The Brief History of the Dead

  At sunset, when she stopped to rest, she had to unpack her equipment. The tent was easy to assemble. It was ornamented with a pull cord that caused it to pop from its bag and stretch out like a life raft until it fully expanded. She would walk around the edges knocking stakes into the ground, and then, when the wires were secure, she would carry her sleeping bag and cooking gear inside and bed down for the night. That was it; the whole procedure took less than fifteen minutes. In the morning, when she was ready to leave, all she had to do was tug on the pull cord again to make the tent collapse in on itself, withering into a perfect little cylinder that made a hissing noise as it shrank. A tag above the entrance read, WARNING: ALWAYS LEAVE DOOR OPEN WHEN DEFLATING TENT, and every time she saw it, she imagined the thing exploding like a balloon as it tightened around its bubble of trapped air, drifting to the ice in a thousand tatters of pink cloth. It was the kind of tent that was purchased by wealthy corporate executives who intended to hike the Rockies or the Appalachians someday but never quite managed to leave the city. Eventually, their children would set it up in the middle of the living room, between the sofa and the fireplace, and pretend they were pioneers.

  And who’s to say they weren’t?

  Ever since she was a little girl, Laura had felt like a pioneer, passing over into the wilderness of the rest of her life. She remembered lying beneath her bed on her twelfth birthday, staring up into the orchardlike rows of the box springs and thinking how strange it was that she had no idea where she would be a year later, on the day she turned thirteen, and that she had had no idea where she would be today the year before, on the day she turned eleven. Certainly she could never have guessed that she would find herself lying underneath her bed staring at the box springs and wondering about the way time was put together. Why was it that everything that had happened to her in the past seemed so clear, but as soon as she turned toward the future, it all went dim and faded to nothing? Was that what it meant to be alive—moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step? Sometimes she felt that way.

  The tent kept her warm at night, or as warm as she could reasonably expect to be. She found the hum of its soft coil oddly comforting, like the sound of car wheels hissing over wet asphalt—a sound she always associated with the million rainy fall nights she had spent listening to the traffic flow past her bedroom window. But it was obvious that the heating system had not been designed for polar use. The heat from the coil radiated though the bottom of the tent, which caused the ice to melt, flow toward the edges, and refreeze, creating a sort of ovenlike seal. When she woke in the morning, there was always a shallow puddle beneath the floor that rippled back and forth as she shifted her weight. It made her feel as if she were sleeping in a waterbed.

  She tried to knock the ice from the fabric before she pried the stakes out of the ground, but she was never able to get rid of it all, and when she activated the pull cord and the tent deflated, fragments of it would invariably crack and go spitting through the air, gliding across the ridges for twenty yards or more. She was usually able to load the sledge and set off again before the sun got too high. She estimated that she had covered sixty miles on her first day of travel and eighty miles on her second—better time than Puckett and Joyce had made, she imagined. The wind and the snow had long since covered their tracks, but for her the weather had been nothing but stillness and sunshine. It felt good to be moving. The crying fits that had come over her in the shelter seemed to have fallen away. She felt stronger than she had in weeks.

  Soon she would wind her way down the ice stream and through the coastal pass. She would cross from the land mass onto the Ross Ice Shelf. And not long after that—a matter of days, probably—she would make it to the station. What a relief it would be to have other human beings to talk to again.

  But on her third day of sledging, the temperature dropped and the sky clouded over, and the wind began whipping up pennants of ice and snow. Before she knew it, she was in the middle of a blizzard. She could still move forward, but the wind was coming from the northwest now, directly in front of her, which made the traveling slow and difficult. Pellets of hardened snow tapped against the window of the sledge, so much of it that it sounded like leaves crackling in a fire. Her headlights bored a narrow tunnel through the blizzard, but the snow confused her vision, making everything go white. She kept altering her focus as she tried to see more deeply into the storm, and the snow would catch her gaze and carry it back to the windshield in a series of shifting planes. Before so much as an hour had passed, her eyes had begun to ache and burn, though she knew she couldn’t look away. The spindrift was thick, hiding the telltale cross ridges and depressions that marked the openings of the crevasses. She had to watch the ground carefully to avoid them.

  The runners of the sledge were outfitted with circular frames of flat metal paddles—she thought of them as flippers—that slapped out in front of the sledge as it moved forward and then drew back underneath as it traveled on. They were a safety device, a sort of makeshift cantilever designed to carry her over any fissures she happened to encounter—or at least any fissures no more than six feet wide. Several times, she had felt the sledge plummeting forward suddenly and then lifting and righting itself before it moved on and she knew she had crossed over another crevasse. She felt as though she were driving a car down a crumbling road. The supporting ice of the glaciers had been decaying for decades, and rifts as deep as subway trenches could open in a matter of hours, sealing themselves off just as quickly. If she slipped, she wouldn’t be discovered until the ice finished melting sometime in the middle of the next century. But she had been trained by years of city driving to recognize every bump and jar she felt as just another flaw in the road. If she was leaning forward in her seat and a particular sort of lurch went through her body, she naturally assumed that she had hit a pothole. It was a form of muscle memory.

