The Brief History of the Dead (9 page)

The experiment was supposed to have proven something about the development of human perception, though for the life of her Laura couldn’t remember what.

As far as she could tell, the only thing it demonstrated was that babies were capable of being tricked, and who would be surprised by that?

That same day, as the last slice of the sun was sinking behind the ice, she saw another form taking shape in her windshield, a low-bodied object at the very corner of the horizon. It shone oddly in the fading light, blinking on and off as she bumped across the ridges. At first she thought it was just a mirage—or worse, another juice container.

But then she spotted the klieg lights standing on either side of it, two dazzling panels of honed white light. They showed the building in all its contours. There was no doubt about it this time. She had finally reached the station.

FIVE.

THE HOMECOMING

D
ying had changed Marion Byrd. She had been so weary back when she was alive: weary of talking and weary of eating; weary of thinking, remembering, desiring, anticipating; weary, most of all, of the prospect of seeing her life out to its natural end. She felt as though she had spent the last ten years of her life carrying a tremendous unshaped stone on her shoulders. The effort of keeping her legs upright and simply walking underneath it had nearly crippled her. She didn’t know how to cast it off, or even where it had come from, only that she had to carry it.

But then the virus had appeared and she had died, and suddenly everything was different.

She began to appreciate all the things she thought she had forgotten how to enjoy, like music and dancing and the way the breeze felt on her neck when she pinned her hair up in back. The tension gradually worked its way out of her muscles. She looked forward to waking up in the morning.

And then there was the matter of her husband: it seemed only natural, with all the other changes she had undergone, that she would love him again.

She listened to him swishing his razor around in the sink, for instance, and then tapping it clean against the porcelain—
tap tap tap
—and she knew that he would clear his throat next, and then dry his face, and only after he had blown his nose into a tissue and carefully straightened the towel on the rack would he call out to her with some question or other. The whole unwavering performance used to fill her with despair, but these days she found herself charmed by it.

“Any sign of Laura yet?” he shouted, and she answered, “Not so much as a rumor. Maybe later today, Phillip. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

It happened like clockwork.

Laura was their only child. She had been on a prolonged business trip when the virus hit, conducting some sort of environmental survey on the opposite side of the world. The two of them had no idea what had happened to her. There had been little opportunity for them to say good-bye, not even enough time to place a phone call or send off an e-mail. Laura was only thirty-two years old—not yet married, not yet weary. When Marion was thirty-two, she had already abandoned a graduate degree, fallen in and out of love a half dozen times, met Phillip, and concluded that that era of her life was over. She had miscarried one daughter, given birth to another, named her Laura after Laura Ingalls Wilder, spent five years raising her, and then packaged her off to kindergarten and resumed working half days as a legal secretary. At the time she had imagined herself to be a woman, and the truth was that even in hindsight, when she remembered herself as she was back then, it was a woman she remembered, with a woman’s wholly developed mind and a woman’s full breadth of feeling. So why was it that when she thought of Laura she couldn’t help picturing her as a little girl?

“I thought we would go to Bristow’s today,” Phillip offered from the bathroom.

“This morning or this afternoon?” Marion asked.

“Well, this morning, I was thinking, but if you’d rather wait a while…”

“No, this morning will be nice. Just let me pick out a good pair of shoes.”

This was another thing she had forgotten how much she enjoyed: shoes. She had collected almost twenty pairs since she had died, including a beautiful pair of laced leather rainboots and a pair of high heels with tapering green straps that wound up her ankles like jasmine vines. Her shoes made her understand, in a way that jewelry and sunglasses and the other trappings of so-called feminine fashion never had, why people dyed their hair or wore tattoos. It was for the same reason that birds wove bits of thread or vinyl construction streamers into their nests: for the sheer pleasure of ornamentation. After she had chosen her shoes—a comfortable but attractive pair of dark blue flats—she grabbed her purse and headed back out to the living room. Phillip was still using the bathroom, so she inspected herself in the mirror that hung by the front door, wiping the oil from beneath her eyes with her thumbs. She kept her face as empty as she could. She could never stand to see herself smiling or glowering, blushing or frowning. Expressions of any kind, in fact, always bothered her. They seemed to turn her face into some kind of Halloween mask. Sometimes, even when she wasn’t examining her reflection, when she was just thinking quietly or talking with her friends, she would realize that her face was taking on the cover of some emotion or other and immediately she would feel a little wash of discomfort pass through her features, distorting them like a stone tossed into a puddle. She was never sure whether her face was cracking apart because she felt so uneasy, or whether she felt so uneasy because her face was cracking apart.

