Shame and Wonder by David Searcy

Author:David Searcy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

So you get somebody crazy enough and rich enough to do this with conviction. Buy the land and bull it through. Hire all the lawyers, pay the necessary tribute, overwhelm the legal difficulties. Form some sort of new municipal zone and cause to come into existence, in the bleakest part of town, the Trinity River Bottoms Homeless Park and Astronomical Observatory. Maybe a hundred acres—no paths or trees or anything, just grass kept like a golf course or a cemetery. Constantly, and more or less invisibly, maintained. And scattered, here and there, across these green one hundred acres, leaving space at the center for the observatory itself, small concrete shelters. All exactly the same. I’m thinking precast-concrete box-culvert sections. Six by six by eight, say, or whatever standard size comes close. You see them on construction sites sometimes—those open-ended concrete boxes. If you think of them as shelter, there’s an eloquence. That hard, cold open-endedness. In that we’re all just passing through. You know? Essential homelessness, you see. But it’s the arrangement that’s most critical, I think. It must be beautiful. How can it not be, though—so long as it doesn’t get too structured. It should seem a sort of scatter, all those empty concrete boxes on the grass. What’s happening here? And at the center like a dream, this great domed building, also concrete, with its heavenly implications.

This has always been a terrible part of town. The hopeless center of West Dallas. Lead-contaminated flat land by the river where the bodies tend to turn up and the streets have names like Fish Trap, Life, and Nomas. This is the area that, according to my old friend Nolan White, who, from the fifties until his murder in the eighties (and whose tales of his grandfather’s life under slavery I somehow neglected to record), lived not too far away, across from my father’s automobile battery warehouse, where junked batteries were collected for their lead content and hauled straight to the smelter down the road—but anyway, this was the region he remembered, back in the thirties before the levees were completed, as the Bottoms, where respectable people weren’t advised to go. But if they did, they should be armed and should not linger after dark.

It never really gets too dark down here at night. It gets opaque. It closes in. The dust and haze and bleary sky-glow from downtown. It is no place for an observatory. They belong on mountaintops, we know. We’ll have to force it. And who knows if anyone will even come—it’s not so much to offer, is it? Precast-concrete culvert sections. The observatory staffers, of course, get paid—to wear white coats, to try their best to use the telescope and figure out what possible application there might be for such a large and optimistic-looking instrument down here at the very bottom of the world. But as for the homeless, who can say? Perhaps, as the local news gets bored, there is a gradual, intermittent, and uncertain drifting in. Around the edges first.

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