The Brief History of the Dead

  The map from the phone book seemed to be some kind of interpretive cubist diagram of the city rather than an actual map. A number of small streets—streets that were not displayed on the map at all—had been wedged in between others that were supposed to be directly adjacent. And some of the streets that were on the map had been disarranged slightly, intersecting at the wrong places, as though some careless shopper had taken them out to look at them and then put them back on the first shelf that came to hand. In one case, a weedy, half-dead golf course stretched over what ought to have been—but was not—four city blocks named for the great cities of Southern Africa: Kinshasa, Nairobi, Lusaka, and Johannesburg.

  More than once Puckett had to retrace his steps and ask for directions. The sole of one of his shoes came loose and began to flap against the pavement.

  All the same, he managed to find the building he was looking for.

  He rode the elevator to the fifth floor, gave a precautionary knock on the door of the apartment listed in the phone book, and then took hold of the doorknob. He had expected the apartment to be empty—he didn’t know why—but just as he was getting ready to open the door, a lanky middle-aged man answered. The man’s glasses were smudged with some kind of transparent grease, and a feather duster of limp yellow hair trailed over his eyebrows. He was eating raisins out of a dixie cup.

  “I help you?” he said after a few moments of silence, and Puckett realized he had been staring at the man like an imbecile.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I screwed up. I was looking for somebody who used to be at this address. Or maybe he did. At least I thought so.”

  The man popped a raisin into his mouth. “This somebody have a name?”

  “Nathaniel Puckett.”

  “Mm-hmm. He cleared out—oh—about the tail end of the evacuation, I’d say. You knew him?”

  “He was my brother.”

  “You Mikey?”

  “Well… Michael.”

  The man nodded and stepped aside. “Come on in then. Your brother and I were roommates.”

  Your brother and I were roommates. It was that simple, apparently. Puckett could hardly believe it. He sat down on a sofa that had been upholstered in a pattern of blue and white stripes, an enormous beast of furniture that took up half the room. There were no other chairs around, and so the man with the glasses sat next to him. “I suppose you want to ask me about your brother,” he said. “Fire away. I’m not armed.” He had finished his raisins, and he crushed the dixie cup and began transferring it slowly between his palms, smoothing out the folds and bulges. Everything about him seemed to amble along at its own deliberate speed, the lone exception being his habit of snipping off the beginnings of his sentences, which was a way of making up for lost time, Puckett guessed.

  Puckett’s brother had always been a mystery to him, a ghostlike stranger with a dirt bike and a broken neck who had collected comic books and stayed up late watching television and had once convinced Puckett to curl up into a ball at the bottom of his sleeping bag so that he could swing him in circles around the living room. That was all he remembered about him. But over the course of the next few hours, he learned any number of new things. Upon his death, apparently, Nathaniel had taken a room in one of the city’s many orphanages, as most children did. He might simply have remained there—again, as most children did. But though he had never grown older than eleven, he had eventually decided to move out on his own. He continued to ride his bicycle for a few years, though it was a racing bike rather than a dirt bike this time. He was in three or four minor traffic accidents before he decided to sell the thing. Afterward, he became an afficionado of the subway system. On Sunday afternoons, he would ride the cars for hours at a stretch, taking them as far as the white clay district, while he stared out at the other cars and the dark tunnels and the aquariumlike spaces of the waiting platforms. For seven years he had worked in a hobby shop selling model airplanes and die-cast figurines to young men nostalgic for the childhood he himself would never lose. Then he had gotten a job pruning bushes at a greenhouse, and after that he had worked for a while as an assistant groundskeeper at one of the city’s largest topiary gardens.

  The man who was telling Puckett about him had been staying in the apartment’s extra room for almost five years now. He and Nathaniel had met at a lecture on “The Comic Book as Literature,” he said. The man had been an English teacher when he was alive, with a taste for what he called “illustrated novels.” And as for Nathaniel, comic books still made up his main reading material. He had built up a sizable collection since he had arrived in the city. He invited the man to his apartment the day after the lecture to look at them.

  “And I never left,” the man said. “What can I tell you? I was brand new. Needed a place to stay, and your brother needed the company. It worked out just fine.”

  “Did he ever talk about me?” Puckett asked.

  “You and your family both.”

  Puckett heard himself letting out a sigh. “I don’t know why I should be relieved by that. I barely… and here I am…” He was stumbling over his thoughts. “You know, I really wasn’t sure he would remember me.”

  “He remembered. You didn’t get a chance to say good-bye, did you?”

  “To say good-bye in person? No. Mom took me to his grave once, but I was pretty little back then. I basically just stopped thinking about him after a while.”

  The whole time the man was talking, he had been shaping the dixie cup slowly between his fingers, and now he was holding a nearly perfect sphere in his hands. “It’s important to say good-bye. My family was at my bedside when I died.”

  “Were you sick?”

  “Leukemia. A bad time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be.”

  “But your family was there?”

  “They were. You want to hear about it?”

  And with that he began his story.

