The Brief History of the Dead (25 page)

Luka hooked his arm around her waist and pulled her close to him as they crossed the street, his hand under the tail of her jacket. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“You seemed a little quiet back there for a while.”

“I know. I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“About you. About Laura.”

Luka put his fingertips on the hip of her dress, by which he meant to say,
You shouldn’t worry so much
. Though what he actually said was “Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Trouble.”

“I don’t love trouble,” Minny sniffed.

“‘Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Suffering,’ then.”

“I don’t love suffering, either.”

“Man Loves Woman, Woman Loves Coffee.”

She bumped him with her shoulder, playfully. “I can’t argue with that, I guess.”

There were places where the snow had risen so far toward the roofs of the parked cars that they stretched down the side of the road in a series of identical, oddly shaped lumps, like the knots of someone’s spine. The sidewalks were slippery with ice. Maybe it was just the banks of snow piled alongside every major lane of traffic, but sometimes it seemed to Minny that she was traveling through a city of tunnels, just another one of the mole people. The sensation was particularly strong on those gray, dismal days like today, when the sun failed to show itself behind the clouds.

She and Luka had established their own little circuit of stores, buildings, and restaurants soon after they decided to haul his newspaper equipment from his old office to his new one and move in together. It had been a long time since either one of them had ventured more than ten or fifteen blocks away from their apartment. But they had heard the same reports as everyone else. The snow had sealed the monument district off from the rest of the city. Luka had even written about it in a special double issue of the
Sims Sheet
. The district was framed by the river on one side and by a sliver of park and a pair of six-lane roads on the others. Beyond those borders the snowdrifts had become so high that the ground was almost impassable. All you could see were the corners of a half dozen billboards and the upper floors of a few tall buildings. It was as though the city were slowly digesting itself.

The man who always carried the signs with the religious messages printed on them passed by Minny and Luka with a placard that read,
FOR OUT OF THE ABUNDANCE OF THE HEART, THE MOUTH SPEAKETH
. He stopped and asked them if they had heard the sound.

He was talking about the heartbeat, Minny presumed. “I’ve heard the sound,” she said.

“Yes,” the man said, “we have all heard the sound, for it is the beating of His Sacred Heart.”

“Is it?”

“He’s coming soon. He’ll be carrying my Bible for me.”

“I’m glad,” Minny said.

The man flinched when she reached out to pat his arm, so she put her hand back in her pocket. “You stay warm now,” she told him, and she and Luka slipped around him and across the intersection and finally through the door of their building.

Luka spent the rest of the afternoon working on the next day’s edition of the newspaper while Minny read a novel by the light of the table lamp in the living room. The days, unlike the nights, passed quickly, and before she knew it she had finished the novel, and he had picked up dinner from the Korean restaurant down the street, and the two of them were standing at the kitchen counter eating noodles and kimchi out of waxed cardboard boxes. He was a journalist, with a journalist’s dining habits. And because she had never developed any firm dining habits of her own—cleaning habits, yes; reading habits, definitely; dining habits, no—she had been happy to adopt his when they moved in together.

“Which do you like better: the idea of the past or the idea of the future?” she said a few minutes later, as he was packing the leftovers away in the refrigerator.

“Not this game again.”

“The idea of the past or the idea of the future?” she insisted.

“You sound like an optometrist testing lenses. This one—or that one. This one—or that one.”

“You’re not going to answer me, are you?”

“Well, the contest is rigged, in my opinion. But I guess I’ll say the future. My real answer is the present.”

“Me, too. The future. Which do you like better: this world or the other?”

“A real life-or-death decision, huh?” he joked.

“This world or the other?”

“This world,” he said. “This world all the way.”

He closed the refrigerator and winked at her, taking two big steps across the kitchen floor.

And then it was night, and she was in bed, and she fell asleep right away for once, though the next night she lay awake for hours thinking about what it would have been like if the two of them could have had a child (and here was a question: if she could have given their child a certain amount of each of the five virtues—health, kindness, intelligence, charm, and beauty—how would she have distributed them, and in what proportions?), and the night after that about the hotel where she had died, the quarantine at the edge of the parking lot, and the warm glow of the vending machine in the lobby.

~

She wasn’t exactly sure when the heart stopped beating.

