The Brief History of the Dead

  The lead marble—she had forgotten its name—turned down a corridor that led toward an open flight of stairs, and the other marbles flocked around behind it. Without hesitation they took the stairs toward the roof, bumping from step to step like a colony of ants fording a stream across one another’s backs. She began to climb up after them. It was twenty flights or more before she and the marbles reached the building’s top floor, but she made the climb with surprising ease. She couldn’t speak for the marbles, but she herself felt strong and vigorous, she might even say athletic. There was so much power in her body, more than there had been at any time since her adolescence. It was as though all her months in the Antarctic had never happened at all. She pushed at the fire door that was positioned at the top of the stairs and stepped out onto the roof.

  The building beneath her was water. All its rooms were water, and all its hallways were water, and she was sailing across it on a great raft of ice. The fire door slowly shut behind her, drawing back with a long, hissing exhalation. She heard it lock into place. The marbles were all huddled together at the leading edge of the ice floe. They looked like passengers peering over the rails of a ship. Every so often, the wind would send one of its ligaments whipping up at them from the ocean, and two or three of them would go soaring up over the others to land at the back of the crowd.

  Laura adjusted the sails on the ice floe and took hold of the wheel. When she spun it to starboard, the floe nosed out toward the stars and the open water, so she swung it back to port, and the floe drifted smoothly and slowly back toward the pack ice that skirted the land mass. It was several hours before she finally docked, sliding into the hollow between two loosely joined sheets of ice, at which point she let go of the wheel and walked off the end of the floe without dropping anchor. The new ice rocked slightly beneath her weight. But it remained afloat, and after a few steps, she found herself walking on a more solid foundation. The marbles were following her now, coasting and whirling over the snow, above and between the staggered lines of her footprints. Occasionally they would roll against the backs of her feet—a quick cold tap. And every now and then one or two of them would go slewing out in front of her in a fishhooking sort of curve, but they never ventured too far ahead.

  The sun and the moon had been resting at opposite ends of the sky for so long that it was impossible for her to tell what time of day it was, but she decided she would call it afternoon, so afternoon it was. Late afternoon, she would guess. She had heard once that late afternoon—three-thirty or four o’clock—was when the human body temperature was at its coolest, and sure enough, when she pressed her palm to her forehead, she found that she was freezing. Her skin threw off the dry chill of a metal serving tray left outside on a winter night. She was cold enough to feel the contours of her skeleton inside her body. Yet she was perfectly at ease, peaceful even, with a wonderful looseness in her hands and toes and her blood completely still inside her. She felt as though she were sleeping in her bed at home.

  When the ice sheet she was crossing fell off into the water, crumbling to pieces along the left side, she skipped over the margin onto the ice floe bobbing next to it. She was a dancer of sorts. She had always wanted to be a dancer. The gap where the ocean lay was an orchestra pit, and she could see the violinists sawing away beneath the water, the percussionist pounding on his big bass drum, the limb of the trombone sliding out, then consuming itself, then sliding out again. She rose onto her toes to leap over a chunk of broken ice. The music blossomed from the water to carry across the frozen bay. For a moment, she thought she was going to lose herself in it, in the sway of the strings and the reverberations of the horns—she had always known that she could lose herself in a piece of music—but then the breaking noise of a cymbal became the crack of a gunshot, and a flock of birds lifted noisily up from the ice, and she watched them take off and bank toward the ocean in a geyser of wings.

  How long had she been walking toward the sun? It seemed like weeks since she had found the ruins of the hut alongside the rookery and fallen asleep inside her tent and then woken in a pool of red threads and shed her clothing and set off after the marbles.

  Though perhaps it had been only a few minutes.

  What was clear was that something had happened. Her sense of time had broken apart into two equal halves and fallen away from her like the shell of a walnut.

  She found herself forecasting the colors the sun would make on the ice. A gold like the pollen of ragweed flowers. A pale green like the green of Easter-egg dye. At first the colors seemed to blossom open just an instant or two before she was able to put a name to them, but a little experimentation convinced her that the process was exactly the reverse: the thought preceded the color. It was a game. She pictured the creamy off-yellow of her bathroom walls, and a half second later there it was on the ice. Seven shades of blue poured into her head, and a moment later she was threading her way right through the center of them. She could shuffle the colors at will. It was like her word association game—one word, one color, leading inexorably to the next, by a process that was largely but not wholly within her control, a process of whim and chance and improvisation. Everything depended on the fluctuations of her mind, and her mind was not entirely her own.

  Those were the rules. She was beginning to understand them.

  When she looked up from the colors on the ice, she saw something standing in the distance, just to the left of the sun: a glittering city, with buildings of glass and stone and steel that rose high above the streets. She saw the clean line of a river cutting through the center, wooden docks piercing the water and grass and trees growing along the banks. A suspension bridge spanned the river from one bank to the other, resembling from this distance the torn silver web of a spider. She was too far away to see how much traffic was on the streets, or indeed whether there was any traffic at all, but the spokes of a railway station shone unmistakably beneath the blue sky. Parks and arcades lay sprinkled between the buildings. An immense cloud of birds wheeled in the air.

