The Brief History of the Dead (3 page)

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello?” he shouted. “Hello?” But no one answered.

He experienced an unusual misgiving. He brought his hand to his chest. He was afraid that the heartbeat he heard was his own.

TWO.

THE SHELTER

T
he wind had been blowing for twenty-three days, first from the east and then from the south, making a prolonged death moan inside the vents. Occasionally a gust of ice would push its way through the hut’s system of turns and baffles, and hundreds of clear gray crystals would come fanning out over the room, peppering down onto the desk and the floor. Laura would stop whatever she was doing and watch them melt. She was disheartened by how long it took. The heating panels were obviously breaking down, if not crippled beyond repair. Next the lights would go, and after that, if she was still alive, it would be the food stores. What a total damned disaster.

The trouble had started nearly a month ago, when the antenna had snapped off the communications array. She and Puckett and Joyce had reconstructed the event as best they could. The antenna was a slender aluminum stilt sheltered inside a large satellite dish, and a thick casing of snow and ice had collected around it. The wind had driven the temperature above freezing for a day or two—the same freak wind that was slowly melting the ice shelf out from under them—and the mass of snow and ice had slipped from the bowl of the array in one giant chunk, taking the antenna along with it.

That was it. That was all that had happened. The whole thing was unbelievably stupid.

Why hadn’t the dish been constructed out of thermogenic metal? Or, failing that, why hadn’t someone positioned it so that it would remain empty? Or, at the very least, why hadn’t the three of them been provided with the equipment they might need to repair it? Sometimes it seemed to Laura that the entire expedition had been slapped together by monkeys. But no. It had been planned and financed entirely by the Coca-Cola Corporation, as either a publicity exercise or a research expedition, depending on where you read about it: an internal document or a news release.

The idea was to send a team of people to the Antarctic to explore methods of converting polar ice for use in the manufacture of soft drinks. The ice cap was already melting, after all, pouring into the ocean by the tankerload, and the corporation might as well take advantage of it while they still could. That was their reasoning. The advertising department had even devised a new slogan: “Coca-Cola—made from the freshest water on the planet,” which, if it caught on, they planned to modify in a year or two to “Coca-Cola—now
that’s
fresh!”

The expedition was supposed to last for six months. The planning board had appointed Michael Puckett the polar specialist, Robert Joyce the soft drink specialist, and her, Laura, the wildlife specialist. There was some debate as to whether they should call her a “wildlife” specialist or an “animal life” specialist—was Antarctica wild in the same way that, say, the Amazon of the last century was wild?—but the argument was quelled when someone suggested that the board consider the word “wild” in its original sense, as a neglected or uncultivated region. So it was that the photograph of Laura that appeared in all the newspapers, the embarrassing one that depicted her stuffing underwear into a military-style canvas bag, bore a caption that read, “Laura Byrd, wildlife specialist, prepares for the long winter.” Her first lover had been a journalism professor, and she was well aware of the subtle ways that newspaper editors contrived to mock the stories they found absurd. Even now, with the cold gradually folding itself around the hut like a pair of hands, she could feel the color rising to her cheeks as she thought about it.

Photographs. Wildlife. Monkeys.

Wasn’t there an old television commercial that showed a family of monkeys sharing a bottle of Coca-Cola at Christmas? She was pretty sure she remembered seeing something like that when she was a little girl.

In any case, it was not long after the antenna splintered free of the satellite dish—two days, to be exact—that the radio gave a few last sputters of white noise and chopped-up syllables and then went silent. Why couldn’t she stop rehearsing the details? The web and telephone connections fell dead along with the transceiver, so that the three of them—she, Puckett, and Joyce—had no way of contacting the corporation for help. Puckett insisted that they search the shelter for any spare parts they could use to patch the radio or the transceiver back together. There were only two rooms to go through, a living area and a sleeping area; nevertheless, the operation took them half the day. They uncovered several hundred bags of pemmican and jerky, a jar of ten thousand vitamin C tablets, a bundle of electric blankets tied together with elastic cords, two kerosene lanterns, six cans of freeze-dried coffee, a Primus stove, an extra pair of collapsible tents, and even a rudimentary tool chest, but nothing that would help them fix the radio or the broken antenna.

