The Brief History of the Dead
It was a relief to feel something solid beneath her, no matter how precarious it might be. She paused there for a moment. Then she sank her weight onto her boot and gave the biggest leap she could manage.
The maneuver gained her almost a foot. The rope swung in a long curve that propelled her against the wall, and she almost lost her grip, but she held on as she waited for the line to fall still. The end of the climb was within reach. She lifted herself another few inches, took a deep breath, then lifted herself again. Five more handholds and she was at the lip of the crevasse, taking hold of the side. But before she could scramble onto level ground, the ice she was clutching calved off in her fingers. She dropped all the way back down into the fissure.
Again she lost her breath, and again she saw the white shapes meandering across the darkness, and she listened as the sledge sawed closer to the edge of the crevasse and then scraped to a stop.
She rested for a long time, slowly spinning in her harness. She didn’t want to die there—she had decided not to die there—and so, limp and freezing and numb, she began making her way up the rope again.
Finally, after two more tries, and with the assistance of the pressure cleft, she was able to scale the rope and thrust herself onto the snow. She crawled away from the brink of the fissure before it could collapse again. Then she lay on her back and stared at the sky. She began to cry. The tears froze to her cheeks, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was just so relieved to feel the ground beneath her. There was one particular star in the sky, fat and white, that burned like an electric bulb. She let her eyes trickle over its scores and bruises as she tried to catch her breath. She wasn’t sure how long it took her to realize it was the moon.
She was about to pass out from exhaustion, which would have meant freezing to death. So she forced herself to stand up and stagger to the back of the sledge. She had trouble opening the storage hutch. The lining of her gloves had been shredded to ribbons in the climb. She bit a few of the scraps loose with her teeth. She didn’t want to look at her hands, didn’t want to know, but her eyes couldn’t avoid them for long. The flesh of her palms had peeled and folded over on itself like the skin of a rotten peach, and the tips of her fingers—all ten of them—were black with frostbite. Jesus Christ. She fumbled at the latch and eventually managed to release it. The moon gave her just enough light to see by. She treated herself with the antiseptic cream and bandages she found in the first-aid kit, and then she slipped her mitts back over her hands and turned them over in the light, investigating the outline of each of her fingers to make sure they weren’t crooked or doubled over at the knuckles. She couldn’t feel a goddamned thing.
It took her longer than she would have expected to set the tent up. She staked it down, shut herself inside, and waited for the heat of the soft coil to fill the air.
After a few minutes, she felt the frost melting from her hair and eyebrows. Her pants and coat gradually softened and fell slack around her body. She knew that she should take them off before she got into her sleeping bag, but she didn’t have the energy.
~
That night, the wind came howling down from the mountains, and by the time she woke up, the air outside was black with snow, a single surging mass of it that made it impossible for her to leave the tent, much less haul the sledge. She spent the next three days sleeping and eating, waiting out the storm. She listened to the gusting noise of the snow as it rode the wind. The blood slowly returned to her capillaries with a puncturing sensation that made her twist inside her skin, and her palms and fingers gradually began to heal.
On the third day, for reasons that were inexplicable to her, she began thinking about the small neighborhood park that was located just down the street from her apartment. In the center of the park was an area of red brick and iron benches, a gathering place carved out of the root-broken dirt where people liked to read books and walk their dogs and lobby one another to sign petitions. She had been through four winters in the neighborhood, but somehow she couldn’t remember ever going to the park in the snow. It was a spring place—a summer place and an autumn place, too, perhaps, but mostly a spring place. The bricks and iron benches were constantly warmed by the sun, and the trees, a few dozen shadowy oaks and pines, always seemed to be leafing out.
The place was so different from this tent of hers in the middle of the ice storm, the only still spot for miles around. Maybe that was why she kept thinking about it: in the same way that the tent was a refuge from the weather, the park was a refuge from the present, a shelter she could rest inside while the cold and wind went rushing and swirling around her.
She remembered the rollerbladers she saw there, how they would weave so swiftly through the crowd, separating and coming back together again in that graceful, nimble, impulsive way they had that always reminded her of a flock of birds. There was a group of four elderly women who played mah-jongg around a small brick plateau near her bench, sitting on picnic chairs they carried into the park themselves. They always yelled at the rollerbladers when the kids passed too close to them, shaking their fists and cursing in a foreign language. One of the women sometimes brought her granddaughter along with her, a melonlike baby who would happily spend the entire day sucking on a blank mah-jongg tile. Once, when Laura was leaving the park, she had leaned over the baby to untangle her blanket for her, and the baby had grasped Laura’s finger in a surprisingly firm fist, bringing it to her mouth and working it between her gums.
“A little help here?” Laura had said to the women at the mah-jongg table. “Hello?”
But they had ignored her, hunching protectively over their tiles. Eventually, she had managed to extract the finger herself, and when she turned to leave, she found a man waiting behind her. He was canted over on his bicycle, propping himself up with his left foot. He appeared to be laughing at her. She laughed, too, and the man handed her a bandanna to wipe the saliva from her finger—“Here you go”—and when he asked her if he could take her out for a drink sometime, she said yes.
