The Brief History of the Dead

  The sledge came in two main pieces: the steering compartment and the storage hutch. She began by detaching the steering compartment from the runners, unfastening the couplings that joined it to the storage hutch and sliding it off onto the snow. It rested on the surface for a few seconds before its sharp edges punched through the crust, leaving a perfect four-by-four-foot square. Then she took the shovel out of the back of the storage hutch, which was still attached to the runners, and worked the snow loose from around the steering compartment’s door. She filled the compartment with everything she thought she could do without: a few bundles of clothing, three thick pieces of plywood, her sunblock, of course, the second of her two cooking pots, and the chest that carried her frozen food, which she had already emptied into the storage hutch. Whatever she left behind, she reasoned, she would be able to pick up again on her return trip.

  She shut the door, strapped herself into her harness, and yanked on the sledge’s traces. Reluctantly it began to move—very slowly at first, then less slowly. After her first few strides, she fell into a gliding motion that carried her steadily but strenuously over the ice. The steering compartment disappeared behind her. The sledge was so much lighter than it had been before. It was half a house now, half a whale.

  A whale. A wail. A good, hard cry. A gnashing of the teeth.

  Laura remembered how she had begun grinding her teeth shortly after she started working for Coca-Cola. It was something she had done in her sleep, unconsciously and entirely without memory. She would wake up in the morning with her jaw aching and have no idea why, until the day her dentist noticed that her enamel had been worn down as smooth as pearl. “Frankly, I’ve never seen a mouth go so bad so quickly,” he told her. “It looks like you put your teeth through a rock tumbler.” He scouted around in her mouth for a while with a penlight, then switched the light off, looked her in the eyes, and said, “Have you ever considered therapy?”

  For a while this had been her favorite dinner party story, the one she told whenever anyone mentioned teeth or psychiatry or the presumptuous suggestions of practical strangers.

  But it had been months since she had thought about it.

  And months since she had thought about her dentist.

  Who was almost certainly dead now.

  Dentist. Doctor. Braces. Eraser. Abrasive.

  She could not expect to come across another shelter before she reached the sea. Once, not so long ago, hundreds of small, temporary settlements had dotted the plateaus of Antarctica, but that time had come to an end almost thirty years ago, when it became clear that the ice cap was beginning to melt. True, less glaciation meant easier access to the mineral resources of the land. But it also meant legal liability for the rising sea levels and climate changes the thaw was expected to bring, and most of the countries of the world had weighed the financial benefits against the financial risks and decided to relinquish their stake in the continent. The whole of Antarctica was purchased just a few years later by a trio of corporations—Coca-Cola, Bertelsmann, and FCI—after both South Africa and Argentina, the last of the thirty-seven countries that had once held claim to it, suffered financial collapse. Immediately the number of polar and scientific expeditions had fallen to almost zero—in part, and undeniably, because the corporations had denied many of the scientists access, but also because the original settlements had not really been established as research stations in the first place. They were markers of a national interest that had now been exhausted, like the flags planted all those years ago on the beaten gray deserts of the moon. The shelters and heavy equipment were broken down and hauled out inside a fleet of cargo planes. The people were evacuated. Laura was aware of two other research parties that had been granted entry to the continent around the same time she was sent there by Coca-Cola. One of them was located on the far side of the Pole, toward Madagascar, and the other at the very tip of the Antarctic peninsula. But both had been abandoned before the onset of winter.

  She would have to rely on her own tent for shelter, on her own momentum for warmth. When she first began sledging, the stars had been hidden behind a thick lid of clouds, so that even with her flashlight it was impossible for her to see more than a few yards in front of her. But by the time a couple of hours had passed, a broad patch of sky had become visible to the northeast. She could see hundreds of stars and satellites, and between them the shifting waves and folds of the aurora, in green and red and gold, flaring up, fading away, and sending out dozens of slowly extending streamers and ribbons. The ice was still dark, though, and there were few landmarks for her to steer by, only the occasionally discernible black rock of the mountain that lay to the east.

