The Brief History of the Dead (23 page)

“That one’s tough. It’s like winter and summer, I guess. I like whichever one isn’t around at the time.” Laura boosted herself onto the rim of the sink. “I can tell you one thing, I like
your
mom better than
your
dad.”

“Me, too,” Minny said. “My dad is a jerk. Do you know what he did yesterday? He dumped the ashtray over on purpose, right onto the carpet, and he made me clean it up. I didn’t knock it over, and that’s what I told him: ‘I didn’t do it.’ But he said, ‘I didn’t ask whether you did it or not. I told you to clean it up, young lady.’ He’s always doing stuff like that. One time—” Minny cocked her head. “Hey, do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen.”

Laura shifted her attention to the upper end of her hearing register. She heard it—a fine droning hum that beat rapidly at the air. She hopped down from the sink. The sound was coming from the skylight in the center of the room. She stood beneath it looking up, and Minny stood next to her. There was a wasp inside, bumping against the barrier of the glass. Its wings were a nearly invisible brown blur, and its stinger was floating beneath its body in the stately, motionless way of a diving bell on the underside of a boat.

“You’re never going to get out through there,” Laura said. She supposed she was talking to the wasp, though she knew better than to think that the wasp was listening. To Minny she said, “We should try to help it.”

“
No way
. I am
not
touching a wasp.”

“You don’t have to touch it. You don’t have to get anywhere near it. Just hold the door open, and I’ll do the rest.”

Minny glanced at the skylight. “If you want to get stung, I’m not going to stop you. I don’t know why they put that thing in here to begin with. It’s not like it lets any real light through.” Then she went to the door and pulled it open, steering herself behind as she pivoted back toward the corner. Her voice came out from inside the closed triangle of space. “Okay. I’m ready.”

“Chicken,” Laura said.

“Fine by me,” said Minny. “At least I won’t get stung.”

“Neither will I,” Laura said. “I’m trying to help him.” She knew she was being foolish, but she couldn’t help herself. It was just that she felt so bad for the wasp: all it wanted was a way out, a way back into the sunlight, but the only thing it knew how to do was keep banging into the glass. She had to coax it away from the skylight. That was the first step. The problem was that it was too high for her to reach. She considered snapping at it with her T-shirt, but she was afraid that if she took the shirt off, the white skin of her chest and stomach would offer the wasp a target it couldn’t resist. Instead, she took a paper towel from the bundle beneath the sink, worked it into a ball, and threw it at the wasp as gently as she could. Its wings buzzed, and its stinger curved angrily under its waist. She threw a second time, and then a third, aiming for the center of the glass.

After a few more tries, she managed to drive the wasp out of the skylight. It landed halfway across the room on the ceiling, dropped a few inches, and landed in the same spot again. She tried to reason with it. “Listen, I’m trying to help you. Just trust me and I’ll let you outside.”

From behind the door Minny said, “He can’t understand you, you know.”

“Yeah, well, most people say that cats can’t understand you either, but you still talk to yours.”

“Cats are smart. Wasps are morons.”

“Not all cats are smart. Maybe not all wasps are morons.”

But this one seemed to be. Laura kept trying to direct it toward the open door. Twice it settled on one of the windowpanes, tapping and vibrating and agitating from side to side until she was able to drive it back into the room. Occasionally it would make a dive for her and she would have to duck, covering her face with her hands. “Don’t sting me, don’t sting me, don’t sting me!” The wasp always looped back up to the ceiling before it touched her.

The air carried a slight odor of ammonia that became much stronger above the grate in the center of the floor. It was the kind of smell that must have been like poison to a wasp—or to this one, at least, which steered carefully away from it. Whenever the wasp plunged toward her, Laura would retreat to the grate, and it would swerve aside.

Eventually, after what must have been dozens of paper towels, the wasp found the doorway of the building as if by accident. Suddenly it was gone.

The buzzing noise was pinched out by the breeze as it disappeared into the branches.

Laura sank against the wall, her face covered with sweat. “You can come out now,” she said.

The door made Minny’s voice sound unusually quiet. “Are you talking to him or me?”

“To you.”

Minny shut the door. She walked over to Laura and leaned up against her, resting her arm on her shoulder. “That took just about forever,” she said.

