Three Days in Houston

Liza Long

“A new theoretical model suggests that as the universe expands, everything, from galaxies, planets and atomic particles to space-time itself, will eventually be torn apart before vanishing from view.” — Hannah Devlin, “This Is the Way the World Ends,” The Guardian, July 3, 2015.

1. March 19, 1989 She meets her father in the maze of tiled tunnels beneath One Shell Plaza. It’s late November, but he is wearing a lightweight wool summer suit, the standard uniform of a senior level oil company corporate counsel. When he sees his oldest daughter, his face lights up. They choose Fuddruckers for lunch. She has lived in Texas four years now and still can’t say this restaurant’s name without snickering. When they moved west from Pennsylvania her seventh grade year, her parents bought her a custom t-shirt, locked velvet letters spelling out “Yankee by birth, Texan by force.” In true Texan ethos, Fuddruckers displays bloody fat-marbled cow carcasses in its windows. She is still eating beef then, but she’ll remember the window of headless skinless cows when she decides to stop. They talk — about school, work, their latest obsessions. Her father’s current ixation is the chemical compound methyl ethyl ketone. “I sometimes dream of going back to school and getting a chemistry degree,” he conides. Her current obsession is T.E. Lawrence. “Why Lawrence?” her father asks. She thinks. Why Lawrence? Because he was both a bastard (when that mattered) and the quintessential proper English product of an Oxford education. Because he dressed up like an Arab. Because he lost his brother in the war that didn’t end all wars. Because she has a schoolgirl crush on a closeted gay man. “Because he embodies the problem of heroism in the modern age,” she tells her father.

2. June 7, 2000 “If you lie down on the sidewalk, you can get the whole building in one shot,” my husband, a self-styled photographer, informed me. I squinted at him

in the bright sunshine, then lattened myself on the pavement and pointed my sturdy Canon at the sky. My husband was right, as usual. From this angle, I could imagine my dead father standing at his window, looking down at us from the corporate counsel oice on the 24th loor of One Shell Plaza. My husband was a Californian by birth; this was his irst time in Texas. We left our two young sons with my mother for a weekend getaway to attend my ten-year high school reunion. My father met my future husband just once, at a college luncheon for Honors program graduates. A year later, when my father died and I took a leave of absence from the Classics Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Austin, my future husband proposed to me in California, where my family moved just before my father died. It seemed so serendipitous (except for the part about my father dying). But before he got on one knee and pulled out a ring, my future husband told me about a dream he had. “In my dream, your father was Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof,” my future husband said, “and I asked him for your hand in marriage.” I had never told my future husband how much my father loved Fiddler on the Roof, how he would dance around the kitchen jiggling his belly and belting out “If I were a rich man” in a rich tenor, more Frank Sinatra than Zero Mostel, sending my mother into its of giggles. I took this dream as a sign from God that this man was my soulmate, so I said yes. After my father died, my mother never laughed anymore. That afternoon in Houston, from my prone vantage point on the pavement, I looked up at my husband. He had tied a white t-shirt around his head to block the sun, and with his self-described “noble visage,” bright blue eyes, and self-assured expression, his resemblance to Lawrence of Arabia was uncanny. “I think there are tunnels underneath the sidewalks here,” I told him as I scrambled to my feet. “That’s ridiculous,” my future ex-husband snorted. “Why would they put tunnels under Houston? It never snows here. And it’s too close to the Gulf — the tunnels would lood.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I must have imagined them.”

3. November 5, 2018 She slips out of her hotel room on the 20th loor and inches along the carpet, pressed against the locked wallpaper of the inner wall, trying not to look at the vast empty space to her right. The laughter from the hotel bar in the center of the spacious 26-story atrium is a faint murmur here. As she nears the elevator and safety, she accidentally glances over the rail. She sees her own body splayed out by the fountain, legs bent at awkward angles, eyes open but blank. With a shudder, she stabs the elevator button, and as the doors open, she stumbles inside. She is safe. She manages a faint smile at the other occupants. One woman compliments her on her red patent leather pumps. She is in Houston for a conference. She writes books and gives speeches and teaches college now. No one else knows about the ghosts here, the lickering wisps of past and future that surround her here. When the elevator reaches the lobby, she spots the marked entrance to the tunnels. The knowledge that the tunnels are real — that she has not imagined them — washes over her, and she breathes easy for the irst time since her divorce. She joins the throngs of commuters, moving by instinct to the familiar white limestone façade of One Shell Plaza’s tunnel lobby. She squints at the elevator, praying for her father to emerge when/if the fabric of space-time rips to reunite them. Once upon a time, she told her father that Lawrence of Arabia never recovered from the war. He died in a mysterious motorcycle crash when he was 46, the age she is now, her father’s age when he got cancer in 1991. The elevator doors open, and a man wearing a lightweight wool summer suit, the standard uniform of a senior level oil company corporate counsel, steps out. His face lights up as he sees his daughter, engrossed in her phone. And watching this familiar scene play out for another father and daughter, the rips in her own fabric feel patched and mended. She knows then that unlike her father when he was her age, she will keep living for a while longer.