  Every so often, when she sensed that she might have veered off course, she would fish her compass out of her pocket and check her bearings. She was so close to the Pole that the needle would drift and spin for a full minute before it came to rest, and even then only if she stood absolutely still. It was difficult for her to get moving again. She only had to pause for a minute and the sledge would take on the weight of its own stillness. The carriage would sink to its belly in the snow, and the runners would fix in place, taking hold of the ice like roots.

  She had never known a person could be so tired. Sometimes she didn’t see how she could possibly keep going. But she did, she always did.

  The snow blew off the rises, leaving bald patches of slippery ice, but long drifts built up in the depressions and made the shelf seem more level than it really was. There were multitudes of people in her thoughts, multitudes walking behind her. Her mother and father. Her extended family. The friends she had known growing up, and in college and graduate school, and in her life as a working adult. Her lovers and all the close friends of her lovers. The people she saw every few days at the grocery store or at the bank, and the people who lived in her apartment building and the buildings surrounding it. The woman who sold the tickets at the movie theater. The man who worked the toll booth outside the Coca-Cola complex. The people she was used to passing on the street but with whom she had never actually spoken. She would think of them, and they would give her the strength to carry on, and then she would remember the virus and the newspaper article and the thousand cities of the dead, and her stomach would buckle, and she would start counting her words again.

  Though she knew she was alone, there was a part of her that refused to accept it. Otherwise, she thought, why not just stop where she was, settle onto her knees, and let the snow accumulate around her? It would be so much easier that way—so much easier than all these exhausting footsteps, one after another, footsteps in their endless thousands.

  But, she reminded herself, she was not alone, or at least she couldn’t be certain she was. Somebody, somewhere, must have survived the virus. And what about Puckett and Joyce? They were still out on the ice somewhere, looking for her. For all she knew, she had already crossed paths with them on her way across the bay. The air was so black, and the wind so deafening sometimes, that they might have come within yards of one another and never even known it.

  When the wind was blowing hard, in fact, it seemed to be the only sound in the world, but when it fell still, she could hear the snow creaking beneath her feet, the sledge shushing behind her, even the occasional shotlike report of distant slabs of ice contracting in the cold. The darkness made everything seem louder than it really was. And then there was the crushed-glass sound of her clothing moving against her body. Her sweat did not evaporate in the cold, but soaked directly into the fabric, where it quickly froze through. By the time she had been sledging for fifteen minutes her shirt and pants would be stiff with frost, and within half an hour they would be frozen into a thousand different angles and creases. It became difficult for her to bend her joints, and when she did, fragments of ice would come raining down her chest and legs, piling up at her beltline and the cuffs of her pants where she had tucked them into her boots. She made the mistake of taking off one of her mitts to reach for her compass once and ended up with frostbite
on all five fingertips. At night, in her tent, she had to wait for her clothes to thaw before she took them off, and afterward she would watch as they lay on the floor steaming and collapsing fold by fold, rustling quietly as the heat softened them. They were not always dry by the time she woke up, and sometimes, when she stepped outside, the fabric would freeze together again. She made sure to take down the tent with her body already arranged in its sledging posture, a lesson she learned the morning her shirt hardened around her, locking into a position that left her head tilted awkwardly to the left for the rest of the day. There was no way for her to remove the clothing to adjust herself, and so she had had to walk that way until she stopped some eight hours later to set the tent up again.

  The bay had been shaped and broken by the pressure of countless freezings. It followed the gradually rising and falling motion of a meadow cut by occasional streams. The streams were crevasses, and while some of them were narrow enough for her to cross, others were not. Each time she came to one, she would lengthen her trace and take her skis off and look to see whether she could make the leap. If she couldn’t (and she often couldn’t) she would walk toward the tapering end until the crevasse sealed itself off—sometimes in solid ice, sometimes in a bridge of packed snow.