All these years later and Laura still remembered her answer: “Not forever, but long enough.”

~

Which would make a wonderful epitaph, she now thought.

She was a world and a half away from the fortress, a world and a half away from everyone and everywhere she had ever been. The tent was impossibly cold. Tiny teardrop-shaped pendants of ice fell onto her chest and stomach as she shivered, and she had to brush them off before they melted against the heat of her skin. She could hear something rattling and cracking whenever she moved—either the sleeping bag or her own body. She was too tired, frankly, to tell the difference.

She knew that she had slept at least sporadically, because she could remember dreaming, and a person didn’t dream unless she slept, did she? But she was so tired and so cold that the membrane separating her waking life from her sleeping life had become porous. Each side had begun to leak into the other. She found it increasingly hard to differentiate between the two.

She had dreamed that she was in her office at the Coca-Cola complex, for instance, watching a ribbon of sunlight slant across the floor, which meant that it must have been late afternoon, sometime in the spring. So why was she so cold, she wondered, and what was she doing in her sleeping bag? She wasn’t supposed to sleep at work. It was the kind of thing that could get her fired. Maybe she was sick, she thought. Maybe she had been sent to the nurse’s office at her high school, where the mattress crackled beneath her, gradually filling with ice. There was so much ice that the sheets crystallized in overlapping scales. She imagined that her mother was feeding her raisins as she lay in bed with a cold, dropping them one by one through the long straw that curved and dipped like a snake on its way to her mouth. “Open the tunnel,” her mother said. “Here comes the train. Chooga-chooga-chooga-chooga—woo, wooo!” But the raisins were alive, and not actually raisins at all. Laura wasn’t quite sure what they were. It was obvious, though, that they didn’t want to fall. They put out dozens of black pincered legs to slow their descent. Thank God for the harness and the rope, she thought. The walls of the crevasse were so slippery, so steep. Who knew how deep it went? And the tent was like a hot-air balloon, barely tethered to the ground. She knew that she had to feed herself if she was ever going to get well again. She had to exercise and take better care of her body. That was what her mother had told her. Oat bran. Green vegetables. Bicycles. She dreamed that she was exercising on the treadmill at her gym, and then she felt something bulbous and hard shaking around in the bottoms of her shoes, and when she took them off and overturned them, her toes fell out like so many pebbles. And she woke up, and she was not surprised.

She had long since lost all feeling in her extremities. Even the nerves of her teeth had been killed by the frost. She would never have known she was clenching them together at all if it weren’t for the spikes of tenderness she felt in her gums, thin needles of pain inside a surrounding aura of pressure. When she finally summoned up the resolve to check herself for frostbite, shortly after she returned from picking through the remnants of the hut, she discovered that the toes of her left foot were nothing more than ugly gray-black knots, beyond all promise of recovery. So were the fourth and fifth toes of her right foot. The tips of her fingers were in bad shape, too—terrible shape, really—along with her right cheek and the whole of her left ear. But she was able to treat them with a hemodynamic salve and bandages, and she had some small hope that they would get better in time.

How she would begin her trek back to the shelter, though, she couldn’t imagine. She would never be able to make it over the shelf without help. And where on earth would help come from? The radio was broken, the sledge was broken, the entire world had been emptied out.

In addition to which she had taken no care to provide a return route for herself.

It was something of a miracle that she had made it as far as the cove in the first place. She wasn’t sure she could find her way back onto the ice through the maze of cracks and pressure ridges that surrounded the rookery, much less to the far side of Ross Island. Hell, she was barely even able to find her way out of the tent at night. She would climb out of her sleeping bag sometimes in a high fever and grope for the opening as though she had never used her hands in her life.

Who was she? she thought. She was nobody special. When she died, there would be no one to remember her. The simple truth was that her strength—or whatever combination of muscle, luck, and willpower had driven her from the hut to the shelter and from the shelter onto the open ice and across the bay—was gone. Played out. Finished.

Finished. Finnish. Danish. Swedish. Meatball.

She gave a tiny, puffing laugh, but the effort hurt her stomach.

