The Brief History of the Dead

  The stars were nearly motionless. The moon was a brilliant white wedge, emerging from behind a thick bank of clouds. She packed her new equipment into the sledge’s storage hutch, slipped the latch into place, and took one last walk around the building. One of the klieg lights, the one directly above the graves, shone hard and straight onto the twenty mounds, so that they cast heavy foreshortened shadows that pooled against the wall of the station like oil puddles. The wind shifted, and she heard the scraping and buckling sound of the sea ice. She headed back out to the courtyard and started the sledge.

  She was worried that the fuel cell might have chipped in the freezing weather, breaking the circuit, but as it turned out, she had no reason to be. The engine engaged with a muffled hum that slowly grew louder. First the headlights brightened, and then the runners lifted, and then the internal GPS monitor flickered on, which meant that at least one of the polar relays was still working.

  But the rest of the relay system must have been down—or large patches of it, anyway. The display indicated that she was at 2 S, 39.4 E, just south of the equator, somewhere around Kenya.

  She took a long, broken breath, closed her eyes, and rested her head on the steering column. She was trying to decide whether or not she should laugh.

  NINE.

  THE NUMBERS

  How many people was any one human being likely to remember? A thousand? Maybe if you were cursed with a particularly slipshod memory. So then—ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? Of course, if you ran out your life in some small village deep in the Himalayas, the number would be greatly diminished, but Michael Puckett wasn’t thinking about Himalayan villagers. Or monks, or nuns, or kids who never lived past that falling-down-drunk stage of toddlerhood. He was thinking about himself, his own life, and by extension he was thinking about Laura. She was the common element, after all, the link or what have you. After all the discussion he had heard in the city, that much was obvious.

  He had spent the better part of a week trying to come up with a good solid number, one that took his entire forty-three years of life into account. At first he tried to make the calculations mentally, sorting through the great crowd of people in his head as he listened to the stereo or rested in bed at night. But when he realized how complicated the whole matter was turning out to be, he pulled out his #2 pencil and a blank pad of paper and settled down to work.

  He began with his immediate family—his mother, his father, and his two sisters, plus the older brother who had died at the age of eleven when he snapped his neck jumping his bike into a creek-bed. Then he added his extended family into the mix: both sets of grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his great-aunts and great-uncles, his cousins, including his second cousins, the husbands, wives, and children of his cousins, the second husbands and second wives and in some cases the second children of his cousins, and so on. Next he counted off his schoolmates and teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, and then the schoolmates and teachers of his sisters, tagging on the occasional college friend that the two of them had brought home for a visit. There were his neighbors to remember. There were the people he knew from work, beginning with his first job sliding pizzas into ovens at Pizza D’Action and ending with his sixteen years at Coca-Cola. There were the members of his church, though when it came to church, he had never been what anybody would have called devout. He was more of an Easter-Christmas-and-whenever-someone-managed-to-drag-his-ass-out-of-bed-on-a-Sunday kind of guy. And then there were the thousands of loose friends who kept jumping into his memory—people who didn’t fit into any obvious category, but nonetheless there they were, like acorns that came popping out of the grass as he mowed his lawn. There were the friends of those friends, and sometimes there was even another tier of friends beyond that. He added his girlfriends to the list (there had been seventeen of them), and his girlfriends’ families, and then his first wife and her family, and his second wife and her family, and of course there was his son and his son’s classmates and his softball team and his other friends from the block and whatnot. And there were all the people he had met at plays and dinner receptions and parties and weddings over the years. Oh, and then there were what he supposed he might call his personal commercial acquaintances, as opposed to his professional commercial acquaintances—his business contacts and such—though now that he thought about it, he guessed he would have to take them into account, as well. He was thinking of all the clerks and salespeople he knew by sight and sometimes even by name: the people who worked at the grocery stores, pharmacies, tool shops, garages, department stores, restaurants, and movie theaters he frequented.

  Any number of times he imagined he was finished with the list, but he kept uncovering new clusters of acquaintances: his Boy Scout troop, the other guys at his gym, the twenty-some faces he remembered from his one disastrous AA meeting. He would go to the kitchen to rinse off a plate, and he would remember the plumber who had repaired his faucet for the past ten years, and the rotating lineup of plumber’s assistants he had employed, and the son he had been forced to bring on call with him that one day when the schools closed down, who had put a deck of playing cards in Michael’s toaster and almost set his kitchen on fire. Everything he saw, touched, or listened to seemed to remind him of a few more people he had neglected to write down. A woman he had seen at the library once and for some reason had never forgotten. His dentist and his dental hygienist. The guys he used to play pool with when he was in college. Finally, when he paged through his notes, he realized that he had forgotten somehow to list his sisters’ extended families: their husbands and in-laws, his nephews and nieces, and on and on through the great cascade of additional people who seemed to be connected to everyone he knew, excepting only his brother, the one who had died, who was a broken thread to him and had no such connections.

