He licked his cracked and burning lips. The dream about his father made sense now. Some part of him had been dwelling on the anniversary. He’d let Con and Rob down again. He was a shitty brother and a shitty son and did not deserve to die in so fine a place as this.
Such were his wild thoughts as he left the conference room where he’d been imprisoned by his hope of Hap’s return. He staggered out and through the dark building, his dive light as dim as he could make it, its staid old battery down to rations as well. Maybe he’d find a pool of water where a spring had flooded or where trapped moisture had drained down through the impossibly tight pack. But there was little hope of that. He left the conference room to get away from his nightmares and his failures. To let his body wander instead of his mind.
Before he died, he should go out into the sand one last time. Better to perish there and be discovered by another diver as they came to pick over this city. He still had a good charge in his suit, might see how far he could make it before the sand filled his lungs. But some naive part of him kept thinking Hap would come back, that Brock would send others, that he would be a fool to go out and die when there was still air in that building to breathe. At any moment, Hap would burst in with a second set of twin tanks, laughing and saying he’d only been gone two hours and here’s the coin those scroungers paid and all the beer and pussy in Springston would be theirs.
Palmer kept thinking this, but the hope had grown as stale and thin as the oxygen. The hope that had kept him prisoner in that room with the chairs and the great table and the brewing machine had weakened. Gone was the need to be there when the divers came for him. And as that hope waned, he left through the door that had damned him, that heavy door that Hap had slammed shut on his face, and with his dive light barely aglow, he nosed around his crypt for the first time.
He had seen many crumbling office buildings full of sand outside Springston, but never on such a scale as this, never so pristine. The buildings he had seen had been picked over for centuries. Men with mastery over the sand had ripped out great holes and had salvaged almost anything worth taking. But Palmer now strolled through a perfect recreation of that long-dead world. It was a museum for the buried gods and the world they had lived in. His fragile mind tallied stacks and stacks of coin as he felt his way down the hall. There were clocks; pictures framed and behind perfect glass; recessed lights and miles and miles of copper wire; unbroken tile; wood countertops. Coin everywhere.
Other divers would come and claim these things. Probably not Hap, for the guilt would gnaw at him. At least, Palmer hoped it would. No, it would be some other diver who would find his bones. They would remove Palmer’s skeleton from his suit piece by piece and marvel that he still had a charge left, that he had been too scared to make for the surface, and someone would point out that he didn’t have tanks, and some other asshole would say that there was a girl from Low-Pub who could’ve done it, and none of them would know that these bones in their hands belonged to that girl’s brother.
He tried another room. A bathroom. Porcelain fixtures and indoor plumbing. He felt insane for twisting the spigots, but no one was watching.
The next room was a jackpot. A bonanza of riches. A small room no bigger than a bed but full of tools. Brooms and mops and much else. He picked up one of the brooms. Synthetic bristles. Plastic. As good as the day it was made. Palmer kicked some of the scrum from his boots to the marble tile and whisked the sand around with the broom. His mother—the mother of his youth—would’ve loved such a broom. Palmer flashed back to chasing Conner through the house when they were boys, giving him a beating before his sister caught up to them both and dispensed two beatings. Back in the closet, he shook bottles of liquids, cracked the cap on one of them and took a sniff. His nose burned. If he needed an easier way out than the sand, here it was.
He surveyed all the useful things packed into such a small space, enough coin to retire on, and closed the door. Someone else would come and take these things. They would figure out a way to dive deep and bring it all back. Wouldn’t bother with him, though. Palmer thought of the city that would be built above these dunes on all that was stolen from the past. There would be an orgy of excess. A gold rush like the old-timers used to tell of Low-Pub’s founding. No one would remember the first person to set foot in that scraper. He pictured Hap in the Honey Hole at that very moment, blisteringly drunk, delicious golden beer everywhere, telling the gathered that he’d been the first one inside, that he’d discovered Danvar all on his own. Fucking Hap.
The next room was an office. Palmer checked the drawers, hoping for a canteen, even though the ancient peoples seemed rarely to use them. Dry pens. Knick-knacks. A silver key, which Palmer couldn’t help but slip into his belly pocket. Folded paper. He pulled this out and held it close to his dive light. A map. Dark lines and place names. The word “Colorado” caught his eye. Palmer slipped this into his pocket too. When they found his body, they would find something useful. Find that he had been useful.
In the center drawer he found raw riches. Coin. An entire pile of them jumbled together as if they’d been swept inside ages ago. They weren’t even locked up, just left among paper clips and pens and other worthless artifacts as if these trinkets were as dear as money.
Copper and silver, they were unscratched by sand. Palmer studied them one at a time before throwing them into his stomach pocket with the key. There grew a jangle by his belly to go with the grumbles, a two-man band. He would die wealthy. Starving and wealthy. Whoever found him would bury him well and pour a beer into his grave. A note! Palmer would write a note to go with the coin, a note to his pallbearer and one to his sister Vic. He would brag about being brave in the first message and admit to being an idiot in the second. He rummaged for a pencil, found one, pulled out his dive knife and scraped the point sharp. It felt good to have something to do, something as simple as sharpening lead. He slipped the knife back into his boot and found a pad of paper. Eaten through with worms, but it would do. He scratched out instructions for his burial and a quick note to Vic saying he was sorry. He signed his name and started to write a date, was just going to guess, but then wrote the anniversary of his father’s disappearance instead. Probably not right, but it was close enough and there was poetry to it. Poetry was better than truth. He folded both notes and stuffed them in with the heavy sag of coin. Hopefully it wouldn’t be Hap who found him. Hap wouldn’t come back. Unless Hap was arriving right then and he was missing him.
In a panic—despite the days of staring at the drift of sand with no sign of Hap—Palmer imagined his friend coming back right then, seeing that Palmer was gone, and leaving him for a second time. Palmer rushed back to the hall, hands on his belly to keep the coins from sloshing around, and he heard a noise. The creak of an old building with the weight of a world on its head. Coming from across the hall.
“Hap?” He called out his friend’s name, felt a little delirious. How long had he slept the last time he’d lain down? Was he still dreaming? “Father?”
There was a noise on the other side of the door. Palmer looked up and down the hallway, the dim red glow of his dive light barely penetrating a dozen paces. He tried to get his bearings. Was this the room he’d been wasting away inside of? Did he get turned around? The darkness beyond the feeble reach of his dive light made everything seem distant and full of quiet potential. He tried the door and found it unlocked. A single door. A different room. He stepped inside and saw rows of desks, those flat plastic screens on each. Several of the desks were jumbled together; they had been shoved away from a large pile of drift pushing its way into the room.