The Brief History of the Dead

  “Yes, but I’m not sure you understand,” he said. “It’s not just the walking I’m talking about, Marion—”

  But they were at Bristow’s already, and the noise of the diner cut him short.

  Bill Bristow had been a toll booth operator for nearly forty years—that was what he’d told Marion and Phillip—but he had never wanted to be. He had spent rush hour after rush hour, day after day, staring out at the lines of traffic and imagining himself as a successful restaurateur. It had been his lifelong dream. And so when he died, only a year or so before the virus hit, he had decided to open a diner—nothing fancy, just hamburgers, chili, and baked potatoes, the kind of place that would serve breakfast all day long.

  It had been his good fortune, he said, to set up shop just a stone’s throw away from the monument. Now his restaurant was the oldest one in town.

  “The Byrd family!” he exclaimed when he saw them, and Marion thought, Or two-thirds of us, anyway. “My favorite customers, the Byrd family! Just like the real birds—they come and then they fly away, and you ask yourself, when will they come back again? I’ve got a booth by the window for you. Will a booth by the window be okay?”

  “A booth by the window will be fine,” Phillip said.

  “Excellent!” He escorted them to their table and called a waiter over to take their drink order. Then he bowed and excused himself, saying, “Such a busy morning,” as he backed away.

  When he was gone, Marion whispered, “It’s like eating in a burger joint with an overexcited French matre d’.”

  “I think it’s charming,” Phillip chuckled. “He’s obviously playing the role he’s always dreamed of. We should all be so lucky.”

  Four elderly Korean women were sitting in the booth behind them. Marion could hear their mah-jongg tiles clicking and see their small gray heads bobbing over Phillip’s shoulder. A little girl, maybe three years old, knelt beside them with her legs folded underneath her, sucking on a peppermint stick. When she saw Marion looking at her, she bit the stick in half and crammed both ends in her mouth, crunching at them until she was able to swallow. She gave a triumphant smile. The smile meant that Marion couldn’t have any.

  Soon the waiter reappeared to take their order. Then he left and Phillip began stirring a packet of sugar into his coffee. Next he would take a slow, pondering sip from the oval of the spoon, make a face as he decided that the coffee was not yet sweet enough, and empty a second packet of sugar into the cup, watching it break the surface, just as he always did. Time had made a wreck out of his body, Marion thought—a wreck out of both their bodies—but he was still a little boy in some respects, marooned at that age when discovering his own habits was a sort of game for him. The game had to be played the same way every day, or the pieces would fall to the floor, the board would collapse, and the illusion that you were shaping your own life—that you were in control—would break. It was one of the many things Marion had loved about Phillip at first, then somewhere along the way stopped loving, and now loved again.

  The service at Bristow’s was unusually fast that day, and the waiter was already laying their plates on the table when Marion caught a glimpse of her daughter out the window.

  A hook caught in her stomach.

  She tapped on the glass and was about to call out, “Laura, Laura,” but then the woman turned her head and it wasn’t Laura at all, just a stranger who happened to have Laura’s self-contained stride and ginger hair, stopping at the curb before she crossed the street.

  This wasn’t the first such apparition Marion had seen. As usual, she was embarrassed by her mistake. Why did she keep expecting her daughter to turn up everywhere she looked? Perhaps because she had run across so many other people she recognized in the city: neighbors, friends, cousins, casual acquaintances, along with hundreds of faces she could not quite place but was sure she had seen somewhere before, plus a few that seemed to have grown out of faces she had known in much younger configurations.

  Even her own mother, who had passed away almost twenty years before, was there, though not her father, who had died when Marion was still a teenager and had vanished from the city, it seemed, just as Marion was arriving.

  It was only from talking with people like Bill Bristow, people she had never met before she came to the city, that she realized how unusual her situation was. Many of the people who remained behind knew very few of the others. And some of them, a couple dozen at least, who had died in the late phases of the virus, seemed to know none at all. They had simply closed their eyes and woken one day in a city full of strangers.

  Marion turned to Phillip. “So what are we doing here?”

  “What we’re doing is enjoying a couple of ham-and-egg sandwiches.”

  Sometimes her distaste for him reared back up in her before she could stop it. She grimaced. “No. What I mean is why are we here as opposed to someplace else. Here as opposed to wherever everybody else is.”

  “I know what you meant, honey. But I can’t give you an answer. I don’t think anybody could. ‘What are we doing here?’ For that matter, what were we doing there? Why were we ever anywhere at all? I think the only thing we can do is stop asking impossible questions and just make the best of it,” he said. “Go for a walk with your wife now and then. Sleep in occasionally. Eat whatever sandwiches come your way.” He took a bite of his own, as if to illustrate the point. “Which brings me to what I was getting at outside—”

  Two men were deep in conversation at the next table, and one of them said, “Laura,” or at least Marion thought he had, and so she hushed Phillip in order to listen in. She only had to wait a few seconds before the word turned over again, like a piece of shingle caught in a heavy current, and she realized that it was actually “laurel.” She caught herself sighing. In the sound there was an echo of the one long sigh that had been the last few years of her life.