That was Mike Hargett, who became her final short-lived boyfriend, the one who had told her that the shade of lipstick she was wearing made him want to bite her lips off.
And then there was the time she gave a book of matches to a man she had never met before, a man in hiking boots and a business suit—such a little thing, but she had never forgotten it. “You don’t have a light, do you?” the man had asked her, and though she did not smoke, she realized she was still carrying the matchbook she had picked up from a restaurant the night before. She felt a tiny electric rush as she reached into her purse for it—delighted, the way she had been as a child, by her ability to carry out a favor for someone. “Keep it,” she told the man, and he struck a match, cupped the flame to his cigarette, and walked away.
The latest war had just ended, and it seemed that the entire city had come together in the park. A woman was joggling a rubber ball from hand to hand. A man was walking his dog. There were a few police officers milling about, and here and there she spotted the yellow collars of the IAS operatives who could always be found in any large crowd. “Infectious Agents Squad,” they would introduce themselves. “I need to search your bag, ma’am.” A little girl was balancing clusters of pine needles around a twig she had poked into the ground, a jump rope slung over her shoulder. Two teenage boys were holding hands and whispering to each other. An old woman sat down on a bench, slipped her shoes off, and began muttering in Italian as she stretched her toes out. Laura watched a man pass by carrying a sign that read, JESUS IS COMING. DON’T BE DECEIVED. At the bottom of the placard he had written the word SINCERELY, as though signing a letter, after which he had printed his name.
Laura tried to remember the name the man with the placard had used, but she couldn’t. Carter? Carlson? Carlsbad. Cavern. Stalactite. Stalagmite. Stalag. Gulag. Labor camp. Labor pain. Birth. Life. Creation. It was something unusual like that, she thought, something like Carter or Carlson—or Creation, for that matter—something with a hard C.
But it wouldn’t come to her. The tent belled out as the wind fell still and sank for a few seconds and then began gusting again. She lay back inside her sleeping bag, staring into the hollow darkness.
Carmen. Kevin. Kermit.
What on earth had the man written on the placard?
By the time she had stopped wondering, she was well on her way to sleep.
ELEVEN.
THE CHANGES
Winter had come to the city, and the snow covered every level surface: the roads and the sidewalks, the fountains and the park benches, even the leaves on the trees, or at least the ones that weren’t cocked over onto their sides. Lindell Trimble had to wade through a solid foot of the shit every morning just to make his way down the steps of his building, and there was more waiting for him wherever he went. On most of the district’s streets and sidewalks it melted under the day’s traffic, then froze again after the sun fell, so that a glasslike sheen of ice whose only visible effect was to slightly magnify the pavement would send person after person sprawling onto his ass. He stood at his door sometimes and watched them fall, one ridiculous tumble after another. They looked like monkeys or rag dolls, barely human, and the idea that he himself might cut so pitiable a figure, that some smug son of a bitch in a three-piece suit might watch him sliding around on the ice and cringe, was appalling to him. This was why he always walked through the banks of snow along the curb, despite the damage it did to his shoes and the cuffs of his pants.
That morning in particular he was squeezing around the side of an abandoned car when the motherfucking beggar came at him again, the one he could never seem to shake. He launched straight into his brother-can-you-spare-a-dime routine: “Got some change for me today? Hey, come on, buddy. You look like a man of wealth and power. I’m sure you’ve got a little change you can give to a fellow in need, don’t you?”
And blah blah blah blah blah.
As usual, the beggar had appeared from out of nowhere, and when he realized Lindell wasn’t going to answer him, he began shouting and waving his arms. “What’s the matter with you, pal? Too good for me, is that it? Mr. Won’t-Even-Look-Me-in-the-Goddamned-Eye. Mr. So-and-So-with-His-Leather-Briefcase-and-His-Hundred-Dollar-Haircut.”
He followed Lindell across the street, the pair of them sliding around on the ice like a couple of jackasses, and when they reached the dirty snow heaped in the opposite gutter, he climbed over after Lindell and grabbed hold of his sleeve. Lindell shook him off.
“Whoa,” the beggar said. “Whoa now.” He held his hands out in a sign of contrition, wearing those fingerless black gloves that were the universal trademark of the urban poor. What, was Lindell supposed to believe that they couldn’t afford to cover their fingers? Was that the idea?
“Hey, look, man, I’m sorry. I was just trying to get a rise out of you,” the beggar said. “You know how it is. But you’ve got to understand I’m your friend, don’t you, buddy? And friends look out for each other, right? So how about you check those pockets of yours again for me? I bet you’ve got some change you can spare for a good friend.”
Lindell could see that his usual policy of fabricating a convenient distraction—pretending that he had spotted someone he knew down the block or that his phone had just gone off—and striding purposefully away wasn’t going to do the job this time. He kept walking, though, plugging his feet one after the other into the hard crust of the snow. “Listen,” he snapped out, “you’re not going to chisel anything out of me, so why don’t you just leave me the hell alone?”
