The Brief History of the Dead (21 page)

“A little help here?” Laura had said to the women at the mah-jongg table. “Hello?”

But they had ignored her, hunching protectively over their tiles. Eventually, she had managed to extract the finger herself, and when she turned to leave, she found a man waiting behind her. He was canted over on his bicycle, propping himself up with his left foot. He appeared to be laughing at her. She laughed, too, and the man handed her a bandanna to wipe the saliva from her finger—“Here you go”—and when he asked her if he could take her out for a drink sometime, she said yes.

That was Mike Hargett, who became her final short-lived boyfriend, the one who had told her that the shade of lipstick she was wearing made him want to bite her lips off.

And then there was the time she gave a book of matches to a man she had never met before, a man in hiking boots and a business suit—such a little thing, but she had never forgotten it. “You don’t have a light, do you?” the man had asked her, and though she did not smoke, she realized she was still carrying the matchbook she had picked up from a restaurant the night before. She felt a tiny electric rush as she reached into her purse for it—delighted, the way she had been as a child, by her ability to carry out a favor for someone. “Keep it,” she told the man, and he struck a match, cupped the flame to his cigarette, and walked away.

The latest war had just ended, and it seemed that the entire city had come together in the park. A woman was joggling a rubber ball from hand to hand. A man was walking his dog. There were a few police officers milling about, and here and there she spotted the yellow collars of the IAS operatives who could always be found in any large crowd. “Infectious Agents Squad,” they would introduce themselves. “I need to search your bag, ma’am.” A little girl was balancing clusters of pine needles around a twig she had poked into the ground, a jump rope slung over her shoulder. Two teenage boys were holding hands and whispering to each other. An old woman sat down on a bench, slipped her shoes off, and began muttering in Italian as she stretched her toes out. Laura watched a man pass by carrying a sign that read,
JESUS IS COMING. DON’T BE DECEIVED
. At the bottom of the placard he had written the word
SINCERELY
, as though signing a letter, after which he had printed his name.

Laura tried to remember the name the man with the placard had used, but she couldn’t. Carter? Carlson? Carlsbad. Cavern. Stalactite. Stalagmite. Stalag. Gulag. Labor camp. Labor pain. Birth. Life. Creation. It was something unusual like that, she thought, something like Carter or Carlson—or Creation, for that matter—something with a hard
C
. But it wouldn’t come to her. The tent belled out as the wind fell still and sank for a few seconds and then began gusting again. She lay back inside her sleeping bag, staring into the hollow darkness.

Carmen. Kevin. Kermit.

What on earth had the man written on the placard?

By the time she had stopped wondering, she was well on her way to sleep.

ELEVEN.

THE CHANGES

W
inter had come to the city, and the snow covered every level surface: the roads and the sidewalks, the fountains and the park benches, even the leaves on the trees, or at least the ones that weren’t cocked over onto their sides. Lindell Trimble had to wade through a solid foot of the shit every morning just to make his way down the steps of his building, and there was more waiting for him wherever he went. On most of the district’s streets and sidewalks it melted under the day’s traffic, then froze again after the sun fell, so that a glasslike sheen of ice whose only visible effect was to slightly magnify the pavement would send person after person sprawling onto his ass. He stood at his door sometimes and watched them fall, one ridiculous tumble after another. They looked like monkeys or rag dolls, barely human, and the idea that he himself might cut so pitiable a figure, that some smug son of a bitch in a three-piece suit might watch him sliding around on the ice and cringe, was appalling to him. This was why he always walked through the banks of snow along the curb, despite the damage it did to his shoes and the cuffs of his pants.

That morning in particular he was squeezing around the side of an abandoned car when the motherfucking beggar came at him again, the one he could never seem to shake. He launched straight into his brother-can-you-spare-a-dime routine: “Got some change for me today? Hey, come on, buddy. You look like a man of wealth and power. I’m sure you’ve got a little change you can give to a fellow in need, don’t you?”

And blah blah blah blah
blah
.

As usual, the beggar had appeared from out of nowhere, and when he realized Lindell wasn’t going to answer him, he began shouting and waving his arms. “What’s the matter with you, pal? Too good for me, is that it? Mr. Won’t-Even-Look-Me-in-the-Goddamned-Eye. Mr. So-and-So-with-His-Leather-Briefcase-and-His-Hundred-Dollar-Haircut.”

He followed Lindell across the street, the pair of them sliding around on the ice like a couple of jackasses, and when they reached the dirty snow heaped in the opposite gutter, he climbed over after Lindell and grabbed hold of his sleeve. Lindell shook him off.

“Whoa,” the beggar said. “Whoa now.” He held his hands out in a sign of contrition, wearing those fingerless black gloves that were the universal trademark of the urban poor. What, was Lindell supposed to believe that they couldn’t afford to cover their fingers? Was that the idea?

