The Brief History of the Dead (15 page)

He waited until he couldn’t see her anymore, and then he lifted his sign up and turned toward the nearest person he could find and began preaching the Gospel again. He explained how Job’s afflictions were a test of Satan—yes—but also a test of the Lord. He asked the man who was stapling flyers to the kiosk if he had heard the News, the Good News of Jesus Christ, and when the man blew a puff of blue-gray cigarette smoke into his face and walked away, he asked someone else, a woman in high heels who was hurrying into a bookstore, and when the woman tossed a handful of change at him, he asked somebody else again.

And so the day passed by.

That night both his legs and his tailbone were sore. He took his shoes off, filled a bucket with warm water, and carried it out through the two glass doors onto his balcony. As he sank his feet into the water, a wave of pins and needles rolled gradually up his body, tapering off somewhere around his shoulders. He sat in his rusted lawn chair watching the light from the sun embering out.

And that was the sixth day.

And then he rested.

EIGHT.

THE VIRUS

S
o Puckett and Joyce had made it to the station. They had followed the same path Laura had, sledging over the western edge of the continent’s land mass, then down the ice stream and across the frozen sea. According to Joyce’s journal, the weather had been good to them, with a brisk wind and a steadily slackening snowfall. By the time they reached the fissures and jags of the ice stream, the few remaining wisps of cloud had dissipated entirely. They had lost a day or two repairing a broken runner. They had come across a few crevasses that were too wide for them to cross. And of course they had bickered, as they always had, about when to rest at night and when to start out again in the morning. But for the most part their journey had been an equable one.

It wasn’t until they pulled up to the station that their troubles truly began.

~

SEVENTY-FIRST ENTRY, FEBRUARY 25.
Arrived. Finally arrived. We slid into the camp around noon, made our way down the short path to the station door. So wonderful to see the impressions of boots stamped into the snow, rather than all that endlessly smooth white ice. Made me feel like Robinson Crusoe standing on that island beach of his. P. beat on the door, expecting someone to answer. And after a while someone did, but not from inside. The crew were all around back. There were six of them. They came scrambling around the corner of the building, carrying picks and shovels. Saying things like “You finally came,” and “We didn’t hear the engines,” and “We almost missed you.” Who they thought we were, I didn’t know. I told them our situation and asked if we could use their equipment to contact the Atlanta office. They looked absolutely crestfallen. Said we were welcome to try the equipment, but—. The “but” must have meant that it wouldn’t do us any good. Which it didn’t. The radio worked, and the satphone, and the computer, but no one was picking up. One of the men said they hadn’t been able to get in touch with anybody for weeks, not since their last supply shipment was dropped off. P. asked the man his name. He said Meatyard. He tapped the duty roster, where it was spelled out. There were twenty names up there. “Where are the rest of you?” I asked, and Meatyard said, “There is no ‘rest of us.’ We’re all that’s left. We just buried Mongno out back. You don’t want to be here.” They told us about the whole ordeal. The story was that some sort of virus had invaded the station, making its way into the building along with their last supply shipment. Puckett: “What was in the shipment?” Another man (Turner? Dykstra?): “Food, soft drinks, cleaning fluids. Nothing out of the ordinary. We asked for a plasma crucible, but they neglected to bring it.” Me: “And when did people first start getting sick?” Turner (or Dykstra?): “Nine days later. That’s when we saw the first signs. It was just Washington initially. And then ten days later [note: I think he must have meant the next day, i.e., the day following the ninth, but not for certain], he passed away.” And then it was Meatyard again: “The six of us might as well be clanging our bells and shouting, ‘Unclean, unclean.’” He told us that all the reports said the virus germinates pretty quickly. P. asked what reports, and they showed us the articles they had downloaded from the newspapers. A clean dozen of them. London, NY, Bombay. Apparently the virus is part of some worldwide epidemic. I have to say the situation looks pretty dire. People are dying by the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. Jesus. I wondered about Karen, Jessica, Marcus, my mom and dad. Fuck. Fuck. Jesus. My mom and dad. So many people. I should remain professional here. I’m sorry. No wonder we never heard anything from Coca-Cola. I’m sure we’ll manage to get in touch with somebody sooner or later—they can’t have forgotten about us completely, can they? Sooner or later. Sooner or later. Just a question of when. In any case, Puckett and I decided to stick with the food stores we brought on the sledge. Less risk that way. One of the men (Sayles was his name) spent the whole conversation wincing, swallowing, shivering, rubbing his eyes. Kept breathing in this funny way that made it sound like he was preventing a sneeze. Preventing one sneeze after another. What’s wrong with this guy? I wondered. It turned out that what was wrong with him was the same thing that was wrong with all the others, the ones who had been buried out back. He died late this evening. Which makes fifteen. Somebody once told me that more people die while the sun is setting than at any other hour of the day. Sunset and dying, night and the grave, one ending and another. Is this true?