  The sound of these bridges beneath her feet was one she quickly learned to recognize, the hollow thwud of snow with nothing supporting it. She was always frightened that the ground would crumble away while she was trying to walk across. Somehow, though, it never did. Often she would put a leg or a foot through the snow, but she was always able to lift herself back out.

  The sledge’s flippers were fully extended, and it would slide over the gap on its own as soon as she began pulling again. It was becoming harder and harder, though, for her to draw the sledge at all. The strain of the cold, the twelve or more hours she spent between breakfast and dinner, between one meal and another, the neverending exertion of making her way over the drifts—it was all taking its toll on her. She was feeling weaker every day. Her knees kept buckling, she kept losing her rhythm of breathing.

  It was on her fifth day of sledging—her eighth away from the station—that a dense, murky fog settled over the ice. Her flashlight was useless in such conditions, shining back against her hands off the motionless white wall. A small button of moonlight capped the fog, dull and lusterless, but its light was too weak to reach the ground. She wouldn’t have seen it at all if she hadn’t happened to look directly above her.

  She spent hours walking blindly forward, trying to feel the changing shape of the ground through the soles of her boots. Was the shelf rising or dipping? How slick was the snow and how thickly was it packed? Was that the lip of a fissure she felt or simply the falling edge of a furrow? She checked her compass every few minutes to make sure she hadn’t wandered too far off course. She tried to keep to a straight line.

  She had been pulling for most of the day when a wedge of sky appeared ahead of her. First it was just a cup-shaped hole through which she was able to glimpse a few weak stars, but then the fog parted around it, spreading open as though someone had unfastened a giant zipper, and the moonlight came pouring through. She propelled herself forward with a dozen driving jabs of her poles, hurrying toward the light. The fog dissolved into clear air around her. The weight of the sledge seemed like an unnecessary burden. She would have thrown it off if she could have—just thrown it off and run. She saw the ice that lay above the crevasse, a thin sheet of brittle shining glass, a split second before she was on top of it. But there was no time for her to stop.

  She said something out loud—“Wait!” she thought it was, though maybe it was “Shit!”—and then the ice made a splintering noise, shattering into a thousand fragments, and she felt herself falling.

  She was caught by the straps of her harness. Her neck wrenched backward, the air rushed out of her lungs, and she heard a clattering sound. She saw white shapes like moths or butterflies floating across her vision in the darkness.

  After a few seconds, she began to breathe again. She was dangling inside her harness. She kicked at the air, casting about for a ledge, a foothold, anything. The walls must have been ten feet apart. Her legs kept pinwheeling between them. Whenever she managed to touch one, her feet would slide loose, and she would start swaying back and forth again. Finally she brushed up against what felt like a pressure cleft or an indentation, but before she was able to anchor herself to it, she began sliding down again.

  It took her a moment to realize what was happening: the sledge was being pulled toward the fissure. She dropped five feet in a matter of seconds, then halted for a moment, spinning in her harness, before she dropped another two.

  She waited until she was sure she had stopped. Then she looked up. The effort of craning her neck made her dizzy, but she forced herself to ignore the feeling. She could see one of the flippers projecting over the edge of the cut. It was outlined against the sky, a stream of stars contained between the solid black walls of the crevasse. The other flipper was not visible to her. The sledge must have lodged against a ridge or a snowdrift, twisting the runners off center. That had to be what was holding it in place. Temporarily.

  Delicately, she reached for the wall. She was closer to it now by perhaps a foot. The rope held steady. The ice was hard and slick, with none of the snow that had given her traction when she was making her way across the shelf. She prodded it gently with her mitts. She could not feel any irregularities there. She was afraid that if she moved too suddenly, she would give the sledge enough momentum to skip off whatever obstruction it had lodged against and her weight would pull it into the gap. The walls were too wide for the flippers to be effective, which meant that the sledge would either crush her as it fell or go plummeting past her body and yank her into the void. How deep did the crevasse go? She wouldn’t be surprised if it bottomed out at the ocean itself, that thin band of water that had somehow managed to remain liquid beneath the pressure of the ice: barely moving, home to absolutely nothing.

