The Brief History of the Dead (22 page)

Perhaps it was only paranoia on his part, but in his experience there was never any shortage of people waiting for the opportunity to fuck someone else over, and he had decided long ago that he would do everything in his power—walk any mile, tell any lie—to ensure that he was always the person who did the fucking and never the person who got fucked.

He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, which was still slick with ice from the freezing weather. He watched as one, two, three different people lost their footing and fell to the pavement trying to maneuver around him. It was as though he were participating in some kind of effortless carnival game.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
and one after another they went down.

Sooner or later somebody was bound to ask him about the trash can, and so he made his way gingerly onto the strip of snow at the curb and began walking. The cabs were not running. It was useless to try to drive under such conditions. The ice was still hard on the ground and the sun had not come out from behind the clouds all morning. What a totally shit day. Maybe later on, after the foot traffic and the rising temperatures and the first few daredevil drivers had pounded a lane of slush down the middle of the road, the cabbies would clock in for the afternoon and begin patrolling the city. But until then he would just have to hoof it, trash can or no trash can.

He remembered what it was like when he was growing up and the salt trucks would invariably roll out to blanket the streets after the first couple of inches of snow had fallen. He wished that they were still around, those massive trucks with their massive drivers. But of course not. They were just another one of the millions of things that had been relinquished to the other world. He blamed Laura Byrd. She had never known any salt truck drivers, and so there were no salt truck drivers in the city. She had never known any software designers, and so there were no software designers. She had known plenty of petty little customer service types, and street people, and dirty screaming kids. But she had never known Lindell’s wife or his girlfriend or his poor dead mother, and so he had to make do without his family.

Instead, look what he was left with—what they were all left with. There across the street from him, for instance, a woman had taken up a slumping posture on a cracked bus bench, where she was playing with a red rubber ball. Behind the window of her apartment, another woman was singing to herself as she slipped her arms into the kind of orange nylon vest worn by school safety officers. Inside a restaurant, a man was using a white plastic fork to eat what looked like a plate of tuna salad on iceberg lettuce, a paper napkin tucked into his collar like a bib. What a sorry lot.

Of the whole group of them, he was the only one who had had the good sense to muster everyone together in one place after the city emptied out.

What do you do when the world has dropped out from under you and you want to attract attention? You take a gun, and you fire it.

You would think that somebody else would have been bright enough to figure that out, but no.

Some guy was standing on the corner of the street handing out newspapers. Lindell tried to duck him, but the man stepped into his path.

“Some weather we’re having lately, isn’t it?”

Oh great, he thought. A weather conversation. “Yes, it is.”

“So can I ask what you’re carrying in the trash can?”

“Nothing important. Nothing unusual.”

The man grinned and passed his hand through the air. “Headline: Man Lugs Trash Can Through the Snow, Refuses to Explain.”

Just then, a woman came up beside the newspaperman with a couple of styrofoam cups in her hands. She kissed him on the cheek. “All they had was decaf, so I brought us some hot chocolate instead,” she said.

Lindell chose this moment to make his escape. The newspaperman and his girlfriend didn’t try to stop him. He crossed Park Street and climbed carefully into the snow-heaped clearing above the sidewalks, where a few scattered trees stood alongside the monument. It was surprisingly difficult to keep his balance carrying the trash can. Ordinarily, when he felt himself slipping, he would have thrown his arms out as a counterweight, but with the trash can in his hands he had to use his elbows and shoulders instead, jerking them this way and that. He must have looked like a complete fool. When he reached the top of the stairs, he ventured off the walkway into the grass. He could hear the satisfying crunch of fresh snow beneath his feet. The monument, rising above the white field and the black footpaths, looked like a pin stuck through a giant map—which in a way, he supposed, it was.

There were a few dozen other people in the clearing, including a guy who was trying to ride his bicycle through the snow, a couple of bird-watchers, and a ring of those parapsychology fanatics he had been noticing more and more often around the city recently, six deluded nitwits linking their hands together and attempting to beam their thoughts out to Laura Byrd. He managed to avoid them by skirting along the outside row of benches and picnic tables. He broke out through the opposite corner of the park, leaving a dotted line of footprints behind him, along with a dish-shaped circle where he had put the trash can down so that he could adjust his pants.

