The Brief History of the Dead (4 page)

She was starved for conversation and laughter, for the simple tangency of other bodies. She tried to remember the times she had spoken to other people—people who had taken her knee and leaned in to whisper in her ear, people who had shouted her down in classrooms and committee meetings—and when she couldn’t remember them, she imagined them, which was the next best thing. She missed Puckett and Joyce, their ridiculous arguments, even the sound of their breathing. She suspected more and more that they had gotten lost somewhere between the hut and the Ross Sea station, or that they had made it to the station but decided not to risk the return trip. She missed her mother and father, too, and her friends, and her neighbors from the apartment building where she used to live. Sometimes she thought about them so much her head became filled with their voices.

“Come on, sweetie, time for bed,” she heard her father saying, and then it was fifteen years later, and her college roommate was telling her, “I’m staying with Kyle for the weekend, so you’ve got the room all to yourself.” Next it was ten years after that, and she listened to her boss as he rapped on the door of her office and said, “I’m going to give you one word, and you tell me what you think:
Antarctica
.” And a year before that, her boyfriend had told her, “That’s the lipstick. You should wear that color from now on. God, it makes me want to bite your lips off.” And then, just a week before she left for the Pole with Puckett and Joyce: “What, you can’t spare a lousy dollar? Miss New-Black-Shoes-with-Her-Fancy-Matching-Belt. Miss Too-Busy-to-Give-a-Damn-About-Anyone-but-Herself.” This was the man who begged for change outside the Coca-Cola building.

She would listen to their voices until the wind drowned them out, and then she would emerge from the fine open air of her memories into the low gray arches of the hut and the endless hours of sitting and pacing.

She looked for ways to draw out her routine, teasing it apart into its various threads and following each one to the end, no matter how wispy and frail it became. She wasn’t going to allow herself to go crazy, she decided. She exercised for a full hour in the morning, rather than just fifteen minutes, jogging in place in her coat and gloves. She read books that forced her to pay attention to every word. The meals she cooked became more and more laborious: pot roasts, stews, and casseroles that used up her store of vegetables and needed to simmer for half the afternoon. She pounced at every interruption, suspending whatever she was doing in order to tug out a crease in her blanket or sweep a trace of snow up from the floor. But nothing seemed to help. The truth was that no matter how many times she lifted herself out of her chair, trying to simulate a feeling of urgency, she was never truly going anywhere. She was stuck right where she was, and she knew it.

She was making a minor repair to the stove one morning when she nearly chopped off her left hand. It happened like this: She heard a bolt rattling above the burner, and when she couldn’t get the leverage she needed to tighten it, she climbed on top of the stove, trying for a different angle. She could see straight down the crevice in back. A metal tailing of some kind had come loose from the wall. It was trembling and jerking, brushing against the stove as the wind shook the cabin. That was where the noise was coming from; it wasn’t the bolt at all. She knew the noise would drive her crazy if she let it continue, and so she tried to twist the tailing back into place with her fingers. When that didn’t work, she tried to saw it off with her pocket knife. And when
that
didn’t work, she decided to hack it loose with a hatchet she found in the tool chest. She steadied herself against the stove with her left hand, brought the hatchet up with her right, and just before she reversed her swing, she lost her grip.

Her hand was so numb from the cold that she didn’t even realize it was empty until the ax came tilting past her head and crashed into the top of the stove. It made a bell-like rolling noise and then clattered to the floor.

When she looked down, she saw a silvery gash in the stove, curling down into itself like a coring of frozen soil. The gash was right at the tip of her fingers—she might have been pointing to it. That was the moment when she realized how truly alone she was. If the hatchet had fallen just an inch or two to the left, she would have bled to death before anyone found her—weeks or, she was prepared to imagine, even years later. She would have to be more careful from now on.