  She said, “My mind is playing tricks on me again. I’m sorry, Phillip. Where were we?”

  By then, though, he had lost the thread of whatever he was going to say, or at least the inclination to say it. They finished the rest of the meal in silence.

  The food was excellent. Marion could sense her bad feelings drifting away from her as she ate, and by the time she was finished, her mood had lifted entirely. She watched Phillip drink the last of his coffee and return the spoon to his cup with a tiny clink, pushing them both to the side of the table. Then, as an afterthought, he wadded his napkin into a ball and dropped it in after the spoon. Next he folded his two empty sugar packets together and put them in the cup, as well. She was pretty sure that if the cup had been just a little bit larger, he would have found a way to fit his entire plate in there. He reminded her of the little girl with the peppermint stick, forcing as much of the candy into her mouth as she could. Looking over Phillip’s shoulder, Marion could see the girl still slouching down in her chair, playing with the ends of her hair as the mah-jongg tiles clacked into place around her. Marion winked at her, but the girl didn’t notice. Phillip noticed, however, and, assuming the wink was meant for him, he winked back at Marion, a look of delighted surprise taking over his face. This was the funniest thing Marion had seen all day. It must have been half a minute this time before she realized she was smiling.

  As they were leaving the restaurant, Bristow hollered out from across the room, “Come back soon, Byrd family!” Phillip tipped an imaginary hat to him, and Marion nodded, and then they were outside.

  The weather was fiercely bright, as though a lamp had been lit behind the sky. A few birds could be seen following a seam of wind over the buildings, soaring in a straight line until they were too small to see. And way up there in all that blue a single well-shaped cloud slid past, its shadow moving slowly over the grass.

  Marion didn’t feel like going home just yet. “What do you think about sitting in the park for a while?” she asked Phillip. There was a time when she would have invented an excuse, any excuse, to turn him away so that she could be alone. She would have sent
him on an errand, perhaps, or insisted that she had one of her own to perform, or laid claim to some last-minute doctor’s appointment. Then, after he was out of sight, she would have found a bench or a fountain-ledge to sit on, someplace where no one else would join her but where anyone might—the sort of place where she could indulge in her solitude, yes, but also in the possibility that something wonderful, something she never could have expected, might come along to break it. For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: life—real life—was really just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone. Now, though, everything was different. Phillip was part of her solitude, just as he had been so long ago, when they were first getting to know each other. They could wait for the world to change together. Both of them were aware of the transformation, and both of them were secretly gratified by it, though modestly and never out loud, for fear that it would go away.

  “What time are we supposed to be at your mother’s?” Phillip asked.

  “Sixish, I think we said.”

  “Then I would love to sit in the park for a while,” he told her.

  They had taken to inviting Marion’s mother over for dinner a few nights every week, but recently she had begun needling them to come to her place for a change, and they had finally promised to join her for an evening of drinks and gin rummy. It was bound to be an awkward affair. In many respects, they barely knew each other anymore. Who was this woman, Marion found herself thinking when they visited her, who lived all alone in her small apartment in the heart of the city? With the row of strange African sculptures on her shelves? Who chewed her fingernails and cried all the time? Marion and Phillip had come to the conclusion that Marion’s mother was in mourning again for Marion’s father. The woman had died when she was not much older than Marion. She was still not much older than Marion, and it was obvious that she had not expected to lose her husband a second time. Her home was filled with mementos from the latter phase of their marriage, the phase that had commenced after they both died—photographs, theater programs, and handwritten notes that she turned over and over in her hands like small deposits of precious minerals. Marion never quite knew what she was thinking at such moments—or at any moment, for that matter. Christians always talked about the possibility of being reunited with their loved ones in the afterworld, but no one ever seemed to consider the idea that after twenty years of separation or more those loved ones might have pared themselves down into mere sticks of what they used to be, that they might have changed into utter strangers. Marion hoped the same thing wouldn’t happen to her. If too much time passed before she saw Laura again, they might barely recognize each other. She didn’t know if she could handle that.

  The sun and the mild air had brought half the people in the city out to the clearing. There were men and women, teenagers and geriatrics, parents and children. There were people on their way to work, people heading to stores or restaurants, and people who simply had nowhere else to go. Marion was watching them flow around her, drifting by in slow-moving pairs and clusters, when she heard it again, her daughter’s name, coming from somewhere over her shoulder. “Laura Byrd,” a voice said. This time she was certain.

  Phillip gripped her elbow. He had heard it, too.

  She interrupted the two men who were walking behind her. “Excuse me, did I hear the two of you talking about a Laura Byrd?”

  “That’s right,” one of them said. “Friend of yours?”

  “Laura Byrd is my daughter,” and she gestured to Phillip. “Our daughter.”

  “Laura Byrd with the red hair?” he said doubtfully. “Who used to work for Coca-Cola?”

  Breathlessly she said, “Yes, yes, that’s her.”

  “Go figure,” the man said, grinning. “I was her boss.”

