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 140