For the past few weeks he had been conducting long conversations about the end of the world in his head. They were simple discussions that, if he wasn’t careful, quickly degenerated into savage arguments and then into swiftly moving imaginary debates in which various people, sometimes judges and prosecuting attorneys, sometimes just disembodied voices, accused him of bearing direct responsibility for the effects of the virus. They insisted that he ought to have done something to halt its spread, or at least to have warned people that it was coming.
Why didn’t you?
they needled him.
Why didn’t you do anything?
But it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t. Fuck you. He was just a regular guy who happened to land a public relations gig with Coca-Cola. Public relations was all about generating or occasionally deflecting interest in your particular brand and then channeling that interest down the most appropriate pathway. Generating and deflecting interest: that was all he had done. What thinking person could blame him for it?

It was true that he might have broken his vow and told the press what was going on, announced that the virus was being disseminated by way of his company’s product—
we’re very sorry
and all that sort of thing—but what good would it have done? The virus had already spread beyond all its original vectors. Coca-Cola or no Coca-Cola, there was no way of stopping it.

He didn’t see how anything he might have done could have changed what happened in the end. And that was what the accusers in his head really wanted from him, wasn’t it? They wanted change—a change in the fate of the world—and they wanted him to be the one who brought that change about.

Well, it was too much to ask. They could all go to hell.

“You can all go to hell.” He said it out loud.

He was going down an open set of stairs, on a side street that had been used so rarely since the weather changed that the individual steps were almost impossible to distinguish beneath the snow. He held the trash can in one arm and used the other to steady himself, stomping and sliding his way to the bottom. Then he cut through an alley between two high buildings and turned right onto what he could tell had once been a major avenue. He took the sidewalk past an automotive supply shop and a toy store and a real estate office, then past a newspaper kiosk, and then past a whole foods store and a coffee bar, all of them abandoned in the days following the evacuation. The farther he moved from the center of the monument district, the fewer people he saw. The snow seemed to be getting deeper and deeper.

He realized he was heading toward the river. Though he hadn’t planned it that way, he figured that it would be as good a place as any to get rid of the trash can. He would let the current carry it out of the city, past the streets and the buildings, past anyone who might be expected to discover it, until it sank into whichever lake or ocean or larger river eventually swallowed the water.

As a boy, on empty afternoons, it had been one of his habits to hike to the creeks and rivers that lay within walking distance of his house. He would throw everything he found along the shore into the water: plastic spoons, baby dolls, pencils, sticks, pieces of waxed cardboard—anything that would float, basically. Then he would try to hit the things and make them capsize, using stones and chunks of dirt. He called the game Bombardment. He remembered the long marches he had to take through the strips of high yellow grass that ran along the highway to get to the river, and the way the water always moved more rapidly toward the center than it did along the shore, and he remembered the day he caught a minnow in the shallows and poured it out of his hands into a Coke bottle, screwing the cap on tight, then slung the bottle end over end into the quickest part of the current. The minnow kept trying to swim away, thrashing around so that the bottle rocked back and forth on the river’s surface. Lindell felt a giant surge of horror and pity rearing up inside him—
poor fish
—and so he threw off his backpack and waded into the water and almost drowned trying to reach the damned thing. It was moving too fast for him, though, and eventually he lost sight of it. He must have coughed up half a gallon of green water when he finally reached the shore. He spent the next three days trying to smack the rest of the river out of his ears.

What a sentimental pussy he had been.

It was amazing the things you would remember if you let your mind wander.

This particular river lay at the bottom of a gentle slope. As he plowed through the drifts of snow, the trash can swung and rattled in his arms, the plastic lining breathing in and out as it caught the breeze and let it go, and caught and let it go again. He could see the suspension bridge that joined the two sides of the river together, its cables white on black with the snow that was covering the steel. He was only a hundred yards or so from the water now. It was obvious that the still places closest to the shore had frozen over. At first he thought that the whole enormous river had crystallized, but when he listened he could make out a quiet swirling and spilling sound. As he looked more closely, he spotted a dark channel of water flowing down the middle of the ice.

He walked to the end of a wooden dock and climbed down the ladder. The ice was thick enough to support his weight, and it did not groan or snap as he made his way toward the center of the river. He paused when he reached the gash.

There was nobody in sight. The wind was blowing softly.

He had walked so far that he imagined some sort of ceremony might be in order, but then he realized what he was proposing—a ceremony for the disposal of a rinky-dink trash can—and he thought, To hell with it. He threw the trash can into the current and watched as it rolled over, gulped at the water, and sank a couple of inches, but kept gliding downstream. A few shreds of paper drifted out of the bag and snagged against the ice at his feet. He was able to read the
worn
from “sworn” and the
cul
from “culpability.” Then he kicked at the ice, and the river tore the pieces away. The trash can kept drifting on.