  When he tallied up the list he had made, the number he came up with was forty-two thousand, but for the next few days he kept discovering little pockets and byways of extra people—where did they all come from?—and if he had to guess, he would say that the number was probably closer to fifty thousand, or maybe even seventy.

  “I can’t believe it would be that high,” Joyce said when Puckett showed him the list. “You must be imagining you remember people you don’t really remember.”

  “I was thinking it was probably too low, actually.”

  “I doubt that.” He gave the dismissive little stiff-palmed wave of his fingers—nothing more than a twitch, really—that he always used when he wanted to drive Puckett crazy. “Underestimation has never exactly been your defining characteristic.”

  Puckett ought to have buried him when he had the chance.

  Joyce had succumbed to the Blinks just a few hours after they set out for the penguin roost. He had taken on a sagging posture that Puckett had mistaken for sleep until the sledge rounded a curve and Joyce tipped over sideways, striking the window with the side of his face. All at once, Puckett knew the truth. He cut the engine and felt Joyce’s neck for a pulse. His skin was still warm, but there was nothing moving beneath it—no air, no blood. Even the muscles had lost their tension. It was the seventh death Puckett had seen in the past two weeks. He was getting used to the signs.

  It had occurred to him that he ought to try the old breath-on-the-mirror test he was familiar with from so many movies. But then again, he reasoned, it was hardly necessary when the person in question was so obviously dead.

  He and Joyce had never known whether to treat each other as friends or antagonists. Or maybe it was just that their antagonism and their friendliness had been so inextricably tied up with each other that it was impossible for anybody to tell the two apart. It was through their arguments, their bickering, that they expressed their fundamental goodwill toward each other, and they both took a particular pleasure in pretending they disliked the other more than they did. It was part of the game. For Puckett to admit that he was upset over losing Joyce, then, would have been a violation of the rules.

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; To tell the truth, though, he wasn’t as upset as he had guessed he would be. After all, there was a part of him that had known this was coming for a long time. He only wondered how long it would be before it came for him, as well.

  It would have taken him the rest of the day and a good portion of the next to break into the ice and lay a respectable grave for Joyce, and it seemed more important to cover some more ground before the horizon swallowed all the good light, so he decided to bury him after he made it across the bay to the second transmitter. He started up the sledge and began following his compass over the ice. It wasn’t long, though, before he felt himself becoming feverish and began losing awareness of his surroundings. It was the virus coming on—he knew it. His skin seemed to be coming loose from his skeleton, like a star casting off its final wobbling shell of gas. His eyes watered over and gradually lost their focus. The last thing he remembered was waking for a few moments some indeterminate time later and watching as a great wall of ice and black rock slowly grew larger in his windshield. Then he fell asleep again, and there was the pinwheel of gold and silver light, and when he tried to touch it, the petals folded together into a single enormous pillar, as tall and wide as a redwood tree. It was only through a supreme effort of his will and imagination that he was able to compress the pillar into a small rod the size of a #2 pencil—which was indeed a #2 pencil, the same pencil he would later use to prepare his list.

  Joyce was the first person he saw when he arrived in the city. Immediately he knew that he must be dead. Puckett took a step back, stumbling over his shoes.

  “What are you doing here?” Joyce asked him, and Puckett asked the same question, “What are you doing here?” And then they argued about something for a while. And then they went their separate ways. And it felt good, it felt right, it felt just like old times.

  Puckett had made no particular effort to stay in touch with Joyce, and he was pretty sure Joyce would say the same about him if anyone asked. But then staying in touch had not demanded any particular effort. Wherever they went, it seemed, they were destined to meet. Puckett could hardly walk into a bar or restaurant without finding Joyce at one of the tables, clicking the salt and pepper shakers together or making lean-tos out of the cardboard coasters, and if he was not there already, inevitably he would arrive within the next few minutes. He could not step out for a quick stroll, could not go shopping at the grocery store, without suddenly coming upon him at the deli counter or the back end of the soup aisle. They had run into each other at the movie theater, the gym, and the drug store, and at the random intersections of a thousand different streets. More than once Puckett had stepped out of a stall in a public restroom to find Joyce buckling his belt only one stall over. They were no longer surprised to see each other, and it was with a certain sense of fatality that they would take up whatever conversation they had left unfinished the last time they met.

  Just one day after he told Joyce about the list he had made, for instance, Puckett ran across him on the ground floor of an office building. Puckett was dashing in to take a quick drink from the water fountain, and Joyce was walking across the black marble tiles of the lobby toward the elevators, and they saw each other and realized their paths were going to cross again. After a short pause Joyce said, “I would wager I remember about two thousand people total.”

  Puckett shook his head. “No, I’m telling you, it’s much higher than that. I’m not talking about the number of people you can call to mind without any effort at all, you know. I’m talking about the number of people you’re capable of remembering when the right chain of associations occur. Sit down and figure it out sometime.”

  “See, the difference between us is that you imagine your own memory is reliable, or at least reliable enough to offer up a basically trustworthy accounting of your life. And I don’t. Not for a second.”

