The Brief History of the Dead

  Laura could see the woman sitting in her car. She was still holding the telephone to her cheek. Her knuckles were as white as candle wax.

  “Mom,” Laura asked, “why is she squeezing that phone so hard?”

  Then the woman began to cry.

  As they waited for the police, the school’s front drive became crowded with the cars of all the parents and child-care workers who were lining up for the three-fifteen bell. The sunlight reflected off their windshields, hubcaps, and bumpers, filling the air with knives.

  After a while, Laura began to feel an ache in her muscles from the impact of the crash. She unbuckled her seat belt, rested her head on her mother’s lap, and stared at the ceiling.

  “Well, it looks like we’ll have to reschedule your dentist’s appointment, hon,” her mother said.

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Laura. “I forgot all about it.”

  And when the sirens came, she didn’t know whether they were the police cars pulling into the lot or those other sirens, the ones that sounded when the bombs were going to fall, the sirens of the orange vests.

  ~

  It took her six more days to make it through the pass onto the Ross Ice Shelf. Six days of continuously falling snow that spun through the air in nets and skeins and lashes. Six days of collapsing ice and stone embankments that rose up inside the storm like baited traps. She had been afraid that she would miss the gap altogether, veering off the path and dead-ending against the side of the mountain, but she woke up one morning to an unexpectedly full silence, and when she stepped outside she found a plain of unblemished white ice stretching into the distance before her. Her relief was immense. The weather must have cleared while she was asleep. She turned around to see a line of cliffs and the tongue of the ice stream behind her. Immediately she understood what had happened: she had cut through the notch the day before, without even realizing it.

  She packed the sledge quickly in the rising light and set out again. If the weather persisted—and that was quite an “if” so close to the coast—she might reach the station before exhaustion finally took hold of her. But conditions could change at the snap of a finger, and she wanted to cover as much distance as she could before they did.

  Soon the sledge was traveling so swiftly that twin arcs of snow shot out from beneath the runners, pattering onto the ice with a quiet slapping sound. As the noon hour approached, the sunlight shone from off the snow as if from a layer of pressed foil. Beneath the sledge was the ice, and beneath the ice was the ocean, and she was surprised that she couldn’t feel the circulation of the water down there. She had thought that she would be able to. But the shelf ice seemed just as solid, just as anchored, as the continental ice had been. Of course, the continental ice wasn’t nearly as impermeable as it had been a few decades ago, before the great melting began. And from the little—very little—geology she had studied, she knew that even the land itself was never as stable as it seemed. Beneath the glaciers, after all, was the stone, and beneath the stone was the magma, and no matter where you stood on the planet, you were always bobbing around like a cork in open water. Perhaps she had just gotten used to the feeling.

  Every time she climbed out of the sledge, and every morning when she left the jacketing warmth of her tent, the vigor of the cold would make her catch her breath. How long had it been since she’d set out from the shelter? Two weeks? Three? Already the days had become colder. The string that bound the sun to the horizon had grown shorter. She would make it through six or seven hours of sledging before the darkness settled over the ice—maybe eight hours if there were a few low-hanging clouds along the skyline to reflect the final traces of the light. Then she would erect her tent and go to sleep. The GPS system was working again, and if she wanted, she could have driven through the night, guided by the khaki-colored markings on the monitor. But she was tired. And beyond that, she was afraid. She was afraid that she would reach the station and somehow fail to see it.

  She kept thinking about the time shortly after she graduated from college when she drove home from a late-night party and woke up on the front lawn of the house she shared with her boyfriend. She had spent the night sleeping in her car. Its fuel cell was depleted, but the front lights were still burning, and a group of children were standing above her tapping on the window. “I’d get out of here if I was you,” one of them said when she opened the door, a boy with a globe of frizzy red hair. “The guy who lives in that house is an a-s-s-hole.” Which, as it later turned out, he was. She had spent the next few weeks wondering what had happened to her. She remembered struggling to stay awake, then turning onto her street with a sense of exquisite relief, but after that nothing at all. She was amazed that she hadn’t folded the car around a tree or a streetlamp. Or a camper van or a swing set or a living room. It was possible to drift without thinking into what you were looking for, but it was just as possible to drift right past it into something far worse. She must have come to a stop on her own front lawn by nothing more than the purest luck.

  Sometimes, as she traveled across the ice shelf, the sky would gray over and the snow would begin to fall again, but it never lasted for long. Though there were mornings when she woke to find the tracks her sledge had left in the ice obscured by a covering of fresh powder, there were just as many mornings when they were lit to a razor’s sharpness by the brightening sun and she could see them extending into the distance like carvings on a wax tablet.

  Once, after a night of soft but persistent winds, she found the ground outside her tent scattered with thousands of marble-sized balls of snow. They were lined up along the sheltered side of the ridges, and were so delicate that they collapsed into a heap of crystals the second she touched them. She had never seen anything like them. Even the vibration of her footsteps was enough to make them collapse, she discovered, so she tried not to step too close to them.