It might have been a few nights later, when she got up at two o’clock to walk around in the blue half-light of the apartment and heard a dripping sound that turned out to be the icicles melting outside the window. It might have been the next morning, when for the first time in weeks the sun came out burning hard and the birds reappeared from wherever they had been keeping shelter. It might have been the day after that, or the day after that, or even the day before. All she knew for certain was that there came a moment when she realized she could no longer hear the pulse that had accompanied her every waking moment for so long, and she felt as if something had died.

It happened like this: She was handing out newspapers with Luka when there was a short lull in the traffic, and suddenly it was quiet enough for her to notice the stillness in the air. She realized right away that something was wrong, something was missing. A fist seemed to tighten inside her stomach. “Listen,” she said to Luka.

He fell quiet for a moment, then whispered, “What is it I’m supposed to be listening for?”

“It isn’t there anymore.”

“What isn’t there?”

She gave him a hint: “Bump,
bump
. Bump,
bump
. Bump,
bump
.”

His expression shifted through three distinct stages—first confusion, then dawning recognition, and finally, as the weights tumbled into place, full understanding. “Hey, you’re right,” he said. “It’s gone.”

“I know it’s gone. I knew it all along.”

“You ‘knew it all along’? What does that mean?”

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to say that she had known since the beginning of their conversation—that that was all she had meant—but the truth was that she had something deeper in mind, something she couldn’t quite pin down, and she didn’t want to lie about it. “I don’t know. Honestly. I didn’t realize I was going to say that.”

“Understandable,” he said. “In fact, understood.”

First she smiled, and then suddenly she found herself fighting back tears. She turned away from him so that he wouldn’t notice. It had something to do with her sense that nothing was permanent, nothing would last. Hearts stopped beating. People put guns to their chests. There was no one and nothing she could ever know well enough to make it stay. It had been one of her chief preoccupations during the last few years of her life: the notion that there was not enough time left for her to really get to know anyone. Most people would say it was ridiculous. She understood that. She was only in her mid-thirties, after all. But whenever she would come into contact with someone new, someone whose stories she didn’t already know by heart, sooner or later that person would start talking about days gone by, and she would get the sad, sickening feeling that too much had already happened to him and it was far too late for her to ever catch up. How could she ever hope to know someone whose entire life up to the present was already a memory? For that matter, how could anyone hope to know her? The way she saw it, the only people she had any prayer of knowing or being known by were the people who had been a part of her life since she was a child, and she hardly even spoke to them anymore. Just her mother and a friend or two from high school, and that was about it. As for everybody else she met, well—there were too many shadows behind a person and there was too little light ahead. That was the problem. And there was no force in the world that would remedy the situation. People talked about love as a light that would illuminate the darkness that people carried around with them. And yes, Minny was capable of loving, but so what? As far as she could tell, her love had never improved things for her or anyone else, so what good was it? She could never rely on it. It weighed no more than a nickel. It was only after she died and met Luka that the vistas of time seemed to open back up for her, and she began to think that maybe she could know someone else as well as she knew herself—that her love might be enough to make a difference, after all.

But sometimes she would start to feel the death in things again, and that old doubt would come washing back over her, and she would fill with the terrible familiar fear that nothing had changed at all. She could never be whole in the eyes of anyone else. No one else could ever be whole in her own eyes. She had known it all along.

“Are you okay?” Luka asked her, and when she nodded, he said, “You seemed to be someplace else there for a minute.”

“I’m all right,” she said.

She wouldn’t ask him the question. She wouldn’t let herself.

The traffic had picked up again, and there was no longer enough silence in the air for them to listen for the beating of the heart. They handed out the last of the newspapers. Then they walked back home over the wet sidewalks, the flattened grass, and the heaps of melting snow.

It was another day of reading and staring out the window for Minny, cut off entirely from the world. Usually Luka would ask her to come along with him while he scouted the city for reports he could use in the newspaper, but she had come to sense when he wanted to be alone, and today was one of those days. It could be a pleasure to walk the pavement with only your own thoughts for company. She understood that.

After he left, she opened the window to air out the room, and the trickling sound of so much ice and snow melting seemed to enter the apartment from all directions at once. If she had closed her eyes, she might have imagined that she was standing in the middle of some tropical cave, the moisture of the forest percolating down through infinite layers of stone to drip into a hundred little pockets of water. But her eyes were wide open. A few people were walking by down below with their jackets slung over their shoulders. Clumps of snow fell from the trees and the hoods of the cars, astonishingly white in the light of the sun. A couple of birds had landed on her ledge and then flown away. She could see the hieroglyphs of their footprints in the snow.

