The Brief History of the Dead - Brockmeier Kevin - Страница 11

"Mm-hmm. Look, what do you think about the two of you coming back to my place with me?" she said. "I don't want to be too – what? Forward. Pushy. But I'd rather not let you out of my sight right now. I'm just around the corner," she said hopefully, and she pointed her finger.

So Luka and the blind man followed her back to her apartment, which was a small one-bedroom on the ground floor of a converted school building, sparsely furnished with a few folding chairs and a coffee table. She brewed a pot of coffee, and later, after they had eaten, as the dishes soaked in the sink, she brought their talk gradually around to the crossing and the other world. She wanted to know how the two of them had died.,

"A car accident," Luka said. "I always knew I would die in a car accident, and that's exactly what happened. I was on the highway, and I hit the front wedge of one of those concrete dividing walls, and the car broke apart into a million pieces. It was like my body stopped and the rest of me just kept on going. Like a dream almost. It wasn't even raining. I just lost control of the wheel."

"And what about you?" Minny asked the blind man.

"Old age," he said after a short pause, which, like all his pauses, might have been either thoughtful or oblivious – Luka couldn't tell. "Old age and neglect."

The night had deepened outside, so that the lamps in the apartment, which had seemed so weak just an hour or so before, glowed like miniature, shining suns.

"And what happened to you?" Luka asked Minny.

"The same thing that happened to everyone else," she said. "The Blinks."

She seemed reluctant to say anything more, and Luka didn't press her.

He already knew most of the broad details, anyway. The rapidly progressing illness that began with an itching behind the eyes. The flight of the population from the coasts and the cities. The looting and the vandalism. The desperation and the brutality. He must have conducted a hundred interviews in the last few weeks of the newspaper, and the story had always been the same.

The conversation fell away, and the three of them sat quietly listening to the faucet drip into the sink. Every so often, the water would strike the edge of a metal pan with a whispery, cymbal-like brushing sound before it shifted and began falling into the soapy water again.

After a while, Minny excused herself to go to the bedroom. She wanted to finish reading her book. "I'm only about twenty pages from the end. It won't take me long. You don't mind, do you?"

"Go right ahead."

"Fantastic." She came back half an hour later, already dressed in her pajamas, and slipped the book onto a small wooden shelf that was recessed into the living room wall. She stood there for a long while with her hands resting on her hips. "I'm trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do," she said to herself. Then, after a few seconds, "Oh, well. I guess it will come to me eventually."

They stayed up another hour or so discussing their plans for the next day. Though Minny knew almost nothing about the city as it existed beyond the few blocks of her neighborhood, she wanted to join Luka and the blind man in their hunt for other survivors. It was decided that when morning came, if the three of them were still there and no one had disappeared, they would head deeper into the conservatory district together. It was Luka's feeling that where there were three people there were bound to be four, and where there were four there were bound to be five. "I'm not so sure about six and seven, though," he said. He tried to work up a little chuckle, a half-laugh for his half-joke, but he was too tired and it came out as a yawn.

The blind man had already fallen asleep in his chair. Luka swallowed a second yawn, and Minny took his arm.

"Look, I only have the one bed, but you're welcome to one side of it."

"Are you sure?"

"Mm-hmm. I'll sleep better that way."

"All right. Good," Luka said. He ended up brushing his teeth with his index finger, then washing his face with a shell-shaped piece of soap he found sitting on the rim of the bathroom sink. By the time he was finished, Minny had already turned off the bedroom light, but he could still see well enough to find his way to the other side of the bed. He stood above her for a moment. He was trying to adjust himself to the idea of sleeping next to another body. The world had swung around like a carousel, it seemed, and given him another chance.

"I think I need to finish my story," Minny said.

"The Bulgakov? I thought you did finish it."

"No, the other story. My story."

He pulled the blanket down and slid beneath the covers. "Shoot."

"Well, I was away from home when the virus hit. That's the important thing." She spoke slowly and deliberately, as though the story were a complicated maze of rooms she was trying to pick her way through for the first time. "I was at a sales convention in Tucson, Arizona. Office supplies. I used to sell office supplies to hospitals and state agencies. There were probably five hundred of us in the hotel, from all over the country. When the news came through, we all rushed for our rental cars. I just kept thinking that I wanted to see my dad again. Isn't that strange? It didn't make any sense. I hadn't spoken to my dad since I was a kid, and he was dead anyway, but he was all I could think about. Not my mom, not my boyfriend. My dad. But the hotel had set up a quarantine around the edge of the parking lot, and they wouldn't let any of us leave. I guess they thought somebody might have carried the virus in from out of state. I don't know. I managed to get one of the last few Cokes out of the vending machine in the lobby, then I went back up to my room. Most of the TV networks were already down, but a couple were showing footage of the virus from Great Britain. It was horrible. Bodies lying dead on the grass or propped up against trees. You're lucky you didn't have to see it." She shuddered. "Honestly. There was this one shot, from London, of these hundreds of shoes lying scattered around on a flat stretch of highway. Nothing but shoes. People must have thrown them off when they were running from something, I guess. Who knows what? I couldn't help turning the TV back on every so often to see if there was anything new, but there never was. By the end of the day the networks were nothing but static, except for one of the gossip channels that was airing some show about Hollywood weddings. A repeat, of course. No more Hollywood weddings. I think it was the next morning that I started to feel sick. I remember going into the bathroom for a glass of water, but not much else after that."

Here she stopped for a moment, and the remembering tone fell out of her voice. "I guess that's the whole story. I'm sorry. I just had to tell somebody."

"Can I ask you one question?" Luka said.

"Ask."

"How long was it before you died?"

"I don't really know," Minny answered. "My guess would be that I didn't make it through to the night."

She was resting on her side, hunched and facing away from him. All this time her feet had been swaying in slow half circles beneath the blankets, one grazing on top of the other, like waves covering each other over on the beach. He felt as though he could listen to the rustling sound they made forever. Just before he fell asleep, he heard her mutter, "The dishes," and the next thing he knew it was morning.

Once more, the blind man was already awake. He was helping Minny in the kitchen, filling the coffeemaker as she plugged the toaster oven into the wall. The three of them ate a light breakfast of English muffins with strawberry jelly, and then they started off into the city.

The streets seemed even emptier than before. Most of the trash – hamburger wrappers, ticket stubs, styrofoam cups – had been blown down to the river or collared inside the necks of various alleyways. The few pieces that remained were either too heavy or not aerodynamic enough to be lifted by the wind. A windup alarm clock. A rubber doorstop. A compact disc. They looked like part of some vast, citywide art installation: Things We Left Along the Way.