The equipment register was plain. Laura knew they wouldn’t find anything else.

The fact was that if even one of their communications systems had been working, they could have requested the material they needed to repair any of the others. But with each and every one of them broken, they were flat out of safeguards.

The people at Coca-Cola knew everything there was to know about advertising and market research and product positioning, but not quite enough, as it turned out, about polar exploration.

The three of them waited almost a week for the corporation to reestablish contact with them. Puckett kept digging out his ice cores, and Joyce kept testing the water to see if it met the company’s purity specifications, and Laura kept searching the area for even the slightest sign of wildlife. She couldn’t help but think that the work they were doing was a waste of time, that the corporation already knew everything they cared to know about the continent from their dozens upon dozens of feasibility studies. After all, if the expedition had been a serious scientific endeavor and not just a way of drumming up interest in Coca-Cola’s newest product line, wouldn’t the powers that be have sent more than three people along? Wouldn’t they have conducted a more rigorous training program? No, the expedition was a publicity stunt—nothing more than that—and they all knew it. Still, the three of them kept working. It was the best way they could think of to kill the time as they waited for help to arrive. These weren’t the days of Shackleton and Scott, after all, when you could disappear into the polar waste for years at a time before anyone noticed you were missing. Expedition protocol required that they submit a statement of progress to the corporation every twenty-four hours, by three in the afternoon Pacific Standard Time, and until the radio went dead they had never missed a day. Of course, three in the morning and three in the afternoon could be indistinguishable so far south, where the sun might float in the sky for months at a time, and it was possible that they had mistaken the one for the other from time to time. But there was every difference in the world between missing a deadline by a few hours and missing it by four, five, six, seven days. The corporation must have realized something was wrong by now.

Soon enough, someone would cut through the wind and the snow to rescue them. Laura could picture it even with her eyes open. A sledge would come slicing across the ice, a team of riders would climb out, and the supplies they needed would be dropped at their front door. Or a helicopter would chop down from overhead, unload a new transceiver, and screw itself back into the air, leaning forward in the wind like a dragonfly.

In the meantime, she could just sit playing cards with Puckett and Joyce. They stared at the reinforced arches along the inside of the hut. Every so often, one of them would press a palm against the door to feel the cold seeping through the metal. They had plenty of time. The three of them began to hear voices calling out to them, dogs barking, the digging noise of engines—sounds that were couched inside the wind like plants flexed inside a seed. Eventually, though, they realized they were just imagining things. No one was coming for them. They had been forgotten.

Laura was the last of them to reach this understanding. When she did, she became so dizzy that she saw spots of light in her eyes—thousands of them, exploding like distant stars. She thought she was going to faint. She muttered something about being out of luck, to which Puckett insisted that you could never really claim to be
out
of luck, since you never knew when things would get worse—or better, for that matter. Luck was not a limited resource, and there was no sense in trying to measure it. To which Joyce responded that the world was full of stories about people who ran out of luck: look at Prometheus, chained to his rock, with that eagle wresting out his liver for the rest of time.
There
was a person whose luck had been exhausted. To which Puckett suggested that maybe luck wasn’t the sort of thing people could be said to possess at all: maybe there were currents of luck, good and bad, that ran through the world, and sometimes we found ourselves in one current, sometimes in the other, but the water itself was never truly a part of us, we were just trying to stay afloat in it. To which Joyce said, “If you’ve never felt luck inside you—really inside you, Puckett—then you have no credibility on this matter.”

Laura had been exasperated by the conversation at the time. It was the sort of spiritless debate that the men would toss back and forth for hours on end just to keep themselves entertained. She had threatened more than once to walk to her death in the snow if they didn’t stop. Now, though, she would have given anything to hear their voices again. Or any voice, for that matter.

