The Brief History of the Dead (24 page)

She was taken aback not only by how much she could see, but by how much she could hear. It had never occurred to her that the light could improve her hearing as well as her vision, and yet undeniably it had. A penguin, for instance, was snapping delicately at its feathers. The fabric of the tent was booming in the wind. A vast tide of krill went swimming past beneath the ice.

Even her heartbeat was clear to her, regular and strong, as though she were holding her breath somewhere deep under water. The more closely she listened to it, the louder it seemed to become, until she could feel it keeping time throughout her body.

It was everywhere—in her toes, her stomach, even the tips of her ears. Amazing.

She shut her eyes and listened. Something unusual was happening to her. She was stretched around her heart, taut and firm like the skin of a drum, a perfectly sealed membrane that was beating, beating, beating. The heat of her blood was moving through her in millions of waves, more than she could possibly contain, and yet somehow she did contain them. She couldn’t understand how she had become so big. She was as large as a forest, as large as a city. Her heart was the size of a lake, and she was swimming in it. She couldn’t hear anything else. The sound filled her until she shook, and then it filled the tent, and then it filled the world.

THIRTEEN.

THE HEARTBEAT

O
nce again Minny couldn’t sleep. How many nights had she lain in bed beside Luka, barely touching his back with the side of her arm as she waited for the darkness to pull her under? Not every night, but often enough. She had tried all the various remedies people suggested—melatonin, red wine, exercise, chamomile tea—but none of them seemed to work. They made her body drowsy, but not her mind. And her mind, let’s face it, was the problem. Her mind was a roulette wheel, rattling and spinning in endless circles, and there she was standing beside it, watching the bright silver ball of her consciousness as it bounced first one way and then another.

That was what insomnia was, after all—an excess of consciousness, an excess of life. Ever since she could remember, she had treated her life as an act of will, the you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to philosophy, but she couldn’t
will
herself to fall asleep. The only way to fall asleep was not to care whether you fell asleep or not: you had to
relinquish
your will. Most people seemed to think that you fell asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse—you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep. She wasn’t able to start dreaming, though, because she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she wasn’t already asleep. And anything that called her attention to that fact made it more likely that she would keep thinking about it, and a million little snowdrops of nervous tension would bud open inside her, and thus she wouldn’t start dreaming, and thus she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

What a mess.

She listened to Luka breathing in the slow rhythm of his own sleep. She had heard the sound so many times that she could have identified it in a police lineup.
Listen carefully, ma’am. Take your time. Is this the sound of the man you’re looking for?
“Yes, that’s him, officer. He says he loves me, but I don’t know why.”

Which was exactly what he himself had said the last time she pressed him for a reason: “I love you, but I don’t know why. I just do. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

And it should have been, but the question kept needling at her.

One, two, three—sleep, she said to herself, but of course it didn’t work.

This restlessness of hers, the way her mind kept turning over on itself as she lay in bed—it was kind of like the city, wasn’t it? The entire population was suffering from an excess of consciousness, an excess of life. That was her diagnosis. They were passing out their days in a place somewhere between life and death, in that drifting stage after the lights went out but before sleep came over them.

A city of people who were waiting to dream.

A city of insomniacs.

She moved her feet in slow, overlapping circles, a nervous gesture she had picked up around the time her parents divorced, when she was fifteen years old and just beginning high school. The friction warmed her feet, which were always a bit cold. She found the repetitive swaying motion comforting. Her mother used to pass by her bedroom and see her rocking back and forth beneath the blankets and shut the door, chastising her, “If you can’t respect the other people living in this household, at least have some respect for your own body, dear,” which always made Minny laugh. She loved her mother and still saw her once or twice a week. Every so often, she even caught sight of her father, eating in some cafeteria or moving around on the far side of a crowd, maybe balancing a pack of playing cards on the rim of a glass in the back room of a bar. He always greeted her with the same look of surprise mingled with terror, then fled before she could say anything to him. Shortly after the divorce, he had put a gun to his chest and committed suicide. He must have imagined that he was escaping from everything he had ever known. Certainly he had never expected to see his daughter again.