  She lost sight of the city when she dipped beneath a hill. By the time she climbed to the top and was able to see to the horizon again, it had disappeared. She turned a full circle, but still she couldn’t find it anywhere.

  It must have been a mirage. She had forgotten about mirages.

  The sun was bigger than it had been when she started her walk, a terrible white sphere that took up half the sky. It was so bright that she imagined she could hear it sizzling. It gave off the sound of an egg sputtering in a frying pan, an egg that was just beginning to go crisp at the edges, and because she was hungry she poured the egg off onto a plate and ate it with a knife and fork, but she did not eat the sun, and she did not stop walking.

  The marbles were some twenty or thirty yards ahead of her now, a hundred teetering balls, so very small inside the sealed arc of the sun. Their shadows seemed to burn themselves into the air. They were right on the verge of disappearing.

  How far she must have come to make the sun so large.

  How close she must have drawn to the horizon.

  Most of the ice had already melted away, and soon she was leaping from one chunk to another, resting barely long enough to feel the pieces bob beneath her. Then the ice was gone altogether, and she was traveling directly across the surface of the water. Plants with long green fronds composed slow figure eights beneath her feet. Small fish darted past in the crimped light.

  She had finally hit her stride. She imagined she could walk forever.

  FIFTEEN.

  THE CROSSING

  It soon became apparent to the blind man that the city was changing. The birds had returned to the air in greater numbers than ever before, and at times the vertical space around him seemed to warp or shift in some way so that he imagined he heard them all calling out from the exact same spot, a great mass of voices clustered together in a tree or on the railing of a balcony. Though the phenomenon never lasted for longer than a few seconds, it was quite distinct. The notes the birds
gave out were sharp, multiangular—sudden little whistles that cut across one another like thorns.

  He had heard this sound before. It was the saddest sound in the world: the sound of something that thought it was free but had come bumping up against the walls of its enclosure.

  The birds might have been the first sign of the city’s transformation (they were definitely the first that he noticed), but there were certainly others. The last of the snow ran to water, and it ceased to rain. The wind picked up speed one day, then reversed directions, and finally stopped blowing altogether. Once, the blind man accidentally kicked a pebble through a subway grate and never heard it hit the bottom.

  He knew, then, that the topography of the city was changing, but he didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, until the first few people came back from the edge of the monument district and the word began to spread. The rest of the city, that portion of it that lay beyond the park and the river, was no longer there. It had melted away along with the snow.

  The blind man heard the story from a man who was holding court in the center of the shopping plaza. “I was thinking I would just go for a ride, you know, really open up and see what kind of speed I could do.” His voice was coming from a crouch. He was spinning the pedals of his bicycle, then yanking them forward to make the chain seize short against the sprockets. “Well, I got as far as the six-laner at the other end of Park Street, and then I had to turn back around. The road wasn’t there anymore. No sidewalks. No buildings. I’m not talking rubble or an empty field, you guys. I’m talking absolutely nothing.”

  “Why didn’t you keep going?” someone asked him. “You know, see what was on the other side?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you—there was no other side. I tried to keep pedaling, but it was like climbing up the inside of a sphere. I could feel myself moving, I just wasn’t gaining any distance.”

  There was a sudden firecrackerlike string of side conversations. Then a few more people came together in the center of the plaza, and the structure of the crowd tightened, and the man with the bicycle began repeating his story. The blind man had already heard enough, though, and he left.

  Later that day, there was a similar report from a man who had tried to leave the district by way of the suspension bridge, and there was another a few hours after that by a woman who had taken the same route the bicyclist had. The woman said that the highway was missing now, too, and that the city dead-ended at the gray strip of concrete where the hazard lane used to be. “This was all I found,” she said, and she let something trickle through her fingers—a few cigarette butts and some fragments of window glass, from the sound of it. By that evening, half a dozen people must have made the journey to the border of the monument district and back. And so began the pilgrimages.

  The blind man himself walked to the border the very next morning. He took Tanganyika Street. The pavement was dry enough to clap beneath his hard-soled shoes again, and he did not have to listen so carefully for the conversations of other people and the carrying sounds of the traffic. He could hear his steps rising up off the ground, hear them echoing against the walls and the fences. That was all the guidance he needed.

  He knew immediately when he had reached the margin of the city. Behind him some kids were listening to music, singing along with excited little whoops and hollers. A pretzel vendor’s cart was perfuming the air, as were the thousands of blades of grass that had opened up beneath the treads of so many shoes. Before him, though, there was a total cessation of both sound and smell. It was as though a wall had risen up in front of him, but a wall with none of the usual physical properties of a wall. When he tried to touch it, he encountered no resistance whatsoever. Before he knew it, he was reaching across his own chest, his hand a full foot to the left of where it had started.

  The same thing happened when he tried a second time, and again when he tried a third.

  The wall was intangible but impassable.

  No wonder the birds had come flooding into the air, he reflected. They had no place else to go.