  He said that he had been sick for a long time before he was hospitalized. “Almost three years. People say they want to die in their own home. But me, I was ready for the hospital. The sterilized sheets, the machines, the whole bit. It just seemed easier there. Easier to cast myself off, I mean. There was less to let go of. You have to understand, I was in pain. Had been in pain for a long time. I was ready to die. Whenever I felt myself slipping away, though, I would see the pictures of my wife and my boys on the wall, or I would notice the chair by the dresser and remember where I was when I picked it up, or any one of a thousand other things. They were like these little knots that I couldn’t unfasten. Finally I decided that if I was going to die I needed to be in unfamiliar surroundings. Maybe because I was getting ready to move into the most unfamiliar surrounding of all. Don’t know. In any case, I asked my family to put me up in the hospital, and they did. They were real good about it. They visited a couple of times a day—even my oldest, who was in college at the time. One day he asked me—Clay, that’s my oldest—he asked me if I believed in an afterlife. I didn’t know what to tell him. You know those stories you used to hear about people who pass through the tunnel of white light and see Heaven waiting for them on the other side? Never knew what to make of them myself. But the fact that the people who survived to tell us about it were always by definition the ones who turned around and came back—well, it would be hard for me to explain why, but it made me doubt their reliability. Still, I kept thinking about it. People used to believe that you could look into the eyes of a dead man and see an image of the last thing he ever saw. Did you know that? I had always imagined the opposite myself. That your vision turned the other way as you died. That time flipped inside out and you saw what was coming next rather than what had come before. Anyway, I wanted to answer my boy’s question if I could. I didn’t know whether he would be in the room when I died. Didn’t know whether I would be able to communicate with him even if he was. So I decided to write him two letters. One of the letters said that there was nothing at all after you died—just a
big winking out, not even darkness. I sealed that letter up in a red envelope. And the other letter said that it was all true, everything you’ve ever heard—the tunnel, your loved ones beckoning you on through the light, and finally Heaven—or at least something like it. I put that letter in a blue envelope. There are other possibilities, of course, but those were the two that seemed the most likely to me. I wanted to keep it simple. I made up a rhyme so I wouldn’t forget which envelope was which: ‘Red is dead. Blue is new.’ For days I kept repeating it to myself. Red is dead. Blue is new. Red is dead. Blue is new. See, I was going to try to choose between them at the last second, when my vision flipped. But I started to worry that I wouldn’t be able to talk when the time came. So I asked the nurse to put one of the envelopes in each of my hands. I held on tight to them. My room had a window, and I could see the sky passing over the top level of the parking garage. First the sun, then the stars, and then the sun again. That kind of thing. It was evening a couple of days later when I finally died. Like I said, my whole family was there. My wife, both my boys. I could feel it coming on. This time there were no knots to hold me in place. I let go of one of the envelopes, and I clutched the other one as hard as I could.”

  Puckett was fascinated. “Which envelope did you hold on to?”

  “The red one,” the man said. “Red is dead.” The lower half of his face gave an awkward little twist. “Obviously I messed up.”

  Puckett laughed. “I’ll say.”

  “If I had it to do over again, I’d pick the blue one, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  They both fell quiet after that. It was a good half minute before the man bent his head to the side and the light from the window touched the oil on his glasses, where it butterflied open in a dozen different colors. “What are you thinking about?” the man said.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You were squeezing the bridge of your nose. That’s your thinking gesture. You did it when I mentioned your brother’s comic books, and then when I told you about my son, and you did it again just now. I’m good at spotting them.”

  Puckett put his hands on his knees. “I was thinking I should thank you for spending so much time with me. Believe me, it helped. But I need to be going now.”

  The couch released Puckett with a long creak of its springs. Before he could make his way to the door, though, the man said, “You know, your brother was my only close friend in the city. It’s good to have someone to tell your stories to. Which is my way of saying come back any time.”

  He reached out for Puckett in what Puckett presumed was a handshake. But when Puckett went to meet it, the man gave him the dixie cup instead: a small, round globe, worn smooth as velvet by his fingers.

  “Would you mind throwing this out for me?” he said. “There’s an ashtray right over there by the elevators.”

  ~

  So what was Puckett thinking about?

  Mailmen.

  Specifically, the number of mailmen he had known in his life.

  They were yet another subset of people he had forgotten to take into account, though so far he had been able to remember only eight of them distinctly. There was the mailman who had always asked to see his driver’s license when he signed for a package, the one he had spotted buying a case of wine in the liquor store, and half a dozen others.

  He was sure he would remember a few more as he let the line of his thoughts play out. It must have been the story about the letters that had brought them to mind. As it had brought his son to mind, and his second wife, and his parents—the people who would have gathered around his own hospital bed if he had had one.

  He was trying his best not to think about them. It was just too hard.

  The air was colder than it had been even an hour or so before, and a thick blanket of clouds had emerged while he was inside. As he was walking home, he overheard two men, maybe thirty years old, hypothesizing about various ways they might contact Laura. This was a popular subject of conversation in the city, though one that never seemed to produce any concrete initiatives.

  “Has anybody thought about using a Ouija board?” one of them said.