His sense of relief was immediate. He felt the way a dam must feel when its gates are finally opened, the way a bomb must feel when its pin is finally tripped. The document had been the last—and, as far as he knew, the
only
—piece of tangible evidence connecting him to the whole end-of-the-world affair. As long as he and the others kept quiet about it, no one would ever know what had happened.

And so, in a sense, nothing
had
ever happened.

That was the way it worked.

The trash can had already vanished downstream. He couldn’t see it anymore, not the slightest trace or sign.

He had ended up at the river purely by chance, and he had no other business to complete there, so he turned around and climbed the ladder back onto the dock.

The snow was just as thick on the uphill climb as it had been when he was going the other way, but he found it much easier to make the hike with both his hands free. Why, it suddenly occurred to him, had he taken the trouble to haul the trash can all that way when he could have removed the bag from the can and simply jettisoned the rest? It would have saved him a whole lot of effort, that was for sure.

Well, there was certainly enough idiocy in the city. Maybe it was catching.

There was no sun for him to track through the sky, but it did seem to him that the light filtering through the clouds was slowly growing dimmer. By the time he caught sight of the monument again, evening had fallen over the city. The streetlights flickered on and made everything glow: the bus benches, the fire hydrants, and the millions of leaves on the thousands of trees, carrying their hilly little deposits of white snow.

He was almost at the door of his building when he heard the sound of footsteps stealing up beside him. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Cups-Runneth-Over again. How are you doing, my friend? Has this freezing cold day of ours taken any of the son of a bitch out of you? Tell you what, then, why don’t you loan me a few dollars? Just enough for a hot meal and a cheap cup of coffee. And ‘cheap’ is the operative word here, am I right? Am I? Yeah, you know what I’m saying.”

Lindell lowered his head and pretended not to listen.

It never failed. He could walk halfway across the city, accomplish everything he set out to accomplish, wear his soles down, tire his legs out, and wash his mind clean of any sense of culpability, and when at last he had made it home and was ready to take the keys out of his pocket, there he would be, the man with the black gloves, holding his hands out and begging for change.

TWELVE.

THE BIRDS

T
he spare tent was missing. Laura made a careful search of the supplies, raking through the tools in the back of the sledge, but it wasn’t there. Several times she accidentally snuffed the candle flame out with her sleeve and had to light the wick again. The shadows twitched back and forth in the bound space of the storage hutch, swaying against the walls. She had not taken the tent out at the station—she was sure of that. And she didn’t think she had unloaded it into the cache she left on the ice shelf, though she was so tired by then that she might have done anything, frankly. But she was damned if she could imagine where else it might be. Back at the hut? Inside one of the crevasses?

It wasn’t until she slipped the latch back into place that she remembered the accident she had sustained traveling down the tongue of the glacier toward the station, the open gash she had dammed over with a piece of plywood, the way she had stumbled about in the falling snow feeling for anything that might have fallen out during the crash. She was absolutely sure, suddenly, that that was where she had lost the tent. She might have been observing herself through the lens of a camera, watching her hands as they probed at the ground, missing the tent by a matter of inches. That was how clear it all was.

Just a few days ago, when she was climbing the great curved slab of polished snow that connected the ice shelf to the penguin roost, she would never have guessed that a lost tent would be so high on her list of worries. There had been so many other questions on her mind: What had happened to her skis? How would she navigate her way around the bottom of the cliffside to get to the knoll? Would she find the radio transmitter there? And even if she did, who would possibly be waiting at the other end to answer her?

But shortly after she topped the ridge, on her first night within listening distance of the penguins, her tent’s soft coil gave out. She woke to find the walls rimed with frost, distinct blue-gray swirls of it that sparked and glistened in the candlelight. The sweat had frozen around the neck of her sleeping bag into a thick manacle of ice, and she had to break through it with a few hard jerks of her shoulders in order to climb out. Her clothing had hardened into a single bloomlike mass. She spent an hour or more pounding it loose and trying to fit herself inside. Then, when she was finally dressed, she dismantled the tent by hand. It took much longer than she would have expected. There was no way for her to get to the soft coil without ripping the fabric apart—and, in any case, she would have had no idea how to fix the thing without a replacement coil anyway—so she packed the tent away and used up the rest of the day threading the sledge through the cracks, rockfalls, and pressure ridges around the base of the cliff. Usually she was able to retain a little warmth from her night’s sleep, but not this time. She was so much colder than she had been before. She would never have imagined that such a thing was possible.

