The Brief History of the Dead - Brockmeier Kevin - Страница 27

A crowd had gathered along the property line, but when he let go of the rake and looked up at them, they dropped their eyes and strode off in a dozen different directions, as if they had been headed somewhere else all along.

He found two sticks and crossed them at the transverse and then knotted them together with a thread from the hem of his jacket, planting them in the ground to mark the spot where he thought his tooth might be. And he leaned the rake against the wall, and he picked up his sign, and all that day he walked the streets delivering the Good Word of Jesus, struggling to make himself heard through the hoarseness of his voice. When he got home that evening, he put the sign away on the balcony and sat on the corner of his bed, emptying his pockets into his hands. He ate all of his sausages and most of his carrots. And that was five days.

FOR THOU SHALT BE IN LEAGUE WITH THE STONES OF THE FIELD, AND THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD SHALL BE AT PEACE WITH THEE. It was the great message of God's mercy upon the suffering, from the fifth chapter of Job, God's great book of suffering. Ever since Coleman had died, he had carried the verse on his sign at least once a week as a reminder of God's grace and His mystery. Of all the books of the Old Testament, Job was the one he found the most puzzling, and also the one he most venerated, and he had often wondered when he was alive if that particular verse, Job 5:23, wasn't both a promise and a forecast of death. It seemed to suggest that God's mercy upon the suffering lay precisely in the fact that He allowed them to die. What could it have meant to the Israelites to be "in league with the stones of the field" if not that they would be buried finally among their ancestors?

It meant that they would be at peace upon the earth, not at peace beneath it, one of his voices said.

And the other voice said, But in death God created for His people a new earth.

And the first voice said, Tell me then, oh Wise One – which earth is this?

And the second voice did not answer.

Midway through the afternoon Coleman was addressing a crowd of people from the bench outside a fitness club when he saw the two boys who had knocked his tooth out. They were carrying tennis rackets and gym bags, and one of them snapped a towel at the seat of the other's pants, then reached around the back of his neck and playfully tucked his shirt tag into his collar, his fingers tickling over his skin. Coleman leapt down from the bench and shouted after them, "God loves you. He loves you and will heal you if you give yourselves over to His care."

The boys seemed embarrassed. They refused to meet his eye. The first one muttered something into the other's ear. It looked like "It's him again," though it might have been "On the count of three" or even "Whose turn is it this time?" – Coleman had never been very good at reading lips – and then the boys started off at a sort of galloping walk. He tried to keep up with them but lost sight of them in the shopping plaza, and then he banged his shoulder as he was running around the edge of a wooden kiosk, and before he knew it he was sitting flat on the ground, his sign resting dead in his lap.

"Are you all right, Mr. Coleman?"

There was a girl standing over him, no older than twenty, with a wide-open look of sympathy around her eyes. But how, he wondered, did she know his name?

"You wrote it down," she said. He realized she was reading his sign, to which he had once again attached his signature – Coleman Kinzler, Ph.D.

"Here, let me help you up," she said, and when he was on his feet she added, "My name's Sarah."

"Abraham's beloved wife."

She shook her head. "You must be thinking of someone else. I'm not married yet."

" 'And the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as He had spoken.'"

Suddenly she seemed to think better of introducing herself. She spent a long quiet moment staring at Coleman. It was as though he were a jack-in-the-box whose lever was winding down, and she was just waiting for the clown to pop out of his skull. Then she said, "Are you sure you're okay? I've got to go meet my mother."

Briefly he remembered the Bible he had given to the Hindu woman so many years ago. He said, "I miss my Bible." "Your Bible is there in your hand."

She was right – he was indeed carrying a Bible – but it was not the Bible he had been thinking of, the one he had bent his heart toward for so long.

Still he said, "I thank you very much for your kindness," and she said, "All right then," her voice climbing an extra notch as she spoke, as though she were asking a question, and he watched her move slowly off across the plaza.

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

So 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. Vm 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?