  Muscle memory. Mussel memory. Alive, alive-O!

  The storm continued for the next few days. She had to trust to her compass and the few flickering signals that registered on her GPS monitor to maintain her bearing. She knew when she had reached the ice stream that connected the land mass to the bay by the number of knolls and ridges that appeared in her path, and also by the generally brashy quality of the ice, but she had no idea how long it would take her to make it through the pass onto level ground.

  The snow fell heavy and fast. Sometimes she didn’t see the obstacles that lay ahead of her until they were only a few feet away. She had to drive very slowly to avoid them. She was lucky to cover a mile or two in an hour, ten or fifteen in a day. The runners of the sledge dipped, lifted, and dipped again as she made her way through the drifts, and the snowflakes clustered together like stars on her windshield. By the end of the day, when she lay down in her sleeping bag and closed her eyes, her body would seem to rock back and forth inside itself, and she would see streamers of white light slanting across her vision. Even in her dreams, she felt herself sledging across the ice and the darkness.

  She was working harder than she ever had in her life, and she was exhausted. She had chopped wood before. She had mixed concrete. She had even helped the Coca-Cola Homes for Neighbors Club build a row of apartments on the side of a hill, clearing the stumps and brush, laying the foundations and everything. But this was nothing compared to the effort of keeping a two-ton sledge on course through the center of a snowstorm. Whenever she stopped to rest, for even a few minutes, a stabbing pain would tear through the muscles in her calves and forearms, and she would have to remind herself to breathe. It was not so much the amount of exercise she was subjecting herself to, but the way she was holding her body at tension for so long. It took an hour or more of total stillness before her muscles would begin to go slack, followed by a comforting numbness that made her want to drift off to sleep.

  She was too tired to cook at night, and she was tempted to leave the metal pots and the Primus stove in the back of the sledge, but she carried them into the tent with he
r so that she would be able to heat her coffee in the morning. The temperature sometimes dipped to forty or fifty degrees below zero, and she would have to spend a good half hour shivering in her coat and gloves before the tent truly began to warm up. She ate two or three multivitamins and a handful of dehydrated biscuits as she waited, and sometimes also a protein bar, and sometimes also a piece of chocolate, and she allowed a few chips of ice to melt on the surface of her tongue. Then she stripped to her long johns, tightened the drawstrings of the sleeping bag around her, and listened to the side wall of the tent going taut and slack and taut again, bellying in and out as it took the wind like a sail.

  On the eighth day of the storm, she was traveling on a downhill slope when a spur of rock came rearing up out of the snow and filled her windshield. Her heart rose up in her chest. She swerved to avoid the rock, but it was too late.

  She rammed into the spur at the rear corner and heard the solid crunch of something breaking. The sledge spun around twice and gradually drifted to a stop. She let go of the steering mechanism. Her skin was covered in sweat, and her stomach had tightened into a knot. The droning sound of the sledge slowly died away, and its runners settled into the snow. She checked herself for wounds. She seemed to be okay—no bleeding, no broken bones—but she wasn’t sure about the sledge. She climbed outside onto a half dozen chunks of rock and ice that had been knocked loose by the collision.

  She made her way toward the back end of the vehicle, holding on to the upper rail with her gloves, the snow twisting around her in an obscuring shroud. She had heard stories about people who had become so disoriented in snowstorms that they had lost their sense of direction only a few feet from their front doors, people who went stumbling and weaving into the tempest with their arms stretched out in front of them like zombies. She knew better than to let go of the rail. She found the spot where the sledge had run into the spur. A long rent had been torn into the wood and metal, exposing the inside of the storage hutch. Her duffel bag was wedged inside the hole, so that only a thin crack of space remained open to the air, bordered with a row of jagged wooden teeth. She could hear the wind passing through it with a whistling noise.

  She sank to her knees, probing at the snow around the runners to make sure nothing had fallen out. She couldn’t feel anything—the bulge of the duffel bag seemed to have sealed the breach in the hutch. She risked a short walk uphill, heading directly toward the spur, but all she saw was a tapering strip of wood and a single, palm-sized lump of black rock. When she was satisfied that she wouldn’t find anything else, she staggered back downhill. She turned the sledge around and continued along the channel of the ice stream.

  It would be more than a month before she discovered exactly what she had left behind on the slope and the full consequences of her accident became clear to her.

  ~

  That night, after she sealed the hole in the sledge with a strip of plywood, she found herself replaying a certain incident from her childhood. It came to her while she was pitching the tent, whirling and condensing in her memory like a tiny runaway planet, so that by the time she fastened the door it had returned to her in all its particulars. The incident was an inconsequential one—of no importance whatsoever, really. But then most of the things she remembered, most of the things anybody remembered, were of no natural importance—were they?—and that never stopped them from rising into the light.

  In her memory she was seven years old, and her mother had just taken her out of school for a dentist’s appointment. Only that morning, her mother had said, “Now don’t let me forget, we have to get you to the dentist by two-thirty. What time do we have to get you to the dentist by?” and Laura had answered, “Two-thirty o’clock,” and her mother had said, “There’s no o’clock to it, hon. It’s just two-thirty,” which was why she remembered what time the appointment was supposed to be.