  So she could freeze to death, or she could fall and break her neck, or she could drown. Those were the possibilities.

  And then there was a fourth possibility, the only other one she could think of. She could climb the rope and lift herself out of the crevasse. She could save herself.

  Or not. She had to admit she was tempted to undo the harness and simply let herself drop. It would be a thousand times easier that way. She would never have to pull a sledge again, never have to struggle or wish or remember again. She imagined death as a wonderful melting. The cold would pass out of her blood. She would be so much warmer. No one would ever find her or know what had happened to her, no one would ever see her again, and what difference would it make? The world was over anyway. She would never meet another living soul.

  But in the end, she knew, she couldn’t let herself do it, couldn’t let herself fall. She had to keep struggling, for the same reason everybody else kept struggling, or at least they always had in the past. She felt that to let go of the rope would be cheating.

  She looked up again. The flipper was still hanging over the edge of the fissure. She understood that if she was going to make it to the surface, she would have to start now, before she fell asleep and the rest of her strength drained away. She had given herself a fifteen-foot lead on the sledge, so the climb couldn’t be any farther than that. She brought her hand to her pocket to put her flashlight away, but realized she was no longer carrying it. She must have dropped it when she fell. She looked between her boots to see if she could spot a pinprick of light twinkling somewhere below her, but there was nothing there to see.

  The flashlight was gone. But she couldn’t worry about that now.

  She tried to take hold of the rope, folding her mitts stiffly around it. They crunched and crackled as the ice inside them snapped loose. At first she thought she had gained a grip on the rope, but as soon as she attempted to lift herself, her hands slipped free. She tried once more, and the same thing happened. Her mitts were to
o rigid. It was obvious that if she was going to climb out of the crevasse, she would have to use her bare hands. She took her mitts off, stuffing them deep in her pockets. The lining had adhered to her skin, and she had no choice but to leave it in place for now. She took hold of the rope again. Immediately, the tips of her fingers began to sting, as though she had plunged them into a mass of thorns, but within seconds they were numb. She managed to pull herself a few fists higher. Her muscles threatened to burst apart in a hundred limp strings, but the sledge stayed in place. So far, so good. She hoisted herself another few inches and then her strength gave out and she lost her grip again.

  Once more, she was swaying at the end of her harness, her head spinning. She took the rope in her hands and began to climb again. All of the ice inside her snowsuit had cracked loose when she fell into the crevasse, and now, as she tried to lift herself free, she could feel the debris shifting around inside her clothing, two heavy bulges around her ankles and a third around her waist. They reminded her of the rings that formed around giant planets.

  Which would make her the giant planet, she supposed.

  Saturn, maybe.

  She had heard somewhere that if you lowered yourself into a well, most of the sunlight would be sapped from the circle of sky that lay between the stones, and the constellations would shine through like steel rivets, even in the middle of the day. If only the reverse were true, she thought. If only the sun could burn through the sky in the middle of the night. When she gazed out of the crevice, though, all she saw were the same stars she had seen the last time she looked, along with the trailing thread of the aurora.

  There was no feeling at all in her hands. She knew she had taken hold of the rope only by the strain of the line against her bones and the dimmed-out evidence of her eyes. She made her way up inch by inch, refusing to let go. A great loop of rope went slack beneath her as she climbed. Once, halfway to the top, she made the mistake of placing her foot in the loop and trying to use it for leverage. The rope was yanked out of her grasp, and she slipped once more to the full length of the harness. She began climbing again. Every sound she made seemed to rattle around between the walls like a rock inside a tin can. She must have been on her fourth or fifth attempt when her foot grazed the pressure cleft she had noticed earlier. She worked at it until she could fit the toe of her boot inside.