She must have gone back to the couch and fallen asleep after that, because soon Luka was standing over her with his hand on her forehead. Occasionally, in the middle of the day, when all of the pressure had fallen away, she would sit down to relax for a few minutes and open her eyes to find that she had dozed off for half the afternoon. It was one of the side effects of her insomnia.

She kept her eyes closed. She knew without thinking what Luka was going to say, because he had said it so many times before: “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Early,” he said. “It was a light news day—just the heartbeat and the weather. Speaking of which, I thought we could go outside and enjoy the sun for a while.”

She felt a breeze on her skin, and she propped herself up on her elbows to see where it was coming from. “I left the window open,” she said. Then she turned to Luka. “Can I ask you something?”

“Uh-oh.”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that. You have birth and then you have the car accident, right? So what’s the third most important thing that ever happened to you? You never told me.”

There was a pause as he sat down, lifted her gently by the shoulders, and put her head in his lap. It was as though she had asked him her question again—why do you love me?—and he had decided to answer her as he always did, by not answering at all.

He spent a few moments stroking her hair with the back side of his hand, then flipped it over by the roots so that it covered her face in a thick curtain.

“Now you look like a caveman,” he said.

It was so ridiculous that she had to laugh. He was always saying things like that—at the least expected times, in the least expected places. No one else had ever been able to make her laugh like he could. No one else had ever tried so hard. No one else had ever known her well enough.

Not a soul.

FOURTEEN.

THE MARBLES

A
nd the spring came, with the sun breaching the horizon and the wind lifting the snow off the ice and the bay popping and cracking like the frame of an old house. Shoals of fish traced the open water, and flocks of skua followed close behind them. Great chunks of glacier thawed and broke off into the ocean, carrying the blue-green ice of a thousand years ago. For a few hours each day the snow glistened like rubies in the drawn-out light of the sun, and for a few minutes, as the light grew stronger, it glistened like diamonds. No other spring in the world was anything like it.

It was a kind of twilight, though not the real one. The air was surprisingly warm, and for once Laura did not have to thrash around inside her sleeping bag to force her way out, because it had already melted down to the thinnest mesh around her. She lifted herself onto her elbows. Ten thousand loose threads slipped over her arms and shoulders and pooled together on the floor. They fell so softly that she could barely feel them moving over her skin. When she ran her hands through the threads, they rippled and separated, bending away from her fingers like water. A fish swam by beneath her. She had the notion that she could dive through the surface of the tent, parting the threads with her body, and wheel around to watch them close back together, that she could sink through the material until she forgot she was sinking at all, an anchor plunging deeper and deeper, but instead she opened the tent flap and stepped outside onto the crisp white snow.

The penguins were nowhere to be seen, nowhere even to be heard, though when she thought about it, she realized she could indeed hear them chattering hectically to one another, so they were somewhere to be heard after all, and she could see them huddled together at the base of the cliff, so they were somewhere to be seen. They had hatched their chicks and were warming them beneath the folds of their bellies.

The sun described a thin arch at the very edge of the sky, the moon a slightly larger arch at the opposite edge. The wind played softly over her skin. She was not wearing her jacket or her gloves, her boots or her socks, her pants or her undershirt—was not, as she understood it, wearing any clothing at all—and yet she had never been warmer or more comfortable. She wondered why she had ever been cold in the first place, why she had ever decided to be cold. Such a strange choice, she thought. And the world, this world, was all about choices.

It felt good to stretch her muscles. She flexed her fingers, combing them through her hair. There was still a trace of frostbite on the index finger of her left hand, a small plum-colored circle as perfectly formed as an adhesive bandage, and she peeled it off by the tail of red string that protruded from the top, dropping it at her feet, where it sank immediately into the snow and disappeared. She held the finger up to the fading light. Much better.

Scattered over the patch of wind-polished ice that surrounded her tent were the same delicate little puffs of white snow she had seen when she was sledging across the ice so many months ago. Why she hadn’t noticed them before, she couldn’t say. They were the size of marbles, the largest of them no bigger than a quarter. Some of them even seemed to present the same whorled feathering pattern as marbles, spreading open into blurred segments inside the glass. She tapped one of them with her big toe and it fell apart, spilling into its nearest neighbor, which also fell apart. They seemed so insubstantial that she wondered how they had ever managed to hold together at all.