  She buckled herself into the car seat and waited for her mother to finish talking to the woman with the orange vest who stood by the front door in the afternoons. Laura and her friends had made an I-Spy game out of the orange vests: whoever could spot the most was the winner. She had noticed that there were always more of them on the days when the sirens went off than on the days when they didn’t.

  Only recently had she grown tall enough to see out the window of the car without rising onto her knees. As her mother climbed into the driver’s seat and the engine made the coughing and shredding noise it always made when it was turning over, she noticed an unusual thing. On the roof of the house across the street was something she had never seen before. It looked like a spinning silver pumpkin trapped inside a metal grate.

  “What’s that?” she asked her mother.

  “What’s what?”

  “That thing,” she said, pointing. “The silver ball on that roof.”

  “Oh. They have those all over the place. It’s a—” Laura watched the motions of doubt appear in her mother’s face as she began to answer the question and then realized she didn’t have the words. “You know, I’m not sure what it’s called. It’s part of the house’s circulation system. I can tell you that.”

  Earlier in the week, Laura had watched a TV program about the body’s circulation system. She remembered the image of a man whose skin peeled away to show his blood pumping through him, a loose basketry of red and blue vessels surrounding a large, throbbing heart. The connection seemed hazy to her. “A circulation system like for blood?” she was about to ask, when another car came hurtling around the corner of the parking lot, driving backward, and punched into the edge of their front bumper.

  The car scraped along their driver’s-side door, not grinding to a stop until it had lined up with them window for window, rearview mirror for rearview mirror, pressed against them as though it were backing into a parking space. Laura saw the driver pause and shake her head before she reached over to apply the emergency brake.

  Softly, as though she were simply commenting on the weather, her mother said, “Well, goddamn it.” Her face usually had a strange, almost strict expression when she was driving, but for the moment, at least, it was completely empty. She was one of those people who truly became beautiful only when they showed no sign of thought or feeling on their faces, like bright, blank flowers unfolding their petals in the sun. Later, after Laura had grown up and moved away, that was how she would remember her mother—as a woman caught in a lovely thoughtlessness.

  “Are you okay?” her mother asked her.

  Laura said that she was fine.

  Her mother lowered her window and motioned for the woman in the other car to do the same. The woman’s window sank away, taking a dim reflection of them with it. She said, “I’m having an unbelievably rotten day.”

  “So am I,” Laura’s mother said. “At least now I am.”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” the woman said.

  Laura’s mother began working a muscle in her jaw, but almost immediately she became plain again. “Listen, maybe you should pull forward and let me open my door.”

  “I can’t,” the woman said. “That’s one of the problems.”

  “What do you mean, that’s one of the problems?”

  “There’s something wrong with my car. It won’t pull forward. It will only go in reverse. That and my kid left his books at home, and the stationery store was closed.”

  “Then maybe you should back up and let me open my door,” Laura’s mother said.

  “Oh. Okay.” The woman released her brake and inched backward, scraping along the side panel of the car. She slowly drifted out of contact with them. She switched her motor off and rested her forehead on the padded arch of the steering wheel, lacing her fingers together behind her neck. It was then that Laura heard her moan—a low, soft animal sound that seemed to swell up from somewhere deep inside her.

  “The cow goes moo,” Laura said.

  “Quiet, honey.”

  Her mother unlatched the door. It made a creaking and buckling sound as it swiveled around the crimp,
and almost at once, the car’s warning bell began to ding. The bell usually came on when the door was opened by even so much as a crack, though sometimes it didn’t. It was something that Laura found impossible to predict.

  “Wait here,” her mother told her. She shut the door and strode over to the other car. Laura could hear what she was saying through the open window. “Do you want to call the police, or do you want me to?” After a few seconds she repeated herself. “Hello? Do you want to call the police, or should I?”

  “You’re not supposed to move a person with a broken bone. You’re supposed to wait for the ambulance,” the woman answered.

  “Did you break something?”

  She shook her head. “I was talking about the car.”

  “Oh, for crying out—” Laura’s mother frowned and cocked her hand in the air. Laura thought that she was going to cuff the woman, but she allowed the gesture to go slack and in the end only slapped the roof of her car lightly with her palm. The noise was still loud enough to make the woman jump in her seat.

  “Look, if your car doesn’t work, you shouldn’t be driving it in the first place.”

  “It was working just fine when I left the house. Then the stationery store wasn’t open, and I dropped Eric’s books off, and when I came back outside, it would only go backward.” The woman leaned over to pick something up from the floorboard and she straightened back up with a phone to her ear. She pressed a few buttons.

  “And to top it all off,” she said after a moment, “it looks like my phone is dead.”

  “I’ll make the call,” Laura’s mother told her. “You wait right here. Don’t go driving off anywhere. Just… wait.” She returned to the car, sat down, and fished the telephone out of her purse. Laura listened to her telling the police operator all about the accident: who had hit whom, where they were located, how many people were involved. “No, no injuries,” she said. “But the other driver seems a bit… off, I guess you could say.”