Puckett and Joyce had been gone for nearly three weeks. When it became obvious that the corporation was not going to send any assistance, they had set out with a loaded sledge toward the western rim of the Ross Sea, where a station studying the migratory habits of emperor penguins was supposed to be located. Their plan was to contact Coca-Cola, explain what had happened, and then, if they could, borrow a radio and a spare transceiver before heading back to the shelter. The sledge ran on the latest fuel cells, designed to operate for sixty days on a single charge. Even if the ice had gone soft or the ridges were lined out against them, it shouldn’t have taken them longer than a week to reach the station. They ought to have returned a few days later. Laura was beginning to resign herself to the idea that they weren’t coming back. She was alone in the hut, and she was frightened.

Outside, the wind made a ringing noise between the cables. The tone shifted and pulsed in slow bands of sound that faded to silence at the upper end of her hearing register. It reminded her of the bells that used to ring at the summer camp she went to as a girl. There were two of them, at opposite ends of the camp, and she had discovered a place by the docks no bigger than her own body where the sounds would cancel each other out. She would stand there listening to the crickets and the lapping of the water inside a bulging pocket of silence. She walked back and forth in the confined space of the hut trying to locate such a pocket. In the corner above the computer station, maybe, or in the chink of space underneath the bed. Then she gave up and sat in her chair by the door and poured herself a glass of wine. It was a ’27 Merlot, their only bottle. It tasted wonderful.

Polar bears. In the Coca-Cola commercial. It was polar bears, not monkeys.

~

Four days later, she found a digital music player inside Joyce’s footlocker. She was washing her face on the other side of the room when the lock sprang open with the abruptness of a gunshot, and she couldn’t resist looking inside. Joyce had taken his journal, his toiletries, and most of his clothing with him, but he had left behind a stack of carefully folded long johns and a pocket-sized Bertelsmann player with a selection of several hundred tracks on it. Laura set the dial to shuffle, and for the next three weeks, until the day she ventured out of the hut into a hard, clear evening of windless snow, the shelter resounded with the music of Beethoven and Link Springs, Handel and Schoenberg and Charlie Parker.

She settled into a routine of reading, exercising, and cooking, marked by long periods of sitting quietly in a chair with the music wrapping itself around her like a cloak. For one hour after lunch every day, she tried to add a page or two to her journal analyzing the effect that the corporation’s cola production methods would have on the continent’s indigenous plant and wildlife—her only official duty of the expedition. The task was made more arduous, and more absurd, by the almost total absence of indigenous plant and wildlife in the area. All the seals and penguins were concentrated along the rim of the ice shelf, where holes and fissures gave them easy access to the ocean. And the only vegetable life on the continent was in the ocean itself, where various forms of algae and seaweed lived. Occasionally she fiddled with the radio, hoping to summon up a signal she could navigate back to the corporation. Once, for less than a minute, she heard a dolphinlike series of clicks, squeaks, and whistles, but then the receiver went dead again, and she couldn’t make out another sound. She played solitaire every so often, but she always stopped when she realized she had been shuffling the cards for too long without laying out a hand. Sometimes she paced back and forth between the bed and the door, counting off her steps.
Four, five, six, seven
. She tried to sleep for eight hours a night, but because of the slow deterioration of the heating panels, she often woke after just three or four, the muscles in her calves bunching painfully together in the cold. She made a point of checking the thermometer every morning. The temperature inside the hut was dropping by about two degrees a night. Soon it would be below the freezing mark, and she would have to punch through a lid of ice just to get to the water in the drinking basin. Already, she could see her breath making tiny little vanishing blemishes in the air. How cold would it have to become before she began to develop frostbite?

One night, shortly after she had eaten dinner, when she could have sworn there wasn’t a thought in her head, she became terribly sad. She felt it as a sort of aching in her joints, as though her body were suddenly collapsing in on itself. What was this? she wondered. The feeling seemed to rise up from out of nowhere. First she was just standing by the broken transceiver, listening to a Shostakovich recording and absentmindedly conducting the orchestra with her finger, and then she was sitting on the edge of her bed, shaking and weeping uncontrollably. She cried until her stomach made a fist inside her, and then she doubled over and placed her head between her legs, gasping until she was able to pick up the rhythm of her breathing again. Every night after that, at exactly the same time, it happened again—the wild sobbing and then the clutching feeling in her gut that made her forget everything that had ever happened to her.