  “Well, maybe she could use a Ouija board to contact us, but it doesn’t work the other way. See, I was thinking we could get everybody together and just try to, you know, project our thoughts or something. A harmonic convergence sort of thing. She believes in that shit, or at least she did back in the day.”

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t at least give the Ouija board thing a shot.” The man made a rolling little high-pitched horror-movie note. “They came from beyond the grave!”

  Puckett passed behind a clump of trees, and soon their voices faded away.

  At the bus bench on the corner of Georgia and Sixty-fifth, a man with motor oil stains on his clothing was adjusting himself through the pocket of his pants. Puckett remembered some twenty car mechanics, though he was pretty sure he had already written them all down; he would have to check his list to make sure.

  At the lower end of the golf course, a blind man was feeling his way down the sidewalk, tugging on the rigging of his beard. Puckett could remember at least six blind people.

  He was almost home when he saw Joyce stepping out of a jeweler’s shop, hunching his shoulders as the wind struck his face. He suddenly felt a tremendous weariness in his bones. Maybe it was the walk, or maybe it was his conversation with the English teacher, or maybe it was just the effort of thinking about his brother after so long, but the last thing he wanted right now was another pointless argument.

  He ducked beneath an awning and waited for him to pass. Joyce was listening to his watch, shaking his wrist as he held it to his ear, and he did not see him. Puckett watched him cross the street at the corner. Then he moved out of the doorway, blew a long breath of warm air into his hands, and felt the first tingle of frost on his cheek.

  He looked up into the sky, a loosely swirling motion of gray and white flakes.

  Not this again, he thought.

  It was snowing.

  TEN.

  THE CREVASSE

  Ice. Frost. Frosting. Crossing. Railroad crossing. Railroad train. Fabric train. Wedding dress. Wedding ring. Ring of fire. Ring of ice. Ice. Iceberg. Glacier. Razor. Stubble. Stumble. Fall. October. November. December. Christmas. Xmas. X marks the spot. Treasure. Gold. Silver. Silver Bells. Jingle Bells. Open sleigh. Snow. Ice. Rice. Mice. Cats. Whiskers. Scissors. Paper. Paper angels. Angel food cake. Nectar of the gods. Ambrosia. Ambrose Bierce. Mexico. Mexican. Jumping bean. Jump rope. Rope bridge. Chasm. Crevice. Ice floe. Iceberg. Ice.

  As Laura strained at the sledge, the words snapped back and forth in her head like a racquetball, a continuously rolling blue whir that she made no effort to stop or control. She was trying to find one word for every step she took, looking for that ideal balance of physical and mental locomotion that would keep her from thinking too hard about whether she would make it to the penguin roost, and what she would find if she got there, and what difference it would make if all the reports she had read were true and everyone, everyone in the world, everyone she had ever known, was dead.

  She did not know—did not want to know—the answer.

  Answer. Question. Mention. Tension.

  Her hauling stride measured slightly more than a foot—a foot and four inches, say—which meant (she did the math) that she could expect to cover one mile, roughly, for every thirty-five hundred words she came up with. If her bearings were correct, she had eighteen miles and sixty-three thousand words to go. The sledge had shut down on her shortly after she crossed Fog Bay, sinking onto its runners on a flat stretch of perfectly ridgeless ice. The flippers had locked and the whole immense carriage had coasted slowly across the ice, razoring a full six inches into the snow before it scraped to a stop. She had tried everything she could think of to get the engine running again. She was no mechanic, though, and it quickly became clear to her that it was broken beyond her capacity for repair.

  Which wa
s not to say that it was broken beyond any capacity for repair. The problem might have been something as simple as a spent fuel cell or a snapped electrical connection. But without reliable tools, good lighting, and replacement supplies, she knew she was out of luck. She stood in the cold with her face in her hands. The snow beneath her boots was loose and high. The wind made the surface stir with thousands of tiny flexing snakes. She climbed back into the steering compartment of the sledge, where the heat was quickly draining away, and shut the door.

  She had already traveled most of the way around the hump of Ross Island, and it made no sense for her to turn back now. She remembered that old joke about the man who swam three quarters of the distance across a river, decided he was too tired to go any further, swung around in the water, and swam back to shore. In the version she had heard the man was Canadian, though in certain areas of the country he was probably Mexican. And immediately across the border, to either the north or the south, he was almost certainly an American.

  American. Yank. Tug. Tugboat. Engine.

  There was only one option open to Laura—that was how she saw it.

  She couldn’t turn around, and she couldn’t stay where she was, so she would have to keep going. She waited until she felt the last of the heat slip away, then took the harness and skis out of the storage hutch, clipped the skis onto her feet, and fastened herself to the front of the sledge.

  She leaned into the harness and tried to pull forward. It was impossible. The sledge was a house, the sledge was a whale. She strained so hard that one of her skis pierced the snow, plunging through the crust with a sound like tearing paper. Her left leg sank down to the knee. She lifted herself out and tried again. This time she used both of her poles for leverage, leaning into the wind, her shoulders hunched and spread to give herself as much muscle as possible. She took one step, and then another, and then a third. Perhaps the traces were stretching slightly, but the sledge did not move. She decided she would have to lighten her load. She simply wouldn’t make it otherwise.