  “I doubt my memory is any more reliable than yours. I just happen to know mine a little better.”

  “Riddle me this then,” Joyce said. “If everybody in the world remembered—what? fifty thousand people, you said?—then how would they all fit into a city the size of this one? This place is pretty big, but I don’t think it’s that big.”

  The next day they bumped into each other again, as they were cutting across the southwest corner of the square. Puckett said, “First of all, do you have any idea how extensive this city actually is?”

  “Do you?”

  “No, but I have a feeling it’s a lot bigger than you imagine. A lot bigger than this one district, that’s for sure. I did some asking around, and nobody seems to know how far the streets go. The closest I came was a guy who used to dabble in cartography. He said in almost ten years of mapping he had never once seen the end of the city. He said—and I quote—that if the city had a boundary line, it must have gone tearing off like a blue streak whenever he came around.”

  “Okay. Maybe. And what’s your second of all?”

  “How’s that?”

  “You said ‘first of all.’ Implying a second of all. So what’s your second of all?”

  “Well, second of all, when I say that we each remember fifty or a hundred thousand people, I don’t mean fifty or a hundred thousand people that nobody else remembers. There’s bound to be a lot of overlap. Both of us remember Laura, for instance. We both remember the folks from the office. And not that it makes any difference, but we both remember Meatyard and Weisz and Turner and those guys, too.”

  Their next encounter took place in a burger joint where they had both happened to stop for lunch. Four gray-haired Korean women were playing mah-jongg at one of the tables, and a couple of IAS officers were sitting at the counter silently scanning the room. They were still wearing their yellow collars, for some reason, though what damage was left to be done Puckett couldn’t imagine.

  Joyce began with, “I think it does make a difference, actually.”

  “What does?”

  “The fact that we remember Turner and Meatyard and the others. You said it didn’t make a difference. I say that it does.”

  “I didn’t mean that it doesn’t matter at all. But it can’t change what happened to them, can it?”

  “Really? You don’t think Laura’s memory has changed what’s happening to us?”

  “Of course it has. But Laura is still alive. Or at least we presume she is.” He took a sip of his coffee. Even after ten years of sobriety, he was still tempted to order a beer whenever he was eating a burger and fries. But, as always, he resisted the urge.

  “Yes. And as long as we were alive, we were keeping some part of the rest of them alive, as well. Think about it, Puckett,” Joyce said. “Think of all the people who must have vanished from this place after we died. Surely there was somebody who existed on this side only because you existed on the other. Can you really say that that doesn’t matter?”

  As usual, Joyce was missing his point. But also as usual, he was not entirely wrong. Of course it mattered; Puckett had no doubt about that. Still, he answered, “All I’m saying is that we’re powerless to affect what happens over there from over here. The arrow goes in one direction, and in one direction only.”

  “I’m not sure everybody would agree with you on that,” Joyce said, but Puckett was too tired of the argument to ask him to elaborate.

  It was much later in the day and he was walking home through the quiet, blue-lit streets when he realized that his older brother—the one who had died when he was only eleven, when Puckett was only four—must have continued out his days in the city until very recently, when Puckett himself had died and the memory of him had finally vanished from the face of the earth.

  My God, Puckett thought. That was almost forty years.

  He had already figured out that his parents, his grandparents, his wife, his son, the entire roster of people he had known over the course of his lifetime had remained in the city until the very moment he had died. He would even say that he had reconciled himself to the fact, though it was hard when it came to some people, he
would admit: his son, for instance, who was only fifteen, after all, and just coming into the prime of his youth. But somehow the idea that his brother, who had been gone for such a long time, was one of those people had never occurred to him. It made him feel as though he had wandered into some strange empty building where a door at the end of a twisting hallway opened onto the bedroom he had slept in as a boy. He was almost afraid to step inside, but he knew he would regret it forever if he didn’t.

  By the time he got home, he had made up his mind. He would have to search out the city for any traces of his brother.

  ~

  The investigation, as it turned out, was not as difficult as he had supposed it would be. His first thought was to track down some of the city’s old census records and look for his brother’s name inside. There was a vacated library around the corner from his building, the front door of which had been removed from its hinges and carted away by vandals at some point. While he knew that the shelves inside were mostly bare, it still seemed like the most obvious place to start. In the Archives Room, on the third floor, he found a cabinet labeled, miracle of miracles, CENSUS RECORDS—PAST FIVE YEARS. He used a metal ruler to jimmy off the lock. The cabinet had already been emptied out, though, and the only thing that remained inside was an old Vaseline jar filled with red rubber bands. He was about to leave when he saw a row of phone books stacked beneath the information counter. The books were almost ten years out of date. Still, though, he was able to find his brother’s name inside, with an address listed on the outskirts of the monument district.

  He tore the page out of the book along with a map that was folded into the back cover and took it along with him. There was a chill in the air as he navigated the streets. His ears began to ache, and so he pulled his collar up and pressed the fabric against his temples until he could hear the workings of his own body, that distant rumbling sound that always reminded him of logs rolling down a hill.