The Brief History of the Dead (28 page)

For a long time it had seemed to him that there were more people on the streets, more people in the park, than ever before, but it was only now that he understood why. As the city became smaller, they were all being drawn toward the center. They were like pieces of bark and foam caught in a giant whirlpool.

And at last he apprehended what was happening.

When the walls came together and the bubble finally collapsed, this was where they would all end up: right here, between these benches and rustling trees. It would happen in a matter of days or weeks. There would be no way for them to avoid it. They would gather together in the clearing around the monument, however many thousand of them there were, and they would stand there shoulder to shoulder. They would listen to each other’s voices, and they would breathe each other’s breath. And they would wait for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe thanks to my editors, Edward Kastenmeier and Anya Serota; to my agent, Jennifer Carlson; and to Carin Besser at
The New Yorker
for her skillful reading of this book’s first chapter; as well as to the Arkansas Arts Council for its generous financial support and to Chris Columbus, Michael Barnathan, and Angela Cheng Caplan for their interest in the story I’ve told. In researching Antarctica for the even-numbered chapters of this book, I turned first to the anthology
Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration,
edited by Clint Willis, which led me directly to Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s unparalleled memoir of Antarctic exploration,
The Worst Journey in the World,
portions of which Laura’s own journey recapitulates.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of
The Truth About Celia,
the story collection
Things That Fall from the Sky,
and the children’s novel
City of Names
. He has published stories in many magazines and anthologies, including
The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s,
and
The Best American Short Stories
. The first chapter of
The Brief History of the Dead
appeared in
The O. Henry Prize Stories
and
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror,
and was nominated for a Nebula award. He has received the
Chicago Tribune’
s Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener–Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one of which was a first prize), and an NEA grant. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

ALSO BY KEVIN BROCKMEIER

The Truth About Celia

Things That Fall from the Sky

FOR CHILDREN

City of Names

Grooves: A Kind of Mystery

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, entities, products, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2006 by Kevin Brockmeier

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brockmeier, Kevin.

                  The brief history of the dead / Kevin Brockmeier.

                                    p.                  cm.

                  e-ISBN 0-375-42423-7

                           1. Death—Fiction.                  2. Epidemics—Fiction.                  3. Future life—Fiction.                           4. Wilderness survival—Fiction.                  5. Antarctica—Fiction.                  I. Title.

                  PS3602.R63B75 2006

                  813'.6—dc22 2005048882

www.pantheonbooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-375-42423-6

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