The next night was worse, and the night after that was worse still. She had to rely on what little body heat she produced to keep herself warm, along with whatever fire she could make by burning the Primus stove, though she tried to use it no more than a couple of hours a day for fear of what would happen when the fuel was finally consumed. The coldest weeks of winter had set in, and the temperature had dipped to seventy degrees below zero—more than a hundred degrees of frost. Already the sweat she had generated inside her sleeping bag had turned it into a rigid, icy box. She was not sure how long it took her to thaw her way into the bag each night, but it couldn’t have been less than an hour. She would jam her feet through the neck and slowly work her way down, stopping every few minutes to rub the muscle pangs from her legs until she melted a tunnel into the ice. She was barely able to squeeze her body inside.

Finally she would fall asleep, though from exhaustion rather than comfort. It was a poor, patternless sleep, not shallow so much as fragmentary, and it lasted no better than six hours. She would wake numerous times during the night with the force of her shivering and with the cramping that seemed to grip her piece by piece: her legs, her stomach, her shoulders. Then a time would come which she would decide to call morning, and she would start the day again, climbing out of her sleeping bag and plugging the mouth with her spare clothing so that it wouldn’t freeze back together.

It took her four days to reach the rookery from the edge of the ice shelf, which was three days longer than she had expected. The ground at the base of the cliff was riddled with pits and crevices, barn-sized heaps of rock, slopes that rose suddenly from flat ice to insurmountable angles. Every time she thought she was approaching the knoll, she would come to some impossible place in the ice and have to turn back.

Often, she dozed off while she was marching. She wouldn’t wake until she tripped over her own legs, or bumped into the side of the cliff, or put her foot through a rift or a crevasse. It was a miracle that she didn’t kill herself.

Occasionally, when the wind dropped, she would hear the hollering of the penguins, a harsh, braying sound like a thousand doors opening on a thousand rusty hinges. Sometimes it seemed as though the birds were only a few feet away. But then the ice would rise up in front of her or the wind would begin to sob again and the sound would vanish.

Finally, a few hours into her fourth day in the harness, as she was pulling the sledge deeper and deeper into a ravine she could sense was slowly drawing together (another dead end, she thought), she discovered a break in the cliff. It was roofed over with snow, but it was just wide enough, just high enough, for her to fit the sledge through.

A rabbit’s hole.

She ducked through the opening, came out the other side, and suddenly she was in the rookery. She couldn’t believe it.

The penguins noticed her before she noticed them. They began gabbling and beating their paddles against their sides. The noise echoed against the barrier. There seemed to be fifty or sixty of them, maybe as many as a hundred, calling out to one another and rocking from side to side like fat black metronomes. They did not approach her, but they did not move away, either. They must have been used to the presence of human beings by now, she thought. After all, teams of scientists had been studying them for more than a century. As she was watching, one of them scooted into the sea, a long, curved finger of which reached all the way into the cove. It leapt back out clacking its beak around some little piece of food it had caught and waddled over to the others. The breeze carried the high, brave stench of their droppings. The smell was only barely softened by the cold.

The last free-swimming whale had been sighted more than thirty years ago, around the time Laura was born, and it was the general scientific consensus that the creatures had all but died out, just like the elephants and the gorillas and all the other great mammals before them. It was possible that there were a few isolated specimens still living in those scattered sections of the ocean that had not yet been cultivated for food, but it seemed unlikely. Certainly Laura had not seen any there in the Antarctic, and it had been her job to look. The continent still hosted herds of leopard seals and immense flocks of skua—though not, apparently, here in the cove—but it was the penguins who were actually thriving, living off the krill the whales were no longer alive to consume. They were as large as Laura had always heard they were. She wouldn’t have been surprised if some of them weighed more than a hundred pounds.

The moon was partially hidden behind an exposure of black rock, but the light was still bright enough for her to make out the landscape. She was tired and sluggish, an old woman suddenly, frozen into her stiff old body, and she wanted nothing more than to lie down and close her eyes. But she knew that if she did she would fall asleep, and she couldn’t allow herself to do that. Not yet.

She set off with the spare aerial in her hand. There was unusually little drift inside the knoll. Maybe it had all been compacted into ice. Or maybe a shift in the wind had blown it out to sea. In either case, it didn’t take her long to find the remnants of the hut—a heap of cracked plastic, wood fragments, and twisted metal tucked inside a shallow scoop in the rock.

It looked as though the building had been crushed by a serac or an avalanche, some great chunk of ice and snow that had calved off the side of the mountain and smashed to pieces. If that was the case, though, it must have landed pretty damn hard. She could see pieces of jagged ice stretching in a great concussion ring around the hut—a thirty-foot halo of rubble. It must have made a sound like the detonation of a bomb when it landed. She could only imagine the upheaval it had caused among the penguins. She pictured a hundred birds diving madly into the ocean.