Immediately the beggar fell away, giving a tight little laugh. “Yes sir, your highness,” he said. “Right away, Your-Majesty-on-His-Holy-Goddamn-Golden-Fucking-Throne.” He made a saluting gesture. Lindell glanced back just long enough to see him looking around for his next target.
Sometimes he thought there must be something about him that attracted such people from an infinite distance. You know the way that certain wild animals will scout around for miles in search of the cleanest place to empty their bowels? Well, he was the cleanest place, and they were the wild animals. It was uncanny. In every railway concourse or shopping mall, he was always the guy trailing the long line of religious cultists behind him, a bright, exploding flare of bald heads, orange robes, and ponytails. The freaks and the con artists, the drug addicts and schizophrenics: inevitably, no matter where he went, they seemed to zero right in on him. Even here in the city he could not seem to avoid them, whether it was the beggar with his patchy beard and his hard-luck stories or that nutcase with the bird fixation and the Jesus signs.
He stopped off at the coffee shop for an espresso. It was a Saturday, or what everyone had decided to regard as a Saturday, and he knew that the Coca-Cola offices would be mostly empty. No receptionist waiting to hand him his messages, no marketing staff gathered for the morning meeting. He sipped his drink at a tall counter looking out onto the sidewalk and the alley and a snow-covered basketball court with two metal hoops dripping chandeliers of ice where their nets ought to have been. The ice would crack into a thousand daggers at the very first basket, he thought. Swish, crash, boom, and there would be a few less players on the court the next day.
When he was finished, he took the crosswalk to the building on the other side of Erndira Street, unlocked the executive entrance, and closed it again behind him. Inside, the lobby was dark and quiet, with the weird theatricality and canyonlike feeling of spaciousness that all office buildings possess on the weekend. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor. The document he was looking for was in the top drawer of his desk. He had known for weeks that it would be best not to leave the thing lying around, but it was only the night before, while he was sipping a scotch and listening to some asshole broadcasting his jungle music for the whole building to hear, that he had finally decided what to do about it. So far, fewer than a dozen people knew what was what (or some of what was some of what, he should say, since despite their expertise nobody in the corporation had been able to piece together the whole story), and all of them had agreed that there was no earthly reason for them to tell anyone else. What was the use of drumming up trouble, after all, in a place where there was only peace and ignorance—a place where the peace, in fact, was the ignorance, and the ignorance was the peace?
To his last breath Lindell would continue to deny any responsibility for what had happened. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t have changed a single goddamned thing. Still, it was a fact that whoever had introduced the virus had done so only a few months after he and the PR department had initiated their white powder campaign, and the possibility that the whole chain of events was somehow inspired by the campaign—or even in answer to it—had definitely crossed his mind. The consumer affairs division had received any number of complaints during the high days of the congressional hearings and the media fuss, including at least one handwritten letter promising total world annihilation, but Lindell had learned from experience that there were cranks and failures beyond number in the world who blamed their lousy jobs and poor posture and the general lovelessness of their lives on some multinational corporation or another and who had nothing better to do than place angry phone calls and write menacing letters. Such people rarely if ever had the balls to act on their threats, for the simple reason that they were already defeated.
Yet somebody had decided to use Coca-Cola as the distribution nexus for the virus. That much was beyond doubt. The only questions to ask were who and why?
There were people in the PR division who were convinced that Islamic fundamentalists were to blame, or some group of anarcho-environmental zealots, or even, though it had been suggested mainly as a grim little joke, the Pepsi Corporation.
It seemed likely to Lindell, though, that whoever had devised the virus had no real grievance against Coca-Cola at all. They were simply looking for the product with the widest possible reach in the global marketplace, the one that would disseminate the virus with the most efficiency, and Coke was it.
Some ten years before,
in response to falling transportation costs on one side of the equation and rising rates of water contamination on the other, the corporation had decided to centralize its processing operations in a single plant on the upper coast of Venezuela. It was cheaper to purify the entire soft drink supply in one location and then ship it the length of the world than it was to manufacture it in some fifty different noncontiguous locations and attempt to purify it on-site. Lindell had never been to the Venezuela plant, so he didn’t know much about its layout, but his best guess was that someone had broken into whichever building held the processing equipment and introduced the virus directly into the syrup tanks. From there it had been mixed and bottled and carbonated, and then packaged and shipped around the world. And from there, undoubtedly, it had been consumed.
Of course, a lot of this was just guesswork on his part. He had sat in on the initial meeting between the CEO and the Infectious Agents Squad as the only delegate from the PR department. The one thing the IAS officers had been able to say for certain was that the contamination patterns suggested the virus was closely linked with Coca-Cola and that they intended to continue monitoring the situation.
The rest of the conversation had been very short. Lindell remembered it in its entirety.
“How many people are we talking about here?” the CEO had asked. “A few thousand? A few hundred thousand?”
One of the IAS officers had caught the other’s eye, and they had both frowned.