“Hey, look, man, I’m sorry. I was just trying to get a rise out of you,” the beggar said. “You know how it is. But you’ve got to understand I’m your friend, don’t you, buddy? And friends look out for each other, right? So how about you check those pockets of yours again for me? I bet you’ve got some change you can spare for a good friend.”

Lindell could see that his usual policy of fabricating a convenient distraction—pretending that he had spotted someone he knew down the block or that his phone had just gone off—and striding purposefully away wasn’t going to do the job this time. He kept walking, though, plugging his feet one after the other into the hard crust of the snow. “Listen,” he snapped out, “you’re not going to chisel anything out of me, so why don’t you just leave me the hell alone?”

Immediately the beggar fell away, giving a tight little laugh. “Yes sir, your highness,” he said. “Right away, Your-Majesty-on-His-Holy-Goddamn-Golden-Fucking-Throne.” He made a saluting gesture. Lindell glanced back just long enough to see him looking around for his next target.

Sometimes he thought there must be something about him that attracted such people from an infinite distance. You know the way that certain wild animals will scout around for miles in search of the cleanest place to empty their bowels? Well, he was the cleanest place, and they were the wild animals. It was uncanny. In every railway concourse or shopping mall, he was always the guy trailing the long line of religious cultists behind him, a bright, exploding flare of bald heads, orange robes, and ponytails. The freaks and the con artists, the drug addicts and schizophrenics: inevitably, no matter where he went, they seemed to zero right in on him. Even here in the city he could not seem to avoid them, whether it was the beggar with his patchy beard and his hard-luck stories or that nutcase with the bird fixation and the Jesus signs.

He stopped off at the coffee shop for an espresso. It was a Saturday, or what everyone had decided to regard as a Saturday, and he knew that the Coca-Cola offices would be mostly empty. No receptionist waiting to hand him his messages, no marketing staff gathered for the morning meeting. He sipped his drink at a tall counter looking out onto the sidewalk and the alley and a snow-covered basketball court with two metal hoops dripping chandeliers of ice where their nets ought to have been. The ice would crack into a thousand daggers at the very first basket, he thought.
Swish, crash, boom,
and there would be a few less players on the court the next day.

When he was finished, he took the crosswalk to the building on the other side of Erndira Street, unlocked the executive entrance, and closed it again behind him. Inside, the lobby was dark and quiet, with the weird theatricality and canyonlike feeling of spaciousness that all office buildings possess on the weekend. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor. The document he was looking for was in the top drawer of his desk. He had known for weeks that it would be best not to leave the thing lying around, but it was only the night before, while he was sipping a scotch and listening to some asshole broadcasting his jungle music for the whole building to hear, that he had finally decided what to do about it. So far, fewer than a dozen people knew what was what (or some of what was some of what, he should say, since despite their expertise nobody in the corporation had been able to piece together the whole story), and all of them had agreed that there was no earthly reason for them to tell anyone else. What was the use of drumming up trouble, after all, in a place where there was only peace and ignorance—a place where the peace, in fact, was the ignorance, and the ignorance was the peace?

To his last breath Lindell would continue to deny any responsibility for what had happened. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t have changed a single goddamned thing. Still, it was a fact that whoever had introduced the virus had done so only a few months after he and the PR department had initiated their white powder campaign, and the possibility that the whole chain of events was somehow inspired by the campaign—or even in answer to it—had definitely crossed his mind. The consumer affairs division had received any number of complaints during the high days of the congressional hearings and the media fuss, including at least one handwritten letter promising total world annihilation, but Lindell had learned from experience that there were cranks and failures beyond number in the world who blamed their lousy jobs and poor posture and the general lovelessness of their lives on some multinational corporation or another and who had nothing better to do than place angry phone calls and write menacing letters. Such people rarely if ever had the balls to act on their threats, for the simple reason that they were already defeated.

Yet somebody had decided to use Coca-Cola as the distribution nexus for the virus. That much was beyond doubt. The only questions to ask were who and why?

There were people in the PR division who were convinced that Islamic fundamentalists were to blame, or some group of anarcho-environmental zealots, or even, though it had been suggested mainly as a grim little joke, the Pepsi Corporation.

It seemed likely to Lindell, though, that whoever had devised the virus had no real grievance against Coca-Cola at all. They were simply looking for the product with the widest possible reach in the global marketplace, the one that would disseminate the virus with the most efficiency, and Coke was it.

Some ten years before, in response to falling transportation costs on one side of the equation and rising rates of water contamination on the other, the corporation had decided to centralize its processing operations in a single plant on the upper coast of Venezuela. It was cheaper to purify the entire soft drink supply in one location and then ship it the length of the world than it was to manufacture it in some fifty different noncontiguous locations and attempt to purify it on-site. Lindell had never been to the Venezuela plant, so he didn’t know much about its layout, but his best guess was that someone had broken into whichever building held the processing equipment and introduced the virus directly into the syrup tanks. From there it had been mixed and bottled and carbonated, and then packaged and shipped around the world. And from there, undoubtedly, it had been consumed.