  Tried not to kill them, was how she thought of it. In the past few weeks, ever since Puckett and Joyce had left, everything around her seemed to have developed a personality.

  By the time she loaded the sledge, the breeze had changed direction slightly, lifting the balls out from behind the ridges. They went skittering away across the shining field like mice. She powered up the sledge and started out toward the northwest.

  She knew that she must be getting closer to the rim of the ice shelf. Fissures and crevices were appearing in the ice more and more frequently now. She slowed down whenever she saw a gap approaching, easing over it until the flippers caught on the other side and she was sure she could move forward. Once or twice she felt the balance of the sledge tipping over and had to back up and change course until the break narrowed.

  At the bottom of one of the fissures, she spotted a dark thread of water. A few minutes later, an egg-shaped opening appeared in the ice, and she stopped the sledge to peer over the edge. There was a sunken pool of water inside, some ten feet down, telescoped by the walls of the tunnel. She could see it rising and falling, lingering for a few seconds at either end like the pectoral muscles of a sleeping giant. It was the ocean. She was sure of it. She was at that margin where the shelf ice began to break apart into pack ice, separating into mile-long chunks that bumped into one another as the currents tugged them back and forth. The station couldn’t be more than a day or two away.

  She moved out again with a renewed intensity. The few clouds that had been in the sky at dawn were gone now, and the air was scrubbed clean, so transparent that it played tricks with her notions of distance. Late in the afternoon, she saw a faraway structure with the low roof and squared off walls of the station, and her heart began to race. She accelerated toward the building, but suddenly it was gone. She activated the magnification feature on her windshield, but still she couldn’t see it. She climbed down from the sledge to take a look around. Half a dozen steps behind the left runner she found the object she had seen. It was a juice box. A juice box with the low walls and squared off roof of the station. The familiar red and white Coca-Cola wave was
slinking across the front, and the C. C. Juice slogan was printed just beneath it: “The Great Taste of Cola… in a Juice!” Somebody must have dropped it traveling across the ice shelf. One of the scientists from the station, maybe. Or Puckett or Joyce.

  For a moment she thought to pick it up and throw it into the sledge, but then a surge of irritation went through her and she backed up to take a run at the thing. The box made a wonderful popping sound when she kicked it, sailing across the ice in a long, straight line.

  She climbed back into the sledge. The incident made her remember the story she had heard about the girl who was raised in a room with no horizontal lines. She couldn’t recall whether the story was true or simply a thought experiment, but the room, as she remembered it, was decorated with a series of black vertical stripes on the walls, and the floor and ceiling were curved to give the illusion that the vertical stripes were continuous. On the child’s first birthday, the story went, she was taken out of the room. She had learned how to recognize vertical forms, but not horizontal ones, so that if she was situated on a table, say, or a platform, she would crawl right off the edge, but she would never run into the corner of a wall or the leg of a chair. Her condition lasted for about a month before her visual sense finally corrected itself.

  The experiment was supposed to have proven something about the development of human perception, though for the life of her Laura couldn’t remember what.

  As far as she could tell, the only thing it demonstrated was that babies were capable of being tricked, and who would be surprised by that?

  That same day, as the last slice of the sun was sinking behind the ice, she saw another form taking shape in her windshield, a low-bodied object at the very corner of the horizon. It shone oddly in the fading light, blinking on and off as she bumped across the ridges. At first she thought it was just a mirage—or worse, another juice container.

  But then she spotted the klieg lights standing on either side of it, two dazzling panels of honed white light. They showed the building in all its contours. There was no doubt about it this time. She had finally reached the station.

  FIVE.

  THE HOMECOMING

  Dying had changed Marion Byrd. She had been so weary back when she was alive: weary of talking and weary of eating; weary of thinking, remembering, desiring, anticipating; weary, most of all, of the prospect of seeing her life out to its natural end. She felt as though she had spent the last ten years of her life carrying a tremendous unshaped stone on her shoulders. The effort of keeping her legs upright and simply walking underneath it had nearly crippled her. She didn’t know how to cast it off, or even where it had come from, only that she had to carry it.

  But then the virus had appeared and she had died, and suddenly everything was different.

  She began to appreciate all the things she thought she had forgotten how to enjoy, like music and dancing and the way the breeze felt on her neck when she pinned her hair up in back. The tension gradually worked its way out of her muscles. She looked forward to waking up in the morning.

  And then there was the matter of her husband: it seemed only natural, with all the other changes she had undergone, that she would love him again.

  She listened to him swishing his razor around in the sink, for instance, and then tapping it clean against the porcelain—tap tap tap—and she knew that he would clear his throat next, and then dry his face, and only after he had blown his nose into a tissue and carefully straightened the towel on the rack would he call out to her with some question or other. The whole unwavering performance used to fill her with despair, but these days she found herself charmed by it.

  “Any sign of Laura yet?” he shouted, and she answered, “Not so much as a rumor. Maybe later today, Phillip. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  It happened like clockwork.

