The Big Dark Sky (10)
6
The Montana night is silent except for the occasional cries of coyotes or the inquiries of owls or the shriek of an unidentified night bird, as those creatures mourn the fate of the Earth.
The stars burn toward the heat death of the universe in however many billions of years, and the dead moon sheds cold light on the dark buildings that stand testament to the folly of the human race.
Asher Optime walks the weed-prickled main—and only—street, savoring the cool clean air. He relishes the peace here and regrets the screaming that must come later, though it will be brief.
Most nights he is not awake at this hour. He usually sleeps from midnight to dawn, as soundly as the unborn in the womb. His thrilling dreams take place in three-dimensional evolving versions of the artworks of Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. In the dreams, those artists of deconstruction wrench from him or cut from him or erase from him pieces of himself, until it seems that he will cease to exist before he wakes. This pleasant expectation is always disappointed, for every dream ends while a part of him remains: one hand crawling past a heavy door framed by brickwork, one sorrowing eye floating in a void where a dog barks in the dark, fragments of his face floating in a field of color. On this night, he will not sleep or dream, because it is his role to be the artist who erases the meaning of a life, the life of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Ophelia Poole.
Five months earlier, a week before his forty-second birthday, Asher had found the road to nowhere, which had led to everything he wanted.
In Montana, the prairies appear endless, and valleys sprawl as wide as plains. The immense forests are so primeval, it’s possible to believe that creatures said to be extinct for many thousands of millennia still live here in these densely grown and deeply shadowed reaches. The soaring, castellated mountains are forbidding ramparts that, silhouetted in a bloody sunset, might be the strongholds of an evil kingdom in a fantasy novel, and gorges plunge to depths where mist gathers as though to obscure passages to secret civilizations beneath the crust of the planet.
In human terms, Montana offers more lonely places than can be counted, some of which were once occupied by people with pluck and aspirations. They came for gold, found it, exhausted the veins; came for silver; came for copper in the mines that had been depleted of silver. They built small communities that they thought would grow to become hubs of commerce and transportation; some did, many didn’t. In the state’s 147,000 square miles, some of the loneliest places aren’t the farthest from all traces of civilization, but are those where men and women had hoped to make a future before being forced to face reality and abandon what they had built.
Of the several remote settlements that Asher Optime has found and explored during months of preparation for his new life, this one is the most suitable for his purpose. A road of compacted earth and broken shale withers away in a meadow, where decades earlier a high crest of earth in the west, perhaps weakened by heavy rains and dislocated by seismic tremors, collapsed and buried the approach to the abandoned town under thousands of tons of dirt. Where the track continues through a forest, generations of undergrowth obscure it, so a trained eye is required to recognize it. Only a determined seeker in a Land Rover with fortified tires can follow the trail through three miles of thick, descending woods to a hundred or more clear acres by a rushing river, where unknown but hardy settlers once came with some purpose in mind that he cannot confirm.
Of the fifty-six buildings, only twenty-two have collapsed entirely or fallen into such ruin that it is dangerous to enter them. Those that remain are mostly simple, decaying houses. The largest structure might have been a modest lumber mill, though all of the equipment and internal features that could have positively identified it were stripped out and taken away at some point during the settlement’s demise.
As best he can determine, the first residents staked their claim here around 1860. The settlement, which was never formally designated as a town, was abandoned by the last of its citizens in the late 1890s. He can’t help but be impressed by the quality of their masonry and carpentry; for if they had possessed any less skill, nothing whatsoever would be standing. They employed native stone and heavy timbers and masterful joinery. Evident dedication marks everything they constructed, so that he wonders if they might have been members of a religious sect.
At the entrance to the town, he’d found a weathered plank mortared into the face of a stone plinth. Eight letters had been burned in the wood. He believes this is the name of the place: Zipporah. On one of his visits to buy supplies in the nearest center of commerce—over thirteen miles from here—he researched the word and learned it was the name of the wife of Moses. This discovery, combined with the fact that by far the most formidable building in town is a stone church, seems to confirm his speculation.
However, another building is a saloon, which on his first tour had sung in many voices when the wind was high and sieving through it, before he made repairs to the structure. Why would a town of religious types sanction such a den of iniquity? That question amuses Asher, although he spends no time pondering it. He isn’t surprised that the settlers were hypocrites, for in his estimation, all human beings are hypocrites, himself excepted.
Ghost town.
Such a location is not just conducive to the work he has set out to accomplish, but it is also properly symbolic. His purpose is to ensure that Earth becomes, from pole to pole, a collection of ghost towns and cities, a planet where not a single human presence disturbs the peace of any continent or sails on any sea.