  Marion was stunned. There was a long moment of absolute silence during which she must have been staring at the second of the two men, because he shrugged his shoulders and remarked, “Sorry to say, but I was just his boss. I didn’t know Laura Byrd from Adam. That’s what I was just telling him.”

  “And I was about to say, ‘Antarctica? The environmental impact specialist?’”

  “Oh, that’s right,” it dawned on the second man. “The photograph in the newsletter.” He chuckled. “Now I remember.”

  “I thought you would. Well, she’s another one unaccounted for.”

  The two men broke their look, and the second explained, “A lot of the old Coca-Cola gang are here in the city for some reason. We’ve been going over their names.”

  “A lot of names here,” the first one agreed. “But no Laura Byrd.”

  Phillip broke the silence. “This is still quite a curiosity. Bumping into the two of you like this.”

  It was apparently an afternoon for such curiosities, for just then a woman who happened to be passing by seized short and tapped the man who had said he was Laura’s boss on the shoulder. “I’m sorry. Did I just hear you say something about a Laura Byrd?” She stressed the name at all three syllables.

  “You don’t know her, do you?”

  “Maybe. I mean, I’m sure there’s more than one out there. But I used to live with a Laura Byrd back when I was in college.”

  It took Marion only a few questions—which college? when did you graduate? what did she look like?—to establish that the woman’s Laura and their own were one and the same. She felt the first few threads of something cinching together inside her, some new way of seeing the world, but she couldn’t quite make it come through. It was like a light flashing behind the leaves of a tree: barely visible through the branches, but there all the same, almost bright enough to identify.

  Before long the men from Coca-Cola had to leave for an appointment. Laura’s old roommate had no other plans for the afternoon, though, and she attached herself to Marion and Phillip as they went through the clearing conducting their survey. “Do you know a Laura Byrd? Does the name ring any bells?” A good number of the people they spoke to had never heard of Laura before, but more than a few of them thought they recognized the name and almost half knew her well enough to show some surprise.

  How could so many people come together in an unfamiliar city and remember the exact same woman?

  It was no simple coincidence, Marion was sure of that.

  By the time they gave up for the day, it was late afternoon, less than an hour before they were scheduled to meet Marion’s mother for dinner. The shadows at their feet were already stretching out to meet the horizon, and the crowds in the park had dwindled to almost nothing. They walked the last few blocks home and collapsed at opposite ends of the couch. Marion was as tired as she had been at any time since she’d first arrived in the city, when she had slept for seventeen hours straight. But for once she didn’t mind. This was a different sort of weariness than the weariness she’d experienced when she was alive. It was a good weariness, that pleasant mental fatigue that comes from too much sunlight and too much expectation. She watched as Phillip closed his eyes and napped for a few minutes. He had always been like that—able to drop off to sleep in a matter of seconds, then rouse himself again twenty minutes later, his attention sharpened to a fine point. She found the ability too mysterious to be jealous of it. After he woke up, she gave him a moment to yawn and stretch, and then asked, “So what do you think it’s all about?”

  “You mean Laura?”

  “I don’t understand how all those people could have known her, Phillip. And I don’t understand why she isn’t here. Where is she?”

  “You’re just full of unanswerable questions today, aren’t you?” he said. “Maybe she is here somewhere, but she just hasn’t turned up yet. Or maybe she’s changed so much that we can’t recognize her. Or maybe she’s still alive. Maybe there’s a different afterlife for everybody, and this is Laura’s, and we’re all just waiting for her to die so that everything will make sense to u
s.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Or then again, maybe the man who asked us for the match this afternoon was right, and God is just out there playing games with us to see how we’ll react. Or maybe it’s chance. In the end, maybe it’s nothing but chance.” He smoothed a crease from his pants as he stood up. “There’s the long answer. The short answer is, I don’t know. But I’m glad we’re here, Marion.”

  He went to the sink to wash his face. She heard him running the water until it was hot enough for the pitch to change, then the rapid welling sound as he cupped his hands to the faucet followed by the sudden collapsing splash, like a tarp giving way, as he emptied the water onto his face. When he came back out, his hair was slicked back in mixed wet and dry strands, except for a thin loop that had come loose from the thatch to dangle over his eye. “We’re here,” he concluded, “and things are pretty good, and that’s enough for me.”

  He sat down beside her on the couch. She was tired and so she rested her head on his shoulder.

  “This is nice,” she said after a while. “You didn’t really help me with my question, but this is nice.”

  “I know it is. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘It’s been a long time’?”

  “A long time since we could just sit together quietly like this. A long time since you would let me, or since I would risk it. You know, sometimes I look back on the last ten years of our lives, and it feels like we were nothing but roommates. I was the bumbling roommate you had to pick up after, and you were the sensitive roommate I had to keep from upsetting. I don’t know what did it to us. Maybe it was Laura’s going away to college, the two of us being alone together after all that time. I don’t know. But that’s what we were, isn’t it? The crazy thing is that I didn’t even notice until it was all over. It took dropping dead, of all things, for me to see things so clearly.”