The Brief History of the Dead (19 page)

He was sure he would remember a few more as he let the line of his thoughts play out. It must have been the story about the letters that had brought them to mind. As it had brought his son to mind, and his second wife, and his parents—the people who would have gathered around his own hospital bed if he had had one.

He was trying his best not to think about them. It was just too hard.

The air was colder than it had been even an hour or so before, and a thick blanket of clouds had emerged while he was inside. As he was walking home, he overheard two men, maybe thirty years old, hypothesizing about various ways they might contact Laura. This was a popular subject of conversation in the city, though one that never seemed to produce any concrete initiatives.

“Has anybody thought about using a Ouija board?” one of them said.

“Well, maybe
she
could use a Ouija board to contact
us,
but it doesn’t work the other way. See, I was thinking we could get everybody together and just try to, you know, project our thoughts or something. A harmonic convergence sort of thing. She believes in that shit, or at least she did back in the day.”

“I don’t see why we couldn’t at least give the Ouija board thing a shot.” The man made a rolling little high-pitched horror-movie note.
“They came from beyond the grave!”

Puckett passed behind a clump of trees, and soon their voices faded away.

At the bus bench on the corner of Georgia and Sixty-fifth, a man with motor oil stains on his clothing was adjusting himself through the pocket of his pants. Puckett remembered some twenty car mechanics, though he was pretty sure he had already written them all down; he would have to check his list to make sure.

At the lower end of the golf course, a blind man was feeling his way down the sidewalk, tugging on the rigging of his beard. Puckett could remember at least six blind people.

He was almost home when he saw Joyce stepping out of a jeweler’s shop, hunching his shoulders as the wind struck his face. He suddenly felt a tremendous weariness in his bones. Maybe it was the walk, or maybe it was his conversation with the English teacher, or maybe it was just the effort of thinking about his brother after so long, but the last thing he wanted right now was another pointless argument.

He ducked beneath an awning and waited for him to pass. Joyce was listening to his watch, shaking his wrist as he held it to his ear, and he did not see him. Puckett watched him cross the street at the corner. Then he moved out of the doorway, blew a long breath of warm air into his hands, and felt the first tingle of frost on his cheek.

He looked up into the sky, a loosely swirling motion of gray and white flakes.

Not this again, he thought.

It was snowing.

TEN.

THE CREVASSE

I
ce
. Frost. Frosting. Crossing. Railroad crossing. Railroad train. Fabric train. Wedding dress. Wedding ring. Ring of fire. Ring of ice.
Ice
. Iceberg. Glacier. Razor. Stubble. Stumble. Fall. October. November. December. Christmas. Xmas. X marks the spot. Treasure. Gold. Silver. Silver Bells. Jingle Bells. Open sleigh. Snow.
Ice
. Rice. Mice. Cats. Whiskers. Scissors. Paper. Paper angels. Angel food cake. Nectar of the gods. Ambrosia. Ambrose Bierce. Mexico. Mexican. Jumping bean. Jump rope. Rope bridge. Chasm. Crevice. Ice floe. Iceberg.
Ice
.

As Laura strained at the sledge, the words snapped back and forth in her head like a racquetball, a continuously rolling blue whir that she made no effort to stop or control. She was trying to find one word for every step she took, looking for that ideal balance of physical and mental locomotion that would keep her from thinking too hard about whether she would make it to the penguin roost, and what she would find if she got there, and what difference it would make if all the reports she had read were true and everyone, everyone in the world, everyone she had ever known, was dead.

She did not know—did not want to know—the answer.

Answer. Question. Mention. Tension.

Her hauling stride measured slightly more than a foot—a foot and four inches, say—which meant (she did the math) that she could expect to cover one mile, roughly, for every thirty-five hundred words she came up with. If her bearings were correct, she had eighteen miles and sixty-three thousand words to go. The sledge had shut down on her shortly after she crossed Fog Bay, sinking onto its runners on a flat stretch of perfectly ridgeless ice. The flippers had locked and the whole immense carriage had coasted slowly across the ice, razoring a full six inches into the snow before it scraped to a stop. She had tried everything she could think of to get the engine running again. She was no mechanic, though, and it quickly became clear to her that it was broken beyond her capacity for repair.

Which was not to say that it was broken beyond
any
capacity for repair. The problem might have been something as simple as a spent fuel cell or a snapped electrical connection. But without reliable tools, good lighting, and replacement supplies, she knew she was out of luck. She stood in the cold with her face in her hands. The snow beneath her boots was loose and high. The wind made the surface stir with thousands of tiny flexing snakes. She climbed back into the steering compartment of the sledge, where the heat was quickly draining away, and shut the door.

