The Brief History of the Dead - Brockmeier Kevin - Страница 28

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. Meat-yard 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," Meaty ard 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.