A light wind came twisting through the cove, and the marbles drifted lazily about before settling back into the snow. It seemed as though they were regulated by a weaker gravity. One good gust was all it would take to carry them away, she thought, and the thought alone was enough to do it, for it wasn’t long before she heard the wind sighing down from the cliff, picking up speed as it worked its way toward the rookery. She watched the marbles shudder as the first few hairs of the breeze brushed up against them, and then they floated up off the ice and began to tumble forward. Within seconds they were on their way. They moved with the same strangely purposeful spontaneity as a flock of birds, tacking from one side to another, crowding together and then fanning apart, yet always pressing forward. Where were they heading with such deliberation? she wondered. Where would they come to a stop? She wanted to know, and so she followed them.

The marbles guided her along at a brisk walk. Soon she had left the rookery far behind. The metallic quacking of the penguins faded slowly away until she couldn’t hear them at all anymore, just the dimmest rasping sound at the furthest limit of her perception.

The marbles were rolling out over the bay toward the sun, which was higher than she remembered, and in a different quadrant of the sky. Every so often they would shuffle positions, the ones in front sliding to the edge of the pack while new ones drifted forward to take their places. She assigned names to her favorites, and then abandoned the names and assigned them sizes, and then abandoned the sizes and assigned them colors. The red one overtook the green one as she maneuvered around a rise in the snow. The blue one was falling steadily behind. She realized that she had abandoned her campsite without any of her supplies, without even her tent, but she brushed the thought away.

She didn’t need her supplies. She couldn’t imagine she would ever need her supplies again.

The bay had broken apart into huge chunks and floes that bobbed loosely in the deep water, swaying on every axis like plates spinning on wooden poles. Tremendous gaps and scissures opened between them as they rode their weight through the water. Small waves lapped quietly at their sides. The marbles sailed over the rifts as if they weren’t there at all. Laura walked carelessly along behind them, watching the cracks seal shut as she approached. The floes came together with a great heavy precision, butting up against one another with a hollow thump, like boats sliding into their berths. They lingered just long enough to allow her to keep her stride before they floated apart again. She went on like this for hours.

Eventually, the marbles hit some sort of pocket or eddy, spinning in place, and she paused to take a breath. She looked behind her. She had left only the most superficial string of impressions in the snow. The footprints at her feet were so shallow they displayed a hollow curve along the instep, something like a barbell in shape. There was a long empty gap between the thick part of the sole and the five tiny jellybeans of the toes. It was as though she had been walking over a thin layer of sand on a bed of the hardest rock. The sand was an unmistakable Sahara yellow. It gave off a continuous warm pressure that rose up powerfully against her bare feet, though her soles were no longer sensitive enough to detect the million-some punctures of the individual grains. They were hardened by her years of desert walking. She was a sort of nomad. A dry wind swept in from the flatlands. The air around her seemed to shimmer. She could hear the flapping of wings beneath the sun as she followed the marbles out toward the dunes.

There were ripples in the sand like the ripples in a sheet of tin roofing. Once, walking through the trees behind her apartment building, she had found a sheet of rippled tin draped across the path beside the tennis courts. Dirt and leaves filled the corrugations, with weeds like bundles of stickpins growing through here and there, all round heads and long thin needles. A year later, the sheet was completely buried by the soil. She was unable to make out even the slightest rib or corner of it. The only sign that it was there at all was the clunking noise a certain section of the path made whenever her foot fell across it. For a moment or two she was there again, in that patch of woods behind her apartment building. It was night, and the headlights of a car entering the parking lot were coasting through the branches of the trees, slipping from limb to limb. First they illuminated one of the oak branches directly over her head, and then they slipped off the edge, leapt thirty feet through the air, and came together again on the bark of a fir tree. There was no difference at all between here and there, or if there was, the lights didn’t recognize it.

Then she saw the marbles rolling over the leaves and she blinked and she was back in the dunes. There was a formation of white stone in the distance, knobbed and hunched to one side, one of those tall desert pillars that had been bleached of all its color by the sun. The marbles turned toward it, and she marched along behind them.

Sweat was pouring down her face, down her shoulders and her back, dripping off her fingers and the tips of her breasts. It accumulated at her feet as she walked, an immense clear lagoon reflecting a hundred wiry kinks of sunlight. Eventually the pool spread past its own boundaries and the sweat trickled away, draining slowly into the yellow sand. She watched it disappear.