Of course, a lot of this was just guesswork on his part. He had sat in on the initial meeting between the CEO and the Infectious Agents Squad as the only delegate from the PR department. The one thing the IAS officers had been able to say for certain was that the contamination patterns suggested the virus was closely linked with Coca-Cola and that they intended to continue monitoring the situation.

The rest of the conversation had been very short. Lindell remembered it in its entirety.

“How many people are we talking about here?” the CEO had asked. “A few thousand? A few hundred thousand?”

One of the IAS officers had caught the other’s eye, and they had both frowned.

“What? A few million?” the CEO said.

“We wouldn’t want to guess, sir.”

“More than that?”

“As I say, sir…”

“So what are we supposed to do? Are you asking the company to issue a recall order? I presume you people are working on a cure—an antidote or something.”

“The virus is lethal. That’s all we’ve been authorized to tell you.” His voice shifted to a lower tone. “I can add that it appears to be spreading rapidly, and not only within the Coke-drinking population.”

It was a moment before the CEO realized what the officer was implying—that it was too late to do anything at all. That the situation was out of their control. That they would just have to watch from the sidelines and hope for the best.

The CEO let out a sigh. “I’ll be motherfucked,” he said.

“That may be, sir.”

And then the IAS officers had left, and the rest of them had sat around the conference table staring blankly out of their faces until someone broke the silence with a “Jesus H. Christ” and the CEO had pledged them all to secrecy.

Just a few days later, Lindell was working on a contingency press release disavowing any rumors of Coke’s connection to the virus when the weblines began reporting that the thing had gone airborne and waterborne. And a day or two after that, he was preparing a crisis statement for the CEO to read to the board of directors when he heard that the epidemic had reached the shores of the United States.

He could hardly see as he drove home that night.

He had died early the next morning.

The document he was looking for now was exactly where he had left it, behind the files in the top drawer of his desk. It was a list of ten names, the ten people who had been present at the meeting with the IAS officers and thus knew about Coca-Cola’s liability with regard to the virus, followed by a statement promising that those people would not reveal this knowledge to anyone else, including the many other Coca-Cola employees who were present in the monument district. Six of the ten had signed the document, the six who had so far completed the crossing—which was to say the six who presumably knew this Laura Byrd woman, though for the life of him Lindell couldn’t remember her. The other four had yet to appear in the city, and enough time had passed for the six of them who
had
appeared to conclude that they probably wouldn’t be coming.

It was the CEO’s opinion, and Lindell agreed, that since the document was the only hard evidence of the whole situation, it would be wise to destroy it.

And though no one had plainly directed him to do so, he was fairly certain—more certain than not—that none of the others would mind if he went ahead and took the initiative.

So it was that in the darkness of his office, lit only by the desk lamp, he ran the little fucker through the shredder and watched as the strips of paper fell as a single loose curtain onto the plastic lining of the trash can. There was so much air trapped beneath the lining that the opening had tightened into a sort of sphincter, and the pieces rested on the surface like cheap flakes of goldfish food floating in the water of an aquarium. He had to swat at the bag, pressing the air out, to make them drop to the bottom. A few stray threads of shredded paper drifted onto the floor during all the commotion. He could make out a
Lind
and a
soev
and an
ola
. He was picking them up when he heard a shuffling noise behind him.

“Unusual to see anybody here on a Saturday.”

A current ran through Lindell’s back, and he straightened up. It was the building’s custodian.

“Yeah, sometimes the work just follows you home,” Lindell extemporized. He was holding the trash can in the crook of his arm, pressing it close to his body like a large bird whose wings he was trying to keep from beating. “You know how it is,” he added.

“I can’t say as I do,” the custodian said.

“Well, no.”
Shut up and go away
. “I guess you wouldn’t, would you?”

The custodian gestured at the trash can. “So do you want me to empty that for you?”

“Oh, no, no. No, I’ll do it,” Lindell said. “I can do it. But thank you. Thank you very much,” and without thinking he brushed past the custodian’s cleaning-supply carriage and went down the hall, where he waited for the elevator to carry him to the lobby.

~

So it was that two minutes later he found himself standing outside with a small metal trash can in his hands. What the hell was he supposed to do with it? He couldn’t just leave it sitting on the street, where anybody with the curiosity, the patience, and a good bottle of adhesive could scoop it up and paste the document back together. And he was afraid to toss it into one of the city’s hundred-some-odd Dumpsters for the same reason: who knew what kind of person might find it? If he brought it home with him, he would have to carry it past the doorman who wore the silver cross around his neck and always asked a thousand questions—
How’s life treating you today? Can you believe all this snow we got last night? What’s that you’re holding there, Mr. Trimble? That trash can with the shredded paper? What’s the writing on it say? Something about Coca-Cola?
And if he went back to the office, there was the custodian to deal with.