She could hear the emperors trumpeting beneath the barrier wall. The last time she went outside, to stake down a loose corner of the tent, they had been huddled together with their backs to the wind. Most of them were carrying eggs on the flaps of their feet, gripping them beneath the soft rounded bald patches on the undersides of their guts, which insulated the eggs from the cold. The ones that didn’t have eggs were balancing egg-sized lumps of ice there, dead little worlds that they protected as avidly as though they were real. She had read about this behavior before, how the penguins were so desperate to incubate their young that they would seize on anything that even slightly resembled an egg. Stones, ice chunks, masses of snow—it didn’t matter. Every so often one of the penguins nursing an actual egg would let go of it in order to dive beneath the water for food, and the others would drop their pieces of rock and ice and squabble over it until one of them had succeeded in tucking it under its gut. They always preferred the real eggs to the fake ones, which suggested that they were merely using the fake eggs as comfort devices, the way that mothers whose children have died will clutch the pillows they slept on or the stuffed animals they ported around with them, holding them to their faces and breasts in order to remember what it was like when they were alive.

Once, though, a behavioral scientist had placed a polished plastic canteen next to the penguins, a fluorescent orange sphere he filled with instant coffee, and they had abandoned their eggs—all of them, and all at once—to fight over it. They must have thought it was the most beautiful egg they had ever seen, the scientist speculated in his journal. The egg they realized they had always been waiting for. The egg of the future.

The rusty sound of the penguins’ voices stopped suddenly, crested again, then slowly died away. Laura listened to the slapping of their wings as she lay shivering in the tent. She was hungry, or at least she knew she ought to be, but she couldn’t steel herself to break out of her sleeping bag. The ice had frozen around the opening in a thick collar, and it would be a terrible struggle for her to push her way through.

If she didn’t freeze to death, she was almost certainly going to starve to death, and she knew it.

Laura Byrd,
the inscription would read, followed by the date she was born and the date she had died.
Laura Byrd. Not forever, but long enough.

Filaments of frost and snow crossed the floor of the tent, blown into straight lines by the draft. Most of it had been swept inside when she opened the flap, but some of it was simply the accumulation of her own breath, which froze into a white powder as soon as it touched the air, settling on the floor in a long plume.

White powder
. The Coca-Cola Corporation had initiated what they called their “white powder” campaign just a month or so before Laura left for Antarctica. The campaign had followed on the heels of the last big germ scare, during which a few thousand people around the country, mostly in small houses scattered along grayed-out highways, had found packages filled with the pale, almost colorless powders of smallpox, anthrax, and scarlet fever on their doorsteps. The deliveries had stopped after only a week, as suddenly as they had started, with no one imprisoned or apprehended. But soon after, people in their millions began receiving stiff cardboard envelopes in the mail that spilled a grainy white powder onto their hands when they opened them. Police departments, hospitals, and emergency warning centers were inundated with phone calls. Thousands of city and county governments activated their terrorism-alert beacons. The powder was quickly revealed to be a harmless laundry detergent with a coupon nested inside, which read, “Clean Up with the Coca-Cola Sweepstakes. Buy One Two-Liter Bottle, Get a Second One Free.”

The corporation had been chastised for the recklessness of the sweepstakes by both Houses of Congress and the editorial pages of several hundred newspapers. They had released a statement apologizing for any disruption the campaign might have caused, and they had assured the public that such results were entirely unintentional. But sales of two-liter Coke bottles tripled in the weeks following the incident, and sales of all other Coca-Cola products doubled.

Guerrilla publicity, they called it.

Laura must have fallen asleep again, because when she opened her eyes she realized she was not listening to a discussion about the white powder campaign at all. She was not in the conference room that adjoined her office or anywhere inside the Coca-Cola complex. She was still lying in her tent. The glaze of ice had melted from around her eyes while she was sleeping, and the light was brighter than it had been in months. She could see everything with a remarkable clarity. The silver pan of the Primus stove, crusted over with a light brown syrup. The fanlike patterns of frost on the walls. The double row of black stitches marching over the dome of the tent like a procession of ants. There was a half-eaten bar of pemmican in the corner, notched with the impressions of her teeth, and an unopened bag of granola beside it. A popcorn-shaped knot of ice had formed around the zipper of her sleeping bag.