Life and Death in the Stacks

[whistlersmum]

Whistler had so become a fixture at the university library, students had started approaching him for reference information.

UNLV's Special Collections housed unique, rare, and specialized research material that documented the history, culture and physical environment of the city of Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada region, the gaming industry, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas.The collections included books, pamphlets, posters, serials and periodicals, scrapbooks, archives and manuscripts, maps, architectural drawings, photographs, and more recently, video and audio tapes.

Everything he needed about the history of Searchlight, the boomtown years, the historic landscape, prominent citizens. And, after days of searching, the Agent finally found the real treasure map he'd sought: a map of the town before it's decline in the nineteen forties.

His finger traced the streets that led to the (former) Catholic Church. "Here's the church, and here's the steeple. Open the doors..."

Comments

[whistlersmum]

It was his memory. Not that it offered any answers. How many thousands of people had he encountered in his lifespan? And if it wasn't her memory, this was their first encounter.

Goddamn, he hated puzzles.

Her question brought him back to a question he'd been asking himself for decades. Why Searchlight? He never had the answer.

But maybe he wasn't asking the right question.

"I used to live here. And I'm trying to find out what was on this spot before they put up a church."

Whistler looked back at the map. Where the slip of a girl had pointed.

"Why do you live 'here'?"

[dori_bell]

“I like the desert.” The girl was thin enough to slide onto the seat without scraping the chair back from the table. “It’s sparse. Quiet.” Without asking if it would be okay to do so, she pulled the map towards her and counted the streets with large, brown eyes; there were more roads, not less, in the past. “It’s strange when a town shrinks. It’s a derelict now. That road’s gone.” Her clear fingernail indicated a passage into hill country, where a mine company had dug until the landscape was riddled with holes.

Returning to task, Dori found the place he had indicated, where a church stood for the better part of fifty years. It had been torn down just after she moved to Searchlight. She remembered the razing.

“It was a strange place for a church,” she said after some thought. “See how far it is from the graveyard and the center of town?”

[whistlersmum]

"Nothing about that town made sense, not then. Definitely not now."

Whistler looked at the map from the new angle. "Why wouldn't they put the graveyard next to the church? It's an extension of..."

Oh.

"Consecrated ground."

He looked at the roads on the map. The Agent reached out and ran a finger from the church outwards in each direction, then back again. Everything flowed into that one point. It may not have been the center of town, but it was a focal point.

[dori_bell]

Dori watched him come to conclusions on topics she knew nothing of. Graveyards were of particular interest to her… a natural habitat, so to speak. The lot in Searchlight left much to be desired. Few headstones dotted the ground. Instead, mounds of dirt were delineated with stones or flat tablets. In some places, iron crosses rose from the dust to puncture the air.

“Are you a historian?”

He looked like someone with a healthy stake in the past, at least so far as his clothes were concerned. But what intrigued her –the reason she had stopped at his table – was that Dori could not sense his internal clock marching towards expiration, as was the case with most people. He seemed to exist apart from time. Like a vampire with respiration and a pulse.

[whistlersmum]

The flowery scent -- tea rose? -- grew stronger, drawing Whistler out of the map. The information was now there; he wouldn't lose it. Not this time.

"I kinda am history," he muttered. It wasn't his intention to admit this. Something about the girl made him want to be honest. "Um, interested in the history of this town," the demon added. "It tends to draw in an eclectic bunch, and I'm worried what'll happen if it hits critical mass."

[dori_bell]

“Probably the usual. Chaos… riots… destruction.” Though no psychic, Dori was adept at figuring out when mass casualties were on the menu. A pall was cast over Searchlight… Death of yore, death to come, and she was a buzzard circling. “Are you going to save it?”

[whistlersmum]

The question stunned the Agent of Balance. It was one he'd never considered regarding Searchlight. Was that his purpose here?

"I didn't save Sodom. I watched Atlantis slip below the sea. I wasn't supposed to intervene then."

He took a breath. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

Whistler studied the girl. "What would you do?"

[dori_bell]

“Let them die.”

The girl’s look was neutral, her voice contemplative. Dori had no experience with fighting the good fight; what she knew was that all things ended so that new things began. She slipped a lock of corn-silk hair behind her earlobe and continued, “According to physics, the universe exists in a state of entropy. There is a natural tendency for the world to slip into chaos. Wood rots. Cells mutate. Civilizations crumble. And yet people spend their time here building and fortifying. I think it’s strange to prolong the inevitable.”

[whistlersmum]

Whistler looked at the girl with extreme curiosity. He wondered if she was a prodigy, given her advanced state of reasoning. It took him over a century to get that cynical.

"Okay, but. If people hadn't built and fortified," he countered, "the Roman empire wouldn't have existed. Or the Renaissance. If we didn't fight back, we wouldn't be here now, having this conversation."

He rubbed the back of his head. "I wouldn't, at any rate."

[dori_bell]

Dori's eyes narrowed in contemplation. She folded her hands atop the table. "But the Roman Empire fell. And the Renaissance gave way to Classicism and the Age of Reason. If a town builds toward critical mass, over and over, perhaps it's supposed to."

Downstairs a stack of books tipped and scattered across the floor. People hustled to pick them up.

'I-I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me today. I can't seem to...'

Dori's eyes slid to the stairs and then returned to his. She wore a placid expression.

[whistlersmum]

The noise below didn't faze Whistler. He was too focused on the topic at hand, and the girl who played Devil's Advocate too well.

"Yeah well, just because something hits critical mass, doesn't mean it has to explode. Lookit me. I've been there more than a few times in my life. Whenever I was about to go off, I'd simply--"

The Agent wasn't a man of mathematics or engineering. Maybe if he'd studied these topics in his spare time, the thought would've occurred much sooner than it did. But he did understand plumbing. And for a brief period in the 1920s, he was superintendent of a low-rise in Hell's Kitchen.

"--let off steam."