~

True—every word of it.

Laura remembered exactly where Joyce had been when he’d heard this particular fact. She remembered the loosely hanging red and white streamers, the high-pitched whistling of the sound system, even the table where he had been sitting at the time. She remembered it all quite distinctly, because she had been there as well.

It had been last July, during the annual Coca-Cola Employee of the Year banquet, just a couple of months before she and the others were scheduled to be shipped off to Antarctica. Puckett and Joyce were sitting at separate tables, each with his own division of the company, and Laura was sitting in the other corner of the room with hers. She could see Joyce talking into his telephone, nodding wearily. Puckett was harvesting something from between his teeth with the nail of his pinkie, covering his mouth with his fist as he worked. The three of them had already been assigned to the polar operation, and she, for one, was dreading the ordeal. Her eyes couldn’t help but pick the two of them out whenever they were in the same room together. Between the tables and the streamers and the vases stuffed with flowers, between the thousand other people dining at the banquet, there they were, Puckett and Joyce, flashing and smoking in her attention like beacons on distant hilltops.

The three of them were victims of a common disaster—that was how she saw it—though she never could have imagined how vast that disaster would be.

One of the waiters bent over Laura’s glass with his pitcher of water, and she laid her hand across the rim and told him, “No more for me, thanks.” The woman sitting directly behind her, the wife or girlfriend of one of the accounting executives, slapped her table and snorted at some joke someone had offered. The banquet’s custodian, who was wearing a shirt and tie so that he would blend in with the crowd, crouched over, as though to inspect his shoe, then sopped a spill of wine up from the carpet. He tucked the napkin surreptitiously in his front pocket, straightened his tie, and stood back up.

The recipient of that year’s Employee of the Year award was Lindell Trimble, the vice president in charge of public relations, who had boosted sales of the company’s primary soda line by one quarter in metropolitan areas and one third in small towns with what he called his ambient graffiti campaign. The idea was to hire graffiti artists to paint Coca-Cola advertisements on sidewalks, walls, picnic tables, trees, and buses—any surface where they might attract attention. There were men and women drinking Coca-Cola products and saying, “Aaaahhh!” There were still lifes autographed with only the Coca-Cola wave and the initials C. C. There were short phrases written in black spray paint so that they looked like gang slogans: “Try Coke!” or “Coke Rocks!” The corporation had to pay a cleanup fine, of course, and occasionally also a small nuisance penalty, but such fines were prefigured in the publicity budget and were minuscule compared to the cost of advertising legitimately on such a wide array of public spaces. Several of the graffiti artists were arrested, and one, in the small town of Rison, Nebraska, was beaten by the police and hospitalized with a dislocated kneecap and two broken ribs. “And that was an unfortunate incident. Definitely you would have to put it on the debit side of the equation,” Lindell Trimble said when he was at the dais accepting his Employee of the Year plaque. “But on the credit side, the campaign has caught on in certain communities—Dallas, Miami, Detroit—and we’ve got people
we didn’t even hire
painting our ads for us. Kids who just think it’s the cool thing to do. Disaffected teenagers and the like.”

He took a sip of red wine. “I’m sure the rest of the PR and advertising gang will join me in testifying that kids that age are the hardest demographic to reach. Absolutely the hardest. So it’s been a good year for us. But that doesn’t mean we can just kick back and take it easy. On the contrary. It’s exactly when you kick back and take it easy that all the energy, all the momentum, drains right out of you, and for a business like Coca-Cola, loss of momentum equals death. A body is more likely to die at sunset than at any other hour of the day—that’s a fact. The trick, then, is to keep the sun from setting. That’s what we’re looking for at Coca-Cola, and what we in the PR division have been fighting so hard to achieve: a sun that never sets. A perpetual noon. Thank you.”