She began to remember certain incidents from her life—meetings, conversations, and various other sodes—with a clarity that amazed her. Once, when she was in college, she had spent an entire day at the Chicago zoo watching a baby giraffe, the last the world would see, swirling and jiggling a length of iron chain with its long black tongue. On the day she began her first job, working behind the counter of a dry cleaner’s, a customer had given her a pair of pants with a ring-shaped stain on the crotch and asked, “Can you get Formula 44-D out of polyester-rayon?” Then there was the time her mother took her to the birthday party of a school friend and afterward scolded her for singing the phrase “When are we going home?” over and over again, to the tune of the “Happy Birthday” song. Laura had been only four years old at the time.

She wondered if she was undergoing the same rush of memories that the dying are said to experience—only much, much more slowly.

Laura Byrd, wildlife specialist, prepares for the long winter
.

And then there was the crying again, which always came as a complete surprise. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to anticipate it. Maybe it was like the pain that women underwent in childbirth, those million agonies of cramping and stretching that washed the mind clean as they took place. Or maybe it had something to do with the upwelling of memories that seemed to place her so firmly in her past life, a life that had overtaken and caught hold of her just as her present was becoming more and more indistinct and her future was fading to the merest suggestion. Maybe the crying was part of her other life, her real life, the one that was unfolding before her eyes, and maybe she was nothing more than a visitor there.

One day, not long before the thermometer stopped working, she realized that the hum she was so accustomed to hearing from the shelter had gone silent. This was the sound the hut made as it converted the vibrations of its atoms into heat. It emanated from deep inside the walls, a tone so uniform and regular that she barely recognized it as a sound at all. She wouldn’t even have noticed it was missing if it hadn’t been for a brief lapse in the wind that brought a nearly perfect stillness to the air. She took off her glove and touched her fingers to one of the heating panels. She could feel the cold biting through her skin. When she lifted the frame from around the panel and slid the locking plate loose, she saw that the coil inside had faded to a pale, lusterless gray. She looked behind the other panels and found exactly the same thing: dozens of dimmed-out heating coils, like dead worms washed onto the sidewalk after a rain. She had known all along that it would happen, and it had. The heating panels had finally quit working.

There were two tents left in the storage closet (Puckett and Joyce had taken the others), and she set one of them up in the center of the living room so that she could sleep inside it. It was surprisingly well insulated—with its own limited heating system, one of the new so-called “soft coils”—and before long she was spending most of her day in there. The light that filtered through the fabric gave the air a milky pink coloring, and the dome inhaled and exhaled slightly as the air pressure shifted in the hut. She had the absurd impression—a dream, really—that she was living inside a jellyfish. Early in the morning, before she was wholly awake, she would lie in her sleeping bag listening to the watery lurching of the wind and imagine that she was pumping slowly across the floor of the ocean as millions of yellow diatoms sailed around her. Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn’t keep a hard eye on herself.

She left the tent each morning to make breakfast and to exercise, and every so often to use the bathroom, and then again in the evening to cook dinner. The shelter retained only a small amount of the heat it had stored over the past six months, and the stove warmed it up a little bit more, but she still had to put on her coat and gloves every time she climbed outside the tent. She didn’t yet know what she would do when the electricity finally gave out completely. It had flickered off a few days before, coming back on in a series of arrested spurts. She had counted every second between the bursts of light and darkness, feeling sick in the pit of her stomach. But for now, at least, it was still flowing.

Flowing. Blowing. Snowing.

She often found herself spinning out word associations as she lay drowsing in the tent. It was a game she had begun playing as long ago as elementary school, as she tried to run a knife through the empty minutes between recess and the end of the school day.

Snowing. Snowball. Ball game. Ball bearing. Bering Strait. Straight man. Man about town.