She had already traveled most of the way around the hump of Ross Island, and it made no sense for her to turn back now. She remembered that old joke about the man who swam three quarters of the distance across a river, decided he was too tired to go any further, swung around in the water, and swam back to shore. In the version she had heard the man was Canadian, though in certain areas of the country he was probably Mexican. And immediately across the border, to either the north or the south, he was almost certainly an American.

American. Yank. Tug. Tugboat. Engine.

There was only one option open to Laura—that was how she saw it.

She couldn’t turn around, and she couldn’t stay where she was, so she would have to keep going. She waited until she felt the last of the heat slip away, then took the harness and skis out of the storage hutch, clipped the skis onto her feet, and fastened herself to the front of the sledge.

She leaned into the harness and tried to pull forward. It was impossible. The sledge was a house, the sledge was a whale. She strained so hard that one of her skis pierced the snow, plunging through the crust with a sound like tearing paper. Her left leg sank down to the knee. She lifted herself out and tried again. This time she used both of her poles for leverage, leaning into the wind, her shoulders hunched and spread to give herself as much muscle as possible. She took one step, and then another, and then a third. Perhaps the traces were stretching slightly, but the sledge did not move. She decided she would have to lighten her load. She simply wouldn’t make it otherwise.

The sledge came in two main pieces: the steering compartment and the storage hutch. She began by detaching the steering compartment from the runners, unfastening the couplings that joined it to the storage hutch and sliding it off onto the snow. It rested on the surface for a few seconds before its sharp edges punched through the crust, leaving a perfect four-by-four-foot square. Then she took the shovel out of the back of the storage hutch, which was still attached to the runners, and worked the snow loose from around the steering compartment’s door. She filled the compartment with everything she thought she could do without: a few bundles of clothing, three thick pieces of plywood, her sunblock, of course, the second of her two cooking pots, and the chest that carried her frozen food, which she had already emptied into the storage hutch. Whatever she left behind, she reasoned, she would be able to pick up again on her return trip.

She shut the door, strapped herself into her harness, and yanked on the sledge’s traces. Reluctantly it began to move—very slowly at first, then less slowly. After her first few strides, she fell into a gliding motion that carried her steadily but strenuously over the ice. The steering compartment disappeared behind her. The sledge was so much lighter than it had been before. It was half a house now, half a whale.

A whale. A wail. A good, hard cry. A gnashing of the teeth.

Laura remembered how she had begun grinding her teeth shortly after she started working for Coca-Cola. It was something she had done in her sleep, unconsciously and entirely without memory. She would wake up in the morning with her jaw aching and have no idea why, until the day her dentist noticed that her enamel had been worn down as smooth as pearl. “Frankly, I’ve never seen a mouth go so bad so quickly,” he told her. “It looks like you put your teeth through a rock tumbler.” He scouted around in her mouth for a while with a penlight, then switched the light off, looked her in the eyes, and said, “Have you ever considered therapy?”

For a while this had been her favorite dinner party story, the one she told whenever anyone mentioned teeth or psychiatry or the presumptuous suggestions of practical strangers.

But it had been months since she had thought about it.

And months since she had thought about her dentist.

Who was almost certainly dead now.

Dentist. Doctor. Braces. Eraser. Abrasive.

She could not expect to come across another shelter before she reached the sea. Once, not so long ago, hundreds of small, temporary settlements had dotted the plateaus of Antarctica, but that time had come to an end almost thirty years ago, when it became clear that the ice cap was beginning to melt. True, less glaciation meant easier access to the mineral resources of the land. But it also meant legal liability for the rising sea levels and climate changes the thaw was expected to bring, and most of the countries of the world had weighed the financial benefits against the financial risks and decided to relinquish their stake in the continent. The whole of Antarctica was purchased just a few years later by a trio of corporations—Coca-Cola, Bertelsmann, and FCI—after both South Africa and Argentina, the last of the thirty-seven countries that had once held claim to it, suffered financial collapse. Immediately the number of polar and scientific expeditions had fallen to almost zero—in part, and undeniably, because the corporations had denied many of the scientists access, but also because the original settlements had not really been established as research stations in the first place. They were markers of a national interest that had now been exhausted, like the flags planted all those years ago on the beaten gray deserts of the moon. The shelters and heavy equipment were broken down and hauled out inside a fleet of cargo planes. The people were evacuated. Laura was aware of two other research parties that had been granted entry to the continent around the same time she was sent there by Coca-Cola. One of them was located on the far side of the Pole, toward Madagascar, and the other at the very tip of the Antarctic peninsula. But both had been abandoned before the onset of winter.

