Want Not (Jonathan Miles) by Jonathan Miles

Author:Jonathan Miles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

5

A MONUMENT WAS RISING in his dreams. Sometime around the end of April, three months after Elwin’s first meeting with the Waste Isolation Project Markers panel and two weeks after the second meeting, the mission was beginning a slow and peculiar creep into his subconscious.

This was unusual in multiple ways. Elwin didn’t often dream, for one thing, owing to a case of weight-related sleep apnea that tended to constantly scramble his REM-state channel lineup. What the act of dreaming brought to mind were the ancient frustrations of watching TV with his younger brother David, who’d lie on his back in front of the Philco Cool-Chassis “Miss America Series” set with the channel knob lodged between his toes, rotating the knob every two minutes in fractured, commercial-free contentment while from the couch Elwin and Jane would hurl murderous threats and occasionally magazines or flatware. On those rare nights when Elwin did manage to sustain and remember a dream, however, the dreams were always oblique, immaterial, indecipherable except at the basest symbolic level: unsatisfying Dada dreams in which, for instance, Maura didn’t return to him pleading for love and forgiveness, no, but rather a bucktoothed Dunkin’ Donuts cashier with a vague if sufficient resemblance to Maura shorted him on his change. That was it: a dream yielding nothing in the way of enlightenment or even a sense of his mind processing its sorrows somewhere deep within its gyral folds—yielding nothing, really, save a healthful aversion to the Dunkin’ Donuts in the Marasmus State student union. He missed the vivid, oversaturated dreams of his younger years, when whole civilizations would appear to him, as in a private sci-fi novel, his mind swarming with the delicious phonologies and morphologies of lost or never-were languages, leaving him flushed and eager when he awoke, caffeinated from the inside.

These newest dreams, to his great and bewildered surprise, were very much like those. The first one arrived the night after the panel’s second meeting, at the Attero Laboratories Waste Isolation Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. There he’d been outfitted with a headlamp-equipped hardhat, goggles, and emergency oxygen pack, and dropped two thousand feet down in a wire-cage elevator for a firsthand look at where eight hundred thousand steel drums of radioactive waste would eventually be stored. With him in the elevator were a blue-suited safety officer; Byron Torrance, the Pollyanna-ish genome biologist; and the artist on the panel, Sharon Keim, a Nevada sculptor whose most notable work was a thirty-ton granite polyhedron on the outskirts of El Paso that several Hollywood actresses had commissioned as a monument to battered women. Elwin liked Sharon; she was thorny, subversive, eager to lance the more swollen egos on the panel, as in:

“I feel I should admit something,” Torrance announced in the elevator, about a thousand feet down. This he said floridly, with that same grandiloquence he applied to everything he said—one sensed the cameras were always rolling in his mind—but since Elwin had yet to become accustomed to this he awaited the admission with suspense.

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