She felt infinitely tired all of a sudden. Her eyes fell closed, and she forced herself to open them. What was she looking for? Oh yes, the radio.

She made her way carefully through the debris, picking around in the wood and plastic and metal. She couldn’t find any real trace of the transmitter, only a beaten aluminum panel that might or might not have been part of the housing. No doubt the thing had shattered into a thousand pieces when the building collapsed. Which meant that her trip across the ice shelf—the crevasse, the frostbite, the days and days and weeks of hauling—had been utterly meaningless.

Meaningless. Pointless. Hollow.

Sleepy Hollow.

Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.

She tossed the spare aerial onto the sediment heap, then thought better and retrieved it. What could she possibly use it for? A depth measure? An ice gouge? She didn’t know, but she hated to throw it away. In truth, she hated to throw
anything
away. She had been accumulating unnecessary objects around herself all her life: knickknacks, old magazines, twigs she had snapped off of dying trees. Occasionally she would look at them, pick them up, even turn them over in her fingers, and she wouldn’t be able to remember where they came from. They were like those skeletonized images from her early childhood that sometimes flashed into her mind when her thoughts began to drift, disconnected from anything that might put them into context. Walking into a brightly lit room with her hair tickling her forehead. Her father lifting a heavy jar out of a cabinet. A dog with a red bow pasted onto its nose. These knickknacks, these memories—where had she collected them all? Her apartment back home was practically an abandoned city of worthless objects: acorns, plastic keys, and ten thousand other things she had no earthly use for. But she had to admit that she liked having them there. At some point, when you were fourteen or fifteen, before you reached adulthood or knew who you were, you had to determine whether you were going to be the sort of person who held tight to every single thing that passed through your life, no matter how insignificant it was, or the sort of person who set it all adrift. Life was easier on the people who were willing to relax their grip, but she had decided to be the other sort of person, the sort who wouldn’t let go, and she had done her best to live up to that decision.

There was no sign that Puckett and Joyce had made it as far as the rookery—no abandoned equipment, no sledge tracks. She doubted she would see them again. But then she had guessed as much long ago.

She set the tent up on a patch of hard ice, unloading the sleeping bag, the Primus stove, and the rest of her cooking supplies. Her hands were so numb that she was unable to drive the stakes into the ground. Instead, she used four rocks she found lying in a pile at the base of the cliff, weighing down the tent’s inside corners.

She couldn’t help thinking of the secret fortress she had played in the summer she was ten years old. That was what she had called it, “the secret fortress,” though it was really just a free-standing public restroom in a section of the riverfront that had been fenced off and sold to developers. For a few months, though, until it was demolished to make way for an office complex, she and her best friend, Minny Rings, had gone there almost every afternoon to talk about boys and hide from their parents and plot their lives together. Sometimes they would pretend they were grown women, mothers with jobs and families, sometimes spies or basketball players or marine biologists. Laura still remembered the day they had ducked through the loose corner of wire fence and found the bricks and tile and porcelain of the fortress flattened into a surprisingly small heap. The bits and pieces had looked so flimsy and pathetic there, as though they never could have sheltered anything at all, not even a row of toilets, metal sinks, and hot air driers, much less the enormously complicated worlds the two of them had imagined. They had looked, in fact, like the debris of the hut did now, which must have been why she was thinking about them in the first place.

But before the fortress was knocked down, she and Minny had walked there nearly every day for the whole of June and July, excepting only the week Laura spent at summer camp. Usually they would meet at Minny’s house, cut through the woods in back of the grocery store, and follow the long gray band of the access road to the river, balancing toe by toe over the rocks that lined the water. The fortress was hidden from the sidewalk by a thick belt of mixed trees, and as long as they were careful not to be seen beforehand, they could slip underneath the fence and make their way onto the construction site without being spotted. They were just two girls playing by the river. No one would interrupt them. The fortress’s door was unlocked along with the high, tilting windows, and they never had any trouble getting inside.

“Which do you like better: summer or winter?” Minny would ask once they were alone. This was her favorite type of question. “Say it’s a clear day. It isn’t raining or snowing, and the sun is out.”

“I don’t know. Winter, I guess. If you ask me in the winter, I’ll say summer, and if you ask me in the summer, I’ll say winter.”

“I choose winter, too,” Minny said. “Here’s another one. Who do you like better: your mom or your dad?”