He waited for the applause to dwindle to a few last popcornlike claps, and then he lifted his glass again in a sort of silent toast and drained it, tipping it up and over like a canteen, before he stepped down from the dais. Just then the automated security field sent its planes of intersecting light sweeping across the room, scanning for armaments or explosives. Lindell Trimble stumbled and dropped his glass as the light cut across his eyes. “Damn it,” Laura heard someone whisper—the building’s head of security, she presumed. “I thought I told them to turn those goddamn things off for the night.”

When Lindell Trimble recovered his smile, he said, “Uh-oh. Caught in the cross fire.” What Laura remembered best about the evening was the way a single syllable of laughter rose up from somewhere in the room, then stopped dead when nobody else joined in.

~

SEVENTY-FIFTH ENTRY, MARCH 5.
Only two left now. Meatyard and Weisz and that’s it. This morning P. and I helped them bury Turner out behind the station. Difficult work. We went down two feet, then heaped the ice back on top of the body. Had to round the entire mass into a sort of hummock before we were finished. Didn’t want the wind to rip it apart. I pointed out that the ice there was shelf ice. I.e., beneath the graves was the ocean, not solid land. To which Weisz said, “At this point I can’t see that it matters very much, can you?” And he was right. In another century, when the glaciers have melted, there will be a long row of bleached skeletons resting on the bottom of the ocean, and who will ever know? Or if the climate repairs itself somehow and the ice stays firm, there will be eighteen frozen bodies packed inside, fully dressed in their flesh and their clothing. Eighteen and counting, I should say. And again, no one will care because no one will ever know. P. and I spent a good twenty hours this past week trying to contact Coca-Cola—or anyone else, for that matter. Failed, failed, failed. The newspapers have all stopped posting. Radio signals are scattered. Phone lines gone dead or diverted to answering systems. There’s every single indication that the virus has taken a global toll. What’s the word I’m looking for? Not an epidemic, but a—? Can’t remember. I wish I was a dictionary. Or an encyclopedia. Or better: I wish I was a camera, one of those news cameras you see hovering and darting around at traffic accidents. How else to know what’s going on? I spent this afternoon arguing with Puckett about what we should do next—whether we should stay or go, whether we should prepare for the effects of the virus. So far we’re symptomless. “But we won’t be for long,” Puckett said. “We were dead men the moment we knocked on that door.” Me: “You can’t know that for sure. Maybe we weren’t exposed to the infection. Or maybe we’re immune. Someone has to be immune, for God’s sake.” Puckett thinks I’m just being naive. So do Meatyard and Weisz. One of the downloads we read suggested that the virus can be spread through simple human contact, or even through indirect exposure in a shared environment. The old cover-your-mouth-and-don’t-touch-the-doorknobs scenario.
Pandemic
. That’s the word I want.
Pandemic
. Apparently there’s an emergency radio by the penguin roost on the other side of Ross Island. “The knoll,” Meatyard called it. “It’s a powerful little thing,” he said. He claims there’s a slim chance—but a chance notwithstanding—that it will be more help to us than the radio inside the station. Says we might be able to find a different tunnel through the reception. Should we try to reach it? If things get any worse, we might not have a choice. It’s becoming colder all the time. Winter and the vanishing sun. The rifts and crevices freezing back over. The ocean receding. I keep thinking about Shannon and Ken and all the others back in Pennsylvania. I wonder how they’re doing. No, let me tell the truth. What I wonder—what I really wonder—is
if
they’re doing. P. and I were supposed to have made the return trip days ago. The trip back to the hut, I’m talking about, not the trip back home. Though for that matter, we were supposed to have made the trip back home days ago, too. Tried to radio Byrd this morning on the off chance that she had repaired the transceiver, but no success. She must think we’re never coming back.

~

Not long after she found the journal, Laura resumed her routine of counting and pacing, numbering off her steps just as she had in the hut on the other side of the mountains. It occurred to her that maybe she was trying to walk away from everything. The station’s rooms were arranged in a ring, with doors on each of the connecting walls, so that she could keep going for hours without ever reaching a dead end. Sometimes she would find herself counting into the thousands and the tens of thousands, taking one step after another in the same sort of blind compulsion that drives suicides to the edges of buildings, crossing through first the front room, then the kitchen, then the dining room and the bedroom and the living room, over and over again, until finally she would stop without thinking by the couch or one of the beds and collapse backward onto the cushions, falling with her legs rigid and her arms stretched out like a child playing catch-me.

It was one of those mind-emptyingly repetitious activities that people take up in order to suppress their anxiety. Some people rocked back and forth, or danced, or drummed their fingers on a tabletop. Some people exercised with heavy machinery. Laura paced.