  Laura was their only child. She had been on a prolonged business trip when the virus hit, conducting some sort of environmental survey on the opposite side of the world. The two of them had no idea what had happened to her. There had been little opportunity for them to say good-bye, not even enough time to place a phone call or send off an e-mail. Laura was only thirty-two years old—not yet married, not yet weary. When Marion was thirty-two, she had already abandoned a graduate degree, fallen in and out of love a half dozen times, met Phillip, and concluded that that era of her life was over. She had miscarried one daughter, given birth to another, named her Laura after Laura Ingalls Wilder, spent five years raising her, and then packaged her off to kindergarten and resumed working half days as a legal secretary. At the time she had imagined herself to be a woman, and the truth was that even in hindsight, when she remembered herself as she was back then, it was a woman she remembered, with a woman’s wholly developed mind and a woman’s full breadth of feeling. So why was it that when she thought of Laura she couldn’t help picturing her as a little girl?

  “I thought we would go to Bristow’s today,” Phillip offered from the bathroom.

  “This morning or this afternoon?” Marion asked.

  “Well, this morning, I was thinking, but if you’d rather wait a while…”

  “No, this morning will be nice. Just let me pick out a good pair of shoes.”

  This was another thing she had forgotten how much she enjoyed: shoes. She had collected almost twenty pairs since she had died, including a beautiful pair of laced leather rainboots and a pair of high heels with tapering green straps that wound up her ankles like jasmine vines. Her shoes made her understand, in a way that jewelry and sunglasses and the other trappings of so-called feminine fashion never had, why people dyed their hair or wore tattoos. It was for the same reason that birds wove bits of thread or vinyl construction streamers into their nests: for the sheer pleasure of ornamentation. After she had chosen her shoes—a comfortable but attractive pair of dark blue flats—she grabbed her purse and headed back out to the living room. Phillip was still using the bathroom, so she inspected herself in the mirror that hung by the front door, wiping the oil from beneath her eyes with her thumbs. She kept her face as empty as she could. She could never stand to see herself smiling or glowering, blushing or frowning. Expressions of any kind, in fact, always bothered her. They seemed to turn her face into some kind of Halloween mask. Sometimes, even when she wasn’t examining her reflection, when she was just thinking quietly or talking with her friends, she would realize that her face was taking on the cover of some emotion or other and immediately she would feel a little wash of discomfort pass through her features, distorting them like a stone tossed into a puddle. She was never sure whether her face was cracking apart because she felt so uneasy, or whether she felt so uneasy because her face was cracking apart.

  Soon Phillip was ready to go. The two of them set out through the lobby of the building. The clearing across the street shone in the light of the sun. The pattern of walkways covering the grass seemed to carve it up into a giant wheel. Phillip and Marion had moved into their apartment at the center of the monument district less than a week after arriving in the city, just like everybody else who had heard the gunshots. At first there were only several hundred of them there, but within a few days there were several thousand, and soon nobody was quite sure how many of them there were. There had been talk of appointing a census-taker, but as of yet no one had taken on the position. A few of the long-term residents had told Marion and Phillip about what they called the evacuation—or sometimes the leave-taking—during which the city had so suddenly emptied out. But no one could say why the people who remained behind had not yet moved on, beyond suggesting that someone must still have been alive to remember them. Marion had seen the Blinks firsthand, though, and she found this theory hard to believe. Certainly she couldn’t think of anyone she knew personally who might have evaded the virus. And when she realized that it would have to be someone Phillip knew, as well, and not only Phillip, but the flower vendor, and the newspaperman, and the man on the corner who begged for change, and the kid who poured pitc
hers of water over the dirt beside the pawn shop, gouging out lakes and moats and islands with a broken stick, and the old Italian woman who didn’t speak a word of English, and the man she heard whistling morosely for his dog every evening—well, the whole idea seemed absurd to her.

  Of course, any number of people might have survived the virus and remained alive to remember them. But Marion found that idea even harder to believe than the other. She had been there, after all, when the virus spread across the plains and into the heartland. She had seen what it could do.

  Phillip took a deep breath, pounding his chest. “You know, I love this,” he said. He swept his fingers through the leaves of a bay tree. “Just being able to walk wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go there. After Number Two, I thought my walking days were over.”

  Number Two was how they referred to his second heart attack. In their last few years, Marion had nursed him through Number One, Number Two, and what they had taken to calling Number Two-A, a minor stroke, after which their family doctor had told him that he should avoid all strenuous activity: swimming, bicycling, aerobic walking—anything that might overtax his heart. There were certain things you didn’t have to worry about when your heart stopped beating, though, and one of them was heart failure.

  “It’s like you’re born with all these blessings,” he said, “only you don’t realize they’re blessings until you lose them. And if you’re thick-headed enough, like me, you don’t even realize you’ve lost them, not until they come back to you. You know what I mean?” He squeezed her hand as if to punctuate the question.

  “I’m glad it makes you happy,” Marion said. And she was, although of the two of them, he was never the one who had made a predicament out of his happiness. That had always been her territory.