Man about town
. Laura had been working for the Coca-Cola Corporation for less than a month when they instituted what they called their “man about town” campaign. This was during the last big water-safety scare, when all the talk shows and newspapers were full of reports that the terrorists were planning to poison the nation’s drinking water. The corporation hired some ten thousand good-looking men and women to dine in the restaurants of New York, Los Angeles, and a handful of other large cities and say to anyone they spotted ordering a glass of water, “Wouldn’t you feel safer drinking a Coke?” By the third week of the operation, domestic sales had increased by forty percent, and by the fifth week they had increased another twenty. The campaign was Joyce’s idea, and its success had landed him the promotion that would eventually send him to Antarctica—and, Laura speculated, to the bottom of a crevasse somewhere. Puckett had been chosen because of his knowledge of the polar landscape (though in truth he was no more than a hobbyist) and Laura because, of the dozen or so environmental impact specialists in her department, she was the only one who had seniority enough to be eligible for the trip but too little seniority to decline. This was how such things were usually decided.

Four days after the electricity began to falter, it snapped off with a conspicuousness that she knew was final. A scent of cordite spread through the shelter—though it couldn’t possibly have been cordite—and the Bertelsmann player stopped dead in the middle of an Etta James song. If she had understood anything at all about how the generator worked, she might have been able to repair it, but she knew next to nothing about electromechanics, only the few scraps of theory she remembered from her freshman year of college. She turned on the flashlight she had placed in the pocket of the tent. The air around her still had the same slightly pink quality to it, but now that the light was reflected back in on itself, rather than filtered through from outside, it was twice as sharp as it had been before. Everything inside the tent seemed to shine with a finely edged clarity. There was a box of granola bars in the recess by the tent’s entrance. She unwrapped and ate one. She was astonished by the distinctness of the individual grains, which were cemented together with such cohesion that they resembled tiny puzzle pieces. This was the kind of food she would be eating from now on, she knew: hunks of pemmican, dehydrated biscuits, beef jerky, and granola bars—food that was meant to last through an apocalypse. She could always hook up the Primus stove or try to construct a fire, of course, but even then she expected the provisions to run out in less than a month. The expedition was supposed to have ended weeks ago, and their reserve of supplies had always been meager.

So this was her situation: no heat, no electricity, and soon there would be no food.

She knew what she had to do—knew, in fact, so immediately that she realized she must have been pondering the question for weeks.

Her only chance was to outfit the second sledge, abandon the shelter, and set off after Puckett and Joyce. If she made it to the western rim of the Ross Sea, she would find food, shelter, and companionship; if not, she would be no worse off than she already was. She didn’t want to leave. The thought of venturing out across the ice, into all that cold and emptiness, terrified her. But there was no other choice.

She spent the next half-day gathering the supplies she needed: boxes of condensed and dehydrated food, a jar of multivitamins, a few cans of coffee, a dozen rolls of toilet paper, one change of clothing, her tent and sleeping bag and thermal lining, her first-aid kit, a bottle of sunblock, a coil of Alpine rope, several waterproof boxes of matches, the Primus stove and a few cans of heating oil, a bundle of candles, the spare tent, a small magnetic compass (the sledge was equipped with a GPS monitor, but she didn’t want to take any chances), her flashlight and a box of extra batteries, the tool box, a cooking pot, a second cooking pot for melting ice into water, a few pieces of plywood, an ice ax, a pick, a sledging shovel, her pocket knife, and, finally, a harness and a pair of skis and ski poles, in case the sledge broke down and she had to haul the supplies across the ice herself. She used up more than an hour looking for an extra fuel cell for the sledge, but she wasn’t able to find one. Which meant that either the corporation hadn’t thought to provide them with one or that Puckett and Joyce had taken it with them. In either case, she would have to make do without it.

She was concentrating so hard on culling and sorting the equipment that she didn’t even notice that the wind had stopped blowing until she swung the door of the hut open to a paling sky and a motionless field of snow. She stepped outside, tucking her hands in her armpits. The air was absolutely still. No matter where she looked she couldn’t see a single cloud, though from somewhere a sparse, floury snow was falling.