Soon Phillip was ready to go. The two of them set out through the lobby of the building. The clearing across the street shone in the light of the sun. The pattern of walkways covering the grass seemed to carve it up into a giant wheel. Phillip and Marion had moved into their apartment at the center of the monument district less than a week after arriving in the city, just like everybody else who had heard the gunshots. At first there were only several hundred of them there, but within a few days there were several thousand, and soon nobody was quite sure how many of them there were. There had been talk of appointing a census-taker, but as of yet no one had taken on the position. A few of the long-term residents had told Marion and Phillip about what they called the evacuation—or sometimes the leave-taking—during which the city had so suddenly emptied out. But no one could say why the people who remained behind had not yet moved on, beyond suggesting that someone must still have been alive to remember them. Marion had seen the Blinks firsthand, though, and she found this theory hard to believe. Certainly she couldn’t think of anyone she knew personally who might have evaded the virus. And when she realized that it would have to be someone Phillip knew, as well, and not only Phillip, but the flower vendor, and the newspaperman, and the man on the corner who begged for change, and the kid who poured pitchers of water over the dirt beside the pawn shop, gouging out lakes and moats and islands with a broken stick, and the old Italian woman who didn’t speak a word of English, and the man she heard whistling morosely for his dog every evening—well, the whole idea seemed absurd to her.

Of course, any number of people might have survived the virus and remained alive to remember them. But Marion found
that
idea even harder to believe than the other. She had been there, after all, when the virus spread across the plains and into the heartland. She had seen what it could do.

Phillip took a deep breath, pounding his chest. “You know, I love this,” he said. He swept his fingers through the leaves of a bay tree. “Just being able to walk wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go there. After Number Two, I thought my walking days were over.”

Number Two was how they referred to his second heart attack. In their last few years, Marion had nursed him through Number One, Number Two, and what they had taken to calling Number Two-A, a minor stroke, after which their family doctor had told him that he should avoid all strenuous activity: swimming, bicycling, aerobic walking—anything that might overtax his heart. There were certain things you didn’t have to worry about when your heart stopped beating, though, and one of them was heart failure.

“It’s like you’re born with all these blessings,” he said, “only you don’t realize they’re blessings until you lose them. And if you’re thick-headed enough, like me, you don’t even realize you’ve
lost
them, not until they come back to you. You know what I mean?” He squeezed her hand as if to punctuate the question.

“I’m glad it makes you happy,” Marion said. And she was, although of the two of them, he was never the one who had made a predicament out of his happiness. That had always been her territory.

“Yes, but I’m not sure you understand,” he said. “It’s not just the walking I’m talking about, Marion—”

But they were at Bristow’s already, and the noise of the diner cut him short.

Bill Bristow had been a toll booth operator for nearly forty years—that was what he’d told Marion and Phillip—but he had never wanted to be. He had spent rush hour after rush hour, day after day, staring out at the lines of traffic and imagining himself as a successful restaurateur. It had been his lifelong dream. And so when he died, only a year or so before the virus hit, he had decided to open a diner—nothing fancy, just hamburgers, chili, and baked potatoes, the kind of place that would serve breakfast all day long.

It had been his good fortune, he said, to set up shop just a stone’s throw away from the monument. Now his restaurant was the oldest one in town.

“The Byrd family!” he exclaimed when he saw them, and Marion thought, Or two-thirds of us, anyway. “My favorite customers, the Byrd family! Just like the real birds—they come and then they fly away, and you ask yourself, when will they come back again? I’ve got a booth by the window for you. Will a booth by the window be okay?”

“A booth by the window will be fine,” Phillip said.