She didn’t blame him for running away.

She understood that she was better off than any number of other people in the city. Take Luka, for instance, who hadn’t seen either of his parents since he had died, or at least since she had met him—just the two or three neighbors he had known and the handful of students he had taught during the one short summer he had spent with Laura.

Minny heard him mumble something in his sleep, and she turned over onto her other side. Her ear was resting on the palm of her hand, which was wedged between her head and the pillow. For a moment she thought she heard someone knocking on the door. Then she realized it was only the sound of her heart beating. And then she realized that it couldn’t be the sound of her heart beating.

She had never been one of those people who went around the city with an invisible heart keeping time in her ears. She had always assumed that such people were undergoing some sort of mass hallucination. They had fixed their minds on something they either wished for or remembered (Luka would have teased the pun out:
something they had learned by heart
). And then, abracadabra, they imagined it was actually there.

But the beating she heard was unmistakable.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum
.

She lay there listening to the sound for what must have been hours, and when finally she opened her eyes again, the light had risen outside her window and it was just as unmistakably morning.

~

The heartbeat did not go away. Several days passed and still Minny could not stop listening to it.

As it turned out, she wasn’t alone. No one in the city failed to notice it. It seemed to fill the air like a soft rain of ashes—so abundant that it revealed the smallest motions of the wind, yet so light that it barely tingled as it touched their skin. Everywhere she went, Minny saw people reflexively putting their hands to their chests as they waited alone in the lobbies of movie theaters or sat talking to one another in crowded restaurants. She knew that they were feeling for that old familiar rhythm.

Luka wrote about the phenomenon one day in the
Sims Sheet
. He headlined the article,
HEART BEATS, PEOPLE LISTEN
. It was a man-on-the-street piece, profiling some half dozen people he had confronted with a pair of questions on the subject: What did the heartbeat mean? And, Where did it come from? As usual there was no consensus of opinion. A man who identified himself as Martin Campbell said that the pattern of the heartbeat was familiar to him, but he couldn’t figure out where he remembered it from. He was only sure that it made him want to go to sleep. A woman named Linda Terrell said, “Don’t you know? There’s a giant heart buried beneath the subways. Take your shoes off. You can feel it beating in your toes.” One man claimed that the heartbeat was his own, though he would not explain how he knew this to be the case.

“Whatever the answer,” the article concluded, “this reporter refuses to believe that the sudden rise or recurrence of the sound is insignificant—though what its significance may be I leave it for you, the reader, to judge.”

One thing was certain, and that was that everyone in the city was interested in the topic. For the first time since Minny had met Luka, they handed out every single copy of the paper that morning and found only a few of them balled up in the trash cans as they left.

Afterward, before they went home, they decided to share a late breakfast at Bristow’s. The restaurant was full, and Minny left Luka standing in the lobby while she went to the restroom. When she came back, he was talking to a woman about the condition of the roads.

“I would say I’ve seen at least one traffic accident a day ever since the ice started falling,” the woman told him. “Why, just on the way over here, I watched someone run smack into the side of a mailbox. That crumpling sound! Have you ever been in a car accident?”

He had, of course. The night they met, when they believed they were the only people in the city—the two of them and the blind man, that is—he had told Minny the story of how he had died in a highway accident. He said that he had lost control of the wheel and felt himself being jarred loose from his body. She had never forgotten the tingle that ran over her skin as he described it. But he answered the woman with, “Never. I guess I’ve been pretty lucky.”

“See, for me it’s been one accident after another,” the woman said. “One time my accelerator went out, and I could only get my car to drive in reverse. I
literally
can’t tell you how many traffic citations I’ve gotten. And
then
I rear-ended somebody once just trying to see how fast I would have to go to get a grasshopper to blow off my windshield. You know how sometimes you’ve got these questions in your head? Well, the police officer was sympathetic, but he said he had to give me a ticket anyway.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Luka said.

A table emptied out, and they left the woman waiting at the door. Bristow, the owner of the restaurant, showed them to their chairs and filled their water glasses. After they had placed their order, Minny asked Luka, “Why didn’t you tell her about the accident?”