  He followed the same road on his way back that he had on his way out, though the walk went more quickly now that he knew the obstacles and could place his feet on the ground with more confidence. Soon he was back in his own neighborhood. He passed through the thousand dangling fingers of the willow tree that stood outside the abandoned library, and then past the upright mailbox, and then, after he had crossed the street, beneath the high rectangular buzzing of the movie theater’s marquee. The theater showed only old silent movies—classics—which was why the ticket vendor always refused to provide him with a ticket, though the blind man had explained a thousand times that what he enjoyed was not the movies themselves, but the cool air and the quiet flickering of the film as it unspooled and the great sense of space above his shoulders, almost enough space for a sky to form there, he imagined, with clouds and wind currents and its own systems of weather. Or perhaps he had failed to explain it a thousand times, or explained it only in his head, or explained it to someone else altogether. It was one of the deficits of old age that he no longer remembered many of the things he would have expected himself to remember.

  And then there were the things he remembered in spite of himself.

  A girl was skipping rope in the courtyard across the street from him, for instance, chanting a crossbred version of a rhyme that had been popular when he was a child: “Hamburger, fish sticks, quarter pound of french fries. Icy Coke, milkshakes, on Sundays it’s an apple pie.”

  He winced as the rope slapped the ground, involuntarily recoiling. It took him a moment to figure out why. At first he thought it might have been because of the way the sand had lashed at him while he was crossing the desert, hissing like a snake, which was itself a kind of rope, a living rope, which passed through his fingers like nylon and made only the barest rustling sound as it touched the grass. A rope was like a whip, and it was only natural for a person to wince at the sound of a whip, even a person who had never been beaten. He himself had been beaten once, though not with a whip. But that had been so long ago and he was so much older now that he found it hard to believe it could have anything to do with his reaction.

  What was it then? Suddenly he knew—it was the girl who had lived at the other end of his block when he was growing up.

  Mary Elizabeth was her name. He remembered listening to her as she skipped rope with her friends in the cul-de-sac that the kids in the neighborhood used as their playground. “Why are you blind?” the other kids would ask him. “Hey, why are you blind?” placing a stress on the word that made it obvious they were taunting him. He had learned that they would keep taunting him no matter how he answered, so it was better just to keep quiet.

  But Mary Elizabeth had never asked him the question at all—not once.

  He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine at the time, but he was in love with her—in love not only with how nice she was to him, but with the sound of her voice, and the way that her sandals flapped against the underside of one of her feet but not the other as she walked, and with the smell of cocoa butter that came from her skin whenever she was jumping rope and had begun to work up a sweat.

  One day—he didn’t know why—he braced up his courage to tell her so. He had been drinking warm Coca-Cola out of a thermos his mother had given him, tasting the way the rusty metal flavored the soda, and was still holding the cap in his hand. As she walked by with her friends, he said her name, “Mary Elizabeth.”

  But before he could finish with “I love you,” as he had planned to, she interrupted him. “Here you go,” she said.

  He felt the weight of the coin landing inside his thermos cap before he heard it.

  The other kids began to laugh, but Mary Elizabeth told them to shut up. “It isn’t funny, you guys. Leave the poor thing alone.”

  The poor thing—that was what she called him.

  He might have been angry with Mary Elizabeth, or so upset that he burst into tears. He was that
kind of child. He might have loved her all the more for defending him. He was that kind of child, too. But instead he had just stood there embarrassed, his courage dying out inside him as the girls took up their jump ropes and began to chant again: “Big Mac, Filet o’ Fish, Quarter Pounder, french fries, icy Coke, thick shake, sundaes, and apple pies.”

  It was amazing to think that he had constructed an entire lifetime out of moments like this. He had strung them together like beads, he thought, choosing only the ones that were the most painful to him, the ones that left a sandpapery grit on his fingers.

  So intently was he remembering the incident that he did not realize he had come to the corner where the curb dropped off into a pothole, and when he stepped off the edge, his foot caught the side. He almost fell over, but he was able to stop himself with one quickly planted step. He could tell right away that he had twisted a muscle in his knee—not badly, but enough so that he should have taken his weight off of it for an hour or two. Still, he kept walking, so that no one would stop to ask him if he needed help.

  He had gone another three blocks before he realized that he had already passed the door to his building. It was almost a quarter mile behind him now, just past the silent movie theater and the library with the willow tree on the front walk. Sometimes, like everybody else, he was afraid he was losing his mind.

  ~

  The small section of Clapboard Hill Road that edged up alongside the riverbank before it curved away and rose into the city was the next block to disappear. It was followed soon after by the lowermost corner of the golf course, including holes nine, eleven, twelve, and fourteen. After that it was an old mattress-spring warehouse on the opposite side of the monument district, and then the bottom half of M Street, and then, a few days later, it was the river itself. The blind man began to think of the wall as a slowly shrinking bubble that was slicing away at the city from all directions. He had no direct evidence for the idea, but he couldn’t keep himself from imagining it: a giant bubble, gradually drawing together along its circumference, rising up from below as it sank down from above. He wasn’t sure what would happen when it finally shrank to a single point.