“Excellent!” He escorted them to their table and called a waiter over to take their drink order. Then he bowed and excused himself, saying, “Such a busy morning,” as he backed away.

When he was gone, Marion whispered, “It’s like eating in a burger joint with an overexcited French matre d’.”

“I think it’s charming,” Phillip chuckled. “He’s obviously playing the role he’s always dreamed of. We should all be so lucky.”

Four elderly Korean women were sitting in the booth behind them. Marion could hear their mah-jongg tiles clicking and see their small gray heads bobbing over Phillip’s shoulder. A little girl, maybe three years old, knelt beside them with her legs folded underneath her, sucking on a peppermint stick. When she saw Marion looking at her, she bit the stick in half and crammed both ends in her mouth, crunching at them until she was able to swallow. She gave a triumphant smile. The smile meant that Marion couldn’t have any.

Soon the waiter reappeared to take their order. Then he left and Phillip began stirring a packet of sugar into his coffee. Next he would take a slow, pondering sip from the oval of the spoon, make a face as he decided that the coffee was not yet sweet enough, and empty a second packet of sugar into the cup, watching it break the surface, just as he always did. Time had made a wreck out of his body, Marion thought—a wreck out of both their bodies—but he was still a little boy in some respects, marooned at that age when discovering his own habits was a sort of game for him. The game had to be played the same way every day, or the pieces would fall to the floor, the board would collapse, and the illusion that you were shaping your own life—that you were in control—would break. It was one of the many things Marion had loved about Phillip at first, then somewhere along the way stopped loving, and now loved again.

The service at Bristow’s was unusually fast that day, and the waiter was already laying their plates on the table when Marion caught a glimpse of her daughter out the window.

A hook caught in her stomach.

She tapped on the glass and was about to call out, “Laura, Laura,” but then the woman turned her head and it wasn’t Laura at all, just a stranger who happened to have Laura’s self-contained stride and ginger hair, stopping at the curb before she crossed the street.

This wasn’t the first such apparition Marion had seen. As usual, she was embarrassed by her mistake. Why did she keep expecting her daughter to turn up everywhere she looked? Perhaps because she had run across so many other people she recognized in the city: neighbors, friends, cousins, casual acquaintances, along with hundreds of faces she could not quite place but was sure she had seen somewhere before, plus a few that seemed to have grown out of faces she had known in much younger configurations.

Even her own mother, who had passed away almost twenty years before, was there, though not her father, who had died when Marion was still a teenager and had vanished from the city, it seemed, just as Marion was arriving.

It was only from talking with people like Bill Bristow, people she had never met before she came to the city, that she realized how unusual her situation was. Many of the people who remained behind knew very few of the others. And some of them, a couple dozen at least, who had died in the late phases of the virus, seemed to know none at all. They had simply closed their eyes and woken one day in a city full of strangers.

Marion turned to Phillip. “So what
are
we doing here?”

“What we’re doing is enjoying a couple of ham-and-egg sandwiches.”

Sometimes her distaste for him reared back up in her before she could stop it. She grimaced. “No. What I mean is why are we
here
as opposed to someplace else. Here as opposed to wherever everybody else is.”

“I know what you meant, honey. But I can’t give you an answer. I don’t think anybody could. ‘What are we doing here?’ For that matter, what were we doing
there
? Why were we ever anywhere at all? I think the only thing we can do is stop asking impossible questions and just make the best of it,” he said. “Go for a walk with your wife now and then. Sleep in occasionally. Eat whatever sandwiches come your way.” He took a bite of his own, as if to illustrate the point. “Which brings me to what I was getting at outside—”

Two men were deep in conversation at the next table, and one of them said, “Laura,” or at least Marion thought he had, and so she hushed Phillip in order to listen in. She only had to wait a few seconds before the word turned over again, like a piece of shingle caught in a heavy current, and she realized that it was actually “laurel.” She caught herself sighing. In the sound there was an echo of the one long sigh that had been the last few years of her life.

She said, “My mind is playing tricks on me again. I’m sorry, Phillip. Where were we?”

By then, though, he had lost the thread of whatever he was going to say, or at least the inclination to say it. They finished the rest of the meal in silence.