He stirred the ice in his glass. “She’s a complete stranger, and mostly crazy would be my guess. I died, remember? That car accident was one of the three most important things that ever happened to me—probably a close second, right after my birth. I’m not going to tell just anybody about it.”

“But you told me about it the same day we met. And I was a complete stranger.”

“You were a complete stranger,” he agreed. “And you’re also mostly crazy. But you were never just anybody.”

This was the kind of thing he would say every so often, a tight little knot of sentences, like the coil of rubber at the center of a golf ball, that would burst open in a spray of contradictory implications as soon as she tried to pick it apart. What did he mean? Did he have something serious in mind? Or was he just being cryptic for the sake of being cryptic, clever for the sake of being clever? She could never tell. He himself seemed to see such conversations as a kind of affectionate game. Sometimes she would try to play along with him, but she was not very good at it, and they both knew it. She felt clumsy, thick-witted. Usually, instead of joining in with him, she would try to come up with a topic that would shift the mood of the conversation onto a slower, steadier course, one she was sure she could follow. A walk instead of a dance, was how she thought of it. This was just one of the many reasons she couldn’t stop asking him why he loved her.

“Or how’s this?” he amended his answer. “You were a stranger, but you were never complete.” He laughed.

“Did I tell you I saw the blind man yesterday?”

It had the effect she wanted: his smile sank back into his face, and his eyes took on a look of simple curiosity. “No, you didn’t. Where was he?”

“He was having an argument with a ticket vendor. I stopped and asked him if he was all right, and he said he was tired of remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember. Those were his exact words: ‘remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember.’ I think I might have been on the forgetting-everything-he-wanted-to-remember end of the spectrum. When I told him who I was, he said he was pleased to meet me.”

“Yeah, he didn’t remember me the last time, either. So that makes—what?—six for me and eight for you?”

“Nine for me, thank you very much.”

“Nine it is.”

The blind man had disappeared back into his solitude soon after they found their way to the monument district, and ever since then, they had seen him only in passing. They had made a bet that the first one to spot him ten times would win an unspecified favor from the other, collectible at any time. The blind man was something of a hermit, though, or at least he took a different set of streets than they usually did, and weeks would sometimes pass between one sighting and the next. Minny wasn’t surprised that he didn’t remember her. When she thought about those first few days with Luka, before they had heard the gunshots, it was tempting for her to imagine that the blind man had never been there at all. Luka had been the Adam to her Eve, the Friday to her Robinson Crusoe, the Master to her Margarita. None of them were stories that left room for anyone else.

On the other side of the restaurant, Minny saw Laura’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Byrd, eating a breakfast of what looked like scrambled eggs and toast. Mrs. Byrd was using her left hand, Mr. Byrd his right. Their other hands were concealed behind a salt and pepper caddy on the back side of the table, where they could lace their fingers together without anybody watching. They looked like two embarrassed teenagers on a first date. And, simultaneously, they looked like an old couple who had been holding hands so long that they no longer distinguished between the times when they were touching and the times when they weren’t. It was sweet.

Minny had seen the two of them again and again since she had arrived in the city, had even waved to them every so often, but never once had they recognized her. This was understandable. After all, she had certainly changed a whole lot more in the years since she and Laura had been best friends than they had.

When she stopped to consider it, she realized that she probably hadn’t thought about Laura more than fifteen or twenty times during the whole of her adult life. She had never been the kind of person who was haunted by memories of her past, or at least she hadn’t been that kind of person before the virus and the news coverage and the sight of all those bodies propped up in the swaying green grass. But then she had died, and she had found out about Laura’s fling with Luka, and all of a sudden she was thinking about her all the time. There wasn’t much for her to remember, just a few stray images of the two of them playing house and pretending to walk a tightrope and then something about a butterfly and a fortress.

The man she was in love with and her best friend from—what?—third grade?

It was all too strange.

After they had finished eating and took care of the check, they gave up their table to a man in hiking boots and a business suit. It was snowing again, and Minny slipped her hands inside her pockets as they stepped out into the cold.