The wind was at her back, and she felt good, invigorated. She felt as though she could follow the marbles for days without tiring a single muscle. The desert was much cooler at night, and the scorpions and lizards lay for hours on the flat brown rocks that were gradually releasing their heat back into the sky, poised there like statues. When the sun rose, the lizards crawled back into the shadows, but the scorpions barely moved at all. The formation she had set out toward—the pillar of white stone—was actually an arch. It was only the sidelong view that had made her mistake it for a pillar. The marbles crossed beneath the inverted U of the arch and circled around one of the legs to cross under it again, and then again, and then again, like leaves caught in a back current. They were a bright quivering silver in the light of the sun, a color with a thousand worms in it, even the black marble and the green one and the gray one.

It was on their fifth circuit around the leg of the U that she followed them under the arch and through the sliding glass doors of the shopping mall into the parking garage, which was the frozen bay, where a broken mass of ice floes kept tapping their bumpers and sawing past one another with metallic grinding noises.

She hopped over a fissure and continued on. The sand was snow again. The confused noise of the car horns faded away behind her. She wasn’t sure how far she had come from her original campsite, but it must have been at least a hundred miles, if not more. She veered with the marbles around an upturned shoulder of sea ice. The snow squeaked beneath her heels.

As far as her eye could see, the bay was a bobbing field of pack ice, interrupted only by the occasional small iceberg. It was jigsawed with bending cracks of ocean water that shone brilliantly in the red light of the sun.

She was close enough to the open water that herds of leopard seals lay sluggishly about on the ice, groaning and whistling and bubbling and grunting. They were calling out to one another or to the universe, she wasn’t sure which. Their voices were so animated that she almost believed she could understand them.

Let the fish swim through the traces,
one of them said.

Where has the moon gone? Where have the stars?
said another.

All worlds are one world,
said a third.

And then Laura forgot what she was hearing, and the noise became exactly what it had been before, a din of barking. It was not the sort of barking that could ever be mistaken for the barking of dogs, but that was the thought that came to her mind. She thought in particular of the dogs that used to live in her neighborhood when she was a little girl. She remembered the way that when one of them, any one at all, would start barking—at a delivery truck, say, or a slamming door—all the others would take up the call in an expanding ring of yips and growls that made it seem as if there was nothing in the world but dogs: dogs that chased Frisbees and pawed at the dirt, dogs that charged after you as you rode past on your bicycle, dogs that stood over sprinkler heads on soft green lawns, lapping at the fans of water like puddles suspended in midair. The dogs didn’t seem any larger than they had ever been, but it was undoubtedly true that she was weaving her way through their hair as she walked, hitching clumps of fur to the side as she marched over the ice floes.

Which meant that she and the marbles must have become smaller. Why was she always becoming smaller? she wondered. She put her foot down on a lump of ice that was also the ridge of the dog’s spine and almost twisted her ankle. She would have to be more careful where she stepped in the future.

The fur along the dog’s back, along with the great dented promontory of its head, blocked out most of the landscape. The sunlight came through in glints and flashes that took on the shape of the openings between individual shocks of hair, V-shaped windows that cracked apart for only a few seconds before they swung shut again. Every time she saw the light flickering out of the corner of her eye, she was compelled to jerk her head around. She was like a marionette. She couldn’t help herself.

She thought of the blind man who used to stand in the atrium of the Coca-Cola building without a dog or even a cane, listening to the water as it poured down the wall of the fountain. He had jerked his head with the same instinctual twitch whenever something new caught his ear—footsteps approaching across the marble floor, the
ding
of the elevator coming to a stop beneath the mezzanine, trees rustling in the air-conditioning. He carried an old leather satchel that he used to set down at his feet, where it would spread its lips open like a dying lily, and whenever people dropped their coins inside, he would dismiss them with a wave of his hands, saying, “I didn’t ask for that. I’m no beggar,” before he emptied the satchel into the wishing pool. He was the kind of person she saw almost every day, then promptly forgot about until she saw him again.

The dog she was riding was not blind, though. It went racing after something it had spotted on the ice. She had to cling to its fur with both her hands to keep from falling over. The marbles trembled and bounced against its tallowy white skin, just visible between the roots of its hair.

Then the dog stopped, hunched over, and wrenched its head to the side as though it had caught a rabbit in its jaws. She slipped down its back and tumbled off onto the ice, landing on her butt.