them. As the truck comes closer, the vroom starts to rumble inside their chests. Jen’s waving hand swings away from the windshield toward the passenger window. Her face conveys extreme merriment, and she seems to be mouthing an emphatic message—though neither can make it out.
First the wind of the truck’s passage blows the hair off their foreheads, then it sucks their hair sideways into the golden wake. Jen turns onto the highway and the little white dog leaps again and again against the cab’s rear window, which is already smeary from its nose, tongue, and paws. The tires screech and the truck rockets down the road, dwindling within seconds to a humming red dot.
The dishes of the dozen silver radio telescopes in the field behind the observatory are tilted toward the ultragreen grass, conveying the impression that the telescopes have traveled an immense distance and are utterly exhausted, more spiritually than physically. Todd and Dawn approach the observatory’s glass doors, which hiss open, then hiss shut behind them, replacing the peaceful din of cicadas and birdcalls with the hum of solid-state machinery. But the steel door to the staircase leading up to the observatory’s dome is welded shut—actually welded: small metal plates span the gap between the door and its frame, each of them nubby and flame rainbowed at its edge, radiating darts of carbon dust.
“What the fuck?” says Dawn.
Todd shakes his head. “Whoa.”
They walk down the hall to a door labeled RADIO TELESCOPE COMMAND STATION. Same deal: nubby edges, rainbows, etc.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” says Dawn.
Todd keeps twisting the doorknob and yanking.
“I was just fucking in here yesterday!” says Dawn.
Todd lets go of the knob and kicks the door. “The whole reason I came here,” he says, “was to use the radio telescope. That’s the whole fucking reason!” He smiles and looks down at the ground, wondering if Dawn has noticed that he used the word “fucking.”
“Who the fuck do they think we are?!” she says.
The dining hall is silent, empty, and the dim green of the ocean bottom. “Hello?” calls Dawn, and is answered only by the echo of her voice. The brushed-steel serving table is cold. The food basins have a greasy sheen at their bottoms, but nothing else.
“What’s with this place?” says Dawn.
“Let’s check out the kitchen,” says Todd.
The kitchen is filled with a darkness that is like a pressure upon their eyeballs. Todd stretches his hand into it, hears a distant click, and the darkness evaporates, revealing a shelf of brilliant muffin hats, each with a pristine white apron dangling from a hook beneath. No teenagers in sight, however, only rows of steel tables stretching in all directions under long banks of LED lights emitting steel-colored illumination. Not a surface marred by an abandoned dish towel, ladle, or knife. Every pot is hanging from its rack, the cans on the shelves arranged by color and in spectrum order. Nothing but the muffled drum tap of water droplets on a metal sink bottom to indicate that Todd and Dawn are not the first human beings ever to enter this resplendent space.
The walk-in refrigerator does, however, contain three hundred pounds of cooked food, and there is a trunk-size microwave next to the yacht-size stove.
Dawn has trout amandine and Todd has mac ’n’ cheese.
The clinks of their cutlery bounce back at them off the two-story windows and the fieldstone walls.
The night is gigantic. Dawn and Todd are lying head-to-head on neighboring benches looking up at the stars. At the bottom of the bluff, the swollen creek rustles amid the high grass on the engulfed banks. “What did you want to use them for?” she says.
“What?”
“The radio telescopes.”
“Oh … nothing.”
“Come on!” says Dawn.
“What?”
“Just say it.”
“It’s nothing … really … it’s stupid.”
“Say it!”
“Oh …” He heaves a deep sigh. “Well, I wanted to send a message.”
“A message?”
“To the M13 star cluster.”
“The M13!”
“I told you it was stupid.”
“Why do you want to do that?” says Dawn. “That’s twenty-five thousand light-years away! You’d be subatomic dust by the time you got a response.”
“I don’t know. It just seems so cool—the idea that millennia after I am gone, someone, somewhere in the universe might know I was here.”
“What would you send?”
An owl hoots. Distant cow bells thunk dully, then go silent.
“Maybe just a series of prime numbers,” says Todd. “Or a schematic of the solar system.”
“I’d send a song.”
“A song?”
“Sure,” says Dawn. “It would have a repeating but complex pattern, so obviously the product of an intelligent species. Maybe it would give some alien a moment of pleasure.”
“What song?”
“I don’t know.”
“‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”
“‘Moondance’!” says Dawn. “I’d sing it myself!”
“Or ‘Moon River’?”
“‘Stairway to Heaven’!”
“I’d send ‘Silent Night,’” says Todd.
“Huh.”
“All is calm, all is bright …”
“That’s a lullaby. You’d put the universe to sleep.”
“I think it’s beautiful.”
“Oh, God!” says Dawn. “I need a fucking drink.” She sits up. “Do you think there’s a car here we could hijack and go into town?”
“There’s a bar in the basement.”
“What?”
“In the basement. A bar. The dining-hall basement.”
The amiable sorrow of Hotel California burbles beyond an open door at the end of a pipe-lined corridor. Inside, amber light filters up through rows of liquor bottles and beams down in moody pools all across the room—the only inhabitants of which are thirty-seven taxidermied animal heads, looking out from the walls with that vacancy of eye that comes between the suspicion that one is choking and the clutching of hands to throat.
“Hunh,” says Dawn.
“It was the same yesterday,” says Todd.
She hunches her shoulders, smiles, and holds out both palms in surrender to a delightful form of helplessness. Then she goes behind the bar and pours two shots of Knob Creek.
“I don’t drink,” says Todd.
“Nonsense,” says Dawn.
A dozen small wooden tables crowd the space between the bar and an ankle-high platform on the far wall, which must be where the men in the giant cowboy hats played their guitars. Dawn brings the two full shot glasses to a table under a buffalo head, then goes back to the bar and grabs the bottle.
Taking her seat, she holds up her glass and waits for Todd to sit opposite her. When he lifts his glass, she winks and taps it with her own. “Clink!” she says, then empties her glass in a gulp.
Todd touches his glass to his lower lip and allows a single drop of bourbon to send a perfumed burning across his tongue. His eyes water. He winces and puts the glass down on the table.
Dawn talks.
She pours herself another shot, and talks some more.
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