She would have to rely on her own tent for shelter, on her own momentum for warmth. When she first began sledging, the stars had been hidden behind a thick lid of clouds, so that even with her flashlight it was impossible for her to see more than a few yards in front of her. But by the time a couple of hours had passed, a broad patch of sky had become visible to the northeast. She could see hundreds of stars and satellites, and between them the shifting waves and folds of the aurora, in green and red and gold, flaring up, fading away, and sending out dozens of slowly extending streamers and ribbons. The ice was still dark, though, and there were few landmarks for her to steer by, only the occasionally discernible black rock of the mountain that lay to the east.

Every so often, when she sensed that she might have veered off course, she would fish her compass out of her pocket and check her bearings. She was so close to the Pole that the needle would drift and spin for a full minute before it came to rest, and even then only if she stood absolutely still. It was difficult for her to get moving again. She only had to pause for a minute and the sledge would take on the weight of its own stillness. The carriage would sink to its belly in the snow, and the runners would fix in place, taking hold of the ice like roots.

She had never known a person could be so tired. Sometimes she didn’t see how she could possibly keep going. But she did, she always did.

The snow blew off the rises, leaving bald patches of slippery ice, but long drifts built up in the depressions and made the shelf seem more level than it really was. There were multitudes of people in her thoughts, multitudes walking behind her. Her mother and father. Her extended family. The friends she had known growing up, and in college and graduate school, and in her life as a working adult. Her lovers and all the close friends of her lovers. The people she saw every few days at the grocery store or at the bank, and the people who lived in her apartment building and the buildings surrounding it. The woman who sold the tickets at the movie theater. The man who worked the toll booth outside the Coca-Cola complex. The people she was used to passing on the street but with whom she had never actually spoken. She would think of them, and they would give her the strength to carry on, and then she would remember the virus and the newspaper article and the thousand cities of the dead, and her stomach would buckle, and she would start counting her words again.

Though she knew she was alone, there was a part of her that refused to accept it. Otherwise, she thought, why not just stop where she was, settle onto her knees, and let the snow accumulate around her? It would be so much easier that way—so much easier than all these exhausting footsteps, one after another, footsteps in their endless thousands.

But, she reminded herself, she was
not
alone, or at least she couldn’t be certain she was. Somebody, somewhere, must have survived the virus. And what about Puckett and Joyce? They were still out on the ice somewhere, looking for her. For all she knew, she had already crossed paths with them on her way across the bay. The air was so black, and the wind so deafening sometimes, that they might have come within yards of one another and never even known it.

When the wind was blowing hard, in fact, it seemed to be the only sound in the world, but when it fell still, she could hear the snow creaking beneath her feet, the sledge shushing behind her, even the occasional shotlike report of distant slabs of ice contracting in the cold. The darkness made everything seem louder than it really was. And then there was the crushed-glass sound of her clothing moving against her body. Her sweat did not evaporate in the cold, but soaked directly into the fabric, where it quickly froze through. By the time she had been sledging for fifteen minutes her shirt and pants would be stiff with frost, and within half an hour they would be frozen into a thousand different angles and creases. It became difficult for her to bend her joints, and when she did, fragments of ice would come raining down her chest and legs, piling up at her beltline and the cuffs of her pants where she had tucked them into her boots. She made the mistake of taking off one of her mitts to reach for her compass once and ended up with frostbite on all five fingertips. At night, in her tent, she had to wait for her clothes to thaw before she took them off, and afterward she would watch as they lay on the floor steaming and collapsing fold by fold, rustling quietly as the heat softened them. They were not always dry by the time she woke up, and sometimes, when she stepped outside, the fabric would freeze together again. She made sure to take down the tent with her body already arranged in its sledging posture, a lesson she learned the morning her shirt hardened around her, locking into a position that left her head tilted awkwardly to the left for the rest of the day. There was no way for her to remove the clothing to adjust herself, and so she had had to walk that way until she stopped some eight hours later to set the tent up again.

The bay had been shaped and broken by the pressure of countless freezings. It followed the gradually rising and falling motion of a meadow cut by occasional streams. The streams were crevasses, and while some of them were narrow enough for her to cross, others were not. Each time she came to one, she would lengthen her trace and take her skis off and look to see whether she could make the leap. If she couldn’t (and she often couldn’t) she would walk toward the tapering end until the crevasse sealed itself off—sometimes in solid ice, sometimes in a bridge of packed snow.

The sound of these bridges beneath her feet was one she quickly learned to recognize, the hollow
thwud
of snow with nothing supporting it. She was always frightened that the ground would crumble away while she was trying to walk across. Somehow, though, it never did. Often she would put a leg